L'ANNONCE faite à Marie - François-Bernard Mâche

L’ANNONCE faite à Marie(Opus 67a à 67p)

December 199044' pour les 16 séquencesElectroacoustic, Performances

Ensemble Organum and fixed sounds

Notice

In 1966, I dedicated Nuit blanche, a piece of music composed to texts by Antonin Artaud, to Alain Cuny, who premiered it in France as a narrator and since then, this collaboration project had not ceased to be nurtured..

By mutual agreement, the use of Catholic liturgy was ruled out. Indeed, Claudel himself wished to set his play in “a conventional Middle Ages, such as the poets of the Middle Ages could imagine Antiquity to be”. But which convention? That of Claudel’s time, as in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, no longer corresponds at all to “our” Middle Ages, which themselves are only a provisional historical vision. I was inspired by the last medieval polyphonic practices still alive in the superb Corsican folk tradition, and I called on one of the best connoisseurs of both this tradition and the authentic texts of the Middle Ages, Marcel Pérès, director of the Organum ensemble.

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For the rest, all the music was composed using an Akaï S1000 sampler, a Cubase sequencer and a DD1000 opto-numerical editor. This cutting-edge technology makes it possible to manipulate ancient instrumental sounds: viols, lutes, crumhorns, crotales etc., as well as to compose, using natural sounds (birds, wind, storms, insects etc.), soundscapes that are reinvented, despite their apparent “realism”. Claudel’s work is only superficially historical or edifying, and Violaine has disturbing shadowy areas. Nor is the music free of ambiguity. To compose in 1990 for a film that proposes an original vision of a play written almost a century ago, and whose action takes place at the time of a mythical Joan of Arc, is to enter into a game of appearances where everything would be false if it were not ultimately a question of approaching by all means that truth buried within us which is not dependent on historical fluctuations, and to which believers give the name of God.

Instrumentation

film

First performance

12.12.91 : Paris, premiere at the Vidéothèque
12.18.91 : Paris, public projections start at Espace St-Michel

Publisher

Sepam

Commissioned by

Dedicated to

Records

Disque Jade / JACD 015

Texts

Analyse

Liste des séquences

L’ANNONCE faite à Marie