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Édith Canat de Chizy works in the margins of recognized genres, methods, and approaches to music composition. Neither a spectralist nor a serialist, she belongs to a lineage of composers who, since Edgard Varèse, have centered their compositions around timbre and sound material. A paradigm of this approach is Pierre Schaeffer, who often repeated the maxim “Je trouve d’abord, je cherche ensuite” — “First I find, then I look.” Canat de Chizy became familiar with Schaeffer’s work through her first teacher, Ivo Malec (1925-2019), at the Conservatoire de Paris, and she was immediately attracted to this approach, in which sound becomes a direct point of access to thought processes. Throughout her career, she sought to keep this immediacy between sound and thought, despite the intermediary of the notated score. While her experience with electroacoustic music did not lead her to continue working with it, she transferred its processes and sound effects — trames (textures), layering, loops, granular synthesis, etc. — to acoustic instruments through extended techniques. Yell, her first piece for orchestra and, as she called it, one of her “mother works,” shows the influence of musique concrète. Yell is bold in its manner of shaping sound and in its large percussion section. It establishes important hallmarks of Canat de Chizy’s voice: attention to timbre, exploration of extreme registers, and a flexibility in performance brought about through timed aleatoric sections, yielding both measured and non-measured segments.
In 1983, Canat de Chizy met a second mentor who confirmed her in her artistic path: Maurice Ohana (1913-1992) taught her the power of intuition and the liberty that can be found in writing. He advised her to make music only if she felt its roots deep inside her. She dedicated to him Le Livre d’heures (The Book of Hours, 1984), a piece for female choir and sacred text. “I was fascinated by monastic life, with the rhythm of its daily Offices,” she explained.1 An emblematic work as regards her style, Le Livre d’heures showcases her treatment of the voice as an instrument. She paid close attention to the specific tone of words, often mixing the voice with instrumental timbres — a type of work she continued to pursue later with more ambitious writing techniques. Her smooth vocal melodies contrast with sharp writing for resonant percussion (glockenspiel, crotales, cymbals, etc.), showing the influence of Ohana’s style, which she quickly assimilated into her own language.
Throughout her oeuvre, Canat de Chizy uses orchestra and voices, but it is in her writing for strings that her personal touch emerges. Herself a violinist, she writes for strings in various chamber ensemble formations, from solo to quintet, even reaching a twelve-piece ensemble with Siloël (1992). She has also written a number of concerti. Few composers have so creatively explored the expressive potential of the contact between bow and string — particularly regarding malleability, texture, brightness of tone, and virtuosity.
As my work progressed, I increasingly felt the need to write music that would be in perpetual movement. A type of music that evolves more through mutation than through development; music with multiple angles, always changing, iridescent, elusive […] music that only strings can make.2
During an exceptionally prolific period in her career, for string ensemble alone, she wrote two quartets (Vivere, 2000, and Alive, 2003), three trios (Hallel, 1991, Tiempo, 1999, and Moving, 2001), and five studies in movement for cello (Formes du vent [Wind Shapes], 2003).
Her work Irisations for solo violin (1999) stands as the emblem of this period. The solo line is pushed forward by a tension between gesture and momentum; it traces an irregular and elusive melodic path as it is pulled toward the extreme high register. The music is restless, and an overflow of energy drives the piece to its final, inconclusive oscillation. “I see metaphysical meaning in this notion of movement,” Canat de Chizy writes. “It is the unanswered question, which precludes repose.”3 The repeated note at the beginning of the score, diffracted in endless arabesques, is one of her favorite musical figures, anchoring many of her string pieces in this period.
Arabesques had also appeared in Exultet (1995), her first violin concerto, written four years before Irisations. The title is a reference to an ancient Latin text sung on Easter night: “The night will shine as brightly as the day, the night is the light of my joy.” As Canat de Chizy shares, “Spirituality is a quest, a relationship with God that took me a long time to discover, and which I would like to show through my music.”4 The piece launches her long series of concerti (for string instruments, flute, clarinet, and percussion), where the orchestra serves as a soundbox and a tool for creating a sense of space around the soloist. Particularly in the third of the nine sections of Exultet, the orchestra becomes a floating and transparent canvas on which can unfold the line of the solo violin, which Canat de Chizy envisions as an “unmoving sun.” Immobility here can be understood as another aspect of movement. The violin and the orchestra, drawing on techniques from electroacoustic music, play at two different speeds. This, in one of the most poetic sections of the score, creates a sense that time is suspended.
Almost twenty years went by before Canat de Chizy wrote a second violin concerto, Missing (2016), written in memory of the violinist Devy Erlih.5 The piece is one of her most daring and virtuosic. Her confidence to embark on this new adventure in sound was reinforced by her own mastery of the violin and by her two stays at IRCAM, where she learned new ways to explore timbre and extended registers. In Missing, the violinist plays without temperament on high harmonics, which resemble electronic frequencies in their purity of tone. Canat de Chizy thinks of these high frequencies on the violin as pointing to another world of sound positioned between the human and the divine.
