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Bernard PARMEGIANI
 Among
the catalogue of works by Bernard Parmegiani (60 opus) some of the titles
testify more particularly to his musical path: Violostries (1965) Capture
éphemére (1968), l’Enfer, after The Divine Comedy
from Dante (1972), Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d’Orphée
(1971-1972) De natura sonorum (1974-1975) La creation du monde (1982-1984)
cycle Plain temps ( 1991-1993), Sonare (1996) La Memoire des sons (2000
2001).
Except for some mixed pieces, his work as a whole takes the form of music
for ‘fixed sound’, coming within the scope of the immense
repertoire of electro-acoustic music. This experience was to be further
enhanced over some 35 years, taking into account that the music for television
radio advertising and the stage provided the composer with the opportunity
to display musical accomplishment by experimenting with new musical forms
and new instrumental techniques. In this respect his most well- known
work is undoubtedly the signature sound signal at Roissy-Charles-de Gaulle
Airport.
In 1971 be mode a video film based on the music in L’oeil écoute
featuring visual imagery processed through a synthesiser.
No one is ever truly seen the world who hat not dreamed what he saw.
In a solitary moment’s reverie that increases the dreamer’s
solitude
two states of deepness come together and echo against each other.
Their reverberations travel back and ,forth between the deepness of the
worlds existence and the dreamers own profound existence,,
The World is so majestic that nothing further takes place in it.
The World rests in its own tranquility.
G. BACHELARD, Rêveries et Cosmos.
The Creation 1982 - 1984
1 — Black Light 17’36”
The dreamer of the world plunges down unendingly into his own depths as
he strives towards the point from which he originates.
Black light.., a fermentation of latent, incommensurable energies, with
no conscious strategy. Unresolved chemistry. Liquid sheets traversed by
the most essential of elements. The echo within the echo increases space
exponentially. Everything is set to begin”...
The beginning of the movement represents the most obscure phase of cosmic
evolution. The musical reverie is inspired by what precedes the astro-physician’
“big bang”.
The absence of tonality that characterizes a good deal of the sound material
in Black Light is due to the use of “white” noises, that is
to say sounds whose mass theoretically contains all the frequencies that
can be accumulated statistically. The deliberate choice of these unprocessed
sounds which are given a profile, broken up, treated as sudden gushings
and glidings or repeated with increased strengths corresponds within my
private system of images to the more suggestive physically indescribable
phenomena.
In the next stage, the merest suggestion of organisation gives rise to
diverging and converging forces, to a dynamics of matter emerging and
then evolving toward as yet fragile and constantly abortive forms.
Finally, sounds ranging between medium and high pitches intimate the first
glimmerings of light.
2 — Metamorphosis of
the Void 23'11"
Something changes into form, heat, light, movement, anarchic corpuscular
vibrations. Everything becomes the “energy of existence”,
In contrast to Black Light this movement uses timbred sounds to suggest
states of coloration which are superposed or strung out sequentially.
The internal dynamics of these states or “layers”, which vary
between zones of extremely low and extremely high pitch, is veiled by
the presence of more or less strongly accentuated vibrated sounds moving
at variable speeds. Light makes its presence felt in a long continuum
of increasingly compact vibrations which change into harmonic accumulations.
These accumulations, which are in turn dilated or contracted, generate
very brief color effects, slidings of sound masses of variable complexity,
repetitions of periodic events succeeding one another at various tempi
(accelerando-slow-medium). Following this gradual, continual filling of
the void, the end of the movement heralds, in a quasi-melodic melopoeia,
the signs of light that are the culmination of all these slow, drawn-out
transformations.
3—Sign of Life 32’
A planet — our planet — emerges and
a “life logic” organize itself around
it. From amoeba to (newborn) man everything is obviously a sign of life,
the interaction of all the elements of transformation.
This final “moment” of Creation is paradoxically the longest
(compared to the two previous movements). It discloses a greater number
of intermediate stages. The sound material becomes more concrete, in other
words it begins to approach what we are able to grasp through auditory
recognition. Made musical, these sounds unfold relative to one another
through rhythmic forms and through the treatment of their timbres.
Initially uncertain and fragile, they elude all attempts to give them
individual shapes.
Breath (in all his aspects) repeats its primal thrust, then settles into
a mode of existence based on mutual exchange with its environment, Water
(in its most concentrated aspect) generates micro-melodies using repetitive
forms. The same process applies to the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
Proliferating divisions create further divisions until at last our own
reality can be deduced from the musical and sound reality of this “creation”.
The process mapped out here is therefore not the one described in the
Book of Genesis. Scientific and parascientific works (H. Reeves, C. Sagan,
R. Clarke, S. Weinberg) suggested the main stages to me. The words that
describe the phenomena of astrophysics are sufficiently suggestive to
stir the musical imagination and to sustain a cosmogenic reverie like
this. Nothing is more conducive to such a reverie than an acousmatic*
view (to state things somewhat paradoxically) of the Creation.
* acousmatic: adj., said of a sound heard without seeing what causes it.
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