petites formes Winners Concert 2024, 25-26 October 2024

The ancient anecdote of this “pictorial duel” between the two painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, one having painted a child in front of grapes, so realistic that a bird came to peck them, the other, winning the duel with a red curtain so much “truer than nature” that everyone believed they were seeing the real curtain covering the work.  The interesting thing resides in the conclusion of this fable: to fool a bird seeking to feed itself demands much less talent than to fool a man who expected to be fooled, an artist as well!

This mimesis, as the Greeks call it, is to some extent the questioning that is central and constant in the history of the arts, of philosophy, of literature, of the theatre etc., from antiquity to nowadays, until Jacques Lacan invented this concept of the appearance and of a semblance more resembling than nature.

For me, electro-acoustic music is particularly open to these thoughts and this allegory of the “curtain and the birds” finds a very concrete echo in our music.  This piece adopts and reorganises the elements and the theme of an older piece that played realistic sounds in movement (Doppler effect), some of these sounds being pure and simple recordings and others “imitated”, completely “fabricated” in this idea of representation as Aristotle described it.

 – Program –

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