Pendulum
Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18
hydraulic jacks. The choir stands on tilting platforms, constituting
a living, sonorous body. That body expresses itself through various
physical states. Its plasticity varies at the mercy of its sonority.
It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds, and lyrical or
narrative sounds. The bodies of the singers and their voices play
with and against gravity. They brush and avoid each other creating
subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they
break their cohesion and burst into lyrical flight or fold up into an
obsessional and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in
a robotic allegory where the technological complexity and the
lyricism of the moving bodies combine into a work with Promethean
accents.
Conception,
construction and musical composition: Michel Décosterd and André
Décosterd
Interpretation: Jeune Opéra Copagnie – Les
voix
Direction: Nicolas Farine
Tenors: Wolfgang Behrenz, Alain
Bertschy, Michel Mülhauser
Baritones: Davide Autieri, Sacha
Michon, Christophe Gindraux
Basses: Francesco Biamonte, Michael
Kreis, Christophe Mironneau
Technical collaboration: Jacques
Décosterd, François Bommottet
Within
the continuum of our researches, the idea of creating a moving choir
came from our intention to instigate a relation between movement and
sound that was as close fitting and natural as possible. In Pendulum
Choir, the mechanical set up engenders physical constraints on the
singers and, as a consequence, on their way of singing. This creates
new and unexpected sonorities, a plastic parameter that we decided to
incorporate in the musical writing. Similarly, we sought to include
phenomena due to gravity, gravity forces, and acceleration forces on
the singers. These phenomena are well known in mechanics but still
foreign to musical compositions. The concept of a mass of sonorous
and moving human bodies, going through a natural distortion under the
effect of physical forces brings to mind a living organ.