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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Entre Temps
Bernard Parmegiani
The composition "Entre Temps" by Bernard Parmegiani moves smoothly from natural sounds to synthetic ones.
"Entre Temps" comes before "Présent composé" (1990) and after "Plein Temps" (1992), which will be the overall title of a cycle of works. In this sense the piece is a lik, a kind of pause between times: the time of the present and that time in which the past, present, and future will find themselves together.
The slowing down of the ticking of a pendulum, with which this piece begins, gives us an image which is both direct and symbolic, bur also the most illusionary image of the slowed-down passage of time. Soundscapes seem to appear in the empty intervals between the isolated events. These resemble mental images of near or distant ordinariness. Often, they are clouded images like those taken from memory, when we seek escape from our over-familiar, immediate and uninteresting reality.
Second movement: What grabs our attention in this second movement - like a contrast - is the playing of a resounding, constantly reviving object each time on the immediate, despite the silent moments, which separate the figures from the resounding passages. This constant variation no longer lets us escape from a development which has "already begun". Every silence - in the musical sense - is expectation, the wish for new variations. With its sound duration, its glissando and its sudden peaks, the sound object in question (a pingipong ball) becomes a musical object. The time interval appears to have dissolved to leave room for constant listening to each moment.
Third movement: As if in order to enable a certain wandering of our attention, the musical objects of the previous movement have vanished to leave room for a kind of "steered" dreaming. The harmonic curves, broad and slow in their movement, withdraw to a space outside time, as if to ignore their context for a moment. The absence of musical silences paradoxically allows escape, artificially creating a kind of personal time interval.
Fourth movement: First, a combined game of recurring events located near and far in the soundspace: swinging in time and swinging time between the present and the past. Later, the previously introduced elements get mixed up, where "moments" and intervals mingle and try to find a way together ... finally, just as determiningin the uninterrupted, uncondensable and irreversible passage of time.
About 40 per cent of this composition was realized in my private studio and about 60 per cent inthe studios of the GRM.
"Entre Temps" comes before "Présent composé" (1990) and after "Plein Temps" (1992), which will be the overall title of a cycle of works. In this sense the piece is a lik, a kind of pause between times: the time of the present and that time in which the past, present, and future will find themselves together.
The slowing down of the ticking of a pendulum, with which this piece begins, gives us an image which is both direct and symbolic, bur also the most illusionary image of the slowed-down passage of time. Soundscapes seem to appear in the empty intervals between the isolated events. These resemble mental images of near or distant ordinariness. Often, they are clouded images like those taken from memory, when we seek escape from our over-familiar, immediate and uninteresting reality.
Second movement: What grabs our attention in this second movement - like a contrast - is the playing of a resounding, constantly reviving object each time on the immediate, despite the silent moments, which separate the figures from the resounding passages. This constant variation no longer lets us escape from a development which has "already begun". Every silence - in the musical sense - is expectation, the wish for new variations. With its sound duration, its glissando and its sudden peaks, the sound object in question (a pingipong ball) becomes a musical object. The time interval appears to have dissolved to leave room for constant listening to each moment.
Third movement: As if in order to enable a certain wandering of our attention, the musical objects of the previous movement have vanished to leave room for a kind of "steered" dreaming. The harmonic curves, broad and slow in their movement, withdraw to a space outside time, as if to ignore their context for a moment. The absence of musical silences paradoxically allows escape, artificially creating a kind of personal time interval.
Fourth movement: First, a combined game of recurring events located near and far in the soundspace: swinging in time and swinging time between the present and the past. Later, the previously introduced elements get mixed up, where "moments" and intervals mingle and try to find a way together ... finally, just as determiningin the uninterrupted, uncondensable and irreversible passage of time.
About 40 per cent of this composition was realized in my private studio and about 60 per cent inthe studios of the GRM.
Bernard Parmegiani (F), born 1927, grew up in musical surroundings, worked as a sound technician in film, TV and radio production, and trained as an actor under J. Lecoq and M. Decroux. Under Pierre Schaeffer he was head of the Image-Music Department at GRM. Extended visits to the USA to study video art, with the support of the French Culture Ministry, followed by large-scale music video productions at ORTF and WDR. Collaboration with jazz and pop groups and attempts to combine the aesthetics of jazz with those of electroacoustic music. Numerous international prizes for his extensive compositional oeuvre.