Pierre Gervasoni · Le Monde, 1996.
“Looking for a DSP to run on a PC.” Unfamiliar with computing jargon, what should one make of this mysterious request from an enthusiastic visitor to IRCAM’s new spaces? The house expert replies: “What bus are you on, NeXT?” This exchange illustrates relations between the major musical-research centre beside the Pompidou, newly expanded into two buildings, and the public being pampered at open days until 29 June.
From the famous Espace de Projection, a variable-acoustics concert hall four floors underground for twenty years, to the enigmatic Spatialisateur high on the fourth floor of the Jules-Ferry and Bains-Douches buildings, everything makes a cutting-edge world accessible and reveals creation and interaction’s workings, particularly to young people.
Visitors include instrument enthusiasts discovering a quarter-tone flute, psychoacoustics devotees hearing about simultaneous auditory-scene analysis, walkers transfixed by the echo-free anechoic chamber or thrilled by Maurice Benayoun’s virtual Tunnel Under the Atlantic.
Interactive terminals at the entrance locate activities. Clicking “Studio 5” reveals a rehearsal with Philippe Manoury and soprano Donatienne Michel-Dansac. Visitor involvement becomes decisive with multimedia productions. Catherine Ikam and Jean-Baptiste Barrière’s Le Message virtuel allows movement to alter a face’s expression, including vocality, on a large screen.
Twenty-five-year-old Milanese composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi goes as far as “composition by interactive model”, treating music as “an entity able to modify itself according to movements of those frequenting the space where it is played”.
Established values and innovation
Yet the best interaction between composer and audience seems to remain listening. Of five IRCAM concerts on 15 June, the most popular combined established Boulez and Berio with innovative Francesconi. Premiered Animus, interacting solo trombone and computer, displays Francesconi’s flamboyance almost excessively and fares poorly after Berio’s masterful Sequenza V for the same instrument.
Live music and introduction achieved fuller correspondence in Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double, whose opening, dizzying as a first descent into IRCAM, uses high technology playfully to lure the ear into ever more adventurous spheres.
Young French composers appearing across programmes did not all fare well. Philippe Leroux happily explored the too-neglected register of fantasy in Continuo (ns). Philippe Hurel encountered real-time sound transformation’s risks: an electronic failure, a last-minute guest at interaction’s banquet, disrupted his spectral showpiece Leçon de choses. Faulty wiring nearly prevented its performance by the aptly named Court-circuit ensemble.
For Fête de la Musique, a free music-and-dance concert takes place Friday 21 June at 8 p.m. at Centre Georges-Pompidou with Ensemble Ictus under Georges-Élie Octors and IRCAM technology. Bartók’s Violin Sonata accompanies projection of Peter Greenaway’s Rosa, made in 1992 from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography. Other works: Stockhausen, Zimmermann, Kaija Saariaho and Thierry De Mey. Telephone 44 78 48 16.