Three rare pieces by a composer best known for his work for the stage, dance and theater, a perfect introduction to the work of a fascinating figure of 20th century electroacoustic music.
"Allégeance volatile and Esquive each tackle the same issue in their own way. Overcoming time: whether it be successive, additional, enumerative, or repetitive. However, there is nothing here about the ensuing nature of so-called "repetitive" music. These are types of high-end music. And it is more about insistence, the obstinacy of an individual who keeps knocking on a door that will never open.
Allégeance's rustic drumming, talkative, acidulous, colourful and overarticulated, with almost clownish desinences, eventually dies out in this very respite. The iterative and puffy shimmering of Esquive with its dull, thin and precise sounds, shifts and is engulfed into another sonic world—which appears as a gaping and collapsed response to this prime insistency.
This is, indeed, a 'volatile allegiance' and 'avoidance' from the sonic to the musical elements: the musical phenomenon anticipated and pursued as the non-sound of sound—or, in other words, the void of sound. This seems to be the lesson of the concrete attitude in music. Such is the kind of questioning that stirs the composer.
He returns with another title: Contrée, which, once again, speaks of a counter-event. Here, the movement is broader, more generous, more confident. Time spreads and stretches out. What seems to be a landscape of entanglements, trajectories, influx, masses and points emerges. "Something" rises and presents itself out of the sounds—these escaping beings, these "relatively short combustion flames " (Schaeffer).
The piece consists of five consecutive and uninterrupted parts: Entrée and Stance I—Véhémence de l'air and Stance II—Grande Allure. It is the central section of an electroacoustic triptych with Sables (2011) as the first and Nil (2017) as the last.
Contrée is dedicated to Philippe Mion, whose friendly ears have been entrusted with my music for so many years."
Régis Renouard Larivière (born 1959 in Paris) is a French composer of electroacoustic music. He studied electro-acoustic music under Philippe Mion and Jacques Lejeune in 1984. He also studied classical musical analysis with Francis Bayer, Hindoustani music in India with de Shivu Taralagatti. He's been appointed to teach electro-acoustic music at the Centre de formation de musiciens intervenants (CFMI) in Poitiers 1990-99. He worked on a regular basis with Christian Éloy on the workshops organized by the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) since 1999. He was also member of the board of the Ars Sonora magazine alonside Katherine Vayne and Christian Zanési (1995-99). He composed for tape and for stage, dance and theater alike.
