Videomusic ?

We had been discussing with Jean Piché about a videomusic project involving live percussionists for a few years. Actually since the beginning of Sixtum. The project was then to be presented at Elektra, which had commissioned Jean Piché for a new work. But for different reasons, we were never able to schedule it.

Then this past year, the time came and we participated in the pre-opening concert of Elektra 2010 last May 5 with two videomusic works, K'ANCHAY by Jean Piché and Beat bye Sylvain Pohu.  We enjoyed the experience, so much that we decided to program these very interesting works again in our 2010-2011 season (January 19), and added to new works for the same medium, one from well known composer Louis Dufort, adn the other by a younger composer, Dominic Thibault.

But what is videomusic after all? Jean Piché gave it a definition in an article entitled De la musique et des images for Circuit (Vol. 13, No. 3), which you can also find on Jean Piché's website.

To complete this article, I also invite you to watch the following videos of a conversation I had with Jean last August 16. In these videos, the composer explains his approach to vdeomusic and some of the problems he encountered writing a work integrating  live musicians.  I also uploaded short excerpts from his piece K'ANCHAY.

From a perfomer's point of view, the videomusic experience is inspiring, and interesting!. The instrumentation used is simple: 4 Roland Sampling Pads and one MalletKat.  Sylvain Pohu also added a sixxen, an instrument built to play Xenakis's work Pléiades. Many percussionists are reluctant to use these types of instruments (MIDI controllers) because they lack the expressiveness possible on real percussion instruments. While this is partly true, controllers allow other types of music interactions, notably wiith the video.

See by yourself!!

September 21 2010 update:
See other beautifull videos by Jean Piché on Vimeo

Composer Jean Piché defines his vision of videomusic.

Composer Jean Piché describes his work with musicians for his latest piece, K'ANCHAY

Composer Jean Piché describes some of the issued related with presentation of videomusic with live musicains

First excerpt of K'ANCHAY by Jean Piché

Second excerps of K'ANCHAY by Jean Piché

Third exerpt from K'ANCHAY by Jean Piché