Annual List of Works : Centre de Documentation de la Musique Contemporaine

~2.3M

Title
To Gather Paradise

Composer
CANAT DE CHIZY Edith (1950, French, 7 place de la Montagne du Goulet 75015 PARIS)

Genre
SATB choir (a cappella)

Year of composition
2001

Duration
11 minutes

Place of premiere performance
Poitiers (Colla Voce Festival)

Date of premiere performance
2001-09-01

Performers
Choeur Accentus; Laurence Equilbey, conductor

Score
Publisher : Editions Henry Lemoine
27 boulevard Beaumarchais 75004 PARIS - France
URL: www.henry-lemoine.com
E-mail: info@henry-lemoine.com
Edition-No.: 27663 H.L.
Price: 16,70 €

Recording
Record company: (+ Address): Globe (label of Klaas Posthuma Productions, Tapuit 4,
1902 KP Castricum, The Netherlands)
URL: www.globerecords.nl
E-mail: not provided
Edition-No.: GLO 5229
Performers: Nederlands Kamerkoor; Roland Hayrabedian, conductor
Price: 14,18 € (No Tax Included)

Motivation
To Gather Paradise has been written by Edith Canat de Chizy. One of the most famous contemporary female composers in France and the only one to have entered the French Academy.
This work is representative of her most recent works. It is inspired by the poems of Emily Dickinson, evoking solitude, death and eternity.
The words of the poet found a resonance in the mind of the composer. The depth of meaning is emphasised by the close links between the words and music.

Programme note
It was through a chance finding in a bookshop of Vivre avant l'éveil that Edith Canat de Chizy be¬came acquainted with the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Her inner journey to the intersection of the visible and the invisible world, and her questions about the soul and nature, death and the beyond, were directly echoed in the composer's own concerns, and Dickinson's aphoristic style found its exact consequence in Canat de Chizy's elliptical and constantly mutating musical writing.
After Lands away (1999), a chamber concerto for cimbalom and string orchestra inspired by the line "To take us lands away", came To Gather Paradise, inspired by poems from the anthology Une âme en incandescence ("Soul at the white heat"), which received its first performance by the Accentus Chamber Choir on 1 September 2001, under the direction of Laurence Equilbey.
Here, the composer expands the work begun in the Canciones, again highlighting beacon-like words whose beams pull into focus the vocal material. Five words, chiselled into diamonds of sound, hold the first part together: alone, steady, solitary, wilderness and homelessness, weaving a description of the poet, for whom wandering equates with solitude. A quickly deployed light semiquaver scansion heralds a more intelligible stanza, which the composer would later use as the epigraph for her second string quartet, Alive (2003): "To be alive is power". In the next se¬quence, which is built on alternating glissandi, the soprano soloist lets out three floaty rises on "to gather Paradise", before the call, more urgent and substantial every time, to "give me back to death". Next, the slow oscillations of a building swell culminate in an outburst at "so near eternity", which quickly fragments into multiple trills. A passage of contrary motion portamento between the male and female voices scored 'très doux' leads to a revisitation of the ascending motif on "to gather Paradise" in the sopranos, over tenor and bass glissandi that melt into sustained on¬dulations until the piece's female voice coda is reached: "the everlasting clocks chime noon".

Biography
Elected in 2005 at the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, Edith Canat de Chizy (born on 26 March 1950) is the first woman composer to enter the Institut de France.
Having obtained a degree in Art, Archeology and Philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, she then studied music in the Conservatoire Supérieur of Paris, where she was awarded, in turn, first prizes in harmony, fugue, counterpoint, analysis, orchestration and composition.
She studied first under Ivo Malec and then, in 1983, came the decisive meeting with Maurice Ohana. At the same time she worked on electroacoustics both at the Conservatoire and with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

She has been awarded numerous prizes for her work, including the Tribune Internationale des Compositeurs Prize for her orchestral work Yell (1990); the SACEM Hervé Dugardin (1987) and Georges Enesco (1990) prizes; the Paul-Louis Weiller prize (1992); the SACD “Jeune talent musique” Prize (1998); and an exceptional distinction for her cello concerto Moïra at the Prince Pierre de Monaco competition (1999). She was made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1994.
In 1997 and 1998, she was a composer in residence at the Metz Arsenal and in 2000 she was nominated at the Victoires de la Musique for her violin concerto Exultet.
Edith Canat de Chizy’s training as a violonist means she is very familiar with string writing. She has an obvious sense of timbre and sound matter which is particularly in evidence in her orchestral works. Her independent language and freedom of style have enabled her to create a singular sound world where her imagination holds sway.
Her last recording “Moving” (Aeon 210) devoted to string works met a huge success with the public and the critics. In July 2003, her second string quartet Alive was premiered at the Bordeaux International String Quartet competition.
Her viola concerto Les Rayons du jour, commissioned by the Orchestre de Paris, premiered in February 2005 by Ana Bela Chaves under the direction of Christoph Eschenbach met a huge success with the public and the critics.
She is crowned in 2004 by the SACEM Great Symphonic Prize.
Since September 2003, she is the head of the Paris 7eme arrondissement Conservatoire where she has opened a composition class that she teaches herself.