This is a personal recollection of a Paris which I never knew. It is an anecdotal remembrance of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier with more then a nod to Raymond Roussel and filtered through the radio of Jean Cocteau’s taxi. This is the Fourier of the mathematical memoir, On the Propagation of Heat in Solid Bodies, a somewhat controversial view at that time in which the author described the diffusion of heat by a partial differential equation which could be solved using an infinite series of trigonometric functions. The equations for Fourier analysis as it has since become known, also turned out to be very useful in the analysis and resynthesis of sound (which is very much like slow heat), and as such could be described as an infinite series of sine waves of different amplitudes, frequency and phase.
Joseph Fourier was also the scientific advisor for Napoleon during the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. Beside his papers on mathematics, Fourier spent several years writing the Description of Egypt in 25 volumes and which Napoleon extensively rewrote, essentially changing history before it was allowed to be published. With its second edition however, Napoleon himself had become written out of the history of this period, and the story was retold minus his appearance. The Rosetta Stone was found by Napoleon’s troops during their invasion. The black granite slab inscribed with identical texts in demotic, Greek, and hieroglyphics provided Jean François Champollion, French linguist and proto-Egyptologist, with the key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. This he finally solved in 1821.
This somewhat confessional narration therefore, describes a small, insignificant and imaginary dinner party celebrating the return of the French scientific delegation from Egypt in 1801. Fourier was the guest of honor, and all his science buddies where there as well as the chief archaeologist for the expedition, Jean Jacques Champollion-Figeac, the elder brother of Jean François. The younger Champollion was only 11 at the time but quiet precocious and considered by many of his fellow Frenchmen, even at such a young age, to be a genuine genius.
Like all my subsequent narrative pieces, this work was designed for real time performance. The vocalized text was extended electroacoustically with my home-brew microprocessor gear which I had been working with since 1978. Also, this particular piece made use during its performance of a working prop in the form of a handheld, random number speaking pager. This was hacked from an old transistor radio with an ancillary piece of circuit board bolted onto it, and with a row of red LEDs which came on according to the intensity of the sound coming from the radio speaker. It picked up the spoken numbers from an infrared link to a speech synthesizer chip connected to a random number generator. Much of my self-designed, hand-built, and feral electronics often looked like a joke or rather a parody of the slick, though one-tune, inflexible commercial gear that was becoming available for electroacoustics during this time.