Winter: 3 versions of an H.H. poem
Voice, branches, dead leaves and contrabass

Spring: Garden of Love, Timbre/Noise
Captured voices, fountain, crickets

Summer: Music Nƒ 3
Open air instruments

Autumn: Chant
Voice, ambience and captured noises

Length: 38 minutes
Production: PM 1996

"To celebrate that which nature, and the creatures which inhabit it, give us to hear, not only in the original reality of the sounds they produce, but also through their capacity to be models for musical composition"

The "Jardins Suspendus" have, in common with the other gardens we visit, the characteristic to be composed of elements which are in constant development. The concern of the composer, identical with that of the gardener/architect, is to elaborate a stable form and at the same time leave "the organic" to take the place it needs to fulfil itself in the succession of the seasons:

Winter: 3 versions of an H.H. poem Grating of a twisted branch

The description of sounds is clear; the music results from the superimposing of that which is given to hear in reading the poem.

Spring: Garden of Love: a fountain, animals, voices speaking
The origin of this part of the project is the interest I have in "the music of speakers." Intonation, rhythm and its variations in the speed of the words, phrases, accents placed here and there according to the language, the register as well as the timbre, the body of acoustic properties of each voice are so many musical components to employ.

The same sentence said a large number of times in different languages by different voices corresponds to as many sound motifs, arranged between silences of unequal length. The listener could be just a little surprised by these voices or animal cries, intimately thrown before them, of which the origin remains difficult to situate. Itís a musical game, made of ambiguity between sound and space, virtuality and reality.

Summer: Music Nƒ 3
The playing of alpine horns, saxophones, contrabasses, violins ñ each of these instruments is located in a different open-air space and a different time. They were recorded separately, then associated with other sounds for the instant of the concert; thus itís as if the listener had acquired the gift of ubiquity, and finds himself simultaneously in several places, ears open to sonic entities which, without this artifice, would never have encountered each other. Signals sounded by the horn on site link these distant places to the concert site.

Autumn: Chant
The voice is more than an instrument, it is the very body of an expression which belongs only to the singer.

There is no language which can take its place: it explains itself, if you will, through its own manifestation.

Biography Pierre Mariétan, born in Monthey (Switzerland), 1935, has lived in Paris since 1964. He studied at the conservatories of Geneva and Venice, the Hochscule für Musik in Cologne, and the Musikakademie of Basel (with P. Boulez and K. Stockhausen) ñ Teacher at the Université de Paris (I and VIII), Maître de conférence at the Ecole díArchitecture de Paris la Villette, Director of the LAMU (Laboratoire Acoustique et Musique Urbaine) ñ Founder of the GERM (Groupe díEtude et Réalisation Musicales). He has composed over 100 vocal, instrumental, orchestral and electronic works, performed at numerous festivals and other musical organisations. He is the initiator of research in the area of qualification of sound in space, with the creation of concepts about background noise, the sonic situation, and auditory models. He is a producer for the Atelier de Création Radiophonique at France Culture (French state radio). He has had numerous tours as musician and lecturer in Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan. He has had temporary and permanent sound installations, and participated in urban and rural architectural projects and realisations, in France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain. He is the winner of many international competitions, including the Ars Acoustica International prize in 1996.