Author: admin-dev

A foreword

I am an improviser and a musicosopher. An improviser whose only score is a well-tempered keyboard, one same soul in one same body, the same ten fingers, and a certain trust in the unique instants music creates when it manages to emerge from the world of sound and unite a performer with an audience in one same feeling of certainty. A musico-sopher, because of my dissatisfaction with the “musico-logical” approaches to music. I therefore turned to the philosophical seizure of consciousness, and to Edmund Husserl in particular. I found my happiness in the texts, the teachings and the interpretations of a certain number of wanderers of musical meaning hailing from the Eastern and Western parts of the world. They taught particular instruments, musical analysis and improvisation; some were also choir directors. Then came the writings and conferences of conductors such as Ernest Ansermet and Sergiu Celibidache. They knew how to place human consciousness at the operative center of music, in practice and in theory. Then also came composers, such as Giacinto Scelsi or Slamet Abdul Sjukur, who had found their inspiration at the very heart of sound.

Today, such people still sing Gregorian chants in monasteries, or Orthodox chants in their own hearts, or Hindu mantras throughout the world, like Shyamji Bhatnagar. Street singers should not be forgotten either, as they proclaim the unhoped-for. The explorers of sound infinity must also be mentioned, for they know how to hear the world in which they live. The world that is here.

Through vocal inflexion, through the quality of touch, through the beauty of phrasing, many anonymous people also allow the Profound Chant, which we all have in common, to vibrate. I finally want to acknowledge the ones who succeeded in touching my Heart of Hearing, a place in which the Universal beats in each of us. All of these people made me understand the value of experiencing music in light of our full consciousness.

These are my forays in the world of music and with my peers, the instrumentalists, the composers, the improvisers and the entertainers. I am most of all referring to the common substance that connects us all, whether we are musicians or not, music lovers or not. This substance, it is the consciousness of music which I call “musical consciousness” and for which I try to understand the movement and the “work” it does in each of us.

I turned to a few composers I was lucky to meet, read or perform – A Concertant Autobiography – and to others I have only heard recently – A Few Steps Forward. I looked to a history that is already far away – Orpheus’s Odyssey, (Monteverdi, Bach and Ravel) – to the worlds of Debussy and Bartok – Elsewhere and Now. I considered the role of the voice in our lives, in opera and in cinema – The Ear and the Voice. And, finally, I turned to the presence, all around us, of musical styles that have survived the twists and turns of history and the uncertainties of Evolution. I see in the young princess Kartini, the feminine icon of modern Indonesia, a predecessor of my own writing. I have dedicated a short study to her and her exceptional ability to grasp the unifying consciousness that music can awaken in us.

I attempt, through my writings, to shed light on today’s interrogations and mutations in order to help open up incessantly expansive and more intensely conscious fields of experimentation.

I would, once again, like to mention the Indonesian composer Slamet Abdul Sjukur (1935-2015) whom I met in Paris in 1975 in circumstances that are recounted in the Tribute presented here. I would also like to give my heartfelt thanks to his talented student, the composer and publisher Jenny Rompas, without whom this book would never have seen the light of day.    

V

I am interested in discrete revolutions. The ones that have great effects but that don’t make much noise. The ones that come from the deepest confines of consciousness and return to such depths after having made one’s consciousness evolve decisively and irreversibly. A smile, a voice, can have a deeper impact than a big burst of laughter or the noise of a crowd. Many of these small gestures made greater contributions to the history of music than esthetic debates and disputes between ideologues. Essence travelled from consciousness to consciousness without a word. As it has been forever since the dawn of time.

These small revolutions have forged the way towards new experiences. They imply new fields of perception which are only rarely described by philosophers, musicologists and by the musicians themselves. This book aims to give a voice to the palpable experience we have when we play or listen to music. Such an experience includes our auditory perception, but it also implies other channels of perception that need to be located and named. This is important for the contemporary musical consciousness. Nowadays, the protagonists of contemporary music, through their clear words and their consciousnesses, must support things that used to happen without saying a word. Fair attitudes depend on adequate words; fruitful orientations depend on the fairness of the attitudes.

