Robert Normandeau

Puzzles gathers five works that Robert Normandeau composed between 2001 and 2003, all conceived for 16 channels and heard here in stereo, and all drawn from music he wrote for the stage, most of it for productions directed by Brigitte Haentjens. In each case the theatre music was reworked or recomposed into an autonomous concert piece. This 2017 edition reissues the album first released in 2005 as IMED 0575.

Puzzle, from Feydeau’s Farces conjugales, is made of door sounds and vocal onomatopoeias tuned so that its small sections can be stacked or placed in any order. For Duras’s L’Éden cinéma, which contains over eighty indications for music, Normandeau wrote long loops meant to run through the whole play; the concert version Éden, a GMEM commission, adds Vietnam, the cinema piano and the gramophone. StrinGDberg, a GRM commission based on his music for Strindberg’s Miss Julie, uses only two sources: a one-minute hurdy-gurdy improvisation by Silvy Grenier, stretched and layered, and a cello played by James Darling.

Chorus, dedicated to the victims of September 11, 2001, starts from Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and its parable of the three rings, combining the shofar, church bells and the call to prayer with the treated voices of actors Gregory Hlady and Évelyne Rompré; it won first prize at the 2002 Fribourg sacred music competition. Hamlet-Machine with Actors, from Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, adds recordings of rehearsals and the first performance with Marc Béland and the cast.

Born in Quebec City in 1955, Robert Normandeau completed the first doctorate in electroacoustic composition at the Université de Montréal under Marcelle Deschênes and Francis Dhomont, and has taught there since 1999. He describes his work as a cinema for the ear, and his prizes include a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in 1996.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 1775, 2017.