Journal de bord d’une expédition aux antipodes
The composition of “Pôles”
Pôles is about two strangers meeting in some futurist world… like a high-tech Waiting for Godot. Ginette Bertrand’s original music is a triumph of eerie menace and celestial harmony.
— Paula Citron, Globe and Mail [Toronto], September 1996.
Written in a loosely informal style, the Québecois composer Ginette Bertrand writes that composing-to-measure for multimedia, above all working with four hyperactive delusional hallucinants, is polar hell.
In Banff in April 1996, collaborating with Pierre-Paul Savoie and Jeff Hall (choreographers), and Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon (images), the anguish of creative indecision is clear. Access to superlative EA technology demanded an attitude of gorging. Four weeks of thrashing sounds in the studio led to three hours of material and a clear idea of the desired result. Yet it was only one week before the show that the final durations for the segments became fixed. (Successfully done with the aid of her long-time collaborator, Savoie.)
Three soundtracks seemed the way to go to achieve continuous sound. Without losing a beat in the two months leading up to the Ottawa premiere, scenario in hand, workshops with the choreographers and rushes of the virtual sequences, the interconnected tripartite nature of the sound emerged: a predominant choreographic soundtrack with live thematic punctuations form a cinematographic track to support the virtual visuals and base ambiance track (concrete and cosmic) to tie things together.
This is Pôles’ soundfield: 15 scenes over the course of 63 minutes.
The polar opposites of starry voids and ocean depths provided the themes for the evolution of the musical language. Inspired by a Thai lullaby the theme for Pierre-Paul (the astral visitor) is a slow pianistic motive based upon the harmonic series.
For the deep aquatic character, Jeff, frenetic rhythmic incantorial, Indonesian-inspired sounds were accompanied by sampled concrete sources. The themes are everywhere, reflecting the characters’ differences and struggles: and, at the behest of Pierre-Paul, in the middle a Beethoven Seventh quotation as an homage to the most beautiful of Occidental music fusing past and future, North Pole and South Pole, and reconciling the differences between the principals.
February 1998, English summary: Kevin Austin (22 March 1998)
Biography
Ginette Bertrand has been active in concert music composition for more than 15 years, passing from solo to orchestral writing, and now focused on EA, with the past 10 years devoted to multimedia and multidisciplinarity. For PPS Danse she has composed a number of commissions. Critics have written well of her work.
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