VI

I use two main operating modes to conduct my enquiry in the subsequent texts. There is the concept of mediology, to which I refer often when exploring the connection between content and message. I examine the elements that are said, written, sung or played, and the instruments or the technical media broadcasting them, as well as the time periods and the institutions that make them possible, and the schools of thought that go along with them. Mediology, an Interpretative Art is entirely dedicated to this, as I consider two contemporary artists, Bela Bartok and Charlie Chaplin, and the ways in which both played with the technological mutations of their time.

 I use the term Tonality in a broad sense. To me, it is the activity of human consciousness in the world of sounds. Its evolution in the history of humanity coincides with the history of music. While often reduced to three centuries of Western music, it is not limited to such a time frame. The reason tonality has been associated with this historical period is because it was its last evolution: first through Monteverdi, and then, even more evidently, through Bach. But its present and its future now belong to humanity as a whole.

The word Tonality refers to the way in which musical pitches are organized around one pitch and how they relate to it, just as the points of circumference of a circle relate to its center. This center is known as the “tonic”.

However, as musical consciousness evolved, the tonic gradually became the start and end points of fully realized musical forms, of all works. It was the point of the circle wherein the movement loops back on itself. Books on harmony also tell us that it is the “functional center of attraction”. But these authors fail to fully understand the scope of their own words.

In the world of sounds, music appears through two simultaneous movements of consciousness in action. One of them is peripheral, as a succession (the notes follow each other, as in a melody), the other is axial, in an integrational mode (by pertaining to only one note… it is the harmony).

Monteverdi, Bach, Ravel

The articles and texts collected in this book all speak of the creative power at the heart of music and of its evolution. Three essential phases in the history of music in Europe in the last four centuries are considered here. The first phase is the way in which Claudio Monteverdi managed to institute a tonal language by combining the syntaxical structure of his musical language with the narrative and symbolic scope of his operas. In the second phase, we ask ourselves why the reflexive movement of musical consciousness became the engine behind music from J.S Bach onwards. This will be the central axis of our exploration, and our reflections will continue as we listen to Bach’s famous prelude to the first cello suite. The third phase will bring us to study Ravel’s Boléro. We will ask a question that the composer asked himself: Is it truly music? … in the way that one understood what music was until 1928, in a European context in which Claudio Monteverdi and J.S Bach were still founding figures. 

Monteverdi :

The birth of the harmonic sequence marked the beginning of a new era in the history of music. The harmonic sequence meant that the musical consciousness was no longer solely led by the “modal” nature of its objects (notes, scales, cadential movements) and the paths they imposed. On the contrary, the connections between these objects was determined by the harmonic sequence as it unfolded. From Monteverdi onwards, the modal progression no longer gave music its character. Instead, the unfurling of the musical consciousness steered the modes towards an ending, the latter of which was its own realization – a moving musical consciousness. The modal pathway became tonalized by musical consciousness in action; the modal pathway became a tonal progression.

The Foundation of Musical Time by J.S Bach

Musical time is the time created by music. But unlike a performance, it is not superimposed on the life of our consciousness. What I call musical time is the time of our consciousness when it is a consciousness of music. It is both the time of the (musical) event of which we are aware and the time which our consciousness experiences of the event. 

Music should therefore not be reduced to the simple development of a sonorous event. Listening to or playing music confronts us with duration. This is not the duration of the world around us, but it is ours. And we love music precisely because it puts us directly in touch with duration, which no other bodily or spiritual activity can communicate to us in this way, so immediately.

“Tonal” means centered. “Tonality” refers to the auto-intensification movement of consciousness, when consciousness grabs hold of the world of sounds and molds it in its image. Tonal consciousness, which I constantly interrogate in my writings, transcends the space and time in which our natural consciousness lives. It does this from the outset, in the prelude, testing itself as a presence, with no other aim than its own seizing. It had to do this in the case of any organized sound environment that wished to call itself music after Bach. And Ravel knew all of this perfectly.

Ravel’s boléro

Two factors precipitated the dilution of musical meaning in the twentieth century: the first was the disintegration of tonal syntax, and the second was the dissolution of thematic dramaturgy. The second Viennese school contributed to the first factor, and a large number of musicians, events and musical styles triggered the second. Ravel’s Boléro is a prestigious example of these events. It has been the piece of “classical” music most played in the world since its creation in Paris in 1928. And yet, is it, in fact, music? The question may appear surprising since the piece seems to alleviate any doubts regarding its nature: it is, of course, music. No one questions this. Let us, in fact, cast doubts about this, just as Ravel cast doubts himself. Before examining the piece itself, we must interrogate the context surrounding it:

Several acceptations exist for the word ‘music’. According to its first meaning, any sound emission can potentially be considered to be music and any arrangement of sound that is more or less voluntary is already music. But Ravel used the second meaning of the word when, to his audience’s stupefaction, he said that the Boléro was not music. He knew that he had mimicked music rather than actually making it when he wrote the Boléro. To him, making music could not be reduced to composing an initial theme, and then another one of a similar nature, and have them follow each other in a crescendo of instrumental intensity and amplitude.                                    

