A musique concrète piece divided into five movements, based on the handling and editing of recordings captured within circuses between 1988 and 1993.
The Circus is a place of lights and colors, but also of shadows, even darkness. Admittedly, it delights children and makes adults laugh. But you only need one rainy autumn evening near a circus tent and the smell of fodder to think of the sadness of the clowns, the endless training of the animals and the freaks who are hidden in some caravan... cinema, the essence of the circus – movement, light, danger and burlesque – will have been admirably rendered in Notes on the circus by
Jonas Mekas (1966), one of the inventors of the filmed diary. With Cirque, Michèle Bokanowski does similar work, entirely dedicated to spinning, in the musical field.
She distinguished herself in particular in the composition of musique concrète, among others Tabou and Trois chambres d'inquiétudes, after having studied with
Pierre Schaeffer and
Éliane Radigue. The latter, great lady of drone and minimalism, fell under the spell of Cirque and wrote the booklet for the piece as a poem.
The piece, divided into five movements, is based on the handling and editing of recordings captured within one or more circuses (this is not specified and is of no importance) between 1988 and 1993. The initial allegro reveals the gallop of a horse joined gradually by other images. The idea of the circular space of the circus tent is immediatly and magnificently rendered and will be constantly recalled by an insistent use of the loop technique. Children's laughter, applause and drum rolls are thus sheared, repeated before being brutally interrupted. Accordion interludes and the distortion of sounds create a dreamlike atmosphere. This beautiful nightmare reminds us, to quote Éliane Radigue, the "Magic of childhood still living in the heart of man even beyond its abrupt end."
Michèle Bokanowski (born 1943 in Cannes, France) is a French Paris-based electroacoustic music composer. Passionate about music from childhood, it wasn't until later, at the age of 22, after reading
À la recherche d'une musique concrète by
Pierre Schaeffer, that Michèle Bokanowski decided to study composition. After classical training in harmony, she met Michel Puig, a pupil of René Leibowitz, who taught her writing and analysis upon Schönberg Theory. In 1970, she began a two-year internship at the Research Department of the ORTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. Between 1973 and 1975, she took part in a research group on sound synthesis, studied computer music at the University of Vincennes as well as electronic music with
Éliane Radigue. She mainly composes for concert and for cinema (music for Patrick Bokanowski's short films and for his feature films
L'Ange and
Un Rêve solaire). She has also composed for television, theatre and dance. In her music, often infused with a mysterious atmosphere, she uses evocative and poetic concrete sounds, with a mastery of looping and feedback techniques and with an art of cinematic editing.
