On Les Disparitions (INSUB. Insub.rec.cd27), French composer Sébastien Roux ruminates long and hard on the conundrum “how does a sound disappear?”
There are eight pieces here scored for viola, cello, and voice, with the composer himself supplying electronics. When I say “composer” and “scored”, in fact the very modern Roux works with texts, or “verbal scores”; the short paragraphs were developed in a collaborative process with the players, Cyprien Busolini, Yannick Guedon, and Deborah Walker in a process which took place in 2021 and 2022, before these finished recordings were made. In these texts, it almost seems as though Roux is simply describing what we hear on the record, but in fact the prose is laden with difficult questions, observations, and notions. There are general indications for how the music ought to be produced, and varied, and it’s evident that our man has a deep knowledge of timbres, harmonics, and tones – but I suppose he leaves a lot of leeway to the team of players as to how to apply the cues.
The instructions for ‘In the other’ are a remarkable exercise in concise prose; when unpacked, it seems there’s a fundamental rethinking of the principles of how we understand, and perform, intervals in musical composition. Roux questions these precepts, which started with mathematical ideas from Pythagoras, and (like Tony Conrad and others) issues a robust challenge, exhorting his players to “construct a catalog that goes from the greatest dissonance to the greatest consonance”, invoking theories about just intonation and ratios along the way. To a non-specialist like me that sounds like he’s asking them to rewrite the whole rule book – and they have to perform it in just five minutes! The intellectual rigour embedded in these texts is matched only by the severity of the music that emerges, and the steely determination of the musicians in attempting to realise these difficult schemes.
We’re some way now from Stockhausen and his Aus Den Sieben Tagen, which was a hefty slap in face for musical orthodoxy in 1968, but now starts to seem provisional and overly diffuse in the face of Roux’s blades of glinting steel, sharpened to a fine point. We last heard Roux in 2020 with his Inevitable Music #5, and even then I noted his penchant for creating self-describing music and much the same applies here. Cyprien Busolini and Deborah Walker, who happen to be members of Dedalus, played on that record also. From 1st April 2025.