An enchanted Game-Land

European music and Indonesian music existed, for a long time, without ever meeting. When the encounter finally occurred, each music was predictably judged by the other party as being strange and remote. This was true of the majority of opinions – especially in Nineteenth Century Europe, an era convinced of its own superiority. We must, however, notice that two of the most influential musicians of their time and culture – Debussy and Bartók –  were able to “hear” in the most concrete and humble way (through audition) and in the most subtle of ways (through comprehension) the essence and universality of such faraway music. When Debussy discovered Indonesian music in 1889, such a world of sound was hardly considered. It was also barely archived in museum collections when Bartók sought this music in the 1920s and 1930s.

Both creators – among the most original and innovative composers of their times – approached Indonesian music in two different ways. We shall attempt to understand each composer’s journey and outcomes.

 A Chiming Keyboard – Debussy

The fact that Debussy discovered Sundanese gamelan music at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889 is established and undisputed. But it also “entered in the legend” and this is admitted without additional scrutiny. This means that we easily omit to ask ourselves how Debussy came to such a discovery, what was the concrete impact of such a revelation, and which personal experiences – intimate, organic and sensual – led him to find the profound meaning of gamelan music, at a time when nearly everyone around him only heard a hodgepodge of metallic bells rung by submissive and colonized tribes. On the one hand, what happened then wasn’t the intellectual illumination of a prophet, or of a solely spiritual being: it came from the experience of a body and a soul. For, what Debussy heard that day, he heard it with his musician’s ear, but he also, and more importantly, perceived it with the heart, nerves, sex and brain of a living and breathing man.

            And, on the other hand, in order for him to « hear » such great music, he had to be Achille-Claude Debussy, and couldn’t be anyone else. The entire creative approach could only be embodied by him, as his path had begun in childhood, and as he was guided by intelligence and intuition, both of those qualities being united and advancing together.

2 – From the Island of Bali – Bartók (2)

One had to be born Hungarian in 1881 and be the subject of an Empire dominated by German language and culture to travel on a donkey’s back in 1905 and collect the marvellous popular songs and dances that still rhythmed the lives of farmers and mountain people in remote regions of Hungary, Romania and the Balkans. One had to be Hungarian, determined, inflexible and conscious of being on a historical mission: to save from oblivion a heritage that couldn’t remain alive, if it weren’t for audacious composers who could recreate it.

One of the most characteristic aspects of Bartók’s music, alongside his integration and transformation of popular themes and rhythms, has to do with the way in which he opposes two complementary harmonic worlds (7): the first is chromatic and generates circular movements, leading to spiralling effects, as if it were driven by strong churning. The second is diatonic and conveys linear thrusts, bursts of ascending lines of triumphant expression. His most sophisticated works are the result of this opposition. In the first movement of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), as well as in the third movement (8), we are able to follow this struggle and to witness each harmonic world’s mutual intensification.

According to Régis Debray (1940), mediology* consists in studying the connection between a message’s content and its transit paths (the medium). Medium and message: these two words were first popularized by Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian sociologist and theorist in communications. He was the first to explicitly focus his research on a relationship that had not been highlighted or discussed before.

Bela Bartok (1881-1945) and Charles Chaplin (1889-1977) were two of the most original creators of the twentieth century. Both of them were faced with the mediological mutations of their time: Bartok as an ethno-musicologist, a pianist and a composer, and Chaplin as a circus performer (mime, acrobat) and as a film actor and director. The second part of this study aims to grasp the significant and exemplary aspects of each of their approaches.

