Label: Futura Resistenza

凄まじい音楽性です...全くノーマークだった作曲家の大変貴重な音源集!!1920年フランスはニース出身、音楽の指導者として活動しつつブリュッセル映画博物館に勤務、様々なフィルムのサントラを手掛けた知られざる作曲家Fernand Schirren。恐らく活動当時に残された音源は一切存在しておらず、ここベルギーのレーベルFutura Resistenzaが初の音盤リリースを実行。ササクレた重々しいパーカッションを軸に組み立てた、底なしに暗い漆黒の即興ものであり、1963年のEdmond Bernhardによる短編映画[Dimanche]。1959年Jean-Marie Buchetによる[Masques]、そして口琴のみを用いた1972年Benoit Lamyによる[Cartoon Circus]、3種のフィルム用サントラを収録。





Although he had accepted my request for an interview about his practice as a rhythmist, Fernand Schirren observed me with a more interrogative look than my questions could ever warrant. From the outset, he warned me that he preferred to be called ‘Schirren’ without the addition of his first name, which he despised. It is of course a contraction of Ferdinand, the name of his father, a painter, but we did not discuss the reasons for his aversion any further. On the other hand, Schirren was more talkative on another point of dissension, that concerning the music of Mozart. It annoyed him because it gave the effect of a character wearing a wig on a powdered face, much like the gallant style with which the divine composer is sometimes associated. In the same vein, Schirren liked to reside in a seaside establishment facing the dike, deliberately turning his back on the shore and the endlessly repeating spectacle of its summer visitors.

It was therefore with an invisible reluctance that he consented to being filmed during a course delivered on the initiative of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at P.A.R.T.S. He wore a khaki sweater for the occasion, possibly inherited from a former military serviceman or bought at an army disposals store. It was a training outfit which, in short, fitted quite well with his binary basic education, where, when spoken in French, the words ‘boom’ and ‘and’ alternated between rhythms of relaxation and tension. He used a very telling image to show the dancers what the ‘boom’ represented:

It’s like when Elisabeth Schwarzkopf greets the audience after her performance. She goes ‘boom’ and bows as if she were performing charity.

I later learned that with Maurice Béjart’s apprentice dancers—to whom he had taught the basics of rhythm, sticks in hand—he used two exclamations stressing the very beginning of life, to be repeated at will: Daddy / Mummy, Daddy / Mummy, and so on.

The repetition of the four syllables, punctuated by the drumsticks, could vary with changing accents, but was intended to instil and keep a constant rhythm.

His practical knowledge of music obviously went much further. His virtuosity as a percussionist, one able to fly from eighth notes to triplets through a thousand other saccades, sung with flexibility. In such moments he was impressively at ease.

Fernand Schirren was an exceptional musician and composer, rhythm teacher to Bejart and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, silent film accompanist of the Brussels Musee du cinema (now CINEMATEK) from its founding in 1962 until the 1980s, and eccentric collector of pipes and romantic postcards. He chose anything but a traditional historical-oriented approach, and left his avant-garde stamp on the film, dance and music worlds at home and abroad. This compilation gathers never before published works that Schirren specially composed for the short films 'Dimanche' by Edmond Bernhard in 1963, 'Masques' by Jean-Marie Buchet and Marc Lobet in 1959, and Cartoon Circus by Benoit Lamy and Picha in 1972. Some of the most intense and curious soundtracks cinema ever gave us.