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Situation of Collective Practice Aiming at Opening a Meaningful Debate:

A Workshop on Graphic Scores within the “Autre Musique” Seminar,
“Scores #3 « Providing-Prescribing”, 2018.
 
Jean-Charles François and Nicolas Sidoroff
2019-2025

 

Translation from French
by Jean-Charles François

 
 

Summary :

Introduction
Description of the Dispositif in Place at the Start of the Workshop
Conduct of the Workshop
Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
Phase 4
Phase 5
Conclusion
Bibiography
 
 

Introduction

This article gives an account of a workshop on “graphic scores”, which the two authors led in 2018. This account will be accompanied by critical commentaries. The intention here, through this workshop and this article, is to propose an alternative to the normative format of professional meetings in the world of academic research. The aim is to go beyond the simple juxtaposition (and often superimposition) of research presentations, in favor of a more direct exchange issued form collective practices enabling the opening to more substantial debates.
 
In the realm of artistic research, the professional meetings are today, for many reasons, completely formatted in formulas in ways that favor juxtaposed (or parallel) communication of research projects, at the expense of a real collective work resulting in debates on fundamental issues. The normative format that has slowly become instituted within the framework of these meetings (conferences, seminars) allows all the chosen persons to present their work on the basis of an equal speaking time. To achieve this, a 20-minute presentation time has been imposed in conferences, followed by a 10-minute period for questions form the public. When the number of participants exceeds the time capacity of the entire conference, parallel sessions are organized. This subdivision of time and space tends to favor autonomous groups with particular interests and therefore avoid any confrontation between forms of thought considered as belonging to categorizations that are foreign to each other. Or on the contrary, parallel sessions may involve the description of similar approaches that would have great interest in confronting each other.
 
The main reason for organizing international conferences in this kind of standard format relates to the usual process for evaluating university research in Anglo-Saxon universities and applied all over the world: “publish or perish”. Participation to prestigious conferences is recognized as a proof of the value of a research project, it gives access, in the best cases, to publications in various journals. Consequently, the personal participation to a conference is conditional on a formal presentation of one’s own research. The currency of exchange has become the line in the academic curriculum vitae.
 
The time devoted at the end of each presentation to give a voice to the people present in the room, tends to be limited to questions rather than the formulation of a debate, not only because of the lack of time, but also because of the idea that research should be evaluated in terms of proven results. If what is presented is true, it should not be the object of a discussion. The object of discussion might concern the proof itself in the context of power struggles, or throwing some light on what remains unclear, but it doesn’t concern the construction of a debate between the specificity of a research project and its inscription in the complexity of the world. The presentation of problematic issues concerning the subject at hand in a conference is left to prestigious personalities invited, delivered from the height of their long experience, in the initial phase of the “keynote address”. In fact, debates take place during the numerous breaks, meals, at coffee machines, and other non-formal activities, most often in very small groups with common affinities. The elements of debate do not emerge under these conditions as democratic expression that would go deeper than just the informative equal-time round-table.
 
The format of academic conferences that was just described can be viewed as a practice juxtaposing all kinds of highly relevant information and ensuring interactions between invited people. The research presentations themselves describe pertinent practical and theoretical aspects and at the same time open the way to effective encounters. However, in these times of difficulties concerning transportation due to the climatic crisis and pandemics, you might wonder whether these kinds of information exchange might not be limited to videoconferences. If face-to-face encounters become more and more difficult to organize, then the rare opportunities to meet effectively should open the way to other types of activity, meaning that the focus should be placed on sharing problems that we have to face, in forms of practices that are much more collective and unique compared to the day-to-day routines of each research entity.
 
At first sight, the idea of a workshop seems appropriate to this program, as it’s linked to the necessity for the members taking part to be effectively present in order to create, through a specific collective practice, something that makes sense and from which theoretical elements can be manipulated. But the usual workshop formulas (as well as that of “masterclasses”) is in principle focused on a practice that is unknown to the participants and which is instilled by those responsible of its animation. Alternatively, you can envision workshop formats in which the agency is only there to allow the emergence of a common practice, and at the same time the emergence of debates around this practice. In this kind of set-up, there is a initial proposition with clear instructions enabling to collectively enter into a practice, then to let happen an alternance between: doing-discussing-inventing new rules, and so on. It’s precisely what we attempted to achieve during the example presented in this article.
 
The workshop in question took place on March 14, 2018, during the 3rd study day, “seminar-workshop” organized by Frédéric Mathevet and Gérard Pelé, within the sound art and experimental music research group L’Autre musique (Institute ACTE–UMR 8218–Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University–CNRS–Ministry of Culture), under the title of Partition #3 “Donner-ordonner” (Score #3 “Providing-Prescribing” or “Giving-Ordering”). Three study days were organized in the Paris area, during the year 2017-18 with the following intention:

These sessions question the relevance of the notion of “score” in relation to new sound and musical practices and, more broadly, by opening up to all forms of contemporary creation.

Lautremusique.net – Laboratoire lignes de recherche. Partition #3.

The study days resulted in a publication: L’Autre Musique Revue #5 (2020).
 
It’s in this context that we ran a two-hour workshop, with about twenty participants working in the domains of dance, music and artistic research.
 

Description of the Dispositif in Place at the Start of the Workshop

The starting situation of the workshop necessitated a particular approach, in order to arrive as quickly as possible at a) a collective practice, b) one that could be continued on the basis of effective participation of the people present, and c) one that could result in debates, bringing out affinities, differences and antagonisms. To achieve these objectives, the initial situation had to meet several requirements:

  1. To be able to describe orally the situation in a few words that would be immediately understood by all.
  2. The situation should define a practice that everyone can do immediately, with no special skills required.
  3. To develop a practice that would be at the center of the seminar’s subject matter – in this case the practice of graphic scores, from the point of view of both their elaboration and their interpretation.
  4. To develop a practice open to questions and problematics, and not as something imposed from the outset as a definitive solution.

Here is the description of the initial situation:

In a single simultaneous movement, to individually produce an action with three coherent elements:

  • A drawing with a pencil on a sheet of paper.
  • A gesture that includes the graphic production; a gesture that can start outside the drawing, include the drawing, then continue after the drawing.
  • A sound sequence produced by the voice or the mouth (the vocal tract).

The action should not exceed three five seconds. The action must be repeatable in exactly in the same configurations.
 
This action, which combines visual art, music and dance, should be individually thought in a coherent manner as a “signature”. In a way, it defines the singular personality of the person who produces it, it should enable any outsiders to identify an individual.
 
Each member present reflects for a short time to prepare his or her “signature”. The protagonists are in a circle around a very large table. As soon as everybody is ready, each signature is presented one after another several times. Then an improvisation takes place, with the rule of only being able to reproduce your own signature at a chosen time (and any number of times). The idea of improvisation here is limited the placement of one’s own signature in time. After a while, it’s possible, to begin introducing variations on one’s own signature.

 

Conduct of the Workshop

The workshop takes place in a seminar room with a large table at its center, with chairs to sit around it, with not much space to circulate or make large body movements.
 
The workshop starts with an introduction to the PaaLabRes collective, to which the two co-authors are members, and to the general objective of the workshop, which is not, as in a usual workshop, to present an original practice, but is completely turned towards the possibility of a debate on graphic scores emerging from the setting-up of a collective practice. The idea is to be first in a practical situation, and then to discuss it.
 
The following description is based on the audio recording of the workshop. A few moments are described without the presence of the verbatim. The spoken words have been transcribed as such, and slightly modified when oral expression is not clear or sometimes partly inaudible.[1]

 

Phase 1

0′:
The initial situation of the “signatures” is orally explained. Among those present, there is some difficulty in understanding that the aim is to realize only a single action with three simultaneous tasks and not three elements separately produced.

P:
“Is this something that’s addressed to others?”
The answer is yes, the signature must also be able to be transmitted.

P:
“Will others be able to reproduce it?”
For the time being it’s not the case, but eventually it should be possible to do it.

Time is given to allow participants to experiment with their signatures. This initial phase lasted 15 minutes (including the general presentation of the workshop).

 

Phase 2

15′:
The signatures are compared. Each signature is produced twice in a row, and two table rounds took place.

21′:
An improvisation is taking place. The participants are only allowed to produce exactly their own signature. Not anyone else’s. The improvisation is only about placing signatures in time. Participants have to try to place their signature at moments when it can be heard and when it can contribute in some way to what’s happening.

P:
“Can we repeat the signature in a continuous way?”
The answer is yes, but it’s also possible to produce only one fragment of it.

P:
“Does it mean that we are only allowed to do it once?”
No, you can do it as many times as you wish. Each time the signature must be recognizable.

P:
“Do we have to continue doing the gestures?”
Yes, and also the drawing on paper.

P:
“Should we keep the same rhythm, the same tempo?”
Yes, in this first improvisation, after that we’ll see.

23′:
Improvisation 1. Duration: 2’ 41”.

 

 

 

26′ 30”:
Second improvisation proposed by the workshop leaders: now you can make some variations around your own signature, either by changing elements (faster, slower, louder, softer, etc.), or by enriching, ornamenting with other elements.

27′ 30”:
Improvisation 2. Duration: 2’ 25”.

 

 

The various drawings produced during the first two improvisations are shown to everyone. It can be observed that these are indeed graphic scores.
 
A first discussion is proposed.

Pz:
“We can continue to experiment. By exchanging our drawings.”

P:
“By making the sounds of others?”

Pz:
« “We keep one part of our signature, but we play someone else’s score. (…) You have to take at least one part of your signature…”

P:
“You mean with the sound?”

Pz:
“From the other’s signature, you can reinterpret your own signature.”

P:
“You take you own sound, not the sound of the other?”

Pz:
“In fact, you use this score to play your own signature. [Brouhaha] You can change your movement. We’ll draw on top of it.”

P:
I do not draw on her score, I take another piece of paper, because you have to redraw.”

Here are examples of signatures:[2]

Signature 1
Signature 1
 

 

Signature 2
Signature 2

Signature 3
Signature 3
 

 

Signature 4
Signature 4

Commentary 1[3]
After the two improvisations with rules determined by the workshop leaders, the only tangible element that you have at disposition are the drawings on paper. The sounds have gone up in smoke and the gestures can be partly identified in the drawings they produced but are also vague elements that linger in memory. In these conditions, the object-paper immediately assumes the form of score, as privileged site of what survive in a stable manner over time. The written score on paper is the locus that determine, in the modernist conception, the presence of an author. Can one find the same attitude in relation to sounds and gestures? It’s not at all certain. At the onset of exchanges of feelings, after the improvisations, one can see that there exists in the workshop a sense of respect for other’s properties: you should not draw on top of the score of another person. The score is sacred, therefore you are not permitted to rewrite over it. The sounds and gestures are not in this cultural circle put on the same degree of intellectual property than what constitutes the immutability of what is written on a score.
 
In improvisation, There doesn’t to be any prohibition on reproducing exactly what another person is creating, even if it’s impossible to do so with absolute precision . Of course, there is an affirmation of a personal identity in the exchanges during an improvisation, but not to the point of refusing the influences exerted by other participants. You are not in a situation where the exact reproduction of a sound object or a gesture leads to the cultural death of the model. This recalls an anecdote of a trombonist having the project to learn the didjeridoo in an isolated Aboriginal community during the 1970s. The ethnologists told him never to reproduce what he heard of the didjeridoo players’ productions, as it was the equivalent of stealing their soul and taking away their reason for living. In our own practices, we are a long way from that idea.
 
The notion of the graphic score’s autonomy in relation to any kind of interpretation, linked to the separation between composer and performer, resulted in assuming historically a dual function: a) the graphic score can be considered as an object susceptible to result in a musical performance (or other); or b) it can be exposed in a museum or art gallery as an object belonging to the visual arts. Of course, it could also be both at the same time.