McLuhan was famous for his phrase “the medium is the message”.  One must take into account the insistent aspect of the phrase, which actually means that the real message is not what we habitually call “a message” (the transmitted content) but rather that which is prescribed by the medium, the technical conditions of communication. The true message is not to be found in the explicit but rather through the vector it engages and through which it engages its users. To use a simplified example, a Mozart symphony performed in public and a recording of the same piece, both have Mozart as the same apparent “message”. However, their medium messages are completely distinct. While the message may at first appear to be the same, we soon realize that the message of the first medium is a living, ephemeral experience that relies on the co-presence of performers and of an audience. The message of the recording medium, on the other hand, is an experience that “can be repeated” indefinitely and that is, to a certain extent, frozen. These differences imply distinct ways of viewing time, hearing, and audience(s). 

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*What is Mediology? by Regis Debray, translated  by Martin Irvine, Georgetown university, 1999.

Beneath the great official history of music lies a more discrete history – small internal revolutions that cross the barrier of words with difficulty. Musicians, who are the very heart and reason for these upheavals, rarely remember such occurrences. In an instant, their consciousness is overwhelmed by an astonishing moment and they are encouraged to discover new worlds. There was Debussy’s stunned reaction upon hearing a (Sundanese) Indonesian Gamelan at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889*. There were also the notable Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes composed by Erik Satie, one of Debussy’s friends, in those same years. At the very beginning of the second Gnossienne, for example, the following suggestion, “with astonishment” (avec étonnement), is offered to the performer. The piece is not meant to be adaggio or vivace, nor is it appasionato or con fuego. There must simply be just the right amount of presence of mind to suspend one’s judgement while also being prepared for delight. This consists in an ethos of the musician, and, even, of the act of creation, which John Cage and a few other twentieth century American composers professed in the wake of Satie.  

                                                                      I

Slamet Sjukur was another one of Satie’s heirs. Upon our first encounter in Paris in 1975, he led me to decipher the decisive calls that sometimes mark the lives of people and often mark the intimate history of musicians. We were to remain friends and partners in crime until his death in 2015. I have had the opportunity of hearing a few other Indonesian composers who were his students; I now believe that Indonesia, a traditional land of syntheses, will soon become the stage for new aesthetic pathways and new, surprising and fruitful adventures in musical consciousness. These adventures are fruitful precisely because they are surprising……….

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*See, Elsewhere and Now  

When reading Raden Adjeng Kartini’s letters, we can understand why she became a key figure in her country. Although her life was that of a young princess retained in the family palace and subject to her father’s law until her relatively late marriage, she also rebelled against the rules of her milieu and the conventions of her time. The calm child was also a revolutionary.

This spurred the birth of an icon, both an image and a fantasy, a force of the imagination and a messenger of reality, marked by an ancestral myth and sowing the seeds to a new story. Political authority can’t ignore such symbolic work since that is what legitimizes it to all, no matter the regime that serves and embodies it: since 1964 (under Sukarno), the 21^st of April became a national holiday, as it was the date of birth of the first activist for women’s education and the founder of the first school for girls in Indonesia. Kartini’s death at 25 years old in 1904 – four days after the birth of her first child –  as well as her published letters, which were translated into several European languages as early as 1911, quickly made her into a legend: she became the Mother of Indonesian women, a “Mother”, just as other great Indian saints had become, but unlike Joan of Arc, Thérèse de Lisieux, Louise Michel or Marie Curie in the French Nation, despite France’s penchant for the archetype of a fighting, liberating and nurturing woman, as Delacroix’s painting “Liberty Leading the People” attests.

Slamet Abdul Sjukur died on the 24^th of March, 2015, in his hometown of Surabaya ¹. He was approaching the age of eighty. A biography of him was published ² and recounted the essential steps of his public life: his studies in music in France with Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux, his activities as a composer, a teacher and a music critic, leading him to become, by the 1980s, the initiator and figurehead of contemporary music in Indonesia.

Many former students are now talking about what they gained from him, both musically and on a human level. Among them, two composers, Krisna Setiawan and Ricky Jap ³ mentioned an “extraordinary” teacher who “opened their eyes” to see “the real world of music” and “revealed to them large and original perspectives, like no other professor”⁴…

Hating one’s self and hating others – we didn’t wait for modern psychology to realize that an essential correlation existed between those two feelings, and this was perhaps made more evident in the Twentieth century, through the tumults of history and contemporary times. Needless to say that Slamet didn’t hate himself and he didn’t even regret the hardships that life inflicted, starting with his disability linked to polio which he had contracted when he was two years old. Throughout his life and despite many surgical operations, he suffered from pain in his valid leg, in his hips and in his back. I NEVER heard him complain or deplore his fate. As early as 1976, when he saw me struggle with heartbreak, he shared his secret to asceticism and the ways in which reality is revealed to those who exercise this discipline with care. It all had to do with one word, ACCEPTANCE.  

