France
Integra Commission: Extended Apocalypsis
Resources: Ensemble, Electronics, and Video Element
Integra Ensemble: Athelas Sinfonietta (Denmark)
Integra Research Centre: IEM (Austria)

Programme Note

Extended Apocalypsis is a work for four singers, sixteen instruments, live electronics and video commissioned by Athelas Sinfonietta and Integra. As often happens in my music, it is a work rooted in earlier works, in this case Voi(rex), written in 2002, and Apocalypsis (2006). The main idea of Apocalypsis was to start from a finished piece – Voi(rex) - and to “stage” its compositional genesis through the music. In turn, Extended Apocalypsis projects Apocalypsis to its extreme limits through expanded duration, amplified compositional concepts, and the inclusion of the video realised by Jacob Schokking. The video element interacts deeply with the overall compositional project.

Apocalypsis could be seen as the living genetic analysis of Voi(rex). The latter is the corpus from which Apocalypsis developed. The musical analysis focused on the different compositional stages of the first piece from a conceptual and formal perspective, but also in terms of the musical material and the technological tools employed. Voi(rex) and Apocalypsis were part of a joint IRCAM/CNRS research project on the analysis of the compositional process. Many elements of this research end up in Extended Apocalypsis. The text, for example, was composed at the same time as the music, but comes from selected fragments of interviews between the composer and researchers in musicology and anthropology. The text evokes in a poetic form the different phases of the genesis of a musical work: the difficult beginnings, the relationship between noise and sound, the inner listening, the meaning, the question of silence…

As in Voi(rex) and Apocalypsis, where the majority of the musical events came from the calligraphic shape of the letters of the poems by Lin Delpierre, in Extended Apocalypsis the shape of the letters determines melodic profiles and the movements of the sounds. The letters return constantly, at a structural, musical and even visual level: the position of the performers on stage describes the graphic shape of an “e”.

Extended Apocalypsis is in seven movements and six intermezzi based on the sonic landscape of the different places where the music was composed: Rome, Paris, Aulnay-sous-bois, Montreal, Heiligenstein, Bois-Aubry and London. During each intermezzo the baritone announces the name of the place and the date of composition. These movements are all intersected by an inexorable upward pulse in the form of clicking sounds produced by the singers’ tongues, evoking the wonder and interrogation associated with the act of creation.

Through reminiscences of earlier vocal works Movement I explores the moment when nothing exists yet, when everything is possible and the only tangible manifestation is the desire to create, inlaid with memories of pieces past.

An unwavering list of all the “ideas” noted during a first phase of work on Voi(rex) scrolls by in Movement II, but unlike Apocalypsis, where each idea was expressed only once, the ear stops here on certain ideas that are repeated as “still shots”.

Movement III “stages” in music a recording session of the voices in the gongs, a selection of fragments of these recordings, their analysis and their treatment while Movement IV presents musically the classification of the chords and the sounds obtained through the recordings, analysis and treatment from the previous movement.

Movement V is the longest one, weaving in a formal braid the spatial trajectories of the sounds from Voi(rex) that become melodic movements, the changed ordering of the letters of Voi(rex) to generate a new literary meaning, the mutual imitations among voices, instruments and electronics, the vertical application of a nested form that in Voi(rex) was used only horizontally, together with the composition of what could have been the sixth, seventh and eighth movements of Voi(Rex) but were abandoned at the time.

Movement VI stages the rehearsal of the work by the performers, but also the perception of this rehearsal from the composer’s perspective: how the composer discerns little by little the music that he has contributed to create.

Movement VII is the shortest. It represents the abandonment of the work by the composer. After being heard in its entirety as a time-compressed audio recording, the first work Voi(rex) disappears very gradually until the pulse that represents its ultimate compression.

The live electronics, developed in the IEM studios in Graz by Peter Plessas as part of the Integra project, allow the technical and semantic possibilities of both voices and instruments to be extended further.

Biography

With his music being widely performed in international festivals and by orchestras such as Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and BBC Symphony Orchestra, Philippe Leroux’s compositional output includes symphonic, vocal, electronic, acousmatic and chamber music. He entered the Paris Conservatory in 1978 studying with Ivo Malec, Claude Ballif, Pierre Schäeffer and Guy Reibel and obtained three first prizes. Other prizes and awards include:  Best contemporary musical creation Award 1996 for (d’)ALLER, SACEM Prize, André Caplet and Nadia and Lili Boulanger Prizes from the Academy of Fine Arts (Institut de France),  and Arthur Honegger Prize (Fondation de France) for his overall production. From 2001 to 2006 he taught composition at IRCAM in the frame of the “Cursus d’Informatique Musicale”. In 2005 and 2006 he taught at McGill University (a Fondation Langlois programme). From 2007 to 2009 he was composer-in-residence at Metz Arsenal and at Orchestre National de Lorraine, then since 2009 to 2011, invited professor at Université de Montréal (UdeM). From September 2011 he is professor in composition at McGill University.