Électroprésence

Vol d’Arondes

Francis Dhomont

Vol d’Arondes has been performed in Aarhus, Aix-en-Provence, Angoulême, Annecy, Arles, Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Besançon, Birmingham, Bogotá, Brooklyn, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Cologne, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Genoa, Huddersfield, Karlsruhe, Kraków, La Rochelle, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Manchester, Marseille, Montpellier, Montréal, Morelia, Nîmes, Paris, Porto, Pristina, Rome, Saint Petersburg, Saint-Étienne, San Francisco, Santiago, Seia, Soignies, Szczecin, Valdivia, Vancouver, Vienna, Weimar and Zurich…

To Annette Vande Gorne

Provence. A summer evening, the window open wide on the slowly darkening sky. Through this deep, blemishless blue, the flight of swallows: a strident, constantly changing feeding dance. The delicious night continues to fall. There are the sounds of the village preparing for the night festival; the echoes reach me. A jet begins its descent into Marignanne. How simple it all is!

It is a moment of pure, contemplative happiness, barely disturbed by a few familiar cares, which are quickly chased away. I think of Verlaine’s “The sky above the roof, so blue, so calm…”

This is music of memory: connotative, certainly, but not representational. It evokes and continues a previous work, Drôles d’oiseaux (1985-86), which provided some of the material for it.

The space, too, belongs to memory.

— Francis Dhomont [English translation: Tom Carter]

Vol d’Arondes [Flight of Swallows] was realized in 1999 at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée multitrack studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain (Belgium) and premiered on November 21, 1999 during the 6th International Acousmatic Festival L’Espace du son in the XL Théâtre du Grand Midi (Brussels, Belgium). The piece was commissioned by Musiques & Recherches. The revised 8-channel version (2001) premiered on 15 December 2001 at Espace GO in Montréal as part of the Rien à voir (10) concert series presented by Réseaux.

Premiere

  • November 21, 1999, L’Espace du son 1999: Créations octophoniques, XL Théâtre du Grand Midi, Brussels (Belgium)
  • December 15, 2001, Premiere of the revised 8-channel version: Rien à voir (10): concert solo: Nature / Artifice, Espace Go, Montréal (Québec)

Awards

Details

Vol d’Arondes (1999, 2001), 11:25
Francis Dhomont
8-channel fixed medium

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