Thank you, Friend!

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¹ This text was first published in French in Le Banian, n°19, June 2015, Paris, France.

² See Le Banian n°15 (2013, Indonésie: Les sons d’un Archipel), Paris.

³ Another one of his students, the composer Jenny Rompas, recently released a piece called March 24 which was composed on the 24^th of March, 2010. She gave the piece this particular title although she usually never names her pieces in this way. The somber and mournful accents of this piece accompanied the funeral procession and Slamet’s burial, which took place on the same day as his death, on the 24^th of March, 2015. He would have probably appreciated such a union between art and life.

⁴See  Le Banian n° 17, (2014, Orang Peranakan, Les Chinois d’Indonésie), Paris.

        In opera, in cinema, in real life

As an art form, cinema is related to sound more than is generally perceived. Its speaking form emerged less than a century ago. Through talking cinema, the voice of each person and the voices of the many could be heard: their words, their cries, their sighs, their songs… cinema became vocal. In films, the specific personalities of the speakers were soon characterized by the registers and timbres of their voices, just like they were for opera singers. These voices could therefore signal a range of tensions and intentions that were either in conflict or in tune with each other. Film directors, just like opera composers, therefore became “voice directors” as much as stage directors; they became orchestrators composing with all of the sound registers of real life, just as much as they were “image directors” and storytellers.   And yet, while voice parts are always mentioned in opera, such is not the case in film. Beyond the fact that voices are present in cinema, each film has a cast of voices that is essential to the drama’s progress and our perception of it. Casting specific voices for roles is not tied to clichés (she is young and beautiful, therefore she must be a soprano…) but pertains instead to the dramaturgical functions embodied by the voices of the actors and of the singers. All of these voices provoke and answer each other, while also needing to complete and balance each other.

Listening to a film means focusing on what is heard: the noises and the music, the voices and the silences. It is a soundscape filled with information on the aims, the feelings and the inner lives of the characters. Listening to a film also means poring over each and every voice, some of which can become the echo chambers of profound resonances within ourselves. The voyage never ends. It is a journey towards the intimate and it can be supported, even intensified, by film music when the latter is not merely illustrative.

Fellini, Kubrick and Orson Welles were all great “voice directors” for their films. This is why I will mostly focus on Il Bidone (1955), Paths of Glory (1957) and Othello (1952) to analyze the connections between a film’s cast of voices and its dramaturgy. A few considerations on Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (1903) and more general considerations on the notion of an oeuvre will also be examined: how do we distinguish films or operas that manage to entertain us for a while from films or operas that mark our lives?

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In opera, the allocation of roles and dramaturgical functions based on a “standardized” vocal cast only emerged with Mozart and in the nineteenth century. Such casting withstood esthetic battles and became prevalent in all countries. The sopranos and tenors, the high pitched voices of both sexes, express ideals and passions: they tend to be lovers who are ready to sacrifice themselves, or intrepid explorers. The median voices, mezzo and baritone, are dedicated to reflecting, expressing doubt or providing council (be it loyal or perfidious): they are devoted confidants, faithful spouses; they can also be traitors – oftentimes the calculating rivals of the passionate tenors or of the upright sopranos. The low alto and bass voices are committed to expressing judgment; they have the attributes of wisdom: they are the fathers and the mothers, the judges, the friars, the kings, etc. They serve to calm the passions of some characters while unmasking the conspiracies and the failures of others. 

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Mozart said that, in opera, “poetry should be the obedient daughter of music”… Musical direction must preside over the way in which the acts, the situations and the lyrics are ordered. The composer and the spectators-listeners are – together and simultaneously – the operators and the center of such direction.

