François Donato (b.1963) is one of the younger composers associated with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. He discovered musique concrète at the University of Pau, and was taught by Jean Schwarz in Gennevilliers.

“Annam” was composed 1993. The word actually means “food” in Sanskrit. He came upon the Sanskrit word whilst working on this piece, and thought that it, in a transcended sense, had bearings on the art of electroacoustics, and musique concrète in particular. He says that the task of modern composers is to “express the composer’s relation to the material” – to Nature – and to transcend nature and “make its spiritual essence perceptible”.

The piece is highly developed, electroacustically, with many events taking place at the same time, alongside and opposed to each other. The sounding characteristics are on many levels related to the music of for example François Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani, which of course is very natural for someone working at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, with that heavy weight of a formidable tradition shaping things – not that that is negative in any sense; the GRM tradition is one of renewal and innovation too. Not many traces can be found from the sonics of Jean Schwarz, even though he was the primary mentor of Mr. Donato.

The apparatus gets more and more digitally evolved, but in the end only the good artist can make any use of it. In the electroacoustic community as a whole there are many composers who have misunderstood this, hoping to fit in with real art just by purchasing machinery, but they’re judged by the end result. Don’t go mistaking the novel for the pen! A composer of electroacoustics has to be a poets and a painter, or he’s no good. These are abstract, non-figurative sound paintings and sonic poems!
This comparably young composer, though, is on the level with history, and with his older comrades and mentors. There is not so much differentiating him from others around him in this genre, but his art is of a high stature, of good quality, innovative and adventurous – and beautiful! Beauty takes on many guises, and beauty does not mean that the music has to be lean or smooth in any sense, but Donato’s sounds are primarily perceived in such a way, a bit polished, as making use of a myriad of light, popping, rolling, bouncing spheres, spreading out in a flare of colors and light.