Francois Giraudon.(Review)

Francois Giraudon

Compact disc, 1998, Chrysopee Electronique--Bourges, LDC 278 1110; available from Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique--Bourges, Place Andre Malraux, BP 39, 18001 Bourges Cedex, France; telephone (+33) 2-48-20-41-87; fax (+33)2-48-20-45-51; electronic mail imebourges@gmeb.fr; World Wide Web www.gmeb.fr

Because Francois Giraudon is such a young man (he was born in 1967), the arrangement of works on this disc from earliest to most recent invites the listener to trace his technical and musical growth. The development of his technique over eight years is clear enough. The earlier works are skillfully done, but the later works are more sophisticated. Musically, Mr. Giraudon shows as much assurance early as later on. Change is most evident in his palette: his preference seems to have shifted from abstract to concrete sounds.

Etude: La Corrida (1990)begins with the noise of a cheering crowd, which fades into a mass of processed sound with an equally broad spectrum, settling in turn into a sort of throbbing gloom. The composer describes the work as a surrealistic view of "la Corrida," and indeed, the dust, heat, and daylight of the bullring are mostly absent. Because the lower registers are more taurine than human, I wonder if the listener is getting the bull's point of view. I wonder, too, if Mr. Giraudon analyzed the creature's bellow for the piece, as Iannis Xenakis did for Taurhiphanie a few years earlier. Technically speaking, the composer set out to explore morphological connections between acoustic and synthesized sound.

Passages (1991) is, the booklet tells us, "for two synthetizers performed in live" (the text is rife with the sort of poor translations found in the Bourges-Prize discs, also put out by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique--Bourges; one can only hope they will in the future find a native English speaker for the task). The piece offers 11 min of FM sounds bathed in reverb, not altogether a bad thing here. Though little in the piece would have been ...