This is also true in cinema, wherein a piece of art cannot be reduced to the story it tells and to the situations that lead to its final denouement. In cinema, as in theatre or opera, simply arousing the spectator-auditor’s point of view and his moral or esthetic judgement is not enough to “become an oeuvre”. One must, more importantly awaken his dramaturgical consciousness, his awareness of the point of hearing he occupies, in order to make this point the center and the engine of his perception and understanding, not only of the events that are being told, but of the artwork seized in its entirety. In fact, in cinema, just like in opera, many works end with epilogues – the Don Giovanni sextet, the finale in Carmen, Madame Butterfly’s final orchestral cadence, the peasant woman’s song after Augusto’s death (Il Bidone), the song of the young German woman who is heard by Colonel Dax in the final scene of Paths of Glory, etc. These epilogues are the expression and the consequence of the awakening of the centered listening of spectators-listeners, by composers and directors whose centered listening is the intimate engine. When one thinks of the operas and films of the greatest of these artists, such moments of representation of real life have reached our heart of hearing by succeeding in forming a whole, becoming an oeuvre.

                                              

A reversed Witness ; Eclosions – The Flight of Spring ; Lessons in Love and Violence ; Inside your Bones.

A Reversed Witness

 I often attend contemporary music concerts with some second thought and, even, some fear. There is this concern that, for the umpteenth time, the mix of styles and genres I will have to listen to will not hold future promises nor open doors to the present because of a lack of awareness of appropriation or filiation. As you can tell, I felt slightly perplexed when I went to the Ars Nova concert presented by the group’s new conductor Jean-Michaël Lavoie at the new Canadian cultural center in Paris, in collaboration with the music department of the Université de Montréal. This was October 12, 2018, only a few days after their inaugural concert in Poitiers. I was, therefore, perplexed, but I was also, as one might later come to understand, ready to be surprised… 

Several spaces and works were offered to us by way of an itinerary. On the ground floor, Suspended time (2004) was a first piece by Jean-François Laporte “for a recorded tape and live analog feedback”. The composer activated the feedback directly on a strange electro-acoustic console adorned with a few springs (BOING BOING), the latter of which punctuated and accompanied a recording of trains and various noises in a train station in Montreal. I remember discovering Spirou comic albums as a child with the same curiosity… So: was this just another (electro)-acoustic piece, as anecdotal as many other works? An introductory text by the composer made me realize that the banality of the sounds implied a completely different positioning on the listener’s part: “It consists of an experience; of experiences that are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary… To abolish our control on the world in order to commune with it fully…”.

This experience is never lived in isolation, even if it is lived alone. It is utterly objectivating precisely because it is essentially intersubjective: if it can actualize in me, it means that it can also

virtually bloom in all of my neighbors, these alter-ego listener-witnesses of the same concert, these suspended train workers, operators without whom nothing extraordinary could occur, managers of a place that is neither in the trains nor in a station, neither in Montreal nor anywhere else but currently in me and maybe in others, and potentially in all of us. This might be said by the hypothetical and never-ending theology of the Verb-Sound that becomes flesh in each of us. It is indeed a strange genesis, a curious communial voyage in a world that is constantly new with instantaneous interconnections, a return with no initial departure, a return which is an ultimate REVERSAL: THIS IS – I AM.

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Eclosions – The Flight of Spring

Eclosions, in the plural form, stands for the flight of a generic spring season we wish to be eternal: the title was fitting for what the listener-spectator was about to experience in this new concert by Ars Nova at the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris, on the 22^nd of March, in 2019.

The common landscape of Western “formal” music, a vast and fertile cultural ground, led to a multiplicity of paths, some of which were extra-European: Debussy’s discovery of Javanese Gamelans in 1889, the vigorous bloom of jazz, the slow instillation of Far Eastern spirituality in the minds of Westerners. These paths developed thanks to many “laboratories” and other spontaneous cultural initiatives; they changed the relationship musicians held towards their music. This resulted in certain composers – as well as some instrumentalists, actors, and singers – no longer identifying with the divisions of roles that existed between creators and performers, written and improvised music, ancient and contemporary music, songs from elsewhere and voices from here… Even when their education had taught them about these divisions.

Tonight’s concert was at the crossroads of such sidesteps, such bridging passages and outward gazes.

Swarms of Sound

 Myriam Boucher is a creator of visual music. She is based in Montreal and has no borders; she works on the organic relationship between sound, music, image, and nature. Her sound video, Nuées, was projected on a screen at the back of the cultural center’s entrance hall. The flight of night birds and the flapping of wings were all supported by the recordings of a baritone saxophone player, Ida Toninato. The entrance hall implies that it is a space in which the audience interacts.  People engaged in conversations as they waited for the concert to begin and they did not necessarily pay much attention to the screen and to the music, despite the work’s prevailing and captivating low frequencies. A different kind of spatial arrangement would have been recommended for the artwork, such as the one used to exhibit the Nymphéas at the Orangerie museum. There could have been multiple screens, many loud speakers, and a silent audience in the center, attentively immersed in the artwork. 