Pz:
“In fact, it’s as if you had a way of interpretating it with your own vocabulary, you perform with your own vocabulary. You just have one syllable, a sound or a gesture, but here you have a graphic score, and it will bring you somewhere else, because it’s not the same [as actual sound or gesture].”

Each piece of paper with a drawing, now becoming a score, is given to the next person on the right.

37′:
Improvisation 3 based on Pz ‘s proposal. Duration 3’.

 

Phase 3

40′:
On the previous discussion preceding Improvisation 3, a participant had proposed another situation:

Pa:
“Replay the improvisation [just performed] and you have to make the score of the totality [of what you hear]. This is to test the reversibility [hearing to drawing, drawing to hearing]. The [recording of Improvisation 2] will be replayed, and you’ll have to make a score according to what you hear. To replay what we just performed and to draw according to what we hear.”

[Through this process, you can test the reversibility of the signatures: can you identify gestures and drawings in relation to what we hear?]

Pa:
“Draw the score corresponding to the sounds you hear. Inevitably all the sounds at the same time.”

P:
“We draw what we hear, in fact?”

P:
“We draw what we want.”

Pa:
“What you hear.”

P:
We are not obliged to use the codes of what we did?”

Pa:
“No. It’s one of the first course that I’ve given here in 1979, it was called “sensorial approach”, you had to put your hand in a bag, and you had to draw tactilely…”

46’50”:
The recording of Improvisation is replayed and at the same time new graphic productions are made in relation to what is heard.

48’50”:
The new drawings circulate to be seen by everybody. Looking at the graphics gives way to numerous commentaries.

P:
“Can we keep some of them?”

P:
“Who did this one? The star! Oh-la-la!”

Pa:
“The proof is there, I think…”

P:
“The language…”

P:
“Clearly…”

P:
“Why should things be this way…?”

P:
“Are they not?”

The process of reading the scores continues with various comments.

P:
“Here we can really see a beginning and an ending.”

The question of representation of temporal unfolding is raised versus a global representation without beginning and end.

Pn:
« “I didn’t think in terms of timelines,[4] in fact. And it even struck me to see things that had a beginning and an ending… Ah! they do exist!”

JCF:
“It’s the deformation of musicians!”

Pn:
“So, rightly, it was for me a question, because paper was naturally seen as a barrier… So, a spatialized writing… But OK, I had started out on something…”

P:
“You were stuck, why?”

Pn:
“The timeline. In fact, these are processes that maybe could be isolated. To be able to circulate from one to the other, to be able to go backwards.”

Pa:
“There are not many representations that are free of this timeline.”

P:
“Sound is time, after all.”

Pa:
« “Nevertheless, you can find some examples. I’m thinking of the work by T., in which there’s no timeline.”

JCF:
“But that’s not the case with the first improvisation. Experiencing time is completely different. When you improvise and make some gesture, it’s like playing an instrument, there’s no timeline. In fact, the time is now. Therefore, it’s in the reversibility that you find a very different situation.”

 

Commentary 2
 
Two questions emerged:
      a) You can keep a score, it’s a tangible object of memory.
      b) The choice between a representation based on a timeline or a global representation outside time.
 
On the one hand, graphic representations tend to be considered as objects with a definitive character, which can be preserved if they are judged worthy of preservation. Graphic productions tend to be seen as fixed representations of sounds that are realized over time. The dominant model is that of musical scores, which in Western perspectives constitute the privileged object for identifying a work. And with a time representation that goes from left to right, as in written texts. Under these conditions, any drawing, any image can be considered as a graphic score, on condition that the codes and modes of reading are precisely defined.
 
On the other hand, an issue arises of a representation based on time unfolding, versus a global representation of all the various elements in play, without beginning or end. There is a recognition that musicians in particular are formatted by the linear representation of sounds in time. There is the constat that the great majority of graphic scores is based on a timeline representation. There are few exceptions that show global forms of representation (as with topographies or cosmologies presenting simultaneously a diversity of elements).
 
The issue is whether the conception of time represented on a score remains the same in the case of improvised music, sometimes thought as a present that is eternally renewed with no concerns for what just happened and for what’s about to emerge. The question of the reversibility of things depends directly on the presence of a linear visual organization. If only the present moment counts, nothing can be reversed or inverted.

 

P:
“Is it possible to try – because my brain is formatted – is it possible to do it again, for those who thought in time to be out of time, and for those who thought out of time to be in time? Because I am really formatted, then it interests me to do it without a linear thinking.”

P:
“Yes, the same.” [Everyone speaks at the same time]

JCF:
“The possibility for those who wish to do it with the eyes closed.”

P:
“With the left hand.”

58′:
The recording of Improvisation 3 is replayed to repeat the same exercise with the new rules.

1h. 00′:
The new drawings just produced are passed around again.

1h. 03′:
Discussion opens.

P:
“When I was linear, it really stressed me out. I felt tense, stuck in the line, whereas the first time it was much easier.”

P:
“It wasn’t tense for me, but I found that it produced something different. [The first time corresponded] to how I felt, but it was completely unreadable. Linear representation, it corresponds to something, it’s easier to transmit.”

P:
“So, I said to myself that when it’s not linear, I’m going to listen globally, and I realized that I couldn’t listen globally. As soon as I heard something, I wanted to draw it and I couldn’t be in the totality of the thing, I was drawn in by the details, somewhere there was still some linearity, it’s thus stayed linear.”

P :
“I think that when it’s not linear, you are more inclined to accept easily the fact that in any case your interpretation will be partial and subjective, you mix elements, it’s more pleasant, you let yourself to be taken along.”

P:
“So, I worked in this way, in high-low, and that opened up the space inside. It was really very pleasant to listen and to draw according to pitch.”

JCF:
“I found that you could really be focused on the gesture of what you heard, rather than identifying the sounds. In any case, what strikes me in particular is that in the initial signature, there is really a coherence between the visual, the gesture and the sound, that you find in part in the temporal presentation, but only in part, but that you no longer find at all in the nonlinear representation… You lose the identification of the signatures.”

Pa:
“For example the duration of the sequence: what we’ve just done, what we’ve just heard, we write (describe?) how much time it lasts.”
 
[Everyone speaks at the same time]

How do we perceive the duration of the recording that has just been played?

P:
“Does it have to be really precise?”
 
[Brouhaha]

P:
“You’ll be able to verify. We don’t care about checking the time, the question is to know who’s the most accurate. You have to write it down, otherwise we’ll be influencing each other.”

P:
“Let’s write it down.”

On a piece of paper, all participants write the estimate duration of the recording of Improvisation 3. Results: 3’, 3’30”, 1’30” [laughs], 2’41”, 2’27”, 4’, 1’40”,2’… The answer was: 2’.

NS:
“The problem is that we all pretty much agree to think that it starts on the first sound and ends with [he produces a vocal sound]. Except that, in fact, when you said: “What do you hear?”, I’d already started [before listening to the recording of Improvisation 3] . A situation of variation… Then, when do you decide that it starts and when you decide that it ends? You can read a sheet linearly like that as well as like that [paper noises as he rotates the sheets in all possible ways]. Then, after that, you find this one in the street, it’s not at all obvious that it should be read this way or that way. Then, where do you start reading? It’s not at all obvious. In a concert, it’s fairly clear, the light goes down, there’s the thing, here, yes there it is, ah that’s it, it’s starting. And on stage, people relax, ah, it’s finished. There is a real thing about the implicit of the end.

 

Phase 4

1h. 12′:
One participant proposed making sounds based on the score (signature) of another person.
 
The proposition is adopted with the following precisions: groups of three are formed to realize in common a single score.

1h. 17′:
Performance of group 1. Duration: 30”.

 

 

NS:
“What are the instructions that you gave to yourselves, how did you work at it?”

P(g1):
“We divided the score in four parts. Here you can see that we divided this part [he shows]. 30” there… We agreed on the attacks…”

P(g1):
“Attacks and birds.”

1h. 19′:
Group 2 performance. Duration: 40”. One of the participants recites a text, the other ones produce various noises.

 

 

P(g2):
“At first, it’s crap, because we are three and there are approximately four lines. We decided that the fourth line would be a sort of reservoir… (…)”

P(g2):
[In English:] “Sometimes I used the score, sometimes I improvised…”

P(g2):
“So, each of us had a line and a playing mode, and then from time to time we’d pick up on the fourth line, therefore we were improvising…”

P:
“Oh! yeah, organized!”

P:
“You agreed to improvise!”

P:
“I only do that. To each her or his own way!” [Laughs]

 

Commentary 3
 
Apart from the ironic tone, which suggests that you should not take spoken words too seriously, we can see that there are difficulties in considering the possibility of middle paths between composition, meaning here that things are fixed prior to the performance, and improvisation, which must remain free of any preparation. This conception may be due to the tendency to consider on-stage the performance as absolute, erasing all the various mediations necessary for it to materialize. Whether the performance be a composition or an improvisation makes no difference, the underhand “tricks” must remain in the backstage, otherwise the mystery of the production presented on stage could suffer. Improvisation in particular, because it implies an absence of preparation of precise events, is often considered not to have resulted from previous events, such as education of the artists, their technical exercising, the elaboration of their own sound or dance style and repertoire of possibilities, their career path, the interactions they may have had in the past with their colleagues, or even the organization of rehearsals.

 

1h. 21′:
Group 3 performance. Duration: 1’ 04“.

 

 

P(g3a):
“We didn’t use any translation. We took the thing as it was.”

JCF:
“Without discussions?”

P(g3a):
“We simplified things, we just said: we have three categories of registers, three types, and then we just read directly.”

1h. 24′:
Group 4 performance. Duration: 1’10”.

 

 

P(g4):
“Well, our procedure was just to say that we’ll all start there.” [Laughs]

P(g4):
“I said to myself that it looks like spoken words. In fact, it really was like the writing of a language.”

P(g4):
“Yes, we thought that was the way to do this.”

P(g4):
“I thought of a radio show on Radio Campus Paris…”

P(g4):
“Still, I found this very pleasant to do. I wanted to continue.”

P:
“But you took a score that wasn’t yours.”

P(g4):
“We did it on purpose. We chose not to take our own score despite the instruction.”

P(g4):
“I didn’t see that. I thought it was better for all three of us to be neutral.”

Px:
[Participant outside group 4, the one whose score was used]: “It disturbed me a little, because I had a very precise idea…”

P(g4):
“Therefore it was your score”.

Px:
“Yeah, I didn’t think that you could do things so well. It’s terrible. Because of you I’ll presenting my projects all over the place, and making monumental flops…”

P(g4):
“It’s not just the score, there are also the performers!”

 

Commentary 4
 
Here, you are right at the core of the difficulties surrounding graphic scores. Is their principal link in terms of creativity relevant to composition on written scores or to the interpretation of graphisms? Are they really the occasion of negotiation between graphists and interpreters on reading codes or on the limits of their respective roles? If the ball is completely in the camp of the interpretation of scores, left to the world of the instrumentalists, vocalists, sound artists, and dancers (etc.), then any result is acceptable, including any aberrant reading of graphics (for example play “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way…”). Graphics don’t count, if you cannot link eventual interpretations to visual signs. In this context, Nelson Goodman (1968, p.188) analyzed a graphic score by John Cage (as part of the Concert for piano and orchestra, 1957-59)) as in no way constituting a notational system, which according to him, should guarantees the ability to recognize a musical work each time it’s being played in relation to the signs present in the original score.
 