After Moïra for solo cello, Les Rayons du jour (The Day’s Rays) — her third concerto, this time for viola — is another cornerstone in her compositional style. The piece’s title is that of a painting by Nicolas de Staël. Spatialization is paramount, as Canat de Chizy carefully pulls resonances from the viola by way of a fluid counterpoint between instrumental lines. Wind instruments within the orchestra are paired, while the viola remains somewhat outside the orchestral texture, enabling free exploration of the instrument’s warmth in the low register, as well as the brightness of its timbre in the high register. The three parts of the concerto, “Déchirure” (Tear, or Rip), “Mouvement,” and “Transparence,” are three ways for the composer to put into sound the material that caught her attention in de Staël’s painting. She shows the depth of her writing for percussion in this piece, which is orchestrated for a large percussion section. The opening material for xylophone is striking, as are the broad gestures and relays of instruments that sweep through the orchestra.
Although writing for percussion came naturally — almost as much as for strings — it was only in 2015-2016 that Canat de Chizy wrote a percussion concerto. Seascape features her percussion of choice: ringing metals (cowbells, Taiwanese gong, bell plates), wood and skin percussion (polyblocks, mokubios, tom drums, and tumbas), as well as keyboards (marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, and crotales), to which the piano is added. Piano is rare in her works, and it is used here as a resonator: with the sustain pedal depressed, the instrument becomes the echo — even the spectral enhancer — of the solo percussion.
Canat de Chizy places the concept of elsewhere at the center of her artistic research. In writing Alio (2002), a short and tense orchestral piece dominated by dry percussion, she felt she needed to “embrace things that are beyond our reach. This has become an obsession that underlies my music like an incessant wave.”6 She considers the orchestra the best medium to convey her aesthetic need for the unreachable. Between 2002 and 2011, she wrote five orchestral pieces on the theme of being drawn to the unknown. She found the inspiration for these works in extra-musical art, including painting (de Staël, Vincent van Gogh, J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, James McNeill Whistler) and poetry (Hildegard von Bingen, Joseph Conrad, Pierre Reverdy, Emily Dickinson, René Char). “How can we live without the unknown ahead of us?” is a line from Char, who inspired her work Pierre d’éclair (Lightning Stone, 2010), a title borrowed from another line by him.
Canat de Chizy draws connections and builds on common themes between painting or poetry and her music, using these connections to form the dramatic framework for each piece. Following Varèse, she believes that each work finds its own form, without having to obey any type of standard. Rather, form follows the material, its progression, and its transformation: “I take raw material, I shape it, and slowly make it more precise.” She takes the time to build a preliminary skeleton of her work, which she compares to the architect’s “monster.” At first comes the raw idea, which she must catch and pin down despite its blinding brightness, fixing it on paper. Then comes the time to write, and through writing the initial idea evolves from blurred to sharp. Once time limits are decided upon, she can start thinking about register and texture, as well as rhythm and timbre. This is the process through which, according to her, an “organic form” can emerge. She tackles the question of specific pitches only at the end, based on the non-octave scales that form her harmonic syntax.7
La Ligne d’ombre (The Shadow-Line, 2004), inspired by the like-named short story by Conrad, expresses the feverish wait before a storm. Warnings sent at the outset by the temple block, mixed with reverberation from the cymbal and a low, suspended string background, lay out the tense atmosphere that leads to the piece’s climax. The string background, often unmeasured, materializes the slowness of time, like a vibrating canvas on which figures appear in a constant dialectic between mobility and immobility.
A reflection on time is also the centerpiece of Times (2010), a composition written for Besançon, the ville du temps (“city of time”), and its international Competition for Young Conductors. The piece’s gestures are efficient and give the impression of strength through the activity of wooden percussion (marimba, wood blocks, temple blocks), crackling effects made by the strings, and repeated motives in the brass. Between tension and relaxation, fiery action and almost silent suspension, the different measures of time are exercised, right up to a point when time is abandoned and becomes space.
In 2006, Omen grew from a combination of influences, namely, Van Gogh’s painting Champ de blé avec corbeaux and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Les Quatrains Valaisians. Motion, obsession, impulse, pure “timbre-spaces,” and bold extreme registers combine in Omen to express a metaphysical dimension of sound. The piece reinforces that Canat de Chizy’s music creates a place of experience.
In 2012, Canat de Chizy received her first commission from IRCAM, which prompted her to experiment with electronics and open her mind to new artistic perspectives. With Over the Sea, she returns to the string trio, adding an accordion to interface between the timbres of the strings and electronics. The piece is inspired by one of Monet’s paintings, in which a mirroring effect gives the illusion of movement. Other titles from this electronic era include Vagues se brisant contre le vent (Waves Breaking against the Wind, 2006), Pluie, vapeur, vitesse (Rain, Steam, Speed; 2007), and Seascape. The recurrence of water and the sea as metaphors for movement, transparency, and the infinite reveals how electronics enabled Canat de Chizy to stretch these concepts “beyond.”