LESSONS IN LOVE AND VIOLENCE 

GEORGE BENJAMIN

At various points in time, authorities viewed the opera as the ideal space for symbolic representations and manifestations, but also as a space to channel and control creative energies. The opera was, therefore, at the center of the esthetic, technological and political issues of its time. Cinema supplanted it in this role for almost a century and the digital world has now taken over. However, the opera stage seems to be finding its place again in the cultural sphere. The other arts are more broadly influenced by the opera than its limited number of performances may imply, as it is, after all, a social network. It is once more becoming a space used to communicate, one which many creators wish to invest and conquer. The abundance and diversity of works created in the last few years attest to this, whether in Europe, in North and South American countries, and even beyond the usual spheres of influence of Western culture.

George Benjamin was born in England in 1960. He was one of Olivier Messiaen’s last students in Paris. His opera music has been performed in some of the best worldwide venues. Lessons in love and violence was created in London in 2018. It was reprised in Lyon, where I saw it in May of 2019. It then travelled to several European capital cities and journeyed as far as Chicago. The composer’s notoriety contributed to this success, as did Written on Skin, his previous opera, which had made a lasting impression; it had been created in 2012 at the Aix en Provence festival and went on to being presented in twenty operas houses all over the world. The great dramaturgical creativity and coherence between the composer and the librettist, Martin Crimp, were further advanced by the director, Katie Mitchell. Such symbioses have not been that rare in the history of contemporary opera. A glacial and very European detachment could be found in the bond between Luc Bondy and Philippe Boesmans (Reigen 1993, Julie 2005). In a completely different style, a few seminal American collaborations should be remembered: Philip Glass and Robert Wilson (Eintein on the Beach, 1976), John Adams and Peter Sellars (Doctor Atomic, 2005, amongst others). The libretto for Lessons in love and violence is based on Edward II (1593), the play by Elizabethan author Christopher Marlowe.

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Inside Your Bones

Some moments are distinctive because of the way they summarize and announce what is to come. The evenings of the 6^th and 7^th of April, 2019, at the TAP in Poitiers, were a vibratory shock that seized the bones from head to toe – from the feet to the head in a first section, and then from a point above the skull cap, all the way down to a few centimeters below the feet. It didn’t only go through the skeleton, but rather coursed through an expanded body, through an envelope that extended beyond the limits of the muscles and of the skin by a few centimeters; it surrounded all asperities and articulations with generous curves:  it was a true diving suit, but without it being weighty or cumbersome; on the contrary, it was light and open. It was suggestive of a more ample breath, and spread the vibratory shock way beyond its sensitive limits.

A vibratory shock was definitely felt: its name is Inside Your Bones. Jean-François Laporte’s work lasted fifty five minutes. It was coproduced by Ars Nova, Totem Contemporain and the Poitiers Théâtre Auditorium. It was created in Montreal in February, 2019.

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It is a strange ceremony, a curious procession of physical sensations, all of which are not isolated but rather connected. As roving listeners, we establish a very particular relationship with each other as our sensations spill out so distinctly from our carnal and muscular envelopes. This internal movement, which we all share, stems from the most physical aspect of ourselves. And yet, it links us to a space that is vaster than the room’s immediate environment. Internal movement: this means that the line that crosses each listener from one end to the other triggers in each person an intense emotional response. The listener’s emotions and sensations act as springboards but not as causes; they act as revealers but not as targets. 

When we think music, we think movement and we think sound, but it is organized movement and mastered sound. We think energy and pulsation, but also form and continuity. We think expression, but also impression: it is a world in which the outside and the inside interpenetrate in curious ways, such as that which is made to move and that which makes something move, that which deploys and that which retreats. When we think music, we also think body and spirit, but the distinction is hard to maintain due to our thinking habits and how they taught us to see the body as the envelope, and the spirit as animating the body from within. But the rapport between the internal and the external seems, strangely, to flip when it comes to the way we see ourselves when we hear, or play, music. Inside Your Bones, the experience that is induced by the piece, allows us to move towards an awareness of this reversal, one which reestablishes the body and the spirit in a much more fruitful bond, a bond that is less abstract and “more embodied”. What we are speaking of here is a consciousness continuum in which matter and life, body and spirit, are steps. They are intensification thresholds rather than irreducible positions opposed by a difference in nature.   

