[ISEA97] Artist Statement: Robert Normandeau — Le Renard Et La Rose

Artist Statement

Concert suite composed from two sound sources:the music commissioned by Radio-Canada for the radio play adapted from The Little Prince by Antoine de St-Exupery (produced by Odile Magnan in 1994), from which one will retrieve the main themes, and the voices of the actors who have participated to the radio play. Le renard et la rose is the third piece of a cycle undertaken in 1991 (…Eclats de voix and Spleen were the first two parts of that cycle) based exclusively on the use of the voice and more particularly on the use of the onomatopoeia, considered as the only case in the human language where the sound describes directly the object, the gesture or the feeling that one wants to communicate, opposed to its abstract representation, the word. The work is divided into five sections which represent as many states of the adult age, associated with different sound parameters: chattering and rhythm; nostalgia and timbre; anger and dynamic; lassitude and space; and finally, serenity and texture. One will find successively the themes of The Little Prince: The King, The Businessman, The Conceited Person, the Rock of Birds, The Desert Well, A Flower, The Rose, The Baobabs, The Lamplighter, The Water Pills Tradesman, The Fox and The Geographer. The piece was awarded the Golden Nica (First Prize) at the Prix ArS Electronica 1996 (Linz, Austria).

  • Robert Normandeau (Canada) was born in 1955 in Quebec City, Canada. He earned his MMus (1988) and DMus (1992) in Composition from Universite de Montreal.Was a founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community. Has been awarded many prizes, including the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica (1996).Serves as lecturer at the Music Faculty of the Universite de Montreal since 1988.Specializes in acousmatic composition (since 1984), his work adopts the perspective of a”cinema for the ear”, where the meaning as well as the sound contributes to the composition.