Launched in 2020, Ircam's Musiques-Fictions collection offers a unique literary and sound experience, combining a contemporary text with a musical creation, in an immersive broadcasting system....
Installed under Ircam's 49-speaker ambisonic diffusion dome, reconstituted in the GMEM Module, the listener is invited to a listening experience in which the imagination is stimulated by a sound environment with wide-ranging expressive possibilities, reproducing a listening situation close to that of the real world, from the great spectacular stage to the most minute details of intimate discourse.
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This Music-Drama entitled "The Great Disaster" was published in The Times on April 16, 1912. On April 14, 1912, at 11:40 pm, the Titanic sank with Giovanni Pastore on board, in charge of cleaning the 3177 dessert spoons for1st class passengers. Giovanni has always been the immigrant, the handyman. Having come down from the mountains of Friuli, he had finally found himself a "good place" on the Titanic.
Under the waves after the shipwreck, in the imagination of writer Patrick Kermann, the ship still tells the same story: the lost land and childhood, the fate of the never-counted third class, the left-behinds of all nations who hoped to reach the promised land of free labor.
In this story of great and small disasters, Jérôme Combier's music conjures up a world both distant and engulfed, alive and ghostly.
Production
Ircam-Centre Pompidou
Support
Sacem
Based on
"The Great Disaster" by Patrick Kermann (2002) © Éditions Lansman
In partnership with
la Friche la Belle de Mai
"A man speaks from the abyss. Giovanni Pastore is Italian. He embarked on the Titanic, where he worked for just four days in the main dining room. What exactly was he doing there? Where was he from? And why is he still talking to us today? His last breath undoubtedly produced a few pretty bubbles in the icy water before he was swallowed up with hundreds of others in the sinking of the Titanic. But his voice still resonates, and with it, those of thousands of others left behind. Giovanni Pastore has a passion for numbers. He crunches them, and this obsession is also that of this new century, which believes itself to be invulnerable. Giovanni Pastore counts the little spoons in the restaurant, the chimneys on the liner, the boilers, the crates of nuts, the pianos and the dead...
This Music-Fiction offers a plunge into the past, inviting us to immerse ourselves in this poetic whirlwind and in the sounds that seem to have escaped from the liner. There's the sound of the wind and the threatening glaciers, the noise of the machinery and the sound, coming from the abyss, of the orchestra that, it is said, played until the very end as the ship sank for good.
"Great disaster" was the headline in the London Times on April 16, 1912. It will be exactly 113 years, on the night of April 14 to 15, 2025, since the White Star Line liner sank. "
- Jérôme Combier and Marc Lainé
Patrick Kermann
Author
Patrick Kermann was born in Strasbourg in 1959. He began writing for theater and opera in the early 1980s. He has written a dozen plays, including "Naufrage" (1992), "The Great Disaster" (1992), "De quelques choses vues la nuit" (1993), "Suaires" (1996), "Les Tristes Champs d'asphodèles" (1996), "A." (1997), "Merci" (1998), "Thrène" (1998), "La Mastication des morts" (1999), "Leçons de ténèbres" (1999) and "Seuils" (1999). He is also the author of two opera librettos: "La Blessure de l'ange" (1998) and "Diktat" (1999). His texts are published by Éditions Phénix, Lansman and L'Inventaire. Most of his plays have been staged. The author enjoys considerable support in France.
In 1996, he received a residency at the Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lez-Avignon to write "Suaires", and in 1998 was awarded a commissioning grant from the French Ministry of Culture to write "Thrène". In 1999, he received a grant from the Fondation Beaumarchais to write "Leçons de ténèbres". He also translated novels and plays: Thomas Bernhard's "Un déjeuner allemand", Euripides' "Electre" and Seneca's "Le Festin" from Thyeste.
He decided to end his life in February 2000.
Jérôme Combier
Composer and artistic director
Jérôme Combier is a composer and artistic director of the Cairn ensemble. He works regularly at Ircam ("Stèles d'air", "Gone", "Dawnlight"), and travels to Japan (Akiyoshidaï international Art Village), Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (Tashkent and Almaty conservatories). In 2005, he created "Vies silencieuses" with painter Raphaël Thierry, and in 2008, the "Noir gris" installation with video artist Pierre Nouvel for the "Beckett" exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou. He writes "Stèles d'air" for the Ensemble Intercontemporain as part of the Festival d'Automne à Paris.
His music is performed at the Louvre as part of the cycle "Le Louvre invite Pierre Boulez". Jérôme Combier was a resident at Villa Médicis from 2005 to 2006, and a guest at the Venice Biennale in 2020. In 2011, he adapted W.G. Sebald's novel "Austerlitz" for the stage, which premiered at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and the Opéra de Lille, in association with Pierre Nouvel and Bertrand Couderc. In 2017, with this same team, he conceived the Multimedia project, "Campo santo". He gives masterclasses at the University of Berkeley (San Francisco), the conservatories of Antwerp and Lugano, the Abbaye de Royaumont, Unesp University in Soa Paulo and McGill University in Montreal.
Jérôme Combier's music is published by Lemoine and Verlag Neue Musik (Berlin) and recorded by the Motus and Æon labels ("Vies silencieuses" - Grand Prix de l'Académie Charles Cros). Jérôme Combier was awarded the Prix Nouveau Talents by Sacd and the Koussevitzki Foundation Prize, Library of Washington (USA). He teaches sound and music creation at the École Nationale Supérieure de Paris-Cergy.
Marc Lainé
Author, director and set designer
A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Marc Lainé has designed over 70 sets for theater and opera. Since 2008, he has been designing his own shows. Author, director and set designer of his creations, he asserts a resolutely "pop" style and a transdisciplinary approach. He combines theater, cinema and live music to invent new forms of storytelling. Since 2010, he has led a cycle of projects inspired by the great genres of popular culture: road-trip, horror film, rock... programmed throughout France and in Paris, notably at the Théâtre de la Ville, the Théâtre national de Chaillot and the Comédie-Française.
In January 2020, he takes over the direction of La Comédie de Valence, Centre dramatique national Drôme-Ardèche.
In 2021, he begins a new fictional cycle, a fantasy trilogy made up of three singular forms: a graphic novel deployed in milie
Friche la Belle de Mai (the Module)
41 Jobin Street13003
Marseille
RATES
Full: 8€
Reduced: 6€ *
* Young people aged 12 - 25, students, jobseekers, recipients of minimum social benefits, intermittent workers, seniors aged 65 and over - on presentation of proof.
Pass Musiques-Fictions * : 10€
*(giving access to two sessions on the same day: Musique-Fiction 11 + Music-Fiction 12)
DURATION
50 min.
Patrick Kermann
text
Jérôme Combier
adaptation and music
Marc Lainé
production
Clément Cerles
sound engineering
Gilles Marsalet
sound effects
with the voice of
Vladislav Galard
Sofia Avramidou
vocals
music recorded by
Amarilys Billet (violin)
Nicolas Crosse (double bass)
Ayumi Mori (clarinet)
Alvise Sinivia (piano)
Diego Tosi (violin)
FannyVicens (accordion)