Programme note

Via rupta is the third part of the series of pieces for instruments and electronics Psyché-Cité/Transversales.

The title of the piece Via rupta is a Latin expression from which the French word "route" ("road") is derived. For Roman people, the construction of a road implied breaking ("rupta") the obstacles that were arising. The meaning of "via rupta" was a broken, cleared, or opened way.
The whole piece is pervaded with this ambiguity between the breaking of matter and the opening of all the possible ways.

Via rupta is a psycho-geology, a sound system which works as an organism, at the intersection of psychic and urban matters.
As in my previous pieces, I tried to express the impalpable life of unconscious psychic processes, affects and impulses, in its utter mobility.
The main lines of my work concern the writing of a sound body that would reflect the unconscious image of the body, developed throughout our life experience and sometimes in conflict with the limits of the real body image. It is a kind of virtual, abstract body, since it appears only in dreams and fantasies in which it can suffer many distortions.

The sound topology of the piece has several aspects.
On the one hand, it evokes the functional and structural complexity of the psychic topology and presents the same web-like articulation, the same kinematical nature. The numerous trajectories, the series of links between the musical objects develop a network of interlacing, crossing, ramifications, junctions which outline abstract and fleeting cartographies.
The musical matter thus undergoes distortions, atomizations and reappearances similar to those that can modify the shape of the body in dreams.

On the other hand, the sound material of the piece is derived from sounds recorded in the subway. I chose the subway because it can be perceived as a kind of intrusive object whose paths bore holes in matter ("via rupta"), and its reticular structure also reminds of a psychic associative process. The merging of the two sound worlds (the subway and instrumental sounds) generates a sort of mutant sound, half-technological, half-organic.
Moreover, the connection between psychic and body experience and the urban world is underlined by this rapidity and this proliferation encountered in mental connections as well as in the structure of a town.

The musical writing expresses a hybrid territory whose boundaries are rather blurred, and which blend together the complexity of the human being’s physiological and psychic functioning and the multiplicity of the acoustic configurations of the suburban city heard as an urban body, a kind of huge mechanical engineering with its own autonomous life.

Urban body or imaginary body? Urban space or mental space? Via rupta is a psychogeography, an architecture of fleetness and mobility. It is a space-fabric whose matter is flexible, with varying dimensions. Its form is a state of flux, an endless process, a series of short materializations which result from extremely fast and trans-generic sound paths.

Clara Maïda, May 2006