This is the google translation of the French text in the booklet:
Pioneer of concrete and electronic music Pierre Henry had bequeathed during his lifetime a series of sounds to Jean-Michel Jarre, with the mutual desire to create a new work.
Five years later in 2022, Jean-Michel Jarre refers to composer disappeared with a work that highlights the common philosophy of two artists that everything brings together in their constant search for technology at the service of music, and that yet everything differs at the level of the process fundamental of composition, concrete music and abstract.
In a musical journey where the sounds of Pierre Henry dialogue with the new composition of Jean-Michel Jarre in a game from mirrors, Oxygen creator finds his doppelganger inverted in Oxymore, opening a vortex that sucks us into a anachronistic back and forth where analog and digital find a common playground.
Not limited to a recorded musical composition, Oxymore is designed as an immersive cuvre in the Radio France's innovation studios in multichannel and digital binaural declined in physical concert 360 presented in preview on the occasion of the Hyper Weekend Festival.
The concert is also broadcast in real time in Oxyville, virtual city created by Jean-Michel Jarre in outpost of a metavers being built, accessible by social VR by a privileged few drawn by lot.
Between constructivism and Impressionism, Oxymore invites the public to get lost in an unexpected acoustic journey, and creates a bridge between the historical sound roots of Radio France and its most recent innovations. The work establishes a link between the department of classical/contemporary music and the music sector, symbolically marking the launch of the "Jarre Academy of Sound" initiated by the Maison de la Radio et de la Musique and the composer.
"In music concrete, There are a strong link with surrealism, which is of a certain way an apology for Oxymore."
Pierre's work has always been a source of inspiration for me, as much by its poetic side, unexpected as by its side noisy, both raw and complex. Apparent contradictions which symbolize precisely what musique concrète and the electroacoustic music, considered in the 60s or 70s as being avant-garde, and which have become today classics to the extent that they gave rise to the electronic music and current music.
I relied on these elements to create Oxymore by using all these codes, which are deeply French. Oxymore is thus a kind of homecoming and my desire to composing music not only from notes, on a music theory, but also from sounds. This work is for me all the more personal as I made it in the studios of Radio France who hosted the GRM and electroacoustic music.
It is also a way to celebrate the action of public service and Radio France, who have always been land-clearing sonically speaking. I wanted to create a work that establishes a bridge between a very organic approach to composition related to sampling, to the transformation of sounds, and that of our digital age with the latest technologies, in particular those that allow a total spatialization of dissemination.
Spatialization is part of the DNA of electroacoustic music-tick, and here I approach sound and music through the multichannel. This allows me to satisfy my passion for immersive creation, being myself very involved in the world of virtual reality.
Today we are still talking about VR in terms of graphics and visual, but it is never said enough that the feeling of immersion first of all, go through the sound. It is also a way to approach a other method of composition and writing for worlds of tomorrow.
Created by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Symphony for a lonely man was the first real work of music it consisted of 22 movements. In a nod to this pioneering work, I wanted Oxymore to be composed of 11 movements, alternating moments of softness and moments of violence, moments that are sometimes feminine, sometimes masculine, of darker and more humorous moments, with the idea that in musique concrète, by definition, there is a strong connection with surrealism, which is in a way an apology for Oxymore.
I conceived Oxymore as a film or as a ballet with a underlying dramaturgical progression that transports us from one movement to another, from one time to another, from one atmosphere to another, sometimes appearing illogical or as musique concrète would do, which is precisely the art of combining noises in an unexpected way in causing surprise. Oxymore allowed me to express the inconceivable in a poetic way.
Jean-Michel Jarre, Paris - January 2022
"The work of Pierre has always been
source of inspiration for me, as well by
her poetic side, unexpected that by
his noisy side, both raw and complex."
1993 Europe en Concert -Brussels
1995 Concert Pour Tolerance - Paris
1997 Oxygene Tour - Rotterdam
2007 Teo & Tea Showcase - De Lint
2007 Oxygene 30th - Amsterdam
2009 Indoor - Amsterdam
2010 Indoor Tour - Liege
2016 Electronica Tour - Amsterdam
2022 Oxymore - Paris
2023 Versailles 400