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Trained by Nadia Boulanger and Charles Koechlin, Francis Dhomont began his career composing instrumental music. But from 1947, before musique concrète was theorized by Pierre Schaeffer, he began experimenting with one of the first Webster wire recorder models. He would record sound objects, before this term existed, and compose with them.
Dhomont settled in Baux-de-Provence, where, to earn a living and raise his children, he became a woodworker. In his free time, he composed in a studio he built in Avignon. Away from the Parisian music scene, he started producing his music in a closed circuit and only composed acousmatic pieces. On discovering works by the Groupe de Recherche Musicale, he started a course with them from 1973 to 1974 and programmed their creations in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence at the Musiques Multiples festival, which he founded and was president of from 1975 until 1979. It was during one of these festivals that he met the soprano Marthe Forget, with whom he traveled to Canada, settling in Québec. He carried out a one-year residence at the Université de Montréal’s Music Faculty and stayed twenty-six years on Canadian soil. During this time, he wrote, composed, and taught, mainly at the Université de Montréal from 1980 to 1996. Since 2004, Dhomont has been living in Avignon.
Apart from works written in his first few years of composing, Dhomont’s catalog is strictly dedicated to acousmatic music. This form, by its nature, is absent of any visual spectacle. Affected by eye problems in his youth, Dhomont was forced to remain in the dark to heal. These conditions, present during his formative years of making music, made his output a strictly sound affair.
These conditions are also the reason behind the recurrent theme of darkness and night in his catalog. Examples include Figures de la nuit (Figures of the Night, 1991), Studio de nuit (Night Studio, 1992), Nocturne à Combray (Nocturne in Combray, 1996), and Forêt profonde (Deep Forest, 1996). This last piece, inspired by Austrian-American psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales also attests to his sensitivity toward psychoanalysis as a subject of composition. He read and worked on psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s writing, particularly Knots, a collection of poetic texts on confusions of the mind and difficulties in relationships. He later drew inspiration from Laing’s book The Divided Self for his piece Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (Under the Gaze of a Black Sun, 1979-1981), which deals with schizophrenia. This piece is a good example of Dhomont’s belief that electroacoustic music allows “sound compositions close to opera in their dramaturgy, but an opera without singers, without instruments, and completely free from the conventions of lyrical art.”1 Often bordering on texts, even when absent of lyrics, his pieces are figurative and develop an idea, as the different titles of his cycles testify: Cycle de l’errance (Wandering Cycle), Cycle du son (Sound Cycle), Cycle des profondeurs (Deep Cycle).
Dhumont is very active in contemporary music institutions. A founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community begun in 1986, he is also president of the Marseille collective Les Acousmonautes and the Klang Projekte Weimar organization’s Ehrenpatron. In 2014, he became Honorary Member of the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music (CIME). He has also been guest editor for the reviews Musiques & Recherches and Circuit and directed several programs for Radio-Canada, such as Voyage au bout de l’inouï (Journey to the End of the Incredible) and Radio France, such as L’Acousmathèque.
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