<With a birth, a life and a death, sound resembles a living being. Time is
its atmosphere and its territory.One could dream of an ecology of the tone
as a new science that had become available to musicians.> (Gérard Grisey.)
To revert to music that one values: of all the new music I've heard in the
last year, some live some on CD, the final work of the above-named
prematurely deceased composer (1946-98): Quatre chants pour franchir le
seuil (Four chants to cross the threshold) is the most bouleversant. Written
very generally speaking in the style of what is called spectral music, it
integrates poetry into its penumbrous & piercing process: "La mort de
l'ange" by Christian Guez-Ricord, for all those angel-fanciers out there;
excerpts from Egyptian sarcophagi of the Middle Empire; "La mort de la voix"
after Erinna & "La mort de l'humanité" after _Gilgamesh_. It ends with the
words sung by Catherine Dubosc in the voice of a woman keening, not a
classical or modern music singer:
I opened a window
And daylight fell on my cheek
I fell to my knees, immobile
And wept...
I looked at the sea's horizon, the world...
If ever a music embodied Rilke's dictum that beauty is nothing but the
beginning of terror, this is it. And I just listened to it in my living
room, thanks to the Klangforum Wien under Sylvain Cambreling & modern
technology.
So by all means Harry Potter, the saga of Middle Earth & whatever, it's Xmas
after all, but this is unmissable ~ hard to take, but unmissable.
Martin
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