Pursuit: IRCAM musical series

Pursuit I: Contacts

Instrumental sounds and electronics, sounds and noises, fixedness and movement, the piano and electronics, these juxtapositions - innovative in 1960 - can be found in a new production of Kontakte by Stockhausen that surrounds the listener in an ever-changing perception.

Produced by wave generators, the tape creates a continuum of timbres, a permanent transition between pitches and rhythms, an immense Momentform (lit. moment form). Influenced by the thoughts and works of Stockhausen, who he discovered during the 1970s, Philippe Manoury presents his latest creation for piano and orchestra in this Pursuit at the Bouffes du Nord.

"It is not a question of forms in which an instant would only be a tiny piece of a timeline, a moment, a particle of a given length of time, but forms in which the concentration on the now would create a kind of vertical incision that would cut through a horizontal representation of time until the absence of time that I call eternity: an eternity that does not start at the end of time, but that can be reached inside each moment."
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Momentform, texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, volume 1, 1963.

Program

• Karlheinz Stockhausen Kontakte
• Philippe Manoury Terra Ignota, in memoriam Karlheinz Stockhausen
  Commissioned by the Orchestre Poitou-Charentes and the Festival de l'Épau, World Premiere

[via ircam.fr]