Cependant, la composition d’une musique d’application — destinée, dans ce cas, à “illustrer l’image” mais surtout à éclairer un genre musical mal connu — comportait ses propres règles, différentes de celles d’une œuvre libre: respect d’une direction thématique donnée, contraintes matériologiques (Vivaldi, alto, chien, ruissellements, naturalisme) et temporelles, recours à des allusions et références, etc.

Un autre Printemps fait bien sûr écho au célèbre concerto de Vivaldi, véritable fil rouge du film, mais il le détourne, l’altère, le recycle. L’œuvre baroque devient alors une simple mais riche source sonore, porteuse de connotations culturelles qui, métamorphosées et associées à d’autres images référentielles ou métaphoriques, proposent une “sym-phonia” au sens premier. La place importante accordée aux mouvements de l’eau et à ses mutations correspond à la métaphore printanière du jaillissement, si présente à l’image. Mais ici le son de la Nature interroge la nature du son; les éléments figuratifs et référentiels du début glissent progressivement vers l’abstraction, grâce aux traitements qui en travestissent l’origine, et la musique retrouve son intégrité. Enfin, pour conclure, le son retournera au sens.

Le processus de composition de En cuerdas, œuvre antérieure dont quelques moments figurent également dans le film, présente avec Un autre Printemps certaines similitudes. Il s’agit aussi d’un détournement, celui des sonorités d’une guitare qui, alliées à d’autres morphologies de même type, vont générer des figures et textures multiples et donner lieu à divers développements. L’univers sonore de cette pièce demeure cependant celui des cordes pincées, frottées, frappées, mais de cordes virtuelles, métamorphosées par les traitements informatiques et démultipliées par l’écriture électroacoustique.

À l’intérieur d’un cadre formel assez strict et de choix préalables opérés sur les programmes, j’ai réservé, comme toujours, une place importante aux séquences-jeux improvisées: utilisation des machines comme des corps sonores que la main vient animer «à la souris», primauté du geste sur la séquence programmée, travail en temps réel sur les dynamiques, etc. Plus tard intervient le choix des “instants magiques” qui seuls figurent dans l’œuvre.

Cette façon de chercher dans le son la beauté qu’il contient pour l’organiser en structures me rappelle l’époque où, pour gagner ma vie, je sculptais le bois en m’inspirant de ses formes naturelles. Dans les deux cas j’ai tenté de réconcilier la volonté et le hasard, le perçu et le conçu, la nature et l’artifice.

Maintenant le film est terminé. Je regarde et j’écoute. En plus de sa beauté plastique, il me semble résumer avec beaucoup de simplicité une évolution musicale très complexe, ouvrant ainsi des portes qui restent souvent fermées a de plus savants discours. Et je me souviens aussi d’une belle aventure, pleine de difficultés mais aussi d’heureuses rencontres: celle d’un charmant collègue, Paul Lansky, celle de mon vieux complice Christian Calon, celle des images de Robert Darroll, celle d’une équipe de production très impliquée et, bien sur, celle de Uli Aumüller lui-même, de ses nombreux problèmes et de sa passion inébranlable et communicative.

However, the composition of incidental music — in this case, to illustrate the image but mostly to bring new light on a new musical genre — had its own rules, different from the ones inherent in a personal work. I now had to respect the direction of a given theme, take into consideration various constraints on sounds (Vivaldi, viola, dog, running water, naturalism) as well as temporal limitations, make use of allusions and references, and so on.

Un autre Printemps (An Other Spring) is of course the echo of Vivaldi’s famous concerto, and in the film it is a thread which is transformed and recycled. The baroque work then becomes a simple but rich source of sounds, carrying cultural connotations which, metamorphosed and in association with other referential or metaphoric images, suggest a ’syn-phonia’ in its first meaning. The importance given to the movements of water and its mutations, corresponds to the metaphor of the gushing of spring so very often quoted in the film. But here the sound of Nature questions the nature of sound; the figurative and referential elements at the beginning of the film progressively move into abstraction, and music finds more and more its own character. Finally, the sound returns to its musical reality.

