Last week was the final presentation of the Ambiant project in Grenoble in the contexte of the # Art, Science, Technologie event organized by ACROE.

A very good event in fact, with very interesting workshop and conferences and concerts.

The ZKM team has made an amazing job, and the sound and light system was very good and impressive.

Many people in the audience for our concert. I’ve finally didn’t find a way to extend my piece, but I’ve change a lot of small details that I think make the music stronger, and I’m quite happy about the result.

ZKM will make a release with the musics and we have now to make stereo and 5.1 versions.

This Ambiant project was a great time and opportunity, very, very good experience on many levels with great people, and I’m glad I’ve been a part of it and made germans and greeks friends.

Jérôme Bertholon - 11/12/2011

Back in Lyon since one week after a wonderful period of composition in Karlsruhe.

So, during this month in ZKM I’ve finished to compose the first version of the piece for the concert that happened on the 16th of September in Kubus.

This first version last around 13 minutes and is composed of 14 sections that follow the original plan of transpositions. The result is quite good but I’ll try to keep on working until the second concert in Grenoble in order to make it a bit longer.

In fact, the material is quite dense and as Claude says there’s something to do about the scale between the internal tension of the music and the time it has to last.

The thing is that working on the composition, I’ve realized that one of the biggest problem was maybe that my different musical datas (harmonic/melodic sketches, rythmical proportions) have something in common : creating tension and only tension.

In a way it’s good but it makes a global structure that is always quite compressed and nervous.

So, probably the first thing to do before starting again on the composition is to go back to the very primitive musical material and to extract other types of expressive curves from it.

Will see…

But the concert has been very good (but with very few people in the audience…) and we have made very different musics with Omer and Damian, and I think it’s quite interesting for the audience.

Jérôme Bertholon - 26/09/11

- Some interesting things happened by using some curve built for one material on the parameters of another one. The perspective for another part begins now to emerge.

- I’ve composed the basic melodic line of the beginning of the 1st section.

Jérôme Bertholon - 24/06/2011

I’ve finished to compose the 2nd section of the piece.

I’ve in fact 3 different versions of it : the first version is interesting but it seems to me that the harmonic parameter is to directional to assume the static formal function that this section must have. Maybe it can be the first step, the reference layer for another section that will occurs later in the piece.

The 2 others are possible solutions, even if a few details are not so good for now on (this can be fixed later).

So, now, let’s begin another part (which one ?).

Jérôme Bertholon - 19/06/2011

The general idea and structure of the first section is now fixed. The high complexity of this part made me afraid of spending to much time on it. So, I’ve decided to continue and to go back after. I’m now realizing the second section.

Jérôme Bertholon - 14/06/2011

From this point, it seems that the basic idea of the piece (to use acceleration/deceleration patterns to compose all the proportions of the piece in a kind of fractal way) is a real problem : it makes me feel in prison with no possibilities to stimulate imaginations and creates non dynamical results.

So, after a talk with Claude it seems that the piece is going to be something else.

I’ve started now to work on new plans and structures and the funny thing is that it seems that no ideas are lose but that all the previous textures that I had imagined are still here but in a more powerfull and dynamic way.

A quite precise plan for the first section should be finished in a few days.

Jérôme Bertholon - 05/06/2011

Still working on organisation.

I’ve worked on a general plan that is now not precise enough but contains some general informations about different sections of the piece.

The idea is now to think at the lower level and to precise things and organisation for the 1st section. One of the bigger problems that still remain is to find the way to think the relation between details and pre-calculated rythmical evolutions.

Jérôme Bertholon - 29/05/2011

I’ve begin to work on a general plan for the piece…more details in a few days.

Jérôme Bertholon - 22/05/2011

“Classification” of different types of textures with small realisations in order to begin to solve the problems.

Jérôme Bertholon - 15/05/2011

- A first solution has been found for this idea of timbre scale.

- now back to more abstract considerations about the structure of the piece. So I’m precising some ideas, organising some parameters, etc… in order to be able to produce a plan in the next days.

Jérôme Bertholon - 08/05/11