The world of sounds of "Le renard et la rose" reflects Robert Normandeau's idea of "cinema for the ear".

"Le renard et la rose" ("The Fox and the Rose", 1995) dedicated to Odile Magnan, is a concert suite composed from two sound sources: the music commissioned by Radio-Canada for the radio play adapted from "The Little Prince" by Antoine de St-Exupery (produced by Odile Magnan in 1994), from which we will retrieve here the main themes, and the voices of the actors and radio speakers who participated to the radio play.

"Le renard et la rose" is the third piece of a cycle started in 1991 ("Eclats de voix" and "Spleen" were the first two parts of that cycle) based exclusively on the use of the voice and more particularly on the use of onomatopoeia, considered as the only case in the human language where the sound describes directly the object, the gesture or the feeling that one wants to communicate, as opposed to their abstract representations, the words.

One will find successively the themes of "The Little Prince": The King, The Businessman, The Vain Person, the Flock of Birds, The Desert Well, The Little Flower, The Rose, The Baobabs, The Lamplighter, The Water Pills Tradesman, The Fox and The Geographer.

The work is divided into five sections which represent as many states of the adult age, and are associated with different sound parameters: chattering and rhythm; nostalgia and timbre; anger and dynamic; lassitude and space; and finally, serenity and texture.

"Le renard et la rose" was composed for a 14 loudspeakers diffusion system. The original tape is intended to be played with one track directly assigned to one speaker. That means that in concert, the piece requires a multitrack tape recorder, a mixing board and 14 loudspeakers plus 2 sub-woofers.

The two tape recorders can be either 2 synchronized ADAT or 2 synchronized TASCAM DA 88 (one playing the first 8 tracks and the second one playing the last 6 tracks). The mixing board should be as versatile as possible. With such a board, it would be possible to assign whatever tracks to any loudspeaker. This might be useful in some concert halls, so that people who are at a distance from some speakers, do not lose any information.

Playing the music from a multitrack recorder on which each track goes to a separate loudspeaker, without having to touch the levels or the equalizations, is a completely different way of composing music. The spatialization of the sounds becomes an integral part of the composition, and thusly the performance space serves to delineate the sonorous parameters as well as the height, the length, and the intensity. Mixing, therefore, is accomplished acoustically and not electronically.

"Le renard et la rose" was composed in the composer's personal studio in 1995 with the financial help of the conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. The work was commissioned by the Banff Centre for the Arts with the financial help of the Canada Council for the 1995 International Computer Music Conference.