Music for percussion II by Ryoji Ikeda © Christophe Urbain

Formerly Musiques en Scène, the Lyon event, now renamed B!ME, Biennial of Exploratory Music, is coming to us for the second time under this new surname.

With this new edition of the B!ME biennial, Grame endorses the notion of “exploratory music”. At the same time selling more (to a general public sometimes frightened by the term “contemporary music”), this designation also proves to be in perfect harmony with the desire to open up to more diverse musical styles and audiences.

Within a plethora of programming whose common thread is the ambition to answer the question “How does music transform us?” », a few highlights illustrate well the inclinations concerning this new orientation.

Zen percussionism

Gathered within a corpus called Music for Percussion II, the miniatures composed by the Japanese Ryoji Ikeda appear as multidimensional experiences. Both visual installations with a radical and unbridled aesthetic – a few objects, two or three performers arranged in a geometric manner – these performative pieces by the names of Telegraph Music, Metronome Music, Book Music, Ball Music or Ruler Music explore the possibilities offered by the diversion of concrete objects for musical purposes. Rhythmic but also timbral or even “spectral”, the experience is total, extremely refined, powerful and immersive.

Electric experience

Iconoclastic guitarist, Marc Ducret is a star of the avant-garde, both for his extraordinary use of the electrified instrument that he pushes to its limits, and for his talent as a composer.

It is in the company of the brilliant quartet Béla that this program was imagined around Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. Between the six movements of this monument composed between 1925 and 1926 by the Viennese composer, will echo original pieces by Marc Ducret for solo guitar (or with quartet) which will lead us, as often, to wild and uncleared territories, to frontiers of modern jazz, rock and noise music.

Preparations and imagined instruments

Many other performances are in keeping, such as the creation proposed by the Lyon ensemble op. It is sent by Guillaume Bourgogne and which will make us hear compositions by Ève Risser and Guilhem Meier, two young composer-performers (respectively at the piano and the drums) whose singularity is to have composed for their own instrument but “prepared ” (in other words “personalized” via artificial modifications such as by attaching all kinds of objects or materials intended to modify its sound).

For its part, the Montreal ensemble Totem Contemporain has decided to play new works for a instrumentarium innovative and extraordinary composed of creations by luthier Jean-François Laporte. Over the course of an original meeting, this most unusual formation will dialogue with the Cairn ensemble, bringing together electric guitar, clarinet and percussion.

Biennial B!ME – From March 9 to 27 at various locations – www.grame.fr