A Living Music

Any musical piece worthy of its name is the product of the composer’s craftsmanship, personal history and intentions. That is, at least, what is stated. But this may not be as accurate now as it was ten years ago, since, nowadays, some musical works seem to be more direct emanations of a vast no-border ¹ psychical experiment in which the composer is the organ, the place. If these works manage to awaken in listeners a range of experiences of a similar nature and intensity, they can become the vectors of new and unpredictable explorations. They can be valuable: the listeners of these works can become the co-experimenters of a world in which the works open inside them vertically, breaking away from linear cause-and-effect relationships. This is to be experienced with the eyes of the brain closed, with the eyes of the body open ².

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^[1] No-border means that it integrates all phases of the mental life: a same consciousness populates sleeping and waking hours; dreams, hearings, visualizations and premonitions can become perception tools and cognitive agents. This is well reflected in the works and the lives of certain musicians. Phil Glass made references to this many times in his beautiful autobiography Words Without Music, 2015.

^[2] This last sentence is a quote by Mère, the partner of Sri Aurobindo. Her experiences and narratives were compiled and commented by Satprem in Le Mental des Cellules, Ed.Robert Laffont, 1981.

“Epic”: before qualifying a certain style of poetic or musical expression, the word first described past legends in which heroes proved their worth. The hero at the center of the Musical Mosaic you have just read is the generic human, it is you and me. Subjects in a world of objects, as some scientists would say; subjects in a world of subjects, according to certain philosophers, to the seers and artists who are constantly struck by a world, a History, lives that have meaning, individually and collectively. It is you, it is me. Tonal harmony invites us to become the heroes of an epic tale known as a “musical composition”.

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A musical composition is a sound sequence that can vary in length. But its most remarkable trait is how it forms a whole with a center that is both static – it is an immobile point – and dynamic, as it emits energy. This center is called the tonic.

A work of music is a complete entity created by the movement of our consciousness as it tends toward a final note that is announced. Its resonance supports the full development of the piece from the very first note, even before it has started resounding. Everything happens in the in-between of the beginning and the end of a tonal work, as in the first and the last words of the great founding epic stories of our collective imagination, from the Mahabharata to biblical verses, from the stories of Gilgamesh and Zarathustra to Greek mythology. Before they were read, these stories were told by voices through songs and rhythms in an effort to stimulate one’s understanding of the text, but also to encourage one to feel its finality: not only to convey the meaning of a tale for an entire audience, but for each listener to seize its fundamental tone. Epic sense and lyrical sense have always been connected.

“Epic sense” is the meaning of a subject who, beyond the succession of events in which he/she is engaged, discovers his/her self in the sum of the lived experiences, as the hero of a life for which he/she is the only one to have the key. Like all of his/her alter egos.

 Thanks to this discovery, he/she can allow his/her relation to time to evolve as exactly as it paves the way for feedback on his/her “reflex” projection towards an invariably fleeting future and a past that is constantly moving away: it leads him/her to historicize. This encounter is as decisive for musical creation and for the understanding of music as it is essential for “one’s understanding of self”.

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One of the most important contributions the West has made to the history of humanity, alongside Heliocentrism and the law of Gravity, is the placement of the tonic – center and driving force – at the beginning and at the end of the musical development. Tonality, a small and constantly evolving spiritual engine, has moved beyond Europe, the area of its emergence, and has become universal.

Therefore, Western music, especially since Monteverdi, has created its own history. To my knowledge, there have not been many other examples in the history of humanity wherein an aesthetic epic tale was nourished by its own movement to the point of creating its own archetypes. These archetypes are forms that have included the fundamental project so well that they have become stable referents, constantly evolving while also remaining immutable. I refer here to the forms generated by contrapuntal composition (such as fugues) as much as to the sonata form and the three or four movements present in nearly all of the works of its repertoire (symphonic, concertante, for solo instruments or for chamber ensembles…). The melodic, rhythmic and harmonic developments are dynamically articulated by these forms, thus connecting the aesthetic quality of the works with their ethical and metaphysical features.