Parmegianis world of sound

The French composer Bernard Parmegiani (1927–2013) researches the various possibilities of working with sound in »De Natura Sonorum« from 1975 and thus creates a masterpiece of electroacoustic music that had a lasting influence on subsequent generations of composers. During the concert evening, one selected of the composition consisting of 12 parts will be heard through the ZKM_Sound Dome.

The piece »Des temps oubliés«(2012) by the Canadian composer Gilles Gobeil is also being presented. He has been creating works in the genre of acousmatic and mixed music for more than 30 years. Many of his compositions are influenced by so-called »cinéma pour l’oreille« [cinema for the ears], others are inspired by literary works that are visualised through the medium of sound.

Bernard Parmegiani on »De Natura Sonorum«

»The presence of impermanence, movement and the transformation of repetition are themes that have produced a dozen works, from Violostries (1963) to Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d’Orphée (1974). A new period begins with De Natura Sonorum, which pursues the problem of combining sound material and its forms of development and in which I dedicate myself to writing down sounds whose ink flows from the material that I am conjugating, confronting, whose nature I want to scrutinise.

Resulting in a dialectical comparison of the living and natural, not captured but free sound in nature and an artificial sound, which contains ‘the flavour of improved natural sound’ according to C. Rossent.

This music, which is supposed to be kept ‘as general as possible’, cleaves a path through constant metamorphosis and a sequence of inductions from the natural to artificial.

Can what is heard reveal something about the nature of sound through its constant process of transformation?« (Bernard Parmegiani)