Orient Occident

The text and video excerpt below document the book by Philippe Langlois, Les cloches d’Atlantis, musique électroacoustique et cinéma archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, first quarter 2012.

On the occasion of a sculpture exhibition organised at the Musée Cernuschi in 1959 on the theme of the relations between East and West across fifty centuries of art, Enrico Fulchignoni attempts to show how, through Egyptian art, Greek art was influenced by Etruscan and Oriental arts. The commentary by Pierre Henry, spoken by Pierre Chambon, and the camera movements underline the resemblances between the various carved statuettes, in their profiles, smiles and postures. The original music by Iannis Xenakis, gentle, slow and distant, seems to pay tribute to these vanished civilisations.

Orient Occident is a work apart in the corpus of Xenakis’s electroacoustic pieces, contrasting with the other works composed at the GRM in the 1950s and 60s, Diamorphoses, Concret PH, Analogique B and Bohor.
Orient Occident works at the level of the sound object on the basis of an instrumentarium made up mainly of metallic percussion. The music, which works in waves, like a great ebb and flow of sonic matter, is harmoniously balanced with the commentary by Pierre Henry, spoken by Pierre Chambon, which integrates with, not to say fuses into, Xenakis’s music. The long sound textures, as well as the scraps of sonic matter that develop over the images of very ancient sculptures, also seem to invite us on a sonic journey towards immemorial times. The music attempts to materialise the past through the memory of sounds and the imaginary linked to the use of raw sonic matter: wood, metal.
As a master of the density of musical matter, Xenakis attempts with this music to penetrate the layers of temporal matter that both separate and connect Western culture to ancient civilisations.

Duration: 20′

Production: Unesco

This information notice was co-produced with INA/GRM for the creation of the multimedia fresco – Artsonores – L’aventure électroacoustique, in the category Films produced by the Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF from 1950 to 1975.