La Corrida, Passages, L'Invisible, Eude, Histoire d'un Rêve, Vox i (review)

François Giraudon. Compact disc, 1998, Chrysopée Electronique--Bourges, LDC 278 1110; available from Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique--Bourges, Place André Malraux, BP 39, 18001 Bourges Cedex, France; telephone (+33) 2-48-20-41-87; fax (+33) 2-48-20-45-51; electronic mail ime-bourges@gmeb.fr; World Wide Web www.gmeb.fr

Because François Giraudon is such a young man (he was born in 1967), the arrangement of works on this disc from earliest to most recent invites the listener to trace his technical and musical growth. The development of his technique over eight years is clear enough. The earlier works are skillfully done, but the later works are more sophisticated. Musically, Mr. Giraudon shows as much assurance early as later on. Change is most evident in his palette: his preference seems to have shifted from abstract to concrete sounds.

Etude: La Corrida (1990) begins with the noise of a cheering crowd, which fades into a mass of processed sound with an equally broad spectrum, settling in turn into a sort of throbbing gloom. The composer describes the work as a surrealistic view of "la Corrida," and indeed, the dust, heat, and daylight of the bullring are mostly absent. Because the lower registers are more taurine than human, I wonder if the listener is getting the bull's point of view. I wonder, too, if Mr. Giraudon analyzed the creature's bellow for the piece, as Iannis Xenakis did for Taurhiphanie a few years earlier. Technically speaking, the composer set out to explore morphological connections between acoustic and synthesized sound.

Passages (1991) is, the booklet tells us, "for two synthetizers performed in live" (the text is rife with the sort of poor translations found in the Bourges-Prize discs, also put out by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique--Bourges; one can only hope they will in the future find a native English speaker for the task). The piece offers 11 min of FM sounds bathed in reverb, not altogether a bad thing here. Though little in the piece would have been impossible 30 years ago, the activity and the sharpness of attacks keep it engaging. Mr. Giraudon describes four "tracks" in the piece in which sounds are transformed from a rigid to a flexible state, or vice-versa.

L'invisible (1992) and Eude 1994 both draw on instrumental sounds, with differing results. The violin and double bass of L'invisible suffer from a slightly distant microphone placement, making it difficult for them to blend with the more spatially immediate synthetic sounds. The bowed strings simply seem out of place, their tone too complex and rough. Eude 1994, for baritone sax and a tape which makes extensive use of the instrument, fares better in this respect. Like the bass clarinet, the baritone blends swimmingly with synthetic sounds, and takes well to processing. Eude 1994 is programmatic, tracing the development of a man-machine from conception to gestation to experience in the world.

For the final two works on the disc, Mr. Giraudon turns to poetics and to concrete sound. Histoire d'un Rêve (1996) is based on Le Rêve de l'escalier, a novel by Dino Buzzati. The choice of text seems apt. The themes that the composer draws from the novel have to do with time, space, and the opposition of static and dynamic objects, all ideas that have ready analogues in music. These concepts seem to be played out only in a blunt fashion in Histoire d'un Rêve; the music is a bit too simple texturally and syntactically to convey much depth. The first section, for instance, consists mostly of processed voices over drones. The professed concepts of spatial and temporal stasis are clear enough, but only the surface of these profound concepts seems to be probed. A question arises: are abstract sounds better suited than concrete ones to convey complex ideas? Because they contain fewer received meanings...