Proust4

Juan Parra collaborates with Jan Michiels and Lise Bruyneel

News March 24, 2021

"In search of lost time, a piano ritual/recital with live electronics and live video"

Orpheus research fellow Juan Parra Cancino participates in a new artistic project with Jan Michiels (Kon. Conservatorium Brussel) and Lise Bruyneel: "In search of lost time, a piano ritual/recital with live electronics and live video, remembering Marcel Proust".

Marcel Proust once wrote that his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) had something of a cathedral. This program erects a cathedral for listening to piano music, built upon poetic associative fundaments.

Like the famous novel it features many characters, but its main narrators are two of Proust’s contemporaries:

  • Claude Debussy writing his Préludes between 1909 and 1913
  • Gabriel Dupont writing his cycles Les Heures Dolentes (1903) and La Maison dans les Dunes (1910) from his sickbed (another analogy to Proust) – this great music harbingers in some ways the world of Debussy and really deserves to be heard more.

The program also consists of many voluntary and involuntary memories (Couperin, Bach, Beethoven, Schumann), of testimonies by contemporaries of the narrators (Chausson, Busoni, Bartók), AND of connections with a more recent past through the work of master temporal illusionist György Ligeti (namely with his Etudes). Ligeti was very much influenced by the scientific environment of his time (for example by fractal theory). This program takes inspiration from a contemporary scientist: Carlo Rovelli. In his acclaimed The Order of Time (2018) he writes touchingly and with crystal clarity about our illusory human time experience, an experience not really in accordance with the fundamental laws of (quantum)reality.

Here live electronics and live video enter the scene. With contemporary technology, the concert hall will be transformed time and again into a unique environment in which diverse memories of sound and image surface, overlap, and disappear. The mysterious gaps in Proust’s time experience will be heard and seen.

→ More info (.pdf)