My work is often inspired by nature’s geometry, structure and textures. As if writing music could begin by staring with a magnifying glass at nature’s elements: water-gas-rock formations-chemical reactions, creating from these images a series of abstract landscapes.
I seek to express emotional experiences in their most raw form, without a literal or narrative setting. Like a collage of different perceptions that eventually forms a whole picture, I attempt to create a world from “real time” experience: reconstructing an imagined event that unfolds in a compressed time frame.
Frequently my pieces start abruptly as if the music has been going on for a while; there is no introduction, no development, just the most condensed version of the untransformed material. Music is color, texture and rhythm and the live instrumentalists create the alchemy.
Since 2000, I have become particularly interested in the way our artistic traditions are evolving through the integration of electronic and digital tools. As a composer who wrote solely for acoustic instruments for 25 years, I come to this exploration from an artistic place that is firmly rooted in the acoustic musical tradition and I notice that the overall landscape of my music is progressively changing with the addition of electronics.
I continue to compose concert works with the abstraction freedom that pure concert music allows us to experience, I have also been immersing myself in collaborative mixed media works in Dance Theatre and Music Theatre. I am interested in a deep exploration of Instrumental Theatre as a “immersive experience,” which I define as the juxtaposition of live music, physical presence and actions on stage, live processing of sound, interactive video, and at times, audience participation.
This enhanced experience, implicit with the use of new technologies, new medias and visuals integrates a new kind of relationship between the performers, the performance space and the audience. I like to work with non-linear dramatic scenarios and believe that the complex intimate experiences felt by each audience member create a unique synthesis and ultimately the resulting story line.
The world we live in is complex—rich and disconcerting, inspiring and at times horrifying. I do not try to make an aesthetic experience of this reality in my new media exploration—but it is my source of inspiration.
Linda Bouchard
December, 2020
