Pousseur - 3 visages de Liège

Composed and realized during the spring of 1961 to
accompany the projections of the spectacle ‘Forms and Light’ conceived by
Nicolas Schoeffer for the Congress Palace of Liège, this work was immediately
removed by the municipal authorities of the town and replaced by some ‘milder’
music. It must be said that in view of what seemed to me a too decorative
aspect of the visual pat of the spectacle, I took care of respecting
consciously the precise chronometric program which was imposed on me. Moved by
observations about the ‘realist’ possibilities of the electro acoustic material
which I had made during previous years, I intended to realize highly
‘evocative’ musical scenes: not only for what concerns the physical nature of
the sound but also in relation to history, even the most recent one (big
strikes at the end of 1960) from the surrounding region. In this way it was not
difficult to assign three rather precise titles to the different parts: ‘Air
and water’, ‘Voices of the town’ and ‘Smelting-Works’, and to send into this
world this musical and socio-graphical triptych for an autonomous existence: it
defended itself rather well. The record, made in the USA, has had a solid success. The
piece has still been realized with the help of the primitive and rather boring
techniques of ‘micro-montage’ which obliges us to be very conscious of every
single element. The composition somehow anticipates (like Stockhausen’s Kontakte) more global production-methods
which became possible somewhat later by the introduction of analogue
synthesizers and later by digital techniques. The piece integrates (like my Électre or Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge) in an intimate way
‘concrete’ material (for example the voices, denaturised until the point of
total abstraction) and purely ‘electronic’ (synthetic) elements. Thus I tried
to give a musical portrait of the city of my youth.

Henri Pousseur