Over the Sealasts twenty-one minutes: substantially longer than the average piece in Canat de Chizy’s chamber repertoire. Its length is due to the use of electronics: she had to consider the time it would take for the sound to propagate in space using reverberation, Spatialisator software, a vocoder, and other tools that generate a sense of space. Although Canat de Chizy has never composed acousmatic works, the real-time electronic processing of acoustic instruments inOver the Sea yields effects that are similar to musique concrète: breathy, cloudy, granular, crackling sounds and sound-wave motion. Her work on texture through electronics has enabled her to build complex polyrhythms and explore a microtonality that crushes tones into their finest intervallic relations. A recorded electronic track is sometimes used as a fifth voice in the counterpoint, and the general spatialization allows for an even deeper use of the extreme registers.
“Her face shone with such stark radiance that it turned back my face”8 — this is an excerpt from the poet von Bingen’s twelfth-century Book of Divine Works, which Canat de Chizy chose as the text for Visio (2015), a composition for six singers, a wind ensemble with percussion, violin, and cello, and electronics. Visio once again uses electronics to explore various ways to set text to music. Von Bingen’s vision is of mystic elation provoked by the divine Word, bringing into question its relationship to music and voice. In Canat de Chizy’s piece, the Latin text precedes or is mixed with a French translation, except in “De circulo gyrante,” which is translated in its entirety. The French is spoken or intoned recto tono (on the same pitch) to facilitate intelligibility. The Latin is electronically processed. For example, the word vidi becomes a flexible sound object, all the while retaining its original meaning. The text is treated in terms of its sound and trajectories. The rich and detailed vocal lines are closely surrounded by the instrumental parts, bringing out the “multiplied voice” in which von Bingen places her hopes. The impression of non-metered time and Canat de Chizy’s pursuit of the sound continuum place the piece in the contemplative universe of von Bingen. While in other compositions Canat de Chizy’s instrumentation for percussion is almost excessive, here it is even more extensive. Tibetan bowls, steel drums, a waterphone, mokubios, a cowbell, a harmonic pipe, a water gong, a flexatone, and a turning cymbal reveal her study of color and dynamic resonance. The instrumentation lends a sense of mystery and awe. The percussion is also electronically processed, either through pre-recorded material or in real time, as in Over the Sea. If the resulting sounds were translated into visuals, the effect would be akin to a shimmering fabric, with the threads of the vocal and instrumental textures woven together in a common and ambiguous sound source. Amplification shapes the vocals and instrumentals, from the harmonics of the cello to the whistles from the mouthpieces of the clarinet and the flute. Electronic processes also spatialize and extend registers. For example, Canat de Chizy used subwoofers, which sound the lowest pitches in the spectrum. The notion of circularity mentioned in the text is picked up by an IRCAM-engineered software that enables the sound to rotate. The software also spatializes the percussion instruments. The shimmering cymbal and the gently oscillating hummed vocal parts create a breathtaking texture and display the emotive power of sound.
Paradiso (2018) for twelve-part mixed choir and two accordions is similar to Visio in that it hints at the electronic influences Canat de Chizy acquired during her stays at IRCAM. Imitating electronics, the accordion parts are microtonal, and they blend with the vocals, modifying their timbres. Paradiso was inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. It uses the Italian text and French translation from the third part of the narrative poem, where Dante crosses the nine spheres to reach the Empyrean Heaven and subsides into the essence of God. The piece is structured around this ascending movement. From vocal fry in the bass, supplemented and projected by the accordions, to high-pitched whistling from singers who blend with the accordions’ shrill register in a low-fi filtering effect, Paradiso makes its way to the tenth heaven. Canat de Chizy honed her technique with this vividly creative work. Her unrelenting search for a place “beyond sound” is akin to de Staël’s “great light.” The result is nearly a sound utopia.
Canat de Chizy has yet to compose an opera, though she is not uninterested in the genre. In her deep appreciation for vocal music, she experimented with lyrical drama in her Tombeau de Gilles de Rais (1993), a staged oratorio for choir, soloists, and speaker. She is still waiting for the libretto that will inspire her to undertake opera in all its greatness.
1. CD liner notes Livre d’Heures (Hortus), translated by IRCAM’s translator. For a complete discography, see Resources. ↩
2. CD liner notes Moving (Aeon), translated by IRCAM’s translator. ↩
3. CD liner notes Times (Aeon), translated by IRCAM’s translator. ↩
4. Exultet (Timpani) CD liner notes, translated by IRCAM’s translator. ↩
5. The violinist Devy Erlih died on 7 February 2012, in a traffic accident. ↩
6. Times (Aeon) CD liner notes, translated by IRCAM’s translator. ↩
7. She organizes pitches in such a way that avoids the periodicity of the octave. ↩
8. HILDEGARD, The Book of Divine Works, translated by Nathaniel M. Campbell, in The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation, vol. 18, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018, p. 386. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?