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Michel Chion: “Requiem Aeternam”
From the album Requiem (1973)
Though he is probably better known as an influential theorist of film music, Michel Chion is also a prolific composer of electronic music in the primarily Francophone tradition of musique concrete inaugurated around 1950 by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.
Chion’s music of the 1970s, along with that of other composers working within the Parisian orbit of the Groupe de recherches musicales such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani, represents the blossoming of an as-yet undiscovered golden age of electroacoustic art, in which the sonic experiments of the 50s and 60s gave way to a coherent, almost “classical” compositional style, with all the positive and negative connotations of that term.
This is music of a rare and disturbing programmatic intensity. The sound of the speaking voice, so often an annoying gesture of pseudo-philosophical depth in electronic music, is here enfolded into the sonic texture in a virtually seamless manner.
Played 401 time(s).
June 29, 2009, 1:48pm
