#violostries

[grrl-beetle]

Bernard Parmegiani - Violostries

[dustedmagazine]

Bernard Parmegiani—Violostries (Recollection GRM)

Violostries by Bernard Parmegiani

Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013) comes from a couple generations of pianists, so he grew up listening. His early adulthood did not point him directly at a life in music. He learned sound engineering in the French Army’s cinema service, and also trained to be a mime, before working as a sound technician for television. But when he started working at Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) as a sound technician, he began a life-long involvement with electro-acoustic composition. While Parmegiani’s involvement with music lasted beyond formal retirement into the last years of his life, the compilation Violostries focuses on early work. The LP collects three pieces, all of which date from the time when Parmegiani worked with audio tape and razorblade, which was a far more time and labor-intensive process than audio collaging and processing would become in the computer age.

The title track was his first major work. In 1963, the violinist Devy Erlih commissioned Parmegiani to make some music to accompany a dance performance; it took him over a year to realize the taped elements of the 16:39 minute-long piece. All of his contributions were sourced from violin sounds, which he sped up, slowed down, filtered, diced and stitched together into an alien accompanist to Erlih’s virtuoso fiddling, whose dramatic plucks and bowed slashes inhabit a realm of high flickers, low expulsions and warped re-shapings of the violin’s familiar sounds. At the time, it represented a challenge to listeners to give up their preconceived notions of any instrument’s limitations; over a half century later, it remains an amazingly detailed sequence of sound events.  

Two shorter pieces occupy the other side. “Capture Éphémère” (“Ephemeral Capture”) is an early effort to deal with the spatial aspect of listening experience. Originally composed in 1967, its mainly unrecognizable sounds loudly rocket, quietly crinkle and shudder like a cartoon character being smacked in the face by a giant tape leader. One suspects that to hear it in its original state would be somewhat like sitting in the middle of an airfield, hearing planes roar past and overhead, and then hearing those sounds be masticated by some monstrous insect. But since quadrophonic sound never really took off at a popular level, in 1988 Parmegiani remixed it for stereo, and that’s the mix heard here. “La Roue Ferris” (“The Ferris Wheel”) debuted in 1971 at a festival celebrating the shipyard of Menton, a port town on France’s Mediterranean coast. One wonders what the fest’s attendants made of its constantly morphing swarms and whirls, which sound more electronic in origin than the other two pieces included here. But once more, the music holds up quite well across the decades as an expression of motion and density through sound.  

Bill Meyer

[jgthirlwell]

09/10/16 Wet Ink presented a multi-channel concert at St Peter’s Church in Chelsea focusing on the music and legacy of musique concrète pioneer Bernard Parmegiani. Violostries, one of Parmegiani’s masterworks, was performed by Wet Ink’s Josh Modney (late of Mivos Quartet), and Points Contres Champs was also presented in surround sound . Also on the bill were  Sam Pluta’s homage to Parmegiani, Points Against Fields, featuring bassoonist Dana Jessen, Paula Matthusen’s of implacable subtraction, Chris Mercer’s incredible The Audible Phylogeny of Lemurs, which consisted entirely of Lemur sounds, and a new work by  David Adamcyk.