Item 7.173 - Espaces inhabitables

1 audio reel (17 min., 44 sec.) : stereo, 7.5 ips, 1/2 track

A2020-05

File consists of a recording of Francois Bayle's five-movement Espaces Inhabitables (1967): Jardins de rien ; Géophonie ; Hommage à Robur ; Le bleu du ciel ; Amertumes.

Digitized copy of audio reel available by request. Contact the Music Library.

Duplicate copy of tape 10.39.

"This music is considered by its author as his "true first work". The five movements that constitute it were composed in succession, and designed to form a whole: Jardins de rien ; Géophonie ; Hommage à Robur; Le Bleu du ciel ; Amertumes.

"Uninhabitable Spaces raises the problem of 'anecdotal' or 'figurative' sounds and their relationship with 'abstract' sounds. The first portable stereophonic tape recorders had just appeared, and some of the materials used for the work came from outdoor sound recordings. In particular: knocks on ship hulls at a shipyard, horns in the radome of Pleumeur Bodou (functioning as a sound reflector), various marine noises, not on gravel, etc. This material was supplemented by recordings of strings, zither and piano.

"The work on the causal reference of sounds allows in this piece, not the picturesque or literary evocation, but on the contrary its surpassing in favor of an attention to the advent of the musical through them. Listening to 'nature' here is not looking for impressions, but for laws on which to rely.

"Thus Jardins de rien, is a movement where the sounds are thought according to the energetic criterion ranging from the fluid to the solid, and their composition considered according to principles of mutations going from one to the other. To the order of the solid belong: the notes of zither, the resonance attacks in general, the descending chromatic figures. To that of the fluid belong: the sounds of trampled gravel, the rustling of waves, the sudden movements dissolving.

"Géophonie: work on oppositions between "loud sounds" and violent resonant percussion; Homage à Robur: progression from blur to sharp, from deaf to precise (Robur is Jules Verne's travelling hero); Le Bleu du ciel: melodic equivocal constant and recognizable drawing although masked by harmonics; Amertumes: continuation and resumption of the first movement.

"Uninhabitable spaces is simply a theoretical purpose: that of exploring a geometry other than that of gravitation and the usual scale ratios of normal sounds – that is to say, to have a wider field that allows energetic modalities in mutation, and therefore a space that we do not know. That's why I said 'uninhabitable'" (Artsonores INA.FR, François Bayle).