My Cinema for the Ears
The musique concrète of Francis Dhomont and Paul Lansky

A Film by Uli Aumüller

Documentary for ZDF / ARTE 2000
Beta SP 4:3, 60 min., Stereo
Camera: Christopher Rowe, bvk, Günther Uttendorfer / Sound: David Aumüller, Mario Gauthier / Animation: Robert Darroll / Film Editor: Bernhard Schönherr

DVD for 20,00 €

A clip can be seen
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Essay (in German)
Reviews
Radio script (in German)

The work of the Franco-Canadian composer Francis Dhomont, pupil of Pierre Schaeffer, the legendary founder of musique concrète, is at the centre of this staged documentary movie. The film is about how to make music with sounds, microphone, tape and computer. Dhomont was commissioned to compose a new, another “Spring” for this film, based on the poem by Antonio Vivaldi from his composition "The Four Seasons: Spring" using the sounds mentioned by Vivaldi, bird song for example, the splashing of a stream, the murmur of the wind, rolling thunder or a dog barking.

Dhomont records these sounds (on location in Canada) in sequences which sometimes quote Jacques Tati and reprocesses them in his studio, altering and recombining them... He reflects upon the idea that composing musique concrète is very similar to the work of a film director. Rewinding, starting again, cutting, mixing and changing, processing the speed, the colours, the notes. Debussy also talked about creating pictures.

The film plays a kind of game: To approach a noise microscopically with the microphone changes the form of his perception. The noise gets more abstract and because of that actually more musical. The same is true of pictures. The closer a camera approaches an object, the more abstract it becomes: No longer one concrete picture, but a composition of colours, shapes, structures, textures. The object in question is a river, a stream, heard and seen from several perspectives, composed in ever closer perspectives, cubist, so to speak, until the perception changes into pure abstraction and then back again into its original concrete form. The aesthetic of musique concrète is translated back into a possible language of this film.

A central theme of the film is perception; perception of the visual and the acoustic and how they refer to each other, how one can dissolve these contexts and put them together again in a new way; how the context, i.e. the composition, focuses perception.

Francis Dhomont meets Paul Lansky, a composer from Princeton, USA. They cross a bridge while talking about whether urban sounds can be used in composition. As with the water of the river, the bridge is also broken down into its acoustic and visual components, a kind of homage to Walter Ruttmann, but again completely different. The topic here, once again, is cubist dismantling and rejoining, the production of imaginary rooms.

The conversation continues in Dhomont’s kitchen and focuses on the tinkling of cups - whether one must recognise a sound’s origin in electro-acoustic music. Does the physical gesture suffice or must the sound more or less proclaim its origin? One says "yes", the other says "no", and a quarrel almost arises. There are, indeed, different schools of thought among composers who work with sounds.

And so on and so forth ...

A sequence which was created at the ZKM in Karlsruhe on their “Inferno”, a high performance computer for the electronic processing of images, marks the end of the film. To visualise Francis Dhomont’s new composition of Vivaldi’s "Spring" with images processed in a similar electronic fashion as Dhomont did with his sounds to compose the piece was a fairly self-evident idea. An electro-visual video to electro-acoustic music (created by Robert Darroll) – within the process of forming the film, this sequence became a coda. It can also be viewed as an independent work, but one is more informed having seen the previous 55 minutes.

All the threads of the film are gathered up in this sequence; and the film documents its creation - one could even say that because the finale is created purely from footage from the documentary, this film documents itself, whilst the many stories with and by Francis Dhomont and Paul Lansky are included on top, are a bonus.