Murmure des eaux (Jeîta or Murmuring Waters) – François Bayle
The traffic of sound and its transmutations would become important themes in Bayle’s oeuvre. Almost directly after Espaces inhabitables, he wrote Jeîta ou Murmure des eaux (Jeîta or Murmuring Waters), another major work that explores space, though in a different way. This piece was inspired by the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon, where in 1969 he had given a concert (and premiered his instrumental piece Nadir) to mark the opening of the recently discovered upper gallery of the cave. For Jeîta, he used sounds he had recorded in the cave, as well as electronic effects produced by the new synthesizers at the GRM studios. The piece alludes to an abstract inhabitant of the cave, fluid and multiple (Jeîta means “murmur of the waters”) — a flowing body like the “Clock of Blood” that is the “Man-Animal” as described by Paul Klee, whom Bayle references in the piece’s program notes. Bayle positioned the piece in a certain listening zone and specified, like Paul Cézanne, that nature is “within.” (IRCAM)
1/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Murmure des eaux 1 03:04
2/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Cloches fossiles 01:19
3/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Murmure des abeilles de pierre 03:44
4/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Bouche d’ombre 01:26
5/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Rêverie de la multiplication 02:47
6/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Le vaisseau Nadir 02:54
7/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Oracle 1 01:12
8/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Murmure des eaux 2 01:04
9/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — L’eau verticale 01:19
10/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Ailleurs 02:35
11/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Rêverie de la résonance 02:57
12/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Eau-forte 02:53
13/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Murmure des dentelles d’eau 05:17
14/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Intervalles d’eau 00:53
15/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Écritures murmurées 01:18
16/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Oracle 2 02:46
17/ Jeîta ou murmure des eaux — Murmure des eaux 3 01:45
18/ L’Infini du bruit 11:00
19/ Jeîta retour — Oracle des eaux 1 02:25
20/ Jeîta retour — Oracle des eaux 2 03:01
21/ ARP_space. Roland Kuit * 03.34
Sami Karkabi, who discovered the Jeita Grotto near Beirut in Lebanon, had asked the composer of “Espaces inhabitables” to write music for its opening in 1969. The premiere of the resulting work, “Nadir”, 1968 (cat. 37), for soprano, tenor, bass, bass clarinet, guitar, ondes Martenot and percussion, took place in the grotto 11 January 1969, under the direction of Konstantin Simonovic. For the occasion, François Bayle made recordings in the grotto itself (percussions on the stalactites, murmuring of the water, etc.) which are the starting point for the suite. “Jeita”, meaning “murmuring of the waters” in Aramaic, examines the paradox of this intimate, nocturnal conjunction between hardness and fluidity (the contrast fluid-solid had already been probed in “Jardins de rien”), paradox fully summarized in the title of one of the movements, “Eau verticale” [vertical water]. Water, which usually “disintegrates incessantly, at each instant renouncing all form” (Ponge), on the contrary here takes form, but at the cost of excessive duration, and by an invisible phenomenon to which this frosty and lustral music renders us sensitive. To this very slow development and transmutation of liquefied stone and petrified water, the music responds as a phenomenology of the invisible—time simultaneously ossified and fleet, a sound universe of the tenuous, of sounds sometimes minuscule, of microscopic rhythmic madness (beating as lightly as insect wings), of sounds of intense and contained energy, of sparkling layers. Its division into seventeen separate movements (certain beaded together) gives the sensation of labour ceaselessly begun again, rather than a flat duration. “Jeîta” also chronologically correspond with the arrival in the GRM studios of the first synthesizers, making possible the composer’s high-pitched framework and sparkling textures which form one of the hallmarks of his first sound.
released January 4, 2021
* The ARP2500 as space projector for very small soundparticles.
