At the confluence of light and soundWith the TM+ ensemble

Concerts 17.01.2022

Light interacts with sound in this "augmented listening journey" imagined by Laurent Cuniot, director of the TM+ ensemble, and the visual artist Justine Emard, who installs the musicians within her blown glass structures, whose show Diffractions calls for synesthesia.

The hall is packed at the Maison de la Musique in Nanterre, mixing an audience of aficionados with a group of schoolchildren duly prepared for the event by their teachers. Six works are on the bill, which will follow one another in an uninterrupted musical flow and a display of light that varies in colour and intensity. " Supraorganism by Justine Emard is a reactive installation made up of some twenty robotic glass sculptures, animated by an artificial intelligence developed from data collected in a community of bees," explains its designer.

The installation is the origin of the piece written byHelena Tulve, Estonian composer and co-director of the Tallinn festival. Estonian Music Days Tallinn Festival. By using the echo of motors in her composition, Helena Tulve integrates the sound dimension of the installation generated by a machine learning system that adapts in real time to the universe of the piece. In other words, the eye listens in Emergence II. Bottomless and shoreless. The impalpable music, with its great refinement of timbres, projects its images infiltrated by light, in a moving space crossed by divergent energies: muffled or resonant shocks and multiple echoes of a strange soundscape swinging between the sounds of nature and the artifices of writing.

Prior to the premiere of the piece this evening, five works are displayed, each in its own way, on the theme of nature and its colours, enlivened by the luminous structures of Justine Emard.

Variation on the colour blue: " At the tip of Pern, one can see a large bird with striped plumage, spotted with yellowish-red, grey and brown, high on its legs, with a very long, sickle-shaped beak . These are the words ofOlivier Messiaen describing the curlew, the last winged creature to appear in his Catalogue of birds. As a perfect synesthete, Messiaen accompanies each bird with the scents and colours of the landscape in which it lives: sensations that the pianist Julien Le Pape, who is in particular demand this evening, makes us feel. We hear him, again as a soloist, in Tristan Murail's Nightingale in Love. It is obviously a tribute to his master Messiaen: " In May, in the hedge of holm oaks, opposite the terrace, a nightingale has taken up residence. All month long, day and night, it sang. It was very much in love ", Murail tells us. But where Messiaen recorded and transcribed by hand, the disciple uses spectral analysis software to transpose, expand and lengthen the sound signal with all the modern comforts! Clusters of colours, bird-like rhythms and depth of resonance chisel out this jewel written only recently (2019) by our composer. More unexpected in a panel of works that are all contemporary, the first movement of Ravel's Trio, a radiant masterpiece of maturity, enchants us under the bows of Noëmi Schindler and David Simpson (and the fingers of Julien Le Pape), whose fragile sounds of high harmonics flicker like light. The sensation is quite different and the relationship to the material both tactile and playful in Philippe Leroux 's Postlude à l'épais, whose exploratory work on texture keeps the listener suspended in the future of the sound.

Considering the somewhat abrupt juxtapositions of the different sound universes, one is tempted to think that judiciously "sewn" articulations to the sequences would have been an opportunity to take longer advantage of the musical and luminous incidences and to further exercise our synesthetic capacities engaged in each of the pieces on the programme.

The journey ends with the prolific American Lou Harrison setting his sights on more distant lands in Varied Trio for violin, percussion and piano, of which we hear three movements: Gianny Pizzolato takes centre stage, on his metallophone in the second movement, restoring the rhythmic energy of the Balinese gamelan while the piano struck under the keyboard becomes a wooden drum.

The Supraorganism's robot captured all these requests to generate new luminous traces from the shadows and reflections projected by the gestures of the instrumentalists and the movement of the music. The show fascinated the audience as it captivated the young public, if we judge by the quality of listening maintained throughout the evening.

Michèle Tosi

Nanterre House of Music 14-I-2022
Tristan Murail (b. 1947): Le Rossignol en amour, for piano; Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Modéré from the Trio for piano, violin and cello; Philippe Leroux (b. 1959): Postlude à l'épais, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano; Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): Le courlis cendré for piano; Lou Harrison (1917-2003): Varied Trio (excerpts), for violin, percussion and piano; Helena Tulve (born 1972): Emergence II. Sans fond ni rivage, for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin and cello. Justine Emard, visual and sound installation; Ensemble TM+: Gilles Burgos, flute, Bogdan Sidorenko, clarinet, Gianny Pizzolato, percussion, Julien Le Pape, piano, Noëmi Schindler, violin, David Simpson, cello. Benjamin Emard, visual and sound installation; Martial Geoffre-Rouland, software programming; director, Laurent Cuniot.

Photos © Justine Emard
Photos © David Gallard

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