ManiFeste 2012: Acanthes Academy @ IRCAM

Things are going well in Paris at the moment.  I've had my first rehearsal with Ensemble Intercontemporain and conductor Pascal Rophé (who is really quite amazing, both as a conductor and as a pedagogue for the academy composers), and there are only minor changes to make before the next rehearsal.  They are doing fabulously with a constantly shifting meter at a fast tempo.  Otherwise, the writing is fairly traditional - not many extended techniques (maybe if it was a smaller ensemble I would have done more... but it is essentially a chamber orchestra piece).  One change I need to make is to let the brass players be brass players, and remove some mutes.

IRCAM is rather amazing, it is kind of like a new music utopia (and Paris is like an art utopia... amusingly, there is a little piece of UCSD here - an instantiation of Niki de Saint Phalle's "Sungod" is just outside of IRCAM).  60% of the funding comes from the French government, and the other 40% is covered by private sources, such as corporate and individual sponsorship (their Design Sonore department works on the sound of slamming your car door, among other things).  Unlike UCSD's CPMC Black Box Theatre, The Espace de Projection features physically variable acoustics, with automated panels in the walls that spin to reveal different contours made of different sound-absorptive materials.  The library is amazing - I found instantly a rare copy of Die Reihe with an important article by John Whitney that I've been looking for.

There are two other venues that we use, the concert hall in the Centre Pompidou (above, next door to IRCAM) and Le Centquartre, which is north on the #7 subway line.

The concerts have been outstanding, including probably the best violin recital I've ever seen, with Boulez's Anthèmes 2 (played by Hae-Sun Kang) and Bach's Sonata in D Minor (played by Amandine Beyer), including of course the astonishing last movement, the Chaconne (check out the recording called Morimur by the Hilliard Ensemble if you don't know the Chaconne). There has also been a blistering rendition of Stockhausen's Zyklus, and a really wonderful new piece called Nôise by Ondrej Adámek. These are of course highlights from a very dense and interesting festival, with more than a week to go still.