Tournures Cessent / Tournures Cessent Orchestrales

Compact disc + 24 p. booklet.

This composition is a kind of false diary of the year 2015, or rather a real concentration of that year’s memories with very little rationality in its hierarchies, its ordering, or in the connections it makes. The narrative, if one wants to hear any, comes from the meeting between chronologies, the shape of the snippets, the fortuitous accidents and such, yet all in the absence of any sequential logic. The idea of building a form of sound by gambling with memories had been turning and returning around me for a while, as if one could place some remains of the past like bets on the green felt of a casino of forms : placing a bet on yesterday for tomorrow, shaping a kind of sonic boli*, a boli dreamt, a boli fantasized — a form to come. What is the form of a shapeless boli, one that’s full of memories, yet resembles nothing ? Conglomerated in a form, an object, things, dust, substances, and other bloods of the kind that the past rendered important, and that the work amalgamates and mashes together.
In the end Tournures Cessent is none of these… neither diary, nor boli, brushing against both, but still standing elsewhere, in the end forming a triangle with them : rather than the compact and opaque amalgam of the boli, or the daily order of the diary Tournures Cessent surrenders to the drift, the transparency, the line, and to a few words, sometimes clear — all from memory.

(*) A boli (plural : boliw)
A boli is a fetish of the Bambara or Malinké of Mali. The boli can be zoomorphic (mostly a buffalo or a zebu) or even sometimes anthropomorphic.
The populations of Mali who practice the so-called bamanaya cult, that is to say who indulge in the sacrifices of animals on the boliw and who communicate with the afterlife through masked dancers say they are Bamana. In the Mandingo religions a boli is an object said «charged», that is to say that by its magic it is able to accomplish extraordinary things, such as to give death, to guess the future, to take possession of someone, etc. The boli, which can also be made up of human or animal placenta, clay, tissue, skin, etc., is itself the symbol of the placenta. It is considered a living being and contains within it a core that can be either a stone, a metal or any other material. This nucleus or «grain» symbolizes the vital energy. The more blood the boli will receive, the more it will be «charged» with nyama (vital force).

ORCHESTRAL CEASING TURNS

Why ?

That they cease ? This was without taking into account the idea of making an orchestral version of it if the occasion arises. If the idea of a sound boli was, and still is, a concern, so was the idea of an orchestral version of an acousmatic piece. While waiting for the opportunity to present itself, that is to say, for the conjunction of a piece and an adequate orchestra, some reasons and motivations were specified : the piece would have to have a radiophonic dimension, that is to say, it would have to include word, voice, document, (sound) image, and even, why not, the everyday, the banal aspects of life in the making. In other words, it would have to be composed not only with sounds but also with levels of meaning and postures of listening. It should also in no way resemble any results already obtained during past experiences directly in contact with the instrument, the orchestra, the writing, and the composition for others, nor even with the dream or the phantasm of an orchestral result. In short, without a model, I was at a loss as to the method, the relationship to the result, the subjective role of the members of the orchestra, etc. Tournures Cessent had all these qualities, all these defects. The conjunction finally presented itself with Onceim (orchestra) and Motus (acousmonium).

Tournures Cessent / Tournures Cessent Orchestrales