Uploaded November 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago

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François Bayle ‎– Jeîta Ou Murmure Des Eaux (1970, new version 2012)
suite concrete in 17 moments

first series
A1 Murmure Des Eaux 3:05
A2 Cloches Fossiles 1:20
A3 Murmure Des Abeilles De Pierre 4:15
A4 Bouche D'ombre 1:29
A5 Rêverie De La Multiplication 2:50
A6 La Vaisseau Nadir 2:53
A7 Oracle 1:12
A8 Murmure Des Eaux 1:05
A9 L'eau Verticale 1:20
A10 Ailleurs 2:27

Premiere: Paris, Halles Baltard, 4 February 1971,at the Journees-Recontres du Grm

Sami Karkabi, who discovered the Jeita Grotto near Beirut in Lebanon, had asked the composer of „Espace inhabitables“ to write music for its opening in 1969. The premiere of the resulting work „Nadir“ (1968), for soprano, tenor, bass, bass clarinet, guitar, ondes martenot and percussion, took place in the grotto11 January 1969, under the direction of Konstantin Simonovic. For the occasion, François Bayle made recordings in the grotto itself (percussions of the stalacites, murmuring of the water etc.) which are the starting point of the suite. Jeita, meaning „murmuring of the waters“ in Armaic, 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“. 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 smultaneously ossified and fleet, a sound universe of the tenous, of sounds sometimes minuscle, 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. „Jeita“ also chronogically correspond with the arrival in the GRM studios of the first synthesizers, making possible the composers high-pitched framework and sparkling textures which form one of hallmarks of his first sound.

Video created with Sonic Visualizer and vokoscreen on an openSUSE 13.2 Linux System.