Patrick Defossez, Anne-Gabriel Debaecker: QUATRE = ONZE == (7)

QUATRE = ONZE == (7)
Contemporary, improvised, electroacoustic music

The duo Other Voix de Piano for acoustic piano and electro-acoustic live sculpture belongs to him Musiques Confluentes (»Einmündende Musik«) and composes mixed music (mixed, both instrumental and electro-acoustic music), »symphonic« chamber music of today, written for encounters with instrumentalists who, as performers, soloists and improvisers from the world of improvised and from new music, but also – depending on the project – for the participation of sculptors, video artists, dancers or poets.

QUATRE = ONZE == (7) – an enigmatic title? An architectural equation?... A musical form, a floating sound poem strongly influenced by acoustic-instrumental and electro-acoustic gestures to listen to and experience! Eleven dialogue spaces for one plastic music, in which the improvisers – as explorers tirelessly roaming the frontiers – participate in the instrumentation of the present by shaping what already exists: a vortex of sound fragments where electronic and acoustic-instrumental sounds collide. A work for which two soloists with exceptional and often unexpected instrumental backgrounds - Daniel Erdmann, pure improviser, and Benny Sluchin, expert in new music - approached this composition in the common integrity of their respective idioms.

In the midst of everything that is at stake in terms of composition and score, there is a symbiosis between improvised and electro-acoustic, but also graphic and literary varieties of contemporary musical writing and language, instrumental playing styles and the loquacity of the improvised discourse.
How does the improvised »float« in the realm of writing, how is the »tone color« world of writing – a piano as a sculptor of black and white matter and the live electroacoustic as a painter revealing color content – ​​»colored« by the passage through the improvisation? … This is how the poetry of QUATRE = ONZE == (7).

During the project, the music computer scientist Florent Colautti, together with the composer of the electro-acoustic, thought about the programming and development of the electro-acoustic instrumental set with tactile execution, where hands explore the electro-acoustic by shaping the correspondence of whole new sound forms in a sensory staging of virtual contacts and in this way create new sonic movements and new musical spaces with the acoustic instruments… where this correspondence of forms becomes both evolving and enveloping presence.

At the premiere and public recording of QUATRE = ONZE == (7) the four musicians were positioned at the four cardinal points of the concert space, the audience sat or lay on the floor, and the instrumental and electroacoustic sound propagation took place in quadraphonic systems mounted vertically above the audience, amplified by two sub-bass speakers on the floor for the low frequencies. QUATRE = ONZE == (7) Depending on the characteristics of the concert venue, it can be performed in the quadraphonic format just described, but also in stereophonic format for a frontal audience.

QUATRE = ONZE == (7) owes itself to an extended European dynamic between France, Germany and Belgium.

Reports on the premiere

»... QUATRE = ONZE == (7) achieves a fantastic surround effect...«

»... experience the music with your ears, but also with your sense of touch...«

»... horizontality of the body, verticality of the gaze, laterality of hearing... It was a pleasure for me to hear, look and feel this music...« »... a sensation felt with the whole body...« / »... the musical inter -pretation does not depend solely on the sounds themselves, it is a function of a state in which the listener independently discovers the effects of his perception ...« / »... the unusual sound, which mixes piano, electroacoustic design, saxophones and trombones, creates a mysterious 3D action between all the performers of this music... It's the first time I've heard a concert surrounded by the musicians... A sense of relaxation dominated the audience at every note... A new perspective on music interpretation and concert listening... «

“That refers me to music as a construction. Craftsmen compose and create an entity that comes alive and erupts over the audience...«.

»… I think what QUATRE = ONZE == (7) achieves is more a matter of smoothness than of structural scheme. As in the Flexus concept, QUATRE = ONZE == (7) expresses the flow of music, the flow of sound...«.

DUO OTHER VOIX DE PIANO
Patrick Defossez - Anne-Gabriel Debaecker

The duo Other Voix de Piano – composition, acoustic and electric piano, laptop, samples-live-sculpture, bowls – promotes what he calls »Musiques Confluentes«: osmosis between written new music, improvised art music and electro-acoustic music.

Other Voix de Piano sees himself as an architect of sound spaces. The duo composes mixed music, instrumental and electro-acoustic at the same time, for improvisational playing as well as for the presentation of written musical objects, a plastic music that is supported by the gesture of the live sculpture of samples (digitalized sound objects) as well as by multicast - »symphonic« Chamber music of today, written for encounters with instrumentalists of free expression who come from the world of jazz and new music; a music that invites sculptors, video artists, painters, dancers or poets to participate, in which they share with the audience a journey into the heart of the sonata.

Other Voix de Piano has numerous works, from solo pieces to instrumental and vocal ensembles, as well as works of contemporary music such as Sculptures of Muses premiered in concerts and in prominent national and international art events at heritage sites, unusual and remarkable exhibition venues.

Patrick Defossez, Anne-Gabriel Debaecker and that duo Other Voix de Piano are members of Future compositions, a French national association for music creation. Her works are in the catalog of Center de documentation de la musique contemporaine Paris (www.cdmc.asso.fr) and des Center Belge de documentation musicale Brussels (www.cebedem.be) recorded and accessible as well as on www.2dlyres.net.

Association 2d'lyres

The cultural association founded in 2007 2d'lyres supports research, creation, dissemination, CD and materialized as well as dematerialized multimedia production of those music-aesthetic directions that as fragile are considered to be: new music, improvised art music, electroacoustics and mixed music, through to cross-genre creations with poetry, stage art, visual arts (painting, sculpture, video, etc.).

On the fringes of the art and music market promotes 2d'lyres a singular, high quality art aiming to bring to life projects centered on thought, personalities, musical confluences, rare or little-common acoustic instruments, and productions that require a long maturation period (research, writing, recording, associated concert, edition of scores, cultural campaign, mediation, etc.).

For the project QUATRE = ONZE == (7) have the Association 2d'lyres and the duo Autres Voix De Piano received financial support from the French Ministry of Culture (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles de Champagne-Ardenne), the Marne department, the city of Reims and the Vaucluse department for the French premiere.

Artistic Contact – Booking – Association 2d'lyres
www.2dlyres.net
Artistic direction: Patrick Defossez
+33 (0)6 88 37 12 21
patrick.defossez@wanadoo.fr