Historically, the composers who were pioneers of graphic scores (notably Earl Brown and Morton Feldman) were not satisfied with the sound results, when their compositions lacked any particular codes that would have obliged the performers to respect them. This happened at the very moment when the performers were not yet able to really understand what was at stake, to really perceive what was expected of them. Later, Cornelius Cardew, while he was himself a performer of his own music and collaborating with many performing musicians, developed a graphic score, Treatise (1963-67) resembling an anthology of graphic signs, an utopian version of a complete freedom left to performers (see paalabres.org, second edition, Treatise region). According to John Tilbury, who was one of the important performers of Treatise, the instrumentalist is faced with a double bind between respecting the codification of signs and improvising by ignoring the written signs. The performer, faced with an absence of codes given by the composer, is in a situation on the one hand of impossibility of being pedantic by assigning for each sound on the score a singular sound (this for 193 pages!) and on the other hand of a moral impossibility to ignore totally the content of the score. Such was the situation of Eddie Prevost who, being completely immersed in the sounds of the music that was unfolding, started to improvise taking less and less account of the visual aspects contain in the score (Tilbury 2008; p. 247).

 

1h. 27′:
Group 5 performance (by the two workshop leaders). Duration: 1’23”

JCF:
“The idea was to go across the score, to have only whispering, to go across and have a silence before and after.”

NS:
“In fact, we decided to do that, but we’d completely forgotten that here was written a 4’ 15”. So, we had to do that. And after that, I said to myself: well, no… it doesn’t work, then why not make a gesture.”

P:
“But the story of the silence is that you perhaps didn’t read correctly, it was in 4/4 beats.”

 

Commentary 5
 
Thanks to this narration, the question of the ownership of what has just been performed is raised. You can detail the “dissemination of author’s right” (Citton, 2014) associated with the latest performances.
 
Let’s go through the workshop performance’s narrations in reverse order. If you tried to tell things chronologically, how would you determine the beginning? And why at this moment, and not a little earlier?
 
Here is the account going back in time:
      • [Phase 4:] 3 (or 2) people collectively invented to play starting with…
      • [Phase 3:] … signs on paper written by a different person, starting from…
      • [Phase 2:] … a recording produced by the entire group, starting from…
      • … a proposition from one person to experiment a second time, after…
      • … discussions and sharing of everyone’s realizations …
      • … of a first proposal from another person to represent on paper what
        the group just performed, starting from…
      • [Phase 1:] … an initial protocol of two people, the workshop leaders, starting from…
      • … trial-and-error (with plural multiples) in different situations of this same
        idea of protocol…
 
If you try to list all the instances in which we’ve used this protocol of signatures, it exceeds a dozen situations, and by far the fifty or so people involved in various ways in such experiments. All the proposals expressed have influenced us in determining the content of the workshop of this day of March 2018. It even happened that one of us two was not present to the experiments that took place, but had only a report on them: that’s another form of influence…
 
This already long journey insists on actions that can be categorized as artistic. But you should also consider, for example: the size and form of the room (organization, architecture), the way the furniture is laid out (according to what occurred beforehand and what will happen after in this room), the circumstances of the lunch break, the style of paper and pens, felt pens, pencils available, the life fragments that each person brings into the room, etc.
 
After this little narrative-panorama leading to these performances, how to answer the question: to whom do they belong? If you consider this question as interesting, it is certainly extremely complex. But you can also consider this narrative-panorama (and so many others) as blowing up the notion of property rights. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)[5] long ago showed already in detail “How property is impossible” (in 10 propositions, his chapter IV, 2009).

 

Phase 5

1h. 30′:
Discussion opens.

NS:
“In the questions raised at the beginning, I noted the issue of notation, we haven’t stopped to take notes, we’ve got lots of well-filled papers. I raided my aunt with her old sheets of paper from the 1980’s. I said to myself: I’m going to take that and see what to do with it, but in the end, they all have been used! So, we have shuffled a lot of ideas, in fact it was notation in relation to creation, to interpretation, and so on. Maybe we can go back over what each of us experienced this moment on these things, and then there’s the idea of notation in the “Providing, Prescribing” context, which was the theme of this seminar day. Then, how do you understand the idea of “Providing, Prescribing” in relation to what we did, what each of you have experienced what we have done. Perhaps, we could go round the table, without any obligation to speak. We can dialogue together.

P:
“I’m completely convinced by what we’ve done. My impression is that I don’t have enough hindsight to be able to put the right words on what happened. In fact, many very different things happened. In any case, it was a great moment in terms of time and exchanges. For what is “prescribed”, we all had to sort out what we had, or at least to be obliged to make some choices. We all had to go through the graphics, especially during the last part. In any case, in terms of form, presentation and method, I find it quite convincing. Or it would need perhaps more time for being able to clarify all what just happened.”

P:
“I pass!”

P:
“It’s really cool. The question I have is: how could you go from this kind of experimentation to a creation in the sense of a spectacle, of a public performance? It’s extremely interesting to do, to practice, and I suppose that it gives a lot of matter to experiment with… so that each person can propose things. Then, around this table, there is a number of us who are already used to graphic scores and to their interpretation. I’m wondering how you go from there to turn it into an artwork. And also, about what Frédéric [Mathevet] said about what was good about graphic scores, that it could enable us to take a step on the side when improvising and to invent new things. In fact, I wonder if it really allows to invent new things. Here, in spite of everything, whatever happens, you always end up in the same kind of things…”

 

Commentary 6
 
Once again, you must face the ambiguity of meaning in the context of the use of graphic scores, between the presence of a score, which in the Western modernist perspectives constitutes an “artwork”, and the multitude of possible interpretations, which underlines their opening up to experimentation and improvisation. For the participant who has just spoken, experimentation should lead to a definitive artwork before it can be presented on stage. But at the same time, for him, the experimentation in itself seems an attractive activity.
 
The first question that arises in this context is about the “new”: the value of an artwork is not in the repetition of what already exists, in the plagiarism of scores already written, but in bringing in new elements. In the case of experimentation and improvisation, the concept of the new might be more modest: you are in the presence of micro-variations around already existing elements that are inscribed in a context of immediate collective production. This context is susceptible to generating moments that are not so much conductive to the creation of new perspectives as the creation of constantly renewed situations. So what are the values specifically linked to graphic scores interpretation? Do they not open up a space of freedom, away from the qualitative evaluation considerations of recognized historical artworks and the requirements in play at the level of their performance? In what way are the performances realized during the workshop less valuable than a lot of performances on stage?
 
The second question concerns the hegemony of the public stage, what we call here “live spectacle”, a highly marked inheritance from what has been developed since the 19th Century. Not only does the existence of a score only make sense if it’s performed on stage, before a public that has access to its publication, but in the case of improvisation, the only intangible element is the performance “on stage”, in presence and in the present, as the only space in which improvising makes sense. But in the case of improvisation, there’s some worry concerning the feeling that the audience isn’t included in the process, that situations should be developed where everyone present is being part of the collective production. Then, the pleasure of experimentation as such can be viewed as an alternative to the stage and to the elaboration of an “artwork”, on condition to find ways to include the public as an active member in the process, and to break out of the logics that separate professionals from amateurs.

 

Jean-Charles François explains the context in which the initial situation was elaborated:

  
“Simply, one of the contexts in which we did this, was on the occasion of an encounter between musicians and dancers (2015)17 at the Ramdam near Lyon). The idea of this encounter was to develop common materials between music and dance. Hence that idea of gestures and sounds linked together. Then, one day, a visual artist joined the group. The question was: what could we do to bring him into the game? And so, we developed this situation. In fact, the project was really focused on improvisation, that is developing situations in which common materials could be elaborated to be eventually used in improvisation, over the long term. So, it was done in that context, rather than with the idea of creating a graphic work, to make a piece around graphic situation.”

One participant asks for clarification on the situations developed in this context:

JCF:
“We created a lot of protocols for entering into an improvisation in which dancers and musicians had to do something in common. Then, based on the elaborated materials, we asked them to develop freely in improvisation. We did this over 5 weekends and a certain number of situations were created. The idea of signatures was the first one we used, because it’s a good way to get acquainted with each other, to get to know the people present.”

P:
“Did it produce a lot of variety? Very different things? To what extent? Gestures, sounds?”

NS:
“Today, in the situation of gestures-graphics-sounds signatures, gesture hasn’t been developed much. But at the Ramdam, the dancers helped us to do all these things. Even starting with a table, by the end everybody was playing on the chairs around the table, we were moving around. And what’s interesting, is that they helped us to do things with sounds too, in the sense that danced intelligence, in fact, is already multiple. I tried to do it, but I was limited, attempting to swing, making big gestures, all the while trying to relax a little. And also the question of the specialization between dance and music: when you work on this, precisely with these dancers, the distinction between dancers and musicians is something that doesn’t hold very long, even if there is a path towards music and a path towards dance. Actually, in real life, it doesn’t hold for that long, and all the protocols we did amount to questioning these things on a regular basis.”
P:
And compared to what I said this morning [she had given a paper presentation as part of the seminar], for me, it’s gesture, with the sound you’re talking about. Even Laban really works with sound. When I am speaking, I can notate it in terms of effort, of its pushing: ‘p… p…’; throwing, spitting, hitting, all these are vocal gestures in fact. Then, the story of the pens (and so on), it’s gesture with, even if it’s producing some sound, you can see that there’s a kind of congruence between gestures and sounds. And it’s true that I have the tendency to speak only about gestures. At the same time, it’s great to bring out the sound from the gesture. Here, I loved your last gesture, because it has a sound, a real sound. With the recording, we didn’t see it, but we heard it, in fact it’s a real sound. I think it’s good to talk at the same time of sound and gesture, also because somehow you dissect to produce two materials, which… In the end it’s not indigestible.”

P:
“So, there’s also at stake something of the order of performance. For me performance is something physical, which isn’t played like an actor plays, but which is simply a matter of putting the body into play, and this is a common state that can be found in all kinds of performance. You can have in the sound here, on the effort, you can have a gesture, that on stories, on the abilities of what you can do on a sort of production, such as a movement of the mouth, of the tongue, you produce sound…”

P:
“It makes me think of the difficulties, when working on sound with choreographs, visual artists, people who aren’t musicians, of how to communicate with others. It makes me think of working with a choreograph who said: ‘I want a fresh sound’. In fact, what he meant by fresh sound is not at all what the other is doing. So, by using either the gesture or the sound, you end up with very different images of what a sound is, what a gesture is, and then, all that allows to communicate between artists that are different. You understand things in completely different ways.”

P:
“I went through something similar with some architects, they were talking about a Riclès [a peppermint spirit] image: Riclès, it’s fresh!”

P:
“Chewing gum! What was really interesting for me was something I’d already practiced: to notate, then translate it again, take it again, replay it, all that… But with dance you have many scores like that, where frankly the choreographer comes up with his or her own scores. And then you look at them, and you don’t understand anything. It’s the same today, you don’t understand anything, no matter what it remains abstruse. But for me there, I thought it was a good thing to be able to appropriate a text… Because with the scores of the choreographers, you don’t dare to do it, I don’t dare. Yes, all of us work with scores, but to do anything you want with scores is very interesting. In this case, it interested me to think: ‘yes, of course, it’s unreadable, I don’t know what it is, but I’m doing it’.”

 

Commentary 7
 
Here, you have an important element linked to graphic scores: they allow to “do” something, to access a “getting into action”. People in the habit to working from written, visual elements, are often at a loss when it comes to improvising, which means doing without what constitutes the basis on which they function. The score is merely the pretext (text before “the text”) for doing something, putting the emphasis on the “doing something”. The score is the means to get into action, in overcoming the fear resulting from its absence. Once this fear mastered, once the action effective, the graphic score can be thrown away or ignored (see the Group 2 above), as it somehow lost its importance in relation to the action it prompted. Whether the score is “unreadable” is of no importance with regards to the realization of a “doing” that fully assumes all the meaning.
 
