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AbstractTom Johnson is a Chicago-born composer now living in France, where he enjoys a certain celebrity, thanks in part to the success of his operas. His case is interesting, however, as an anachronistic manifestation of simplicity in music—in the meaning intended by the complexity or chaos theories. A pupil of Morton Feldman as well as an admirer of Satie and Cage, he participated actively in the life of the New York school through his reviews in the well-known magazine The Village Voice, pushing the logic of minimalism to its ultimate entrenchments. Indeed, his post-Duchamp conception of the found object applies in particular to the mathematic formulae he puts into music in the strictest way, without any addition of feeling, without interpretation, yet with a dimension that could be called playful. A practising Protestant, Tom Johnson refuses the halo effect of being labelled a composer and prefers the humble status of “finder.” The unrelenting determinism of his sonic finds, their disembodied, clock-like mechanism go against many a listening reflex and many aesthetic tendencies. Thus can the “voice of the Village” be said to sound strangely “simple” in the grandiloquent jumble of the European intellect.
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Claude Vivier was a genius Québecois composer of contemporary music. His disconcerting musical writing evokes for the psychoanalyst the dark world of a childhood before the words of the mother tongue, marked by the tinkling of percussive elements and dissonant sound echoes close to the body, from which an ineffable melancholic perfume pierces. In the composition of the sung part of the work, as can be represented by the opus Wo bis du Licht!, there is the singular use of an invented language addressed to oneself which seems to join the notion of paraphrenic twin put forward by Michel de M' Uzan. The precocious psychic wounds inflicted on the subject Vivier generated a singular destiny of creator on which the psychoanalysis can risk to throw a glance.
Keywords: jumeau paraphrénique, perception, langue maternelle, traumatisme précoce, identitaire, paraphrenic twin, perception, mother tongue, early trauma, identity
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Polanski's The Pianist (2002) displays a particular approach of music. The artistic commitment, which is the main subject of the movie, allows the director to question how an individual can face Evil. The way the music is used in this movie in not an unexplored topic of research. However, no study has so far sought to thoroughly show how an analysis of The Pianist can shed new light on Polanski's reflection about the status and function of music, which plays an essential role in the director's filmography. Thus, the main aim of our article will be to question in which way and to what extent music appears to the lead character as a means of survival and resistance against the Nazi's dehumanization process. We will also show that Polanski's vision of music, far from being naive or excessively idealistic, proves to be fundamentally ambivalent.
Keywords: Chopin, Le pianiste, musique de film, Roman Polanski, Shoah, Chopin, film music, The Pianist, Roman Polanski, Shoah