Works by Dauphinais, Gonneville, Hamel and Lalonde.

La Symphonie des éléments is a collectively-authored work in four movements, composed in late 2000 and early 2001 by André Hamel, Michel Gonneville, Alain Lalonde and Alain Dauphinais for the young musicians of the senior wind symphony at the Joseph-François Perrault high school in Montreal. Hamel, Lalonde and Dauphinais are part of the collective Espaces sonores illimitées, specializing in collectively composed music that takes as its central preoccupation the spatialization of sonic sources. It was Michel Gonneville who invited this trio to join him in the project. Encouraged by the dedicatee’s music director, Richard Charron, these composers sought to engage the wind symphony’s young musicians in an adventure of both discovery and development, with respect to the particular musical properties of the work and its language, as well as the highly specific performance conditions caused by the changing arrangement of the musicians from movement to movement. On the occasion of its premiere as part of the 2005 MNM festival, some twenty, more senior students from the Montreal conservatory will join forces with the musicians from JFP. Each movement refers, through musical style, to one of four well-known elements of ancient symbolism, which are Water, Earth, Fire and Air.

As part of MNM Youth.