Denis Smalley

Sources / Scènes brings together four acousmatic works by Denis Smalley spanning more than 25 years, from Pentes (1974) to Base Metals (2000). Three of them are built on a principal sound source named in the title, a sound that acts as central reference, steers the choice of other sounds and shapes the form. At the same time the sources call up scenes in the imagination, some close to reality, others only by analogy. Human presence is almost absent: the listener is left alone with the spaces.

Base Metals, commissioned by Sveriges Radio Malmö, uses only metal sound sculptures made by the artist Derek Shiel from found objects, chosen for their resonances, with more interest in sustained surges and drifts than in clashing metal. Empty Vessels (1997), for the French State and the Ina-GRM, began with recordings of air resonating inside large garden pots from Crete and an olive jar from Turkey in Smalley’s north London garden, where rain, birds and passing planes were filtered by the vessels; it is the closest his music comes to soundscape. Tides (1984), in two movements, Pools and Currents and Sea Flight, draws on two water recordings and was his first work to use computer transformations, with material made in Toronto, at Finnish Radio and at the GRM. Pentes, realized at the GRM in 1974, transforms instrumental and synthesized sounds around one recognizable source, the drone and traditional melody of the Northumbrian pipes.

Born in Nelson, New Zealand, in 1946, Smalley studied in Olivier Messiaen’s class at the Paris Conservatoire and with the GRM in 1971, then took a DPhil at York. He pioneered sound diffusion in the UK at the University of East Anglia, later headed the music department at City University, London, and developed the notion of spectromorphology.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0054, 2000.