Sonosphère III & IV
For Symphony Orchestra and Live
Shatter the concert format! This is the goal declared by the composer Elzbieta Sikora in her Sonosphères III & IV. Erase the ceremony that encapsulates the beginning of each classical musical performance, destroy the bows, get rid of the weight of the decorum that the history of music conveys without knowing why.
Sonosphère – literally a sphere of sound. The dictionary teaches us that the term was born in 1974, and at the time, designated "a round loudspeaker with a magnetic base enabling its orientation". For Elzbieta Sikora, the term is not only poetic, but also a veritable compositional aspiration: that of inhabiting and dressing an acoustic space in its entirety to expand it. The third and fourth chapters of this series should be played successively. Sonosphères III invades not only the concert hall, but the entire building: the music resonates in the foyer via brass instruments in the balconies. The buzz of the audience also becomes a part of the musical discourse until the audience enters the room itself, where the orchestra is playing, welcoming them. Sonosphères IV then takes over, limited to the concert hall, but—with the brass and percussion instruments hidden in stereo throughout the seats—always working with the space between the orchestra’s sounds, the space between the sounds and the public; the sonosphere, constantly in motion.
The Technologies
Beyond the spatialization and plotting the trajectories of the sounds in space, the live electronics contribute here to giving birth to a type of ambiguity to perception, notably via the variety of the timbres created. A manner of highlighting the hidden secrets of a simple violin, a piano chord, or the trill of a flute.
Past Experiences at IRCAM
La tête d’Orphée II for flute and electronics (1982)
Biography
Elzbieta Sikora
Composer (b. 1943)
Polish composer Elzbieta Sikora has lived in Paris since 1981. She studied composition in Warsaw with Tadeus Baird and Zbigniew Rudzinski. In Paris, she studied electroacoustic music with Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle, comp…
