actuellecd

Track listing detail

La vie de l’esprit

Joane Hétu / Joane Hétu / Manon De Pauw

  • Year of composition: 2019
  • Duration: 14:54
  • Commission: Productions SuperMusique

Stereo

ISRC CAA4J2210011

  • 48 kHz, 24 bits

“The mind is like a parachute, it only works when it is open.”

La vie de l’esprit (The Life Of The Mind) is an allegory on the workings of the mind, the ideas and the imagination that I designed and created in collaboration with Manon De Pauw. The work focuses around three distinct elements which intertwine throughout the piece:

• Influx, such as data bandwidths;

• Synapses, demonstrating connections that create cerebral electricity and the transmission of information in the brain;

• The mind, where form, imagination and the network of thought appear.

To the live video score I juxtaposed fluid and electrifying music which is at times chaotic and at times airy, like the billowing of a parachute. In so doing I proposed to the musicians of Ensemble SuperMusique an environment in which they thrive, one of creativity and freedom. Manon De Pauw, for her part, used minimal means to create the live video score. Using only water, a few paint brushes and water-colour paint, her pictorial gestures on the surface of a light table evoke retinal, cellular and neural images.

[English translation: Elizabeth Millar]


Joane Hétu thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) for its support in the research and creation of this work.

Premiere

  • November 27, 2019, Sonne l’image, Amphithéâtre — Le Gesù, Montréal (Québec)

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Aléas: Révélations des pierres muettes

Cléo Palacio-Quintin / Cléo Palacio-Quintin

  • Year of composition: 2019
  • Duration: 7:23

Stereo

ISRC CAA4J2210012

  • 48 kHz, 24 bits

This new work is part of my creative laboratory «Aléas», a cycle of malleable and open compositions that build into each other, sharing content through their interactions. Recordings of these pieces will be collected in a transdisciplinary digital work. It is the creation of a poetic universe in which I explore the way human beings conceive of the universe that surrounds them.

At first glance rocks may seem inert and mute, however they contain a multitude of information about the past. The long history of planet Earth is written in them through geological layers formed over millennia. The content and form of each rock describes its origin and the path it took to become its individual and unique shape. Each rock can thus tell us its story…

In surveying this wall of rock at Cirque Peak — that I explored at an altitude of 2800 meters in Banff National Park and recreated as a digital photo montage — the improvising musicians of the ESM will lend their voices to these rocks, revealing a facet of their history.

[English translation: Elizabeth Millar]


The creation of this work is supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ).

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    Aléas: Révélations des pierres muettes (2019, 7:00) by Cléo Palacio-Quintin

First Words

Viviane Houle / Pierre Hébert

  • Year of composition: 2018, 19
  • Duration: 15:01

Stereo

ISRC CAA4J2210013

  • 48 kHz, 24 bits

These are my late father’s words, his attempts to communicate with us after his near-fatal operation for throat cancer in 2010. When he woke up in the ICU after the operation, he could not speak or move anything other than his right hand. For several weeks he communicated with us by writing on pieces of paper he could not see, and we tried our best to understand. It was the first and last time he expressed many of these words and sentiments.

I immediately recognized the beauty in the shape and content of the words he wrote but it took eight years to find the right form to transform them into something musical. From 157 pages of writing, I chose 56 and transformed them into a graphic score for improvising musicians. I then asked filmmaker Pierre Hébert to translate my compositional ideas into a film.


First Words was commissioned by the NOW Society and performed in Vancouver with the NOW Orchestra in March, 2018. It was revised significantly in 2019 for Ensemble SuperMusique.

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