On this issue, it should be noted that graphic scores very often take on their full meaning when it comes to learning improvisation practice. As a pedagogical tool, they provide a convenient transition between the habits of sight-reading scores and doing without any written support in improvisation. As in the case of “sound painting” or gestural conducting of improvisation, this type of teaching practice tends not to liberate those who get into improvisation from the hegemony of the visual over the sonic. The principal difficulty lies not in the pathway from traditionally notated score to graphic score, but with what will take place afterwards, if the aim is to access a situation of oral/aural communication that places the essential emphasis on listening and making sounds (and/or gestures) in improvisation. This applies to the musical realm and might be very different in the dance domain.

P:
“You can allow yourself to interpret without the pressure of the author, to be detached from the issue of the author. Therefore, this could even be done with choreographers. Certainly, we don’t allow ourselves to do that, but it’s something that you should be able to seize, and also in a certain way, if it’s drawn in this way, it should allow you to seize it afterwards. It all depends on the approach taken. If this is transmitted, somehow, you’ll be able to seize it.”

P:
“I don’t know, it’s also designed to create art works.”

 

Commentary 8
 
Once again comes back the necessity to create an “artwork”, in order to be able to present something professionally acceptable to an audience. To achieve this, you need to create situations that guarantee the development of practices that are inaccessible to amateurs. Experimentation in collective workshops can be strongly encouraged provided that at a given moment a creative demiurge (term that can be declined in the feminine) will seriously take over by selecting the most interesting moments of the experimentation to produce an artistic object. Those who took part in the experimentation process now play the role of little obedient soldiers.
 
In the professional world, there’s a lingering tendency to sacralize the one who assumes full artistic responsibility for a collective performance. In the context of this present workshop, it is said concerning this issue, how “allowing yourself to interpret without the pressure of the author” is a delicious transgression, but that cannot be done in the framework of a professional work resulting in a presentation on stage. However, the impression of being completely integrated into the creation process persists, and that’s what can be written in the performance program notice.
 
These rather ironic comments having been written, then, you can also take seriously the following proposal: can a given practice reach the status of an achieved work of art while respecting the rules of equality and of democracy within a collective, in a co-construction of the final result? Can an experimental process be developed over a long term with a continuity between experimental situations and public presentations? To work in such a context, any determined “method” (of a compositional nature) will not fit. It will be necessary to continually vary the modes of interaction according to the work’s progress, as was particularly the case during the present workshop over a very short time span. The supporting tools cannot be limited to a single situation, as in the following examples: improvisation, writing scores, using audio or video support, images, narratives, charts, defining protocols, and so on. The diverse supports can be summoned along the way of the needs of the collective. Without forgetting to include in the process all the “domestic’ elements linked to the artistic work itself: cooking, housework, children, administrative aspects, relationships with institutions, organization of the space, scheduling, raising funds, etc. Another essential element has to be taken into consideration: it will take much longer for a collective to achieve a satisfactory result, than for a composer or a choreographer working on their own on exclusive plans written down in advance. But complete achievement will undoubtedly remain unattainable, and so will emerge as the salient element of an approach which, as in the case of improvisation, will eternally restart over again and again.

P:
“If it cannot be interpreted, if you’re given something that cannot be interpreted in some way …”

P:
“That’s in this respect that a score is not a gift, it’s not meant to give something.”

P:
“In fact what is given is that moment when, together, in a group, you learn to build your own signs. We’ve determined ourselves our own instructions for use, and thus we’ve built collectively together a reading defined with the people present.”

Pe:
“After all, these are not only signs. We don’t know what a sign is, but according to the things mentioned by Tim Ingold, there wasn’t necessarily something of the order of the sign, there was something practical, which proceeded from movement. You don’t play with the sign, but you replay it, well, you go over it again…”

P:
“… you translate…”

Pe:
“… you have taken the same pathway, then…”

P:
“… it’s a pretext to…”

Pe:
“… a point of entry. And also in relation to what you were saying, about this idea that it could not be interpreted and all that. This being so, there are scores that are virtually unplayable, but when you look at them, they put you in a certain universe. Perhaps, you will not be able to transform them into sound, it’ll remain a purely visual thing, but if you look in detail, you’ll see lots of scores, you’ll be able to imagine things, and after that you’ll be able to play it, it will become worthwhile to play it. Already – in front of details – you say to yourself, this is a music that gives you something. You can also imagine that this music is a drawing. The things by Cage, where the margin for interpretation…”

JCF:
During the 1950-60s, we lived through something like this, that is, a large number of composers producing graphic scores, and they were also very frustrated by the results, because, for example, the performers tended to produce clichés, as nothing was prescribed. A certain frustration could be also found with the performers, because they found themselves in a sort of middle ground, in which you had both the imposition of graphics, but a non-imposition over its interpretation: the performers had to start with a given data that they didn’t choose. It was both imposed, and you had to invent everything. This was the time when performers of contemporary music turned more to improvisation, that is, to completely taking hold of things without the help of a composer. What’s interesting today is the renewed great interest for graphic scores, which has reappeared in recent years – it never disappeared in fact – but maybe in a different context.”

Pg:
“The term of ‘graphic score’ certainly refers to something precise. For me, for example, my scores represent real graphic preoccupations. Besides, I don’t use any score-editing software, I use graphic design software. For example, I take a blank page, and create something graphic, and sometimes I make choices according to a grammar principle, but above all I make a graphic choice so that the eye is satisfied, so as to find an equilibrium, a dynamic, and so on. For me, it’s a highly coded graphic score.”

JCF:
“There’s a book from the 1970s by architect Lawrence, RSVP Cycles (1970), I don’t know if you are familiar with it?”

Pg:
“We’ve talked about it…”

JCF:
“Your approach reminds me of this.”

P:
“I really appreciated this day. With your methodology, you said t we had to physically recognize – or so I didn’t quite understand – we had to recognized each other, I don’t know what the intention behind it was.”

JCF:
“The primary intention was that we didn’t know each other and it’s a mean to…”

P:
“… present ourselves.”

P:
“The signature, in a more physical way…”

JCF:
“Yes that’s it, to get to know each other in a non-verbal way, but well… it was just a beginning…”

P:
“I never done that before. I would like to do it in relation to the experience of walking. And to discuss, to select the sound, what sounds to keep, what sounds will be transmitted. To choose sounds, to be attracted to sounds. In working together, we harmonize things. But in what I’ve experienced, I cannot transcribe all the sounds at once, I have to make choices…”

 

2h. 00′:
Frédéric Mathevet, organizer: “We take a 15-minute pause. Then, we’ll start again at 4:30 pm, we have the day until 7:00. That’s going to imprint itself in our heads. For the round table.”

[End of recording and workshop]
 

Conclusion

Within the space of two hours, it was possible to develop real practical situations, already familiar for the people present at the workshop, provoking animated discussions. These discussions focused at the same time on the immediate modalities of the practical situations, on the invention of variations around these situations, and a debate on the aesthetics and ethics that these practices evoked on the spot. From this debate emerged all the major aspects of the problematics linked to the use of graphic scores:

  1. The interpretation of visual objects in dance and music domains, the relationships between ‘creators” (composition, choreography, stage direction, ensemble conducting) and “performers”.
  2. The question of intellectual property of graphic scores
  3. The multiple functions of graphic scores, between artistic production and specific tool within a more general process.
  4. Experimental situations in relation to professional performances on stage.
  5. The meandering nature of experimental situations in relation to the precise elaboration of a definitive “artwork”.
  6. The body presence, providing dual access to dance movements and sound production, enabling to establish meaningful relationships between dance and music in relation to a visual object assimilated to the field of visual arts.

It seems obvious that the fleeting expressions during the discussions could not imply an in-depth analysis of the concepts addressed, nor an immediate awareness of their meaning on the part of everyone present. That’s why it was necessary to take up what was said during the workshop in a series of our own “commentaries”. Interpreting what people said helps us to think but is by no means a way of analyzing or explaining what those persons think or do. The aim of opening a debate arising from a common practice and from the particular history of each participant has been completely achieved. You cannot predict what this first collective approach might have produced if the workshop had been extended over two or three days, but we’re in the presence of fairly promising beginning.
 
Obviously, all the questions pertaining to graphic scores could not be tackled during the workshop, the debates have not exhausted the issues.
 
In conclusion, the practical set-up that we’ve just described seems to be a credible alternative to be developed during professional meetings linked to research (notably artistic). The juxtaposition of ideas, research reports, and various communications can be done through teleconferences (synchronic) and other digital tools (asynchronic). As international face-to-face gatherings becomes increasingly a rare occurrence due to climatic and pandemic evolutions, the invention of alternative situations where effective encounters around practices and the debate based on elements developed in common takes place, becomes a very important condition of our artistic and intellectual survival.
 

 


1. In this text P= workshop participant. When someone takes the floor several times in a very short time, the identification is P+a letter (Pz for example). The only persons that are identifies by their names are the two workshop leaders: JCF=Jean-Charles François, NS=Nicolas Sidoroff.

2. It should be noted that the papers on which the workshop participants produced their signatures have been lost. The examples given are taken from a similar situation in Budapest in January 2023.

3. The exchanges during the workshop between moments of practice allow to explicit a certain number of elements connected with the situation, and a second phase is necessary to carry further the ideas that are expressed. It’s the function of the commentaries in frame, written after the fact by the two authors.

4. See Tim Ingold (2007, 2011) on the notion of “lines”. As it happens, Tim Ingold was invited to present a paper in the seminar, in the session immediately preceding our workshop.

5. “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) was a French anarchist, socialist, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the ‘father of anarchism’.”(wikipedia)

 


 

Bibliography

L’Autre Musique revue, #5 Partitions, 2020. See L’Autre Musique.
 
Cage, John (1957-58). Concert for Piano and Orchestra. Editions Peters, London, New York.
 
Cardew, Cornelius (1963-67). Treatise. The Gallery Upstairs Press, Buffalo, N. Y. 1967.
 
Citton, Yves. (2014). /Pour une écologie de l’attention/. Paris : Éd. du Seuil, coll. La couleur des idées.
 
Goodman, Nelson (1968). Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976.
 
Halprin, Lawrence (1970) The RSVP cycles: creative processes in the human environment, G. Braziller, 1970.
 
Ingold, Tim (2007). Lines, A Brief History. Routlege.
 
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (2009).
 
Tilbury, John (2008). Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981), A life Unfinished. Matching Tye, near Harlow, Essex: Copula.

Encounter with Vincent-Raphaël Carinola and Jean Geoffroy

Vincent-Raphaël Carinola and Jean-Geoffroy’s contribution is in two parts. On the one hand, a research article, “Espaces notationnels et œuvres interactives”, originally published in English under the title “On Notational Spaces in Interactive Music”, by Vincent-Raphaël Carinola and Jean Geoffroy, in the proceedings of the conference organized by PRISM-CNRS in Marseille (May 2022).
On the other hand, the transcript of a meeting between Vincent-Raphaël Carinola, Jean Geoffroy, Jean-Charles François and Nicolas Sidoroff in Lyon in February 2023.

 

Access to the two parts and their French versions

First part

Access to the article “On Notational Spaces in Interactive Music”
Access to the French translation “Espaces notationnels et œuvres interactives”
 

Second part

Encounter with Carinola, Geoffroy, François, Sidoroff
Access to the French original version of « Rencontre avec Carinola, Geoffroy, François, Sidoroff »

 


 

Encounter with
Jean Geoffroy, Vincent-Raphaël Carinola
and
Jean-Charles François, Nicolas Sidoroff

1erFebruary 2023

Translation from French by
Jean-Charles François

(with the help of Deepl.com)

 

Summary :

1. Origin of the Collaboration
2.1 Toucher Theremin and Agencement
2.2 Toucher, Hands/Ears Correlation
2.3 Toucher, Notation
2.4 Toucher, Form
2.5 Toucher, Process for Appropriating the Piece
3.1 Virtual Rhizome, Smartphones, Primitive Rattle, Virtual Spaces
3.2 Virtual Rhizome, the Path to Virtuosity, Listening
3.3 Virtual Rhizome, a Collaboration Composer/Performer/Computer Music Programmer
3.4 Virtual Rhizome, the “Score”
3.5 To conclude: References to André Boucourechliev and John Cage
 


 

1. Origin of the Collaboration

Jean-Charles François

Could you retrace the story of how you met, how did your collaboration come about, and what was its context?

