Figures (review)

Robert Normandeau: Figures. Compact disc empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9944, 1999; available from DIFFUSION i MéDIA, 4850 avenue de Lorimier, Montreal, Quebec H2H 2B5, Canada; telephone (514) 526-4096; fax (514) 526-4487; electronic mail info@electrocd.com; World Wide Web www.electrocd.com.

Robert Normandeau's recent compact disc, Figures, presents four of his acousmatic compositions from the latter half of the 1990s, documenting his continuing investigations of the medium and its stylistic evolution. The results of these explorations are more focused and less physical than his earlier work, yet for the most part they clearly retain Mr. Normandeau's distinctive compositional fingerprint.

Although the liner notes speak of the composer's ideal of a "cinema for the ear," these works contain a noticeably smaller number of "concrète" source sounds than his pieces of the 1980s, with more focus on playing with and sonically developing the material he does utilize. Thus, although the "cinema" ideas and elements are still present, they are less literal than in his earlier works.

The four pieces on Figures are arranged chronologically (quite convenient for a reviewer!) and span the years 1995-1999. The first, Le Renard et la Rose (1995), employs as its source material elements from the music and voices for a radio production of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince which Mr. Normandeau scored. The piece begins wonderfully. First, a cascade of laughing voices erupts from nowhere. Then, after about five seconds, it is suddenly replaced by a churning pulsed texture of vocal ostinati, taken in part if not entirely from the initial laughing sounds. The result is simultaneously artificial and primal, and quite intriguing. These ostinati are quite prominent during the work's first section, where they die away, return, and evolve many times.

Le Renard et la Rose is structured in five sections, and each of these has its own distinct sound and types of activity. Primary among the activities are pulsed rhythms, as percussive patterns are repeatedly employed to propel the music throughout the piece.

Overall I am struck by two things in this composition. First is Mr. Normandeau's impressive sense of pacing. He seems to be constantly pushing the piece forward, sometimes forcefully, sometimes gently. But even in its moments of repose, this music does not sit still. When its ostinato engine is shut off the sonic environment is still fluid. To me, this work is a "short" 14:45.

The second striking element, as in many of this composer's works, is his talent at choosing and sculpting materials. Nearly every sound has a bite to it, a sense of physicality and place. The "place" here, however, is not as literal as in earlier works, in which Mr. Normandeau would actually include recordings of subway stations, children in the park, the seashore, and so forth. In Le Renard et la Rose and the other works on this CD, I sense that the individual sounds are abstractions that retain enough qualities to point to their origins--original sounds or sets of sounds which often never appear themselves. While Mr. Normandeau has been processing sounds for years, his newer pieces atomize the source sounds more. Meanwhile, he makes less effort to perceptually tie unprocessed sounds to their processed relatives. Combining these well-defined sonic scenes and colors with the work's swirling activity, the listener has much to enjoy.

The second piece, Figures de Rhétorique (1997), is quite different from Le Renard et la Rose and is not quite so successful. It is scored for tape and piano, and in this recording the piano part is played by Jacques Drouin, for whom the piece was written. Mr. Normandeau states in his liner notes that he constructed the music in four movements, creating structure by utilizing devices of rhetoric. He categorizes these speech-types into "figures of meaning (hyperbole, litotes, metaphor, oxymoron, parable, and pleonasm), words (alliteration, embellishment, and rhyme), thought (allegory, apologue, bombast, irony, and tautology), and construction (antithesis, ellipsis, repetition, and reticence)." Although the piece is...