Robert Normandeau

Tangram collects five acousmatic works that Robert Normandeau composed between 1989 and 1993, the period he describes as his “cinema for the ear”: themes drawn from the titles, inspiration sought outside music, especially in film. All use sampled acoustic sounds, mostly recorded on portable DAT, and all were conceived for multitrack playback, each track on its own loudspeaker, so that the mixing happens in the air. To keep that spatial dimension, every piece except Spleen was recorded here as a diffusion over eight loudspeakers at The Banff Centre for the Arts in July 1993.

Bédé, named after the French abbreviation for comic book, uses only the onomatopoeias of 11-year-old Marie-Hélène Blain. Her voice returns in Éclats de voix (1991), five sections pairing a childhood state with a sound parameter, made partly at the GRM in Paris for CKUT; it won 1st prize at the Noroit-Léonce Petitot competition in Arras. Spleen (1993) is its sequel, built solely from the voices of four 16-year-olds around adolescent melancholy. In Tropes, written for the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death, every sound comes from Mozart's chamber music and a passage of the clarinet concerto, stretched past human breath and virtuosity. The title piece, dedicated to Francis Dhomont, follows the seasons through their elements and materials, with frogs, night birds, storms and trains folded into mechanical loops, and was presented at the Planétarium de Montréal for the city's 350th anniversary in 1992.

Born in Quebec City in 1955, Normandeau completed the first doctorate in electroacoustic composition at the Université de Montréal in 1992, under Marcelle Deschênes and Dhomont, and has taught there since 1999. The booklet includes texts by Jean-Christophe Thomas and Claude Berthiaume.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9920, 1999.