Concert of Jacques Demierre & Louis Schild
10.02.2022 – Temple St-Théodule, La Tour-de-Peilz
Public presentation concluding musicians Jacques Demierre and Louis Schild’s micro-residency with us. The concert was preceded by the presentation of their publication Engamblant, published in June 2021 by Les Presses du Réel, in the presence of Pauline Piguet and Michèle Pralong.
Engamblant, a silk-screen printed edition, delivers a reworked transcript of a recorded interview between Jacques Demierre and Louis Schild, where the notions of surveying and measuring are examined, among other things.
In the publication, graphic designer Pauline Piguet takes up the measuring theme using the single-page space as her reference unit, while playwright Michèle Pralong offers a more narrative pre-echo to the two musicians’ conversation. Interwined with the interview, the handwritten score of Mesure composes a wandering that retraces in real time the act of sonic survey that the tuning of a piano entails.
The conversation starter between Schild and Demierre is a composition by the latter, The Well-Measured Piano. Written for piano and recorded sounds, the piece “results from a work of measurement, that of the piano as a territory, and of the instrument’s different sonic regions”.
Demierre and Schild then extracted a new work from The Well-Measured Piano’s basic elements, further probing and echoing the notions of surveying and measurement. Mesure is an instrumental sound installation for piano, recorded sounds, electric bass and amplification, of an approximate duration of 90 minutes.
Having presented this installation work several times now, Schild and Demierre have imagined a new, contrapuntal performative extension of Mesure, which they will be working on at La Becque before ultimately performing it with the NEC, the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain in La Chaux-de-Fonds.