Machina Humana
Project Description
Written especially for the Lemanic Modern Ensemble, Machina Humana is coproduction between the ensemble, the Archipel Festival (Geneva) and GRAME, a French national center for music creation.
This piece is part of a new cycle of works, each of which provides a different perspective of our industrial world, and is inspired by various atmospheres of industrial activities in different cities.
Machina Humana is preceded by the composition The Forgotten City, commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain, inspired by the city of Buffalo, New York, a once-powerful sector of the Manufacturing Belt in the United States (See program note annexed to the file). The Forgotten City and Machina Humana are to be seen as two mirror compositions. Forgotten evokes the memories of a past industrial activity through an intense rhythmic energy and a purely acoustic approach where the industrial sound is re-synthesized through the orchestration and combinations of extended technics. Machina however, draws upon the dynamism of the current industrial activity of the Arve valley of Haute-Savoie and Switzerland, and uses raw factory sounds as material alongside electronic processing of instruments.
The confrontation between Man and Machine is at the heart of this project Machina Humana. He poses the question of who is really in control, Man or Machine. The work includes sound material recorded at the heart of the industries in the Alps. David Hudry chooses to impart a musical dimension to the banal sounds of this factory environment and to present these noises as musical objects often blending them with the sounds produced by the musicians. The recorded sounds are used in a wide range of ways: from very short impacts to long atmospheric sound tracks. The shortest sounds are sampled in order to obtain rhythmic control and to compose new, unreal machines sound sequences stemming from the composer’s imagination. The longest sound track provides a sound picture of the activity in selected factories. These long sound sequences are accompanied by instrumental interventions sometimes also processed electronically.
The instrumental writing includes many different extended technics from scratching sounds in the strings to multiphonics in the winds, in order to create varying relationships between the instrumental material and the sounds recorded from the factories.
A drum set is used to direct the listener’s attention to the machines pulsations also present in the instrumental part. He also uses many rhythmic patterns transcribed from what he heard during his recording session in the factories. This rhythmic and sonorous approach that he has been experimenting with since The Forgotten City translates into a new artistic necessity to give rhythm a preponderant dimension, without forgetting the primordial work given to the melody and the harmony that accompanied him since the beginning of his career as a composer.
With the help of the computer program Max MSP, different sound processes are applied to certain instruments in order to blend with the industrial sound material.
Project Objectives
By associating a territory like that of the Arve Valley, with its rich history linked to precision mechanics to a regional ensemble devoted to contemporary music, David Hudry wants to achieve two goals: 1) to valorise artistically the sounds of this particular industry and 2) he wants to invite the factory workers to perceive the sounds of their daily environment differently. More importantly, he proposers his audience a new perspective on the industrial environment, a renewed listening of the sounds characteristic of this unique universe.
Beyond this musical project, Machina Humana will be extended in the form of a temporary exhibition at the “Musée de l'Horlogerie et du Décolletage” in Cluses, a city historically at the heart of this complex machining activities called décolletage. During the exhibition, fragments of Machina Humana will be presented to the visitors. This project brings into the museum a previously inexistent sound dimension and it raises awareness of the composer’s artistic approach, that will lead up to a reprise performance of the piece in December 2018.
