Celso AGUIAR




Jonathan NORTON




Fernando LOPEZ-LEZCANO




Nicholas HOPKINS




Nicky HIND




Cem DURUÖZ (guitar in Ripples)




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Stéphane ROY Crystal Music
After having straddled the world of literature and fine arts for several years, Stéphane Roy chose to devote himself fully to electroacoustic music. The malleable richness of certain pictorial works sparked his imagination and strongly influenced his concept of an acousmatic art. Unstable spaces, kineticism of sonic forms, shimmering vibrations of colors and contrasts of characters have dominated his compositions ever since. The works of Stéphane Roy have been awarded prizes in national and international competitions. He has been invited on several occasions to present his works in Europe and the Americas. Stéphane Roy completed a doctorate in composition under the guidance of Francis Dhomont and Jean-Jacques Nattiez and since 1989 has taught at the Université de Montréal. He was a visiting scholar at CCRMA at Stanford University (USA) in 1992-93. Material substances and sound substance have never been so closely associated as in the acousmatic genre. Crystal Music, which originates in this genre, is a music of forms, colors and materials shaped by kinetic energies and perspectives in the inner space of the work. Like glasswork, the material has been dilated, moulded, transmuted in the smelting furnaces of experimentation. Like crystal, it has been worked on by the imagination which gives its transparency the power of illusion. Beyond pure matter, there are still certain sham voices lost in factual collages, but also rhetorical phenomena of breaks and antagonistic relationships between musical characters, tensional nodes, suddenly subjugated by the whimsicality of an arabesque. Crystal Music, is run through by an abundant style using sound material as others use flat areas of color which they scratch with a nervous, angular graphism: it thus reveals a desire for plasticity which shortly betrays a dramatic expression. This work, composed largely with Bill Schottstaedt's Common Lisp Music program, could not have been realized without the technical support and exceptional conditions I enjoyed at CCRMA, Stanford University during the year 1992-1993. I thank also the Faculty of Music at the University of Montréal for lending me its studios in order to complete this piece. Crystal Music, was commissioned by the ACREQ (Association pour la création et la recherche Électroacoustiques du Québec), subsidized by the Canadian Arts Council. Crystal Music was awarded the First Prize at the 3rd Noroit-Léonce Petitot International Acousmatic Music Competition (Arras, France, 1994). Crystal Music previously appeared on the compact disc Prix international Noroit-Léonce Petitot 1993 (NOR 3). Crystal Music has been recorded in 1996 on the CD entitled Kaleidos under the label empreintes DIGITALes (IMED 9630).