Vincent-Raphaël Carinola

We already worked with Christophe Lebreton[1] on different projects and although Jean and I had often crossed paths, and I knew and admired his work and his various collaborations with composers, I was looking forward to the opportunity to work with him. The point of departure was all the work they had done, Christophe and Jean, on new electronic interfaces and the role of the performer in relationships to them, Jean will be able to tell you more about these projects in detail.

Jean Geoffroy
The work with smartphones started for me thanks to Christophe, and to a first deviation from the usual applications I had created for Xavier Garcia’s pieces.[2] In 2018, Christophe and I created a structure called LiSiLoG in which we develop all kinds of projects around artistic innovation and transmission, which could be summed up in a phrase by Bram van Velde, a painter in an interview with Charles Juliet: « You have to give an image never seen before ».[3] It’s quite a simple phrase, and yet so difficult to grasp!

For a concert in Seoul, I had selected some applications taking account for their framework, sound possibilities, possible developments and I had written a short text as an introduction to the concert, in which we also played other pieces by Xavier.
What I realized almost immediately was the possibility of recreating spaces that were different from those imagined by Xavier, and it was equally possible to work on a kind of “sound intimacy”, because in fact, there’s nothing “demonstrative” about playing with a smartphone, you have to lead the audience to enter in the space you’re proposing, and thanks to the different applications deviating from usual utilization and used in different ways, it was as if I had in front of me a new instrument.
In this case, everything stems from the sound and the space it suggests, and then you need a narrative that will enable you to keep a relatively clear framework, since without this framework you run the risk of going round in circles, and playing the smartphones like a child with a rattle…
As with the Light Wall System[4] also designed by Christophe, the most interesting thing, besides music itself, is the absolute necessity of working on a narration, on a form. This should be obvious to any performer, but which is sometimes forgotten it in favor of the instrument, its virtuosity, its placement on stage…
With the SmartFaust applications,[5] the main aim was to return to a sound devoid of « artifice », that would enable us to invite the audience into a totally revisited sound universe.

After this concert, Christophe had the idea of taking his work with smartphones a step further, and then he proposed to Vincent to imagine a piece for “Smart-Hand-Computers – SHC”, a term that better represents this interface than the word “smartphone” which is primarily used to designate a telephone.

From the outset, however, the process was different than with Xavier, if only in terms of creating the sounds. The fact of having two SHCs totally independent of each other with the possibility to include aleatoric elements in the piece and above all, work on the writing of the piece itself made it a totally different project from anything I had done before. Moreover, this piece is an opportunity for us (Christophe and I) to imagine other performing frameworks: we developed a solo version with a set-up similar to that of the Light Wall System, and we’re working on a project for two dancers. Virtual Rhizome by Vincent-Raphaël Carinola really functions as a permanent laboratory, which incites us to constantly revisit the work, which is essential for a performer. These three proposals around the same piece raise the question of our relationships with the audience: from a) the intimacy of a solo with two SHC, b) to a form of address to the public within the Light Wall System framework, and c) to a choreographic piece in which dancers are at the same time performing the music with their body movements.
This piece enables us to re-examine the act of interpretation, which in itself is an exciting question that performers I think don’t often enough consider.

 

2.1 Toucher, Theremin and Agencement

Jean-Charles
We can separate the two pieces Toucher and Virtual Rhizome. Toucher involves the theremin, but as I understand it, it’s not at all the traditional theremin where you’re constantly controlling pitch in order to produce melodies with very precise intonation. It’s consequently a very different situation, and I was wondering in what way it involves a fundamental change in comparison to percussion playing, and if there were any particular problems induced with this change of media, this change of instrument?

Vincent-
Raphaël
Toucher is another story. Here too, the initial idea was the relationship with the performer, in this case Claudio Bettinelli.[6] He owned a theremin that we used in a performance piece called Typhon.[7] He suggested to use the theremin by connecting it to a computer, using it as an interface to control image and sound.

Following this first experience we wondered whether it would be interesting to write a work for this “instrument”, bearing in mind that from the moment the theremin is connected to a computer, the instrument is definitively no longer a theremin (the more so since its original sound is never heard). The instrument is the theremin connected to a computer, to sounds and sound processing modules distributed around the audience. This is partly the subject matter of the article « On Notational Spaces in Interactive Music »:[8] here the instrument becomes a playing system. What we consider to be the instrument, the theremin, is just one part of the system, which is in fact the “true” instrument. The theremin is equipped with antennas that capture the performer’s gestures, lamps or electronic circuitry that generate a sound that varies according to the distance of the hands from the antennas and, sometimes, in the same cabinet, a loudspeaker is included. This is like electric guitars, there is a kind of amplifier that can be more or less close to the musician. What interests me here is the possibility to dissociate the organological elements of the instrument and turn each component into a writing support. The performer is then confronted with a sort of fragmented object within a system. On the one hand, the performer has to deal with an instrument very different from the traditional one, since he/she doesn’t control everything because part of the sounds are generated by the computer – so, he/she is playing an instrument that has the ability to function on its own – and, on the other hand, the performer has to follow a score which is not entirely constituted by notation on staves. The score also includes the computer program, which contains the sounds I have generated, integrated into the computer’s memory. So, the score itself is scattered across the whole range of media supports: the graphic score of the gestures, that of sounds, the computer program, the interactive programs, and even the “mapping”, that is, the way in which the interface is correlated with the sounds and with the unfolding of the piece in time.

This is why the performer’s work is quite different from that of a performer who is playing an instrument with which he forms a single body, since with this new instrument – as a system – the body tends to be separated from the direct sound production. One part of the way the instrument functions escapes him/her. The performer doesn’t always control the totality of the sounds (since I am the one who generated them as well as the sound processing modules). Moreover, the computer can also function automatically. That’s what’s so interesting, because it means that the way the performer can adapt to the system becomes in itself an object of creation, the object of the composition, and that’s what’s so beautiful. The performer cannot be considered as someone who appropriates a piece fixed on a support, external to her/him, and which she/he then comes to interpret: he/she is part of the work, one component of this “composed” ensemble of interfaces, the computer, the fixed sounds, him, her, the musician, her/his corporeal presence on stage, etc. We face the same type of problem with Virtual Rhizome but addressed in a very different and very strange way.

Here is the video of the version of Toucher by Claudio Bettinelli :
 

 

Jean
With Toucher, Vincent is right, it’s a question of building the space and consequently becoming part of a system, which itself partly escapes you. This is a really fascinating situation that forces you to be at the same time interpreter and “learner” all at once in real time. You have above all to develop a certain quality of listening, which is not based on expectation but on surprise. That’s what I’ve learned with these two pieces, even if I started by Virtual Rhizomes and then turned to Toucher.
The fact that the situation in which you find yourself partly escapes us could mean some sort of comfort for the performer, but on the contrary, it really disturbed me. This project allowed me to find myself really at the center, first and foremost as a “listener” before being a performer. This requires concentration, to pay attention to all the sound events that you generate, as well as those that you don’t necessarily control and that you need to appropriate and integrate into your “narrative”.
What makes this attitude more sensitive is the fact that, with these instruments, everything seems simple, because just in relation with a movement. Even though the theremin is extremely technical, each person develops his/her own technique, an attitude linked to a form of inner listening to sound, listening that does not pass exclusively through your ears but also through the body.

Vincent-
Raphaël

In fact, what’s very complicated for me with interactive systems in general is that, if everything is determined, that is if the performer can control each sound produced by the machine, she/he becomes some sort of “operator”. The computer takes no initiative, everything must be determined by conditional logic: if-then-else. The computer is incapable of reacting or adapting to the situation, it only does what it’s asked to do, with a very… binary logic. Everything it does, the way it reacts, is limited by the instructions specified in the software program. That’s why you never have the same relationship with the digital instrument as you do with an acoustic one, in which there is a resistance, a physical constraint, linked to the nature of the instrument, which structures gestures and allows the emergence of expression. That’s why the idea of simulating an instrument that escapes the musician’s control, forces the performer to be in a very attentive listening, to be literally on the look-out, to strain the ear, to charge listening with tension. I think that if you want – I don’t know if it’s possible – to be able to find something equivalent to an expression – when I say “expression”, I don’t mean romantic expression or anything like that, it’s something proper to the musician on stage, to the performer, something that belongs only to him or her – you have to find new ways of making it emerge in interaction with the systems, that’s somewhat the idea of inviting the performer to “stretch the ear”.

Jean
I’d like to add one little thing: when you speak of tension, it’s for the performer and it’s also the case for the audience. Because ultimately, there are no predicable gestures in the sense that when a violinist takes her/his bow, moving it towards the strings, everyone expects to hear a violin sound, whereas with the theremin, even if one gets nearer to the antenna, you never know when or what sort of sound will be produced. In addition, before the actual beginning the piece, I proposed an introduction in silence, precisely so that the attention of the audience would be drawn to this silent gesture which would then reveal an unexpected sound. The idea to put the public in this state of listening/searching/waiting… ultimately making them “actors” of this shared artistic moment. Effectively, something is at stake, raising tension, something is at play, at that very moment.

 

2.2 Toucher, Hand/Ear Correlations

Jean-Charles
In the article “On Notational Spaces in Interactive Music”, you mention “a hand/ear correlation of great requirement”.[8] What do you mean by requirement concerning the hand?

Vincent-
Raphaël
You could say that it is the requirement of the meaning you give to the sound and therefore to the expressive movement of the hand that produces it, but it’s also the structurating of a space that is drawn around the theremin, making possible gestures that have meaning in themselves, a choreography you could say.
Then there’s also the process of interaction, on what actual parameters is it possible to act, a volume, a sound form? From there on, you have your “playground” where the hand can develop its movements, intuitively at first, then by exploring the relationship between sound and gesture to give it a singular form of coherence.

Jean
First and foremost, there is a sound, and the “response” you have to propose; how spontaneously, intuitively, my body or my hands will interpret that sound, shaping it in a physical form. All this provides a consistency, an expression, a projection, which without the gesture would not at all be the same. It’s quite simple to do this experiment: take a mechanical sound made of “beep, beep, beep, beep”, nobody will listen to it and it’s uninteresting, but if we start to incarnate it, to give it a temporality, a form, a space, it changes everything. That’s exactly what’s at stake in the piece Silence Must Be by Thierry de Mey.[9] At this point, the hand, the gesture, the presence, will give a direction to the sound, will give it a meaning that a priori it doesn’t have. In Toucher, the relationship to sound is far more complex: the gesture must produce the sound while drawing it in space. Claudio’s version is brilliant from this point of view, there’s a real choreography of sound, which results in a sort of totally insane form in terms of space, and relationships to the instrument. Ultimately, it’s all about presence of the sound, and of the performer. Each performer playing the piece will have re-imagine a form that has nevertheless already been written, but that has to be inscribed in a space that needs to be each time reinvented. And it’s the performer’s task to reveal this through a gesture, a movement, a pause, a suspension, something that belongs to the performer. At that precise moment, the gesture embodies that, or at any rate gives an incarnation to an immanent sound, which is not produced in any case by blowing or striking in a way that could be predictable.

