Yves Daoust

The Art of Sound

Music Electroacoustic  |  Mixed  |  Instrumental

Spanning five decades, Yves Daoust’s catalogue embraces electroacoustic, mixed, and instrumental composition — each work treating listening itself as a dramatic act. His music has been performed and broadcast internationally, and is distributed on the empreintes DIGITALes label.

Key Works

1979
Quatuor
Musique concrète — His first “concrète” work, revisiting musical heritage through cultural sound sources.
1981
Valse
Mixed — Flute (and piccolo), Bb and Eb clarinets, alto/tenor/baritone saxophones, trumpet, electronic organ, amplified harpsichord, piano, electronic piano, violin, and tape. The starting point of a unique writing process where “nature” and “culture” cohabit in parallel discourses.
1984
Petite musique sentimentale
Mixed — Piano and tape.
1986
Adagio
Mixed — Flute and tape.
1986
Il était une fois… (conte sans paroles)
Electroacoustic.
1988
Variations sur un air d’accordéon
Mixed — Comedian-accordionist and tape.
1991
L’Entrevue
Mixed — Accordion and tape.
1991
Water Music
Electroacoustic — Stereo support.
1995
Impromptu [mixte]
Mixed — Piano, synthesizer / sampler, and tape.
1997 – 2001
Bruits — trilogy: Children’s Corner / Nuit / Fête
Electroacoustic — Urban sound fragmentation. Listen to Nuit below.
2007 – 2008
Chorals ornés
Mixed — Organ and stereo fixed medium. Follows in the footsteps of the parallel-based approach established with Valse.
Album
Docu-fictions — Selected Recordings
Available on empreintes DIGITALes. Stream or purchase the full album below.

Discography

1991
Anecdotes
empreintes DIGITALes — IMED 9106
1996
Filmusique-Film opéra (with Maurice Blackburn)
Analekta — AN 7005/06
1998
Musiques naïves
empreintes DIGITALes — IMED 9843
2001
Bruits
empreintes DIGITALes — IMED 0156
Electroacoustic Mixed Music Musique Concrète Instrumental Sound Art empreintes DIGITALes

Complete Works Catalogue

1976
Paris, les Grands-Magasins
Electroacoustic — Phonography / daily environment sounds.
1979
Quatuor
Musique concrète.
1981
Valse
Flute (and piccolo), Bb and Eb clarinets, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones, trumpet, electronic organ, amplified harpsichord, piano, electronic piano, violin, and tape.
1981 / 2000
La gamme
Electroacoustic.
1982 – 1995
Maurice Blackburn, ou portrait d’un méconnu
Electroacoustic.
1984
Petite musique sentimentale
Piano and tape.
1986
Adagio
Flute and tape.
1986
Fantaisie
Electroacoustic.
1986
Il était une fois… (conte sans paroles)
Electroacoustic.
1988
Variations sur un air d’accordéon
Comedian-accordionist and tape.
1989
Ouverture
Electroacoustic.
1989
Suite Baroque
Electroacoustic.
1990
Mi bémol
Electroacoustic.
1991
L’Entrevue
Accordion and tape.
1991
Water Music
Stereo support.
1992
Joie
Electroacoustic.
1992
Résonances
Electroacoustic.
1994
Impromptu
Electroacoustic.
1995
Impromptu [mixte]
Piano, synthesizer / sampler, and tape.
1997 – 2001
Bruits
Electroacoustic.
2002
Objets trouvés
Electroacoustic.
2003
Solo
Electroacoustic.
2004
Le temps fixé
Electroacoustic.
2005
About Time
Electroacoustic.
2007 – 2008
Chorals ornés
Organ and stereo fixed medium.

Fonofone Instrument  |  Educational Project  |  Publications

Fonofone is a sound-creation instrument conceived by Yves Daoust in 2004 to awaken musical creativity in young people. It has become the cornerstone of a sustained pedagogical engagement reaching thousands of students across Québec and beyond.

Discover Fonofone → Fonofone.ca

Teaching Conservatoire  |  Workshops  |  Pedagogy

A central pillar of Daoust’s practice is transmission — the conviction that listening, creativity, and sonic awareness can and must be taught. Over thirty years at the Conservatoire de musique et d’art dramatique du Québec, he shaped generations of electroacoustic composers and built enduring institutional programs.

