PIERRE-YVES MACÉ « Jardins partagés » (2017-2020) for ten singers, ten musicians and electronics

For these Shared Gardens, Pierre-Yves Macé, a composer inspired by field recordings, drew from a corpus of songs gathered all over the world by the Ensemble Les Cris de Paris over the course of several years. Simple little tunes, lullabies and pop songs… The songs of the world are also the whole world’s songs and offer the musician both a melodic resource and an audio document. The melodies feed the instrumental and vocal writing. The loudspeaker, an instrument in and of itself, allows us to hear documents in their entirety and also transformed and spatialized through electroacoustics. These three cantatas assert an aesthetic cosmopolitism that might represent a “post-Babel” emancipated from the “confusion of languages”; it is an old dream of musicians to imagine listening as the primary instrument and music as the shared voice of a very human garden, a Shared Garden