Vincent-
Raphaël
That’s really the most appropriate term in my opinion: “immanent”. Unlike acoustic instruments when to produce a sound you need to apply a more or less strong force according to the desired result, with Toucher — but it’s also the case with Virtual Rhizome — you have instruments where it’s as if the music was playing in the background. This bring us back to what I was saying earlier concerning the “automatic” aspect of the instrument. The sound materials are there, the musician doesn’t produce them in the strict sense of the term: the sounds are recorded, the modules are fabricated or programmed, and so on. It’s as if the role of the hand were to dig into the matter and to extract it from a kind of magma. That’s why this reference to immanent music appeals so much to me. The musician searches inside something that’s already there, to make certain points of view emerge. This is evident in certain passages of Toucher with its many layers, and the fact that you might be here or there in relation to the antennae, or that you move the hand in one direction or another, or from one point to another, etc. It’s in some ways as if you were working with a material, as if you were in the process of sculpting it. As you said, Jean, with Claudio, there’s something that pertains to a construction, to the evolution of things: he seeks out one element, then another, and thus shapes the discourse. What was fairly new for me and very surprising in the version Jean played, was that he juggled with all these materials. You got the impression of an erupting volcano, from which emerged a completely splintered universe of magma, lava, basalt fragments… I mean, it was all over the place. And that’s also another way of working the material that I really like. The work of interpretation also consists in becoming one with this apparatus system [dispositif] in a certain way, but in a manner that is completely different from a traditional instrument where everything is determined by the movement of the body. Here, there is a kind of encounter between two logics, the logic of the machine and the logic of the performer, and from this encounter emerges something very interesting..

 

2.3 Toucher, Notation

Jean-Charles
How does the relation to notation function?

Jean
This is a fundamental issue in this type of adventure! And I learned a lot about this question of writing while working on Virtual Rhizome. As performer, you are constantly looking for a framework, for an artistic writing that allows you to enter into the composer’s approach and give concrete substance to a written work. In relation to scores, I’ve often been frustrated. Either it’s too directive (too many injunctions, signs, notes that don’t allow a singular reading, as you are too busy doing what’s written down…) and in that case, you’re looking for some space of interpretation, you say: “But how am I going to breathe?” Or it’s extremely open with all kinds of possibilities of interpretation and approach. I’m not speaking of mf, ralentis, accel. etc., but of words that would enable us to really contextualize a form, a phrasing. Sometimes, the role of the performer is reduced to a minimum, even, from time to time, not really considered by the composer. Or on the contrary, you are into something very (overtly) open which leaves a lot to improvisation and less to form, in any case less in terms of storytelling, of narrative. It’s the in-between that is interesting, having something that’s absolutely written down, absolutely thought out – and we will talk further about this for Virtual Rhizome, but it’s the same for Toucher – but which leaves room for the performer to interact.
Ultimately, the question is: should we play what’s written or what we read?
This approach changes things considerably. In many pieces you have introductory notes that resemble more instruction manuals, sometimes they are needed, but they become a problem when there is nothing else besides!
When You read Stockhausen’s Kontakte, even without having read the introductory notice, you’re capable to hear the energies that he wrote in the electroacoustic part. In Toucher, as in Virtual Rhizome, we have a very precise structure, and at the same time sufficient indications to leave the performer free to listen and make the piece his or her own, keeping with the limits set by the composer. It’s really this alloy between a predicted sound and a gesture, an unstable equilibrium… but it’s the same thing with Bach.
With pieces like Vincent’s, it’s essential to have this intimate perception: what do I really want to sing, ultimately, what do I want to be heard, what pleases me about it? If you adopt exactly the same attitude behind a marimba or a violin or a piano, you will really achieve as performer something that will be singular, corresponding to a true appropriation of the text you are reading. The idea is to make people hear and think, just as they do when a poem is read: what will be interesting will be the multiplication of the poem’s interpretations, each one allowing the poem to be always in the making, very much alive. It’s exactly the same with music.

Vincent-
Raphaël
Here, unlike in classical notation, not all the information is on the score. I know that this has never been the case, that there are historical codes, such as ornamentation, which were not always notated. With these works, it’s even more the case since, as mentioned earlier, there’s one part of the instrument that functions autonomously. The instrument is fragmented into its different components (gesture sensors, sound generators, loudspeakers, etc.) and each component of the instrument is subjected to a writing process. As a result, the score itself is broken down into the different components of the system, such as the computer program, the recorded sounds in the computer memory. If you follow the score and do the gestures exactly as notated, you get nowhere. In fact, in a piece like Toucher – we’ve got enough hindsight now to be able to say this, since it has been played by quite different performers – you have to understand technically how it works, that is, to know what a Max patch is, how the machine functions in interaction, what is a granulator (etc.), in order to play it with ease. By understanding what’s happening, you can better control the instrument, follow the score, and grasp more precisely what is graphically notated. It’s not possible to keep up a traditional attitude of reproducing a certain type of gestures as they are notated by the composer and therefore have to be respected. It doesn’t work like that, it cannot work like that, it’s impossible for the reasons given earlier, because the relationship to the instrument is not at all the same. In Toucher, there is a representation of the gestures and also a notation of what should be heard, indicated with the name of the sounds. But there’s a third notation at the very end of the score: it’s a script that describes what’s happening in each part of the piece. There are 19 parts, it’s relatively easy to memorize and ultimately this is what the performer memorizes most of all. The performer keeps two different things in mind: a) how the instrument works, i.e. how it responds to the musician’s action, how the space around the antennas is organized, what the patch does, the different samples used, etc.; and b) the script, i.e. the successive activation of the instrument’s various components over time.

 

2.4 Toucher, Form

Jean-Charles
Because the 19 situations can occur in different orders?

Vincent-
Raphaël
No, not in Toucher, unlike Virtual Rhizome. In Toucher, the form has a very directional layout. It’s structured in two parts that follow the same outline: it’s as if you were drawing something, first by making dots, then lines, then ornaments within the lines, and then, there is moment when it becomes so complex that you lose the link between the gesture and what you’re hearing. It’s at that moment that appears the “true” sound of the theremin, as if it was saying: “Ah! but here I am, I’m the real instrument.” So, there is a formal order: it begins with number one, then at number two there’s a new element, at three a third one, at four you come back to three, and so on. Therefore, you cannot play it in any order.

Jean
As for me, after having assimilated the different parts, I try to highlight some “pivotal states”, some kind of punctuations that enable me to build my interpretation and therefore my reading of the form of the piece. It’s not a question of telling a story but to convey a sort of narrative in the sense of a trajectory, an inner journey that unfold like the threads between the sounds you reveal, or that you are going to hide. It’s this relationship with sound that we have over time that in the end shapes the narrative. To start with little things, with scraps of sound, and then begin to construct by paying attention to never “losing the audience”, by providing some listening clues. If the performer is really involved in this dynamic of listening to time and space, there will necessarily be something that the public will grasp. It’s clear that in this context, members of the public must also be curious about what is or isn’t going to happen; as the piece progresses, a kind of “co-listening” can be perceived, and from that moment, the sounds become definitively shared by all present. The issue is to get in the same “fragile listening”, between a sort of communicative tension and intense listening, audience, and performer here and now.

Vincent-
Raphaël
In the case of Toucher, you cannot modify the order of the sections, however, each section leaves enough leeway to develop its own particular discourse. This said, all this should flow in a continuity, you cannot stay in one spot for half an hour, because then the whole continuity would disappear. But this possibility to take your time is important in order to rediscover this manner of seeking out the music in the instrument, and letting it emerge. So, it’s important that there’s a certain temporal freedom to be able to do this. Some modules contain a small amount of randomness, sometimes resulting in unpredictable results. Consequently, while the musician is shaping the sound material with the hand, if he/she hears something interesting, unexpected, she/he can repeat it because it’s good and makes him/her happy. In concert, something unexpected might happen: “Ah! well! that’s amazing, I’ve never heard this before, I’ll do it again”. And so, there’s also this kind of opening in the piece that allows to have these pleasant, surprising moments. All the while trying not to succumb to the machine’s charm!

Jean-Charles
To pass from one section to the next, for example from 1. to 2., the timing is controlled by the performer?

Vincent-
Raphaël
Yes. For example, in number 1, in Toucher, you never know precisely what sound is going to appear. You know that there’s a reservoir of vocal sounds, of sighs, there are some that make “pook, bong, zoom” [sons vocaux très courts], and then others much longer that make “paaaaaah” [whispered]. So, if you hear one that’s longer, you have to wait to avoid it being too busy… You could trigger a lot of them, it’s not prohibited to do it, but it wouldn’t make sense. Sometimes it happens that you would add one or two more, or that, I don’t know why, you would want to hold on a little longer, and then, when things are settled down, when they are well in place, you’ll move to number 2, which retains the elements of 1 with an additional variation.

 

2.5 Toucher, Process for Appropriating the Piece

Nicolas
Sidoroff
I was listening to you, but I was also looking at you, because you were making all kinds of interesting gestures. Concerning the way Jean appropriated this score, or this notation, or this work – I don’t know what is the best term to use – how did it start, what did you do and in what order? You said that you’d discussed it a lot with Vincent, so when and how this happened? Was it before, during or after? Or maybe all three? What is the temporal process of appropriating the score?

Jean
As with any piece involving electroacoustics, as far as I am concerned, everything starts with the sound. It’s the composer’s “signature” and that’s what guides me. From there, you start to understand the composer’s space, universe, and it’s a question of finding your place in it, your reading of it, your response to it. For these two pieces, it’s not just a question of playing the sound, but to making it your own. Once you have the idea of the sound space of each one of the parts, you can begin to inhabit these different spaces by giving them your own perception through gesture.

For me, there’s one thing that’s really incredible, it’s the prescience that you can have of a sound, a prescience that is revealed through an attitude, a gesture, a listening. For Virtual Rhizomes, we don’t always know which texture is going to be played, what impact it will have, and the listening and attention that result from this open up incredible horizons because potentially, it compels us to be even more intuitively aware of our own sound sensations. It’s this balance between the attitude of anticipating integral listening, and the notion of form we’ve been working on, that you need to keep in mind, so as not to get into that famous « rattle » Vincent talks about. It’s interesting to think that a texture played that you don’t know a priori will determine the development of this particular sequence, but you still have to give it a particular meaning in terms of space.

During my last years as percussion professor in Lyon, in order to ensure that this particular attention to sound was an essential part in the work on a piece, I wanted no dynamics to appear on the scores I gave to the students, so that they would just relate to the structure, and that the dynamics (their voice) would be completely free during these first readings. At that point, the question of sound and its projection becomes obvious, whereas if you read a written dynamic sign in absolute terms and therefore decontextualized from a global movement, you don’t even think about it, you just repeat a gesture often without paying sufficient attention to the resulting sound.

On the contrary, Toucher and Virtual Rhizome (like other pieces) force us to question these different parameters. For me, Toucher as Virtual Rhizome, are fundamentally methods of music: there are no prerequisites, except to be curious, interested, aware of possibilities, and present! Such freedom offered by these pieces is first and foremost a way of questioning ourselves at all levels: our relationship to form, sound and space, this is why they are true methods of Music. These pieces are proposing a real adventure and an encounter with oneself. On stage, you know pretty much where you want to go, and at the same time everything remains possible, it’s totally exhilarating and at the same time totally stressful.

Nicolas
I have the impression that to work on it, you « squatted » each of the 19 situations, as if they were « houses ». Did you stay in the first house, to use that image, to see what was going on in its corpus, what it was all about, before moving on to the second?

Jean
Exactly.

Nicolas
Or instead, did you do a global reading, saying to yourself: “Ah! there’s a journey to the next house”?

Jean
No, I really proceeded part by part, in any case this is my way of doing things, to manage to find yourself in the best possible way in one space before going on to explore the next. This is what I call “presence”, you must be present, firmly anchored in the ground. With new technologies, we could remain in a form of superficiality, totally focused on representation and the use of effects. That’s precisely what is at issue with these electroacoustic systems, which function somewhat like Pandora’s boxes, with all the dangers this represents in terms of interpretation: do we decide for the instrument or does the instrument decide for us…?

