Musicologie.org

Article by Jean Marc Warszawski on the site Musicologie.org

Philippe Langlois
Les Cloches d’Atlantis

Langlois Philippe, Les cloches d’Atlantis. Musique électroacoustique et cinéma. Archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore. “ Répercussions ”, Éditions MF, Paris 2012 [504 pp.; ISBN 978-2-9157-9455-7; €26]
One suspects, indeed one knows, that the question of film music is an important question of music. For Philippe Langlois, cinema is a musical crucible, the crucible of electroacoustic music. He shows this in an erudite, thoughtful and pedagogical summa.
Though they were silent, the first films, from their very first image, were never silent: they were accompanied, from the piano to the full orchestra, and could serve as training grounds and fields of experiment for composers.
But the craftsmen of this technological art were attracted from the outset by new instrument-making, such as the theremin or the ondes Martenot, and they also sought to give sound to images. Hence the title of the book, which refers to the film by Ian Hugo of 1951, for which Bebe and Louis Barron produced the first music composed solely of electronic sounds.
Les Cloches d’Atlantis is an obligatory history reference work, which fascinates through its analyses and reflections on the interactions between images and sounds, a search for organic, structural relations, in the very techniques of production and recording, beyond decorative illustration.
The author, a musicologist, is also a man of the field who creates sound installations, for the cinema, the cinema, the radio, where he coordinated the Atelier de création radiophonique of France Culture.
This book is accompanied by a website, Les cloches d’Atlantis.
jmw