Ensemble SuperMusique - Le fil d’Ariane (2024) Hi Res

Founded in 1998, Ensemble SuperMusique (ESM) is directed by Joane Hétu and Danielle Palardy Roger. This variable geometry formation entirely dedicated to the interpretation of current music and improvisation is among the rare ensembles whose repertoire is exclusively made up of works of current music. The ESM is made up of the most prominent instrumentalists and composers of Montreal’s vibrant current music scene. Since its founding, the ESM has commissioned more than 50 works that combine written music and improvisation.

The number of voices does not matter: from the organum of the medieval School of Notre-Dame, polyphony unfolds in a double horizontal and vertical dimension, even if it means stretching brief melodic fragments to superimpose its parts. Respecting the principles of harmony, she then plays with the figures of heights and rhythms, providing her buildings with ever more complex and solid structures. Speculating, ordering and calculating the fairest proportions, the musicians of Ars Nova, Ars subtilior and the Renaissance also animated their discourse with repetitions, variations, imitations, canons in increase or decrease, parallel or contrary movements , retrogrades and reversals of all kinds. To the requirements of numbers were added the rules of rhetoric, placing writing under the sign of exploit and surprise. The multiplication of voices has no limit when Johannes Ockeghem mixes thirty-six in his Deo gratias; his motet is an immense sonic monument whose entries gradually take up and metamorphose the single motif, forming a very dense chord as the voices freeze.