Power and Responsibility: Converted to Streaming Between Machines (review)

Françoise Barrière.Compact disc, 1999, Chrysopée Electronique--Bourges LDC 278 111; available from Mnémosyne Musique Média, Place André Malraux, B.P. 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

The International Institute for Electroacoustic Music--Bourges (IMEB) has been a long-standing promoter and focus of international activities in electroacoustic music through the organization of the Synthèse Festival, its annual electroacoustic music and software competition, as well as through its distribution of recordings and other publications. IMEB has issued two series of compact disc recordings since the mid 1980s: the Collection Cultures Electroniques, which highlights the winners and participants of the annual Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (now numbering more than a dozen volumes, many of them double CDs); and the Collection Chrysopée Electronique, which promotes work by composers affiliated with the Groupe de musique électroacoustique de Bourges (GMEB). To date, this second series numbers approximately 15 titles. Recent documentation of the Festival Synthèse has also produced several CD-ROMs and collections of writings originating with members of IMEB.

The French electroacoustic composer Françoise Barrière co-founded GMEB in 1970 in collaboration with Christian Clozier. In addition to her work as a composer, she continues to co-direct IMEB and its many activities. Her electroacoustic work has previously appeared in the Collection Chrysopée Electronique; in fact, the first volume of the series presented a collection of her early works, and the eighth offered another of her pieces on a compilation disc with eight other composers. The most recent compilation of Ms. Barrière's work is Volume 14 of the series (although there is a discrepancy between the listing of the disc as Vol. 14 on the spine of the CD cover and the information in the CD booklet that lists it as Vol. 13).

Three works dating from 1981 to 1997 are featured on this new disc by Ms. Barrière: Scènes des voyages d'Ulysse, Equus, and Dessus la mer. Each piece weighs in at between 20 and 26 minutes in duration. The composer introduces her work in the CD booklet with a discussion of her compositional methods and approaches to the transformation of sound. Her objectives are in line with many of the classic ideals of the French musique concrète tradition: the recontextualization of recorded sounds, the poetry of sonic transformation, and the role of syntactic coherence in the construction of large formal design. She departs from the Schaefferian doctrine to a certain degree in her expressed wish to create an electroacoustic music "based on psychological and cultural suggestive qualities of a sound" where "every sound is . . . perceived through a network of memories and sensations."

The first work on the disc, Scènes des voyages d'Ulysse (Scenes from Ulysses's Voyage), from 1981, attempts to "communicate to the listener the flux of impressions, reveries and fantasies evoked by the tale" of The Odyssey. A diverse palette of materials--modulated analog synthesizer sonorities, human voice, lyrical solo violin, piano, French popular song, American popular music, orchestra, Greek folk music, classical European chamber music, opera, Maurice Ravel's Pavane, the songs of birds, frogs, and insects, and both subtle and radical transformations of all of these--contribute to a spacious, quasi-narrative fresco of sonic images. The work consists of a number of distinct sections that present an electroacoustic "reading" of various parts of Homer's epic: the voyage, Hades, the sirens, the island of the sun, and the return to Ithaca. Some sections are fluid and convincingly conceived in terms of the choice of sound materials and their role in the overall temporal design. Other sections are collage-like and present a contrasting approach to time and an equally contrasting perspective on the constituent materials, their autonomous identity, and their place in the unfolding...