Teaching & Testimonials →

Analysis Evolution  |  Aesthetics  |  Musical Language

A study of Yves Daoust’s musical evolution — from his radical beginnings in 1975, through the invention of a new genre, the full flowering of his aesthetic, and a late immersion in intimate memory.

1975 — Origins
The Founding Rupture
Daoust describes his beginnings as a moment of radical negation — he was searching for what he did not want to do, rather than what he wished to build. The revelation came from a piece by Luc Ferrari, described as a lightning bolt that finally gave him a direction. His first recognized electroacoustic work, Paris, les grands magasins (1975), is raw and frontal: a sonic walk through Parisian department stores, with no aesthetic layering, no transformation. He calls it “very clumsy” himself, yet already recognizes in it the first seeds of his future language.
Paris, les grands magasins (1975) Influence: Luc Ferrari Radical musique concrète Single-layer soundscape
Late 1970s–80s
Inventing an Impossible Genre: Mixed Music
This is where Daoust forges his most original compositional identity. He theorizes mixed music not as the integration of an instrument and a tape, but as the deliberately separate coexistence of two media with different temporalities. Unlike most composers of the era — where the tape dictates or supports the performer — Daoust gives each medium its own autonomous discourse. The interview with the performer becomes the raw material of the tape: a musical paradox staged in L’entrevue (c. 1982), where an accordionist’s theoretical thoughts on Bach cross an instrumental writing drawn from the English Suites.
L’entrevue (c. 1982) Tape + live performer Two parallel media Accordion · Bach transformed Spoken word as score
Late 1980s–90s
Maturity: Instrumental Theatre & Portrait
This period sees the full flowering of his aesthetic of layered meaning. Daoust works systematically through stratification — a surface narrative, a deeper hidden subject beneath. In Les agréments, he juxtaposes Couperin extracts with a flutist in existential crisis, superimposing an 18th-century ornamentation treatise onto the absurdity of a virtual piano with no pianist. Humour is fully embraced. The Bruit trilogy (Children’s Corner / Nuit / Fête) marks a turn toward urban sonic fragmentation, exploring a technique of sampling and reconstruction of environmental sounds — air conditioners, street noise — with near-scientific analytical precision.
Les agréments · Couperin · irony Bruit (trilogy) Urban sounds · fragmentation Multiple layers Extra-musical concepts Humour
2000s
Intimate Portrait & Memory
The most recent works reveal a deepening of the gesture: Daoust draws close to vulnerable human subjects — a courtesan (Lili), a singer in cognitive decline (Temps fixé) — and weaves their fragmented, repetitive, lacunary voices against their glorious past. The repetition of phrases uttered by a singer with dementia is not an editing flaw but a precise notation of memorial degradation. The reel-to-reel tape machine in Temps fixé itself becomes symbol: an archaic tool, it embodies the very idea of frozen time that the piece interrogates.
Lili — courtesan · solitude Temps fixé — decline · memory Reel-to-reel tape machine Mozart · degradation Life narrative

Permanent traits across all periods

Layering as formal signature

The absolute formal signature of Daoust. Every piece operates on at least two simultaneous levels: the apparent (the surface narrative) and the deep (the true philosophical or emotional subject).

Rooted in classical music

Bach, Couperin, Mozart, Debussy — not as cultivated references, but as organic continuation. Daoust claims a continuum, refusing the radical breaks valorized by the contemporary scene. His persistent tonality is its most audible trace.

The interview as material

A methodological constant: he records, lets the subject speak, then edits with a discretion close to an ethnographer’s. The other’s voice becomes musical notation.

Playing with time

Present vs past, frozen time vs living time, repetition vs forgetting — his central philosophical obsession, expressed in each work under a different form.

Biography Composer  |  Pioneer  |  Institution Builder

Born in Longueuil, Québec, Yves Daoust is one of the most distinctive and influential voices in contemporary electroacoustic music — trained at the NFB, at the GMEB in Bourges, and at the Conservatoire de musique de Québec, where he spent thirty years building the electroacoustic programs. Recipient of the Prix Serge-Garant (2009).

First Electroacoustic Composition

Paris, les Grands-Magasins  — 1976
Electroacoustic — Phonography / daily environment sounds. Exploring nature through captured urban soundscapes.
Full Biography →

Contact

For inquiries regarding scores, commissions, Fonofone, teaching, or collaborations:

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