I have already proposed Scratch by Cendo: it is, as I warned, a pre-saturation piece. Even L'usage de la parole by Franck Bedrossian, noted by Frank, still seems to me to be pre-saturation. With In Vivo by Raphaël Cendo, for string quartet, one enters—if you forgive the pun!!—into the heart (vivo) of the matter. This is a very clear example of saturation: an excess of energy at the expense of detail, emphasis on gesture rather than minute articulation, the search for distorted sound in antithesis to the "cleanliness" of classical sound. Perhaps there is some analogy with Ferneyhough regarding the scope of the "paroxysmal physical situation" into which the instrumentalist is pushed, but while new complexity proposes an excess of information linked precisely to the quantity/quality of detail, saturism is instead based on a moderate amount of information that however expresses an abundant energy.
Here are the program notes.
Ce premier mouvement pour quatuor à cordes (qui en comportera trois) explore les limites de vitesse, d’intensité, de densité, de pression et de puissance de chacun des quatre instruments. Cette écriture de l'excès permet aux interprètes de se mettre dans une situation physique paroxystique ou la qualité de l'interprétation ne dépend plus de la justesse ou de la maîtrise absolue du texte mais de l'énergie instrumentale qui y est déployée. Cette forme de contrôle (ou de perte de contrôle) permet une véritable immersion dans le phénomène sonore dans lequel l'écriture du geste prend une place prépondérante. Cette (première) étude du vivant peut aussi s’entendre comme une expérience radical du son, comme une recherche utopique d’une autre dimension du son de ce que l’on pourrait nommer ici, le Hors-son.
Thanks for the notes RedScharlach, I'm starting to make a mental map of the different authors/pieces ... but doesn't this genre of music seem too "standardized" to you?
Well, it depends ... what do you mean by "this genre of music"? And what do you mean by standards?
Of course, it is very distinctive music. And it is very different from the other Cendo track that I proposed a short while ago!
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Azzurro
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Reply 4 by Azzurro
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RedScharlach wrote:
... what do you mean by "this genre of music"?
Is it a way of suggesting I say "Noise"? And indeed, as you say in your first post, you speak of
the search for distorted sound in antithesis to the "cleanliness" of classical sound
in effect, a sound can become music or tend towards noise... and making a comparison with the city, often from a "distance" one cannot perfectly identify noises and consequently perceives only something "nebulous"... I was saying "standardized," but in reality I meant... similar... or anyway, from "afar," one doesn't perceive many differences compared to other "nebulous bodies"....
Now you will ask me, what do you mean by "from afar"...
RedScharlach wrote:
it is very different from the other Cendo track that I proposed a short while ago!
...true, but you yourself say that one is pre-saturation and this is saturation... so you should turn the statement around thinking of 2 tracks in the same field... no?
Try posting another track here that you like and that is based on saturation... and let's try to reason about it...
mmm ... no! I didn't want to suggest anything to you, it's just that I wasn't sure if you meant saturation in particular, or "contemporary music" in general ... If, as I understand it, you meant exclusively saturation, I can certainly agree with you; the risk of standardization is quite high (after all, isn't there a degree of standardization even in a Fugue? Or in a Sonata?). To tell you the truth, I believe that the saturation trend reached its peak development in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, and that with pieces like In Vivo, the possibility of building an entire world on the same premises was exhausted. On the other hand, saturation itself is consciously an extreme version of certain isolated moments by Grisey or Romitelli: it is as if a fragment of Partiels (the fragment of distorted sound, which there occupied one end of the spectrum of possibilities) had been observed under a microscope and a world had been found within it. This fragment/world, for a few years, was the world for Cendo, Bedrossian, Yann Robin...
Another example of saturation? Tracés d'ombres by Franck Bedrossian (2007), also for string quartet. It seems less "didactic" to me than In Vivo, and in its own way more "classical"...
The three stages of this piece, contrasting by virtue of their accelerated or stretched temporality, develop and then explore various saturated phenomena, which are filtered and rhythmed by the instrumental gesture. Step by step, an articulation of excess unfolds, whose vanishing point could be the end of the second movement. Thus, the global form proceeds through oppositions and transformations of textures and figures, aiming to establish a dialectic through timbre. Oscillating slowly or in haste between roughness and transparency, the sonic matter evokes the wanderings of a human voice and its haunting of silence.
I liked this piece; regarding saturation and "standardization," referring to the parallelism of the fugue (or something else), in my opinion, recognizability should remain... I mean, a Bach fugue is recognizable from one by Frack or others... so, the compositional process is one thing, the result is another
