[Jeu de temps / Times Play 2014]

Winning Works and Composers

Winners / Gagnants | Submissions / Soumissions | Events / Événements | Awards / Prix | CD Cache 2014 | Jury

For the 2014 edition of Jeu de temps / Times Play (JTTP), the composers of the six top-placing works (there was a tie for fifth place this year), as chosen by an international jury, were awarded prize packages comprised of CEC memberships, CDs and journal subscriptions provided by our Project Partners; cash prizes were also awarded to the top three placing composers. These works are also amongst the eight submissions selected for inclusion on Cache 2014, the accompanying compilation CD of the JTTP project. The winning works and other works on Cache are presented in a number of radio broadcasts and concerts over the course of the year.

In addition to the awards and support offered to the winners and Cache participants, all works submitted to JTTP are featured in a dedicated issue of eContact! and can be heard on the JTTP 2014 submissions page, which also contains programme notes for the pieces and composer biographies.

1. Line Katcho — Aiguillage [Switches & Crossings] (11:06 / 2013)

Aiguillage [Switches & Crossings] bases itself on the engineering, the mechanics, the forces and physical energies underlying the operation of roller coasters. Circuits of long serpentine paths are triggered by a single initial state, the origin of unfolding activity that replenishes and renews itself within itself.

Line Katcho works in the fields of acousmatic music, videomusic works and film music. Her primary concerns involve using sound as kinetic matter, representing movement, forces or gestures. Her controlled writing is complemented by an experimental approach and a strong interest in perceptual play. She is the artistic director of the Soundwich concert series in Montréal.
http://soundcloud.com/linekatcho

2. Pierre-Luc Lecours — Impacts discrets (9:14 / 2014)

L’horloge s’arrête
a nuit commence à peine
filtre la lumière
dérobe la quiétude
il y a des cris
personne n’est encore venu
— Guillaume Lebel, La voix meurt pleine

The work on Impacts discrets revolves around the idea of creating an abstract, yet clearly articulated physical system in the midst of which the music evolves and reacts. A system with its own laws, a sort of surreal microcosm where space is subjected to another gravity and to other physical laws.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist, Pierre-Luc Lecours began his musical career as a self-taught musician before studying electroacoustic composition at Université de Montréal. He has participated in the composition and production of several albums and film soundtracks, theatre and digital applications. Although his work covers a wide range of æsthetics, Lecours always aims to create emotional impact and to create successions of images with his music. In 2014, his work was prized in the Destellos Foundation Electroacoustic Compositions Competition and in the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers.

3. Guillaume Côté — La gerçure des alentours (9:22 / 2014)

Composed almost exclusively around synthetic sounds and based on the pejorative representation of sound in literary works of the North, the second piece of my cycle themed on the North and on Quebec’s landscape underlines the sounds in the North as something alien, aggressive, unnatural, dull and poor. Through the use of the writings of Marie Uguay, the work attempts to deal with and give human sensitivity to the austere vision of the Nordic imaginary. Thanks to Markita Boies for the narration and Stephan Kovacs for the use of the writings of Marie Uguay (Poèmes, Éditions du Boréal).

Guillaume Côté is a young sound artist with a marked preference for a musical discourse based on contrasts. His artistic process essentially rests in the search for beauty in things’ imperfections. He is presently a master’s student and teaching assistant in electroacoustic composition at Université de Montréal. Laureate of SOCAN (2013) and Jeux de Temps / Times Play (2013) prizes, his works have been chosen and broadcasted in numerous festivals worldwide, including Festival Música Viva (Lisbon, 2010), Electronic Music Midwest Festival (Chicago, 2010), Festival Longueur d’ondes (Brest, France, 2010), Noisefloor Festival (Stafford, UK, 2011), SEAMUS (Miami, 2011), EMUfest (Rome, 2011, 2012) and MANCA (Nice, 2013).

4. Fernando Alexis Franco Murillo — Qualia (10:43 / 2013)

Qualia is about the personal relationship we build with the sounds during a concert or performance. Every single person present in the concert hall will have a different experience for the same sonic event.

It is at Concordia University that Fernando Alexis Franco Murillo discovered a new form of expression with electroacoustic music. His music is inspired from personal experiences and human emotions like love, sadness and anger. He is currently completing a master’s degree in Electroacoustic Composition at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal under the supervision of Louis Dufort.
http://soundcloud.com/alexis-franco

5. (ex æquo) Sébastien Lavoie — The Four Seasons: Summer (6:10 / 2012)

My goal is to give musical sense to sounds related to the specific season and to spatialize them according to their cardinal direction. Vivaldi composed the Classical music version of Four Seasons, I’m proposing the electroacoustic version of the Four Seasons. Over the last four years, I’ve recorded many sounds to inspire me in my compositional projects. Since I live in Canada, I noticed that I had recordings from all four seasons. Thus, I thought it would be great to organize these sounds in relation to their related natural elements (Winter = water, Spring = earth, Summer = fire, Autumn = wind). In addition, to complement the work, composed for eight channels, I’ve incorporated the four cardinal directions to give a geographical sense to the four seasons (winter = north, spring = east, summer = south, autumn = west). So there will be a focus in each season — an attention to the (spatial) location — of the sounds in the composition.

In 2007, Sebastien began his electroacoustic music studies at the Université de Montréal, completing his master’s degree in 2013 on the integration of spatialization in acousmatic music and its performance in concert, under the direction of Robert Normandeau. During the course of his studies, he also benefitted from an exchange program in order to study abroad for one year at De Montfort University with the composer John Young. Sebastien regards himself as belonging to a new generation of students in music who use the laptop as musical instrument. This compositional tool allows him to develop his musical skills as much on stage as in the studio. What totally gets him into electroacoustic music is the possibility, using technologies, to generate a multitude of hybrid musical forms. Sound explorer, he travels through the diverse avenues of noise and music in order to capture and compose novel sounds.
http://soundcloud.com/sebastienlavoie1

5. (ex æquo) Guillaume Barrette — Résurgence (8:55 / 2012)

Composed at the beginning of my master’s degree in electroacoustic composition, Résurgence is a piece combining guitar, real-time processing and tape. It was formed by the combination of acousmatic composition and my guitar playing, experimenting in different ways to generate sounds by the entire body of the instrument in order to incorporate, thereafter, different sensors. It is part of my on-going research into the development of an augmented guitar for compositional works I have been working on throughout my master’s degree.

Originally from Québec City, Guillaume Barrette completed his studies at Cégep de Sainte-Foy in Natural Sciences and Music. Afterwards, in order to combine his main interests, he undertook studies in electroacoustic composition at the Université de Montréal. Recipient of first prize in the 2010 SOCAN Foundation’s Awards for Young Composers as well as third prize in 2012, he was also a finalist in the CEC’s JTTP 2011 and 2009. In 2010, he completed an enriching séjour to pursue his artistic studies at De Montfort University in England. He is currently finishing a master’s degree with the subject of developing a hyper-guitar as a tool for composition.