Each year, the GMEM invites a composer associated with the program to present his or her creative works and the reference works that have built his or her artistic and professional career. Based on double listening and shared commentary, the Écoutes Commentées are special sessions where audiences are invited to discover new music under professional and exceptional conditions.
During these listening sessions, Elsa Biston would like to share with the young audience her attachment to the concert situation, which allows a step aside, a time for oneself and for attention, and where through listening a relationship between the intimate and the shared can be created. She will propose music that invites us to be attentive to the way we listen, to our position as listeners, offering us time to observe ourselves in the process of feeling. Paying attention to a sound object, to its qualities, to the way it materializes time, to the effects that listening to it provokes in us, and finally to the emotions that it can generate; perceiving that this work can result in a quality of relationship with the world around us, a more refined sensitivity. It is thus to discover music as a means of knowledge, of oneself and of the link that unites us to others and to the world.
She will present a piece for her "vibrating objects" device, a set of objects - cans, papers, drums - that diffuse music while transforming it, each in its own way. The visual anchoring of the sounds in the objects, which produces a sensation of personification, provokes a particular type of attention and questions the importance of the presence or absence of the body in the perception of the sounds, and the senses and imaginary that this induces. The power of sounds on our imaginary will then be evoked, as well as the necessity of a critical posture in any act of perception.
Elsa Biston
composer, musician
In her compositional work, Elsa Biston reflects on the modes of relationship and transmission between composer and performer, while focusing on the fine perception of sound phenomena. In addition, as a musician and director of recordings of classical and contemporary music for Radio France, questions about the medium and the sound material are at the heart of her approach. Since 2016, she has been shaping her device of "vibrating objects", various objects and instruments on which transducers are fixed, driven by a computer program, which she plays in various formations the trio La Vague (Mirr collective) with Benjamin Sanz and Julien Pontvianne, solo, with the clarinet quartet Watt, or during the fall festival 2019 for the creation of Antonin Tri-Hoang, disparitions, at the Church of Saint-Eustache. Her show Prendre corps, a performance/installation for 26 vibrating objects and 2 clarinetists, premiered at the Vanves theater on November 12, 2021. She has written for the ensemble l'Instant Donné,(J'irais comme un torrent furieux, alla breve for France musique), for the Spat'sonore (ensemble of augmented and spatialized instruments by Nicolas Chedmail). Her electroacoustic pieces(Il n'y a pas d'autre côté, Muance, Brume) have been broadcasted by the festival Présences (Radio France), Futura, Elektra Music, Scrime, etc. She builds new projects with the percussion trio Line upon Line (Texas), Hanatsu Miroir (Strasbourg), Zafraan (Berlin) and Spat'sonore (Paris). With the Trafic collective, she initiates projects with inhabitants of the districts of haut-Montreuil, where she develops with the composer Alvaro Martinez a music which is built around the transmission and the exchange of the cultural resources of each one.
Friche la Belle de Mai (the Module)
41 Jobin Street13003
Marseille
Elsa Biston
composer and musician
WORKS BY
Luciano Berio
A-Ronne - 1974 (6 min.)
Hildegard Westerkamp
The doors of perception - (5 min.)
Éliane Radigue
Geelriandre - 1972 (12 min.)
Pascale Criton
Wander Steps - 2018 (5 min.)
Elsa Biston
There is no other side - 2020 (12 min.)
Slow times low freqs - 2020 (15 min.)