To Francis Dhomont

The same old story: should the music follow upon the words, or is it separate and distinct, following its own logic? In Architecture nuit [Architecture Night], the text is only one source (as is the timbre of the voice, alchemical transformations of sound). Source of images, of meaning, and most importantly, of space: the interior space of sensations, of emotional callings, of the silence behind the words and, too, real space, exterior to and experienced through the text. The music responds to this. Utilizing the techniques of composition on tape in the studio, the recording of the voice plays off a variety of spaces.

Polyphonic piece — polytimbred — the meaning must be found in the description of space and timbre, and the architecture in relation to the evolution from discontinuous to continuous, from solid to linear, from recent to long-past, from material to vibrational, from dark to light, from bedecked to bare.

Each piece is organized as a fractal of the whole around the horizontal axis (left-right space) of the central piece and develops, along one or several of these trajectories, a series of variations of the same theme: space-words, space-timbre. The space of sound.

Architecture nuit [Architecture Night] was realized in 1988 at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain (Belgium) — 16-track recording and mixing; at the 123 studio of the Ina-GRM (Paris, France) — digital sound editing); and at the Paradoxe studio of Radio télévision belge francophone (RTBF, Brussels, Belgium) — analog and digital sound editing. It was presented in concert on January 27, 1989 during the 2nd festival of poetry Le meneur de lune at the Colisée in Roubaix (France). Narrator: Alain Carré. Architecture nuit was commissioned by the RTBF as its entry in the Grand Prix Paul Gilson of the French-language Public Radio Community (CRPLF) and was a finalist at the 17th Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (France) in 1990. The book Architecture nuit was published by Phi (Echternach, Luxembourg) in coproduction with Éditions du Noroît (Québec) and Les éperonniers (Bruxelles, Belgique) in 1992.

Premiere

• January 27, 1989, Concert, Colisée, Roubaix (Nord, France)