Listening Blog #4: Michel Chion’s “Requiem”

This week’s listening was of Michel Chion’s Requiem (1973). The piece contains ten movements, which are represented as individual tracks on the CD. Chion seems to divide the 10 movements into two larger parts, I (1-6) and II (7-10). Without diving too deeply into the aesthetics of the sounds just yet, it can broadly be described as a continuation of the musique concréte style with a much darker hue: tightly arranged abrasive sounds, both recognizable and not, abruptly interrupting each other throughout the piece.

Requiem can be difficult to grasp, but it is made easier to approach after reading the liner notes given in the CD. Not differently from traditional requiems, the text of the piece is based on the Funeral Mass, presented in its original language. Rather than focusing on the dead, Chion chooses to concern the piece with the “troubled minority of the living”. The most interesting piece of information I was able to gather from the notes, however, was that the piece was meant to be written “symmetrically”. Meaning, the tenth track used elements of the first, the ninth using elements of the second, and so on- with the sixth movement being the axis in the middle. This did not fully make sense to me at first for two reasons: there cannot be a middle if there is an even number of tracks, and the third movement did not seem to have anything necessarily to do with the eighth movement. I came to the conclusion that both movements 2 and 3 were related to the ninth track, as they featured the same eerie chime-like sound. This made sense, then, with movements 4 and 8, and more or less with 5 and 7 (it was much harder to hear the similarities between these two). This is all suspicion though, as Chion does not go into the specifics in how the tracks are built off of each other.

Although I did not catch onto this framework upon my initial listening, there were elements of it which I noticed. For example, I noticed by the ninth track I was hearing sounds that I had definitely heard prior. Most importantly, I found the sixth movement, “Évangile”, to be very significant and even climactic. This does reflect Chion’s attempt, as it was made to the axis of the entire piece. To me, this piece is sonically the most “unhinged”. The main dissonance that “drones” through the beginning of the movement is very bendy and unstable, like the tape is falling apart. Later, light sounds of birds can be heard before they are abruptly interrupted by another harsh sound, almost as if it exists from a different realm and is bursting through the tape. It gives the impression that the listener is experiencing something surreal or perhaps super-real.

The entire piece, to me, is meant to reflect the lifespan of a human soul, or the lifespan of all human lives in a steady flow of time. The harsh, confusing, and abrupt sounds that keep appearing and disappearing reflect the constant repetition of birth and death, and the difficulty distinguishing the two. The symmetry of the piece reflects this symmetry of a lifespan: the infinity of beginnings and ends. Hence why Chion describes “Évangile” as a “symbolic rupture of the tape…, that opens a gap of eternity in the flow of time, allowing a glimpse of ‘something else’.” But what is that “something else”? Perhaps it is the infinite, the meaning behind the constant struggle between living and dead. Perhaps it is the raw language of art and music that outlives humanity. I don’t know, I’m not a philosopher. But that sixth movement definitely caught my attention, and that ought to count for something.