The compositional process of En cuerdas, an earlier work from which a few moments are also used in the film, presents some similarities with Un autre Printemps. Here again there is a ‘rerouting’, where the sonorities of the guitar are mingled with other sounds belonging to the same type of morphologies, and being used produce infinite material for all of these various developments. The sonic environment nevertheless remains one of strings that are plucked, rubbed and struck; but strings that have been made virtual, transformed by computer manipulations and demultiplied by the electroacoustic composing process.

Within this formal framework and the preliminary choices made with the software, I have allowed myself, as always, a great deal of room for improvised “séquences-jeux”, using the machines like a “sound body” brought to life with the mouse: its movement controls the musical gestures of the programmed sequences, the dynamics are worked out in real time, and so on. The moment of choice comes much later, when only the ’magic moments’ are kept.

This way of looking for the inner beauty of a sound to be later organized into structures, reminds me of a time when, to earn a living, I was sculpting wood following its natural forms. In both cases, I have tried to reconcile intention and chance, the perceived and the conceived, nature and artifice.

Now the film is finished. I watch and listen. Beyond its purely visual beauty, the film manages to capture in a simple way a complex musical journey, opening doors which are too often closed by scientific discourse. As well, I am reminded of a lovely adventure, with some hardships but also allowing for joyous meetings: with a charming colleague, Paul Lansky, with my old partners Christian Calon and Jean René, enjoying Robert Darroll photography, the dedication of the production team, and, of course, Uli Aumüller himself, how he dealt with numerous difficulties and shared his unwavering passion.

Robert Darroll, photography: We often speak of “Visual Music” but the thin dividing line between “visual music” and “music illustration” is not always clear. If the visual composition follows the tonal composition too closely (or vice versa), we tend to get the same “information” on both levels simultaneously. This is often the case when a particular musical gesture, like an ascending arpeggio, is echoed by a sequence of ascending forms. So a very close match between both dimensions is not always desirable. The other extreme, meaning the absolute autonomy of both dimensions without any compositional relationship at all, results in a meaningless random effect. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a satisfactory solution. And with each film or musical composition it will be different. We have occasionally had cases where the film needed a highly synchronised sound track in order to be comprehensible — at other times, we have opted for a loose, occasional synchronicity where the tonal dimension contributes mainly to the subjective mood of each visual sequence. In this specific case, Un autre Printemps, the form of the visual composition was dictated by Francis Dhomont’s tonal work. I did not find the composition very gestural, it was dominated by textures of varying intensity, most of which seemed to be derived from sounds of water, which suited my purposes very well. Water as a connecting, flowing, ever-present element. Even as we go over the bridge, somewhere below water is flowing, even if out of sight. The source of all my video material was the documentation which recorded Francis Dhomont collecting sound-material and reworking it for Un autre Printemps, and which included not only natural elements such as flora and water, but also manmade elements such as the construction of the bridge. These constructional elements form a stark contrast to the flowing natural elements. Visual Music is abstract painting in time. Even when the aural dimension “quotes” the barking of Vivaldi’s dog, I was averse to illustrating this with a real dog, more interested in the tonal characteristics with which the real music instrument imitated the real dog. I was interested in the jagged surface of horsehair scraping over the string. As the musical composition is highly “artificial” in that it consists largely of synthesised or highly modified tonal events which only obliquely refer to Vivaldi’s themes, I was not bound to illustrate those themes visually. The visual product is as artificial as the tonal source of its composition. Nor did I feel the necessity to repeat anything which had already been stated in Uli Aumüller’s film although, throughout the composition, recognisable fragments of footage previously seen in the main body of the film, are reused, mostly in a modified form. I felt it was rather more important to create a visual language which, although born out of that film material, would arrive at an unexpected and formally diverse effect, flowing parallel to Francis Dhomont’s tonal composition.