Nicolas
You said a moment ago that you’d seen Claudio’s version? At what moment in the process?

Jean
Afterwards, always after I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what I want to do. I know Claudio well, he was one of my students at the CNSMDL [Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon], he is a very talented musician, with a very Italian, magnificent presence. His version sounds like an evidence. I would be incapable to reproduce what he does, his version being so totally singular and corresponding so perfectly to his personality. If I decided to reproduce what he does, it would be a disaster, it would be ridiculous. And that’s precisely what’s so strong about this piece, there is no right or wrong version, just an exactitude of interpretation. To be exact is something that’s both simple and terribly complicated, as it’s a matter of finding yourself.

Nicolas
The silent gesture that you make before starting the piece, that you mention several times, at what moment in the process of learning the piece does it appears? And do you always keep it, because it’s now part of your interpretation? How does it come about?

Jean
To play in silence just a few gestures is something that’s touched me greatly, ever since I started to play the piece by Thierry de Mey,Silence must Be many years ago. I became aware that creating a gestural space in silence enabled me to concentrate on presence, and presence alone, because there’s no artifice, no virtuosity, only presence. The idea is for the audience, surprised at first, even incredulous, to gradually enter into your discourse, and in the case of Silence Must Be, the clues are given later when I play again the same silent sequence accompanied by a recorded soundtrack. For Toucher, I really like to start in this way, with the difference here that I build a gesture that increases more and more, giving the public a key to reading. The idea behind this is to really “make silence” which is the best way to work on sound, since playing more doesn’t make you hear. On the contrary, it sometimes knocks you down, and very often the more you boost the sound, the more you crush it. Here, the idea is to ensure that the first sound produced by the theremin should be extremely thin, almost at the limit of the audible, and in order to achieve this, a real silence is needed. Once the piece begins, it’s from this dynamic level and initial listening that you are able to develop it further.

Jean-Charles
Apparently, in all this, the notion of recording a given performance raises some questions. Often, for example, in improvisation, you don’t use recording for public release, but as a mirror to listen to what really happened, because there is a difference between listening afterwards and listening while playing. What is the status of recordings in this context?

Vincent-
Raphaël
There is the possibility of video capture, which is part of the working tools, but it’s not simply a sound recording. It is, of course, the trace of an experience, but for those playing the piece, it can also be a working tool, helping to understand how it works. There is also the audio recording itself: it’s pretty funny, because I remember when the piece was broadcasted on the radio, listening to it, I wondered if it was really the piece? What we hear is only one part of the piece. This is why I promote the idea that the works are very particular agency systems, it’s not simply the sound, it is a combination set up between sound, the performer who plays, and the gestures he or she makes. All this carries some sense in Toucher. If you listen to it on a recording, it’s as if you would listen simply to an acousmatic piece. Personally, I was quite satisfied because it sounded good as an acousmatic piece. Except that this piece isn’t based on a fixed support, even so there exists a fixed system, since the computer is there, and the program is fixed on a memory. But each time, it gives rise to a different interpretation, to a new unique projection in time. The video capture makes sense in terms of trace of an event, as with any recording of any work.

Right now, one of my students is practicing the piece. He worked on the available online videos to understand it, to understand its notation, etc., which saves time. But that wasn’t the approach used by Jean, who had another kind of experience. I think that each person deals with it in a certain way. But it’s fair to say that, generally speaking, video has become an accessory to the score.

 
 

 


 

3.1 Virtual Rhizome, Smartphones, Primitive Rattle, Virtual Spaces

Jean-Charles
We can now move on to Virtual Rhizome. In this piece, the interface between the performer and the system set up is achieved through the manipulation of smartphones. To begin with, we’ll go back a little to what has already been discussed: in the article already mentioned, you speak concerning this subject of « hochet primitif » [primitive rattle].[10]

Vincent-R.
[laugh] I like it.

Jean-Charles
It seems to me that this idea is connected in some way to video games, where there are beginners and then virtuosos…

Vincent-R.
… those who win and those who lose…

Jean-Charles
But in video games, it seems that beginners are somehow recognized as respectable in the same way as virtuosos. Is this the case, that is, is the piece still the piece, no matter who plays it, even someone who’s never studied music before?

Vincent-
Raphaël
I don’t know. About this idea of rattle, it’s linked to the issues of interfaces. In Toucher, the link between gesture and sound is completely arbitrary, I chose it myself, it’s a purely contingent relationship. The same gesture, used elsewhere in the piece can produce very different sounds. But the object-theremin is there, with the space around the antennas. There’s everything we were talking about earlier, which structures the musician’s gesture, enabling to play in an expressive way. With smartphones, for me, it was a problem, because in this case, space is no longer an issue, it’s an object reduced to the minimum movement. From the gestural point of view, you can make all the gestures you want, but it’s an object that you’re holding in your hand and with one and the same hand movement you can produce a billion different sounds. So, there was a problem concerning the construction of a discourse, due to the absence of a structured space that would allow you to say: “Well! first I’m here, then I’ll play there, then I’ll move away, I’ll go to…”. In Toucher, , this structured space exists around the antennas. In Light Music by Thierry de Mey,[11] that Jean premiered, there is a light surface, also virtual, you don’t see it, but when he places his hand somewhere, it’s not just anywhere, he places his hand according to the structure of the space. With the smartphone, there’s no structure. It’s a punctual object, almost “incorporated” that can only be shaken. It reminded me of a maracas. Really, all this technology for making the gesture of a maracas, it wasn’t worth doing all that [laugh] This was a big problem for me. I had to think hard to find a solution that seemed appropriate. The solution to the problem was not in any way to try to turn the smartphone into an instrument. That object in itself, isn’t that important – although obviously it is, I’m caricaturing a little – but what’s important is: what is the performer playing? Where is the piece really located?

When you’re playing a video game, you might find yourself in a room or on the street, and then at some point you take a turn, you go to another room or to another street, and then you’re attacked by some aliens, you’ve to react, and then you move on to the next stage. It’s a sort of virtual architecture in which you can move in many different ways. This was precisely the idea in Virtual Rhizome, to depart from the traditional instrumental model, which still exists in Toucher, but which is no longer appropriate here because there’s no space to explore with this object that is the smartphone. And from this came the idea of building a virtual space and using the smartphone as an interface, almost like a compass, enabling you find your way around this architecture. That’s how the two things, the rattle, and the video game, are linked together.

 

3.2 Virtual Rhizome, the Path to Virtuosity: Listening

Jean-Charles
And so, where can we find the path to virtuosity in this piece?

Jean
Listening. Being able not just to listen, but somehow to be the sound…
When I recorded with Vincent the percussion sounds used in Virtual Rhizome, I played almost everything with the fingers, the hands, and that allowed for much more color, dynamics, than if I’d played with sticks. When you’re playing with the hands, there is a particular relationship with the material, especially when you’ve spent your entire life playing with sticks, and in fact, when you’re playing with the hands and fingers your listening is even more “curious”.
Then, in this piece, you need to thoroughly understand the interface and play with it, especially with the possibility of superimposing states that can change with each interpretation. But once again, this is only possible with a clear vision of the overall form, if you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the interface.
Whoever the performer is, there is one common thing, which is this necessity to listen: you hear a sound if you go to the bottom of what it has to say. This means writing an electroacoustic piece in real time, with what you hear inside the sound.

It’s the idea of this interiority that helped develop the interpretation, because at the beginning I was moving a lot on stage, and the more I evolved with the piece, the more intimate, singular and secret this approach became. That’s why on stage there is a counter-light (red if possible) so that the public can only see a shadow, and ideally closes the eyes from time to time…

What’s interesting with the versions with dance is that, ultimately, even if the movements are richer and more diversified, there is really this inner listening that predominates, and forces a certain purity, a choice of intention before the choice of movement, that gives rise with the dancers to totally peculiar listening and embodiment movements.

Vincent-
Raphaël
This version with dance was very impressive, because the three dancers were perfectly in place. I said to myself: “But how could you be in place in something that’s never in place, that’s never the same?” You really had the impression that they were perfectly synchronized with the music. How did they do that? It was touching, yes. Very moving.

Jean
And it was brilliant because the accumulation of possibilities, that is roughly, the layers they had encountered, the sound they knew, or at least they heard. They made up a kind of narrative (it’s exactly the same thing in Toucher), they knew, there was a story in the making, with emphasis on certain things, they had to be in a certain place at a given moment. Their sensibility was extraordinary and above all their intelligence. Really, when you’ve worked in a setting like that, with pieces with such intensity in terms of interpretation, I think there is veritably a huge difference between before and after. Because the usual situation of the choreographs is to dance to music that has already been definitively fixed. Most of the time, during rehearsals, they roughly only repeat things that have already been more or less decided. On the contrary, you have here the idea of a flexible framework that enables you to know where you are situated among an infinity of possibilities. And the three dancers benefitted from it, because we performed it three times and each time it was great.

 

3.3 Virtual Rhizome, a Collaboration Composer/Performer/Computer Music Programmer

Jean-Charles
During the elaboration of the piece, you worked together on recording sessions of voice and percussion sounds. What was the nature of the collaboration between the two of you?

Jean
In any case, it’s Vincent who is the composer. It’s a collaboration, of course, but the distinctive feature of the composer in relation to the performer is to be “ahead of time”, which forces you to move toward what is proposed. The collaboration between composer and performer has always existed, even if it can take different forms depending on the encounters.
With Vincent, everything seemed coherent and flowing, even when we were recording many sounds over the course of a day. Everything was clear to me, and I quickly understood in what sound universe I was going to evolve in, even though I had no idea of the form of the piece, but just knowing the landscape is an essential thing for the performer.

Vincent-
Raphaël
Regarding collaboration, it’s true that I really enjoy writing solo pieces, because it implies a very strong bond with the person playing them. The piece arises from this kind of relationship. In Virtual Rhizome, there was something a little special about the fact that the instruments didn’t exist yet, everything had to be developed. Effectively we had the smartphone, but I spent a lot of time first imagining how to deal with the piece, before working on the sound processing modules, which I did with Christophe Lebreton, bearing in mind that I never work with computer music designers. I had worked with Christophe before, but on projects in which he played an artistic role. In Virtual Rhizome it was the first time he really had the role of computer music programmer. I would make the patches in Max and Christophe encoded them in Faust and then compiled them for iApp. As the tool wasn’t ready, it was difficult to be able to work directly on the piece. And at the same time, with such a piece, a relationship with Jean had to be established. I remember suggesting to Jean something like this: “I don’t know where we’re going, but we need to have some sounds. I would love that the work be a sort of portrait of yourself, and so to start with the instruments you like, the way you approach them, and also for you to play with the hands, without sticks.” Conceptually, in a piece like this, where precisely there is no contact with the instrument, it was interesting that the sounds possess in their deepest being this direct contact with the performer’s body. Lastly, the most personal sound imaginable is the voice. Thus, I asked Jean to come up with a text. In fact, there were two texts: Jean proposed extracts from Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu, and I proposed a text (read in French by Jean) by Jorge Luis Borges taken from « Jardin aux sentiers qui bifurquent » [in Fictions][12]. It’s another Borges-style labyrinthic story that fitted the project very well. And both texts say something of the sensual work of listening, the work on sound matter, the labyrinthic structure of the work. They are there as signatures from which we can sometimes hear a word, a barely audible fragment of Jean’s voice.

You raised the question of virtuosity earlier, Jean-Charles. Speaking then of virtuality or virtuosity, I liked the link you made between the two. The virtuosity here resides in the fact that there are two smartphones, behaving in complete isolation from each other. They don’t communicate with each other. You could play the piece with only one smartphone, in a way. You could switch from one situation to another, forwards and backwards, using a gestural control. With both of them, you can combine any situation with any other one. This means that you have to work extremely hard at listening, precisely because, on the one hand you don’t always know what automatized sequences will appear, the textures, the layers mentioned by Jean, and on the other hand, you have also controlled sounds, played, each of which can be very rich in itself. The use of two smartphones implies a great deal of complexity because of the multitude of possible combinations. This requires working intensely on an inner concentrated listening, to orient yourself in this virtual universe, which precisely has no physical consistency. There’s no score anymore, the score is in the head, it’s like the Palace of Memory in the Middle-Ages, a purely virtual architecture that you have to explore. That’s why I like the way you link these terms of virtuosity and of virtuality, because each depends on the other, in a way.

Jean-Charles
About this collaboration, Jean, do you like to add something?

Jean
I already knew Xavier Garcia’s pieces, so working with smartphones wasn’t a problem for me, on the other hand it was when I started subverting Xavier’s applications that I really realized their potential. It’s essential to know at a minimum how it functions, otherwise you cannot really play it without being overwhelmed by the tool… For there is the risk that the tool could ultimately take up all the space.

Nicolas
What I find interesting is that the question of the PaaLabRes fourth edition is centered on how to report on practices and especially the complex ones that have just been described here. In the case of Virtual Rhizome perhaps more than in Toucher, there are three poles that are fairly well defined in terms of the classical division of labor of the 19th century, when the computer didn’t exist. There is the person who composes, the person who performs, who transforms the composition into actual sounds, and Christophe who is the luthier, who would be a kind of computer technician, I don’t know how to call it. So, the composer provides a piece to be played, something to make music in terms of action verbs, Jean, as a performer learns it and creates something with it, and Christophe’s role is to deliver the computer software with the system included to make it work. And it’s this kind of combination, which is not at all as simple as what I’ve just described. It’s nevertheless a first representation, and if you go a bit to the floor below to see the relationships that are woven between each other, how the fact of having said something at a given moment, of having used this very word, for this precise use, that comes out at a given moment, because we have perhaps heard it pronounced as you got off a bus, might create the conditions of a real collaboration. How can you describe this form of complicity between these three positions which, in a bit simplistic and bestial vision, might seem as extremely separated. We tend to look at things too quickly, but in fact there is an enormous amount of subtleties. At what points does this sort of cooperation between at least the three of you come into play? It’s not IRCAM with the Max MSP and this kind of wider community. I don’t know how to make this clear. I’ve got a few ideas, but I submit this question to you to help us do that.

Jean
I think that it’s a modern version of what existed with Mozart and the basset-horn, Bartok with the pedal timpani, Wagner with the saxhorn… I think these relationships have always existed, and they’re extremely closely interwoven. The luthier, Christophe, takes part in the creation of the piece, he is a structuring factor in the creative process. It’s clear that today we’re no longer in the situation of previous times when the composer completely mastered the tool and was often performing his or her own works, keeping control over the three thirds of the creative process: intuition, writing, realization.
Nowadays, with the presence of set-ups, “agencies” [dispositifs], the notion of writing has completely changed its framework, you have to describe the music and at the same time to develop the electroacoustic set-up process of captation, in real time, that is, building an instrument.
The composer can only partly cover the second third, bearing in mind that lutherie also evolves in the writing process… The only obvious thing is that from beginning to end, there is a spoken word, that of the composer, in terms of: “This I want, that I don’t want”. And for me, this is the alpha and omega of creation, that is, its requirement. The composer provides us, performers, with a material, a discourse, a narrative, a vision, a relevance. It’s not a question of hierarchy, but this kind of spoken word is at the heart of the whole process of encounter and creation.

 

3.4 Virtual Rhizome, the « Score »

Nicolas
In the article (already quoted), there’s figure 3, which is a graphic representation with smartphone 1 and smartphone 2 going from 7 to 8 and coming back to 7, and so on. We wondered if this was a notation of one of the possibilities? Is it in fact something that perhaps Jean never did, that Jean never needed to look at to realize the piece? This figure seems to me a little incompatible with the idea that what is represented here is actually the score indicating what there is to do. So, what exactly does this figure 3 represent?
 
Extract from the score of Virtual Rhizome (example 3 of the article)

Extract from the score of Virtual Rhizome (example 3 of the article).

 

Vincent-
Raphaël
In fact, this is an extract from the score. The score also provides a text of presentation that explains the precise meaning of this notation, which corresponds to a transcription of Jean’s first interpretation. Actually, it’s a possible pathway, but based on the fact that it had already been done. Jean’s interpretation was very good indeed! The recording respects the score absolutely, as it’s been done in other way round… A fair number of things come from his interpretation. At some point, Jean was going back and forth between the two situations… I transcribed this extract you mentioned, which I think corresponds to situations 7 and 8. It makes it explicit that it’s possible to linger in one area of this architecture to explore it, to look at what’s going on around it, and to play with the complexity resulting from combination of the two smartphones. But there are many more ways of exploring it than what’s indicated in the score.

At the top of Figure 3, there’s also a word: “ineluctable”. These terms have been added to produce intentionality. The performer doesn’t just generate sounds, she/he animates them, gives them a soul, literally, and to give them a soul requires an intention, a meaning. It might be a concept, I don’t know, a geometric figure, something that generates intentionality. This is important in the score, but what is notated is actually a possible pathway, and this is the result therefore of the performer’s work, it’s a pathway followed by the performer during the collaboration, and which becomes a possible model for the piece’s realization. It’s interesting to note that it is this pathway that was followed by other performers who played it, as if the form was definitively fixed.

Jean-Charles
Vincent mentioned above that there is no longer a score and that « the score is in your head ». How does this work from your point of view, Jean?

Jean
That’s related to what Vincent said, in a piece like this, the idea of having an infinite number of interpretations is an incredible richness, it’s a bit like analyzing a poem, there will be as many different approaches as there are people reading the poem, which is nevertheless the same for everybody, I love that.

Jean-Charles
This is what Vincent calls “images”? In the text of the article, you can read this: “images totally internalized by the musician”.[13] Are these the words you just mentioned?

Vincent-
Raphaël
Not just these words, but all the sounds and the pathway, everything. An image in the “imaginary” sense, you see, it’s something internalized…

Jean-Charles
It’s not just something visual?

Vincent-
Raphaël
No, it’s internal. But you always have to build an image, so that things can have some consistency and be externalized.

Nicolas
My hypothesis would be that people respect the score, which is given as impossible to respect. In fact, I shouldn’t ask both of you at the same time [laugh]. If someone contacts you, Vincent, who would like to play the piece, what do you begin to tell her or him, what do you send, and so on? Conversely, if a performer comes to see Jean and says: “Ah! I thought it’s great, what do I have to do to be able to play the piece?” What do you give, and what don’t you give, or don’t give right away?

Vincent-
Raphaël
Yes. But there’s included in the score an introductory text, which guides a great deal the work to be done. That’s written down. If someone comes to ask me how to practice the piece, the first thing to say is that you have to work on each situation separately, to understand how it works, because the score isn’t just the notation. The score is also the instrument, the sound processing modules, the choices of recorded sounds, Jean’s voice, it’s the way certain types of controllers were configurated to certain types of parameters, it’s all part of the score. You have to know all that in order to navigate inside it, and, once you know that, then I think you can work on the construction and on the musical aspects. Jean knew all about it because he participated to the creation of the instrument with Christophe, so for him, it was completely obvious. But for someone else, it’s not at all obvious. This was already the case with Toucher, but here perhaps even less so. It’s not easy, because of the conception you have of an instrument on which you act physically, and your gestures produce expected results, and of a score where the intentions are transcribed.

 

3.5 Conclusion: References to André Boucourechliev and John Cage

Jean-Charles
At the end of the article “On Notational spaces and interactive works”, in the conclusion, there are references to Boucourechliev and Cage. Now, listening to what you said, it occurs to me that it’s precisely here a little different because, notably with Cage, there is a fundamental separation between the composer and the performer. The composer defines processes and then passes the relay to the performer to realize the piece without the need for any contact between them. It’s a bit the same with Boucourechliev: the performer can elaborate his or her part of the creative process in with complete independence. Consequently, it seems to me very interesting to refer to this origin of graphic scores from the period 1950-60 (more or less) and compare them with what’s happening today. But at the same time, what you are talking about today seems to me completely different from what happened then.

Vincent-
Raphaël
That’s for sure. But before talking about that, I’d just like to respond to what Nicolas was saying about Christophe’s role in this matter. He’s the designer of the system. His idea of doing something with smartphones was already an important starting point. As is usual when you start something new, at first the ideas tend to be rather vague, you don’t quite know what you can do with them, so you tend to refer to known models. In this case, Christophe’s experience is based on the model of the instrument, among other things. I was a little hasty in talking about his artistic work. He is not only a computer music programmer, but also a creator of interactive systems. And for me, the conception of interactive systems is part of the writing process. I might be the only one to say this, but I think that, fundamentally interactive system design is an integral part of the writing process. There’s a keyword that I like a lot, as it translates quite well this type of experiences: it’s the term of “agencement”. For each new piece, we find ourselves agencing musical functions – performer, composer, luthier – with technical tools, creating each time original agencing. Thus, the difference between Toucher, Bach’s Chaconne and Virtual Rhizome, Rhizome is that each time, there are different agencing between what we consider to be a score, a notation, an instrument, the performer, the composer, the role of each one, the way in which the piece is elaborated, and each time there’s a work, and therefore there’s effectively a composer. The very idea of the work of art, its configuration, the relationships between the composer and the performer, all that, gives way to particular agencements. And for me, the composer who most experimented this during the 20th century was Cage. With Cage, the works – he fabricates works, so he’s effectively a composer, he has that function – are very often particular agencing involving situations, the performer is also a theatre actor, the instruments that have to be chosen, or technical tools, installations, and so on. Obviously, for me, there’s a direct link between Cage’s work and pieces like Virtual Rhizome, in that Cage’s scores often don’t represent a finished work, they are open forms. Above all, the score is a generator of works. If you consider Cage’s Variations, it’s an object designed to produce works, in short, it’s as if you were given a model, an instruction manual designed to fabricate your own, by determining the evolution of parameters and the relationships between them. In fact, Cage proposes technical tools and supports that enable the performer to construct her or his own work. In so doing, he emancipates the performer from the traditional role of interpreter, creating a particular agencing between the performer and the score. And regarding Boucourechliev, there is definitively a link between him and Virtual Rhizome: the score is a sort of navigation map. What I said earlier about virtual architecture applies here, smartphones are like helms that enable you to navigate inside the work. Boucourechliev ‘s Archipels de Boucourechliev is a little like that, appropriately named, it’s a navigation map.

Jean-Charles
We tend to use the word dispositif instead of agencement.

Vincent-
Raphaël
Dispositif”, I used it too, you find it written in the article. Dispositif suits me fine. To dispose, layout, arrange, compose, it speaks, it’s logical. But dispositif has a double meaning. Philosophically, it’s also one of those double-edged terms: Foucault speaks of dispositifs, of imprisonment, of surveillance. And it’s true, one feels it, there’s something about the technical dispositifs which imprisons us. The Deleuzian terms of “agencement” has for me a more open meaning. There is something about agencement compared to dispositif that makes it more open, less oriented. The dispositif has a purpose. The agencement, I don’t really know what it’s for, it remains open to exploration. These are nuances, two complementary points of view of the same process.[14]

Jean-Charles
Thank you to both of you for a very rich encounter. Thank you also to Nicolas.

 


1.Christophe Lebreton : « Musicien et scientifique de formation, il collabore avec Grame depuis 1989. » Musician and educated as a scientist, he collaborates with Grame since 1989.
See: Grame

2. Xavier Garcia, musician, Lyon