| |  This music is for ensemble with strong vocal experience. Lucien Jean-Baptiste conducted the National Conservatoire of Music (he named it “César Geoffray”) of Toulon before conducting the National Conservatoire of Saint-Denis in Réunion. He also composed and arranged many choral singings (both for children and adults).
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Those are unaccompanied vocal music short pieces intended for middle school students. It’s based on nine paintings exhibited in the Musée d’arts de Nantes’s renovated galleries.
The aim is to draw closer to famous painters but also to develop a choir melody from those prestigious paintings, based on some well-known movements such as popular music, minimalist music, passacaglia, vocal play, musical design and even a little bit of improvisation.
Those opuses have exclusively been written for unaccompanied vocal music, so young singers can experiment the pleasure of shaping and precising their own choir music at the same time as discovering harmony’s benefits. This would not go without some cheekiness.
However, if the choir isn’t sure, if desks are losing their balance, if voices aren’t so in tune, then some instruments should be included but be careful to their range and various stylistic accounts you get.
So, it can be suggested that: bowed stringed instruments better suit to “Le Vielleur”, some sonorous brass better suit for “Charlotte Corday”, low octaves (as D-A in stubborn cadenza) slowly played on a piano better suit for “Naufrage du trois-mâts ‘L’Emily’”, three contrary collection instruments can be played for each line of “Les cribleuses de blé”, then playing bass can represent the punctuate rhythm and alto’s bourdon in “Diane”, why not, and finally a little bit of fairground organ may be played on “Les grandes plages de Biarritz” just like a wink.
Some percussionist can come and improvise on repetitive cells in “Soto”, and then all instrumentalists of each category can mix to amplify graphics, a tribute to Kandinsky.
The choirmaster is free to choose the order of pictures. However, stylistic changes have to be taken into consideration.
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| | |  Une île (Yves Gilbert/ Serge Lama/ Jacques Berthe )
Septembre (César Geoffray/ César Geoffray)
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Reijo Kekkonen was born in 1961 in Finalnd. He graduated from Sibelius Academy in 1991. He conducted several school choirs, choirs for teenagers and female choirs. He sang in Helsingin Kamarikuoro, the Finnish Radio Chamber Choir. He manages SULASOL Editions for many years now. His arrangements and compositions were released by Warner/Chappell for example.
This work was written between 2008 and 2009 in Dion Ritten initiative. He ordered a piece for his female choir to Reijo Kekkonen. Reijo Kekkonen wrote a variable-size-choir piece which would need several sides of female voice. Love, joy, passion, and death are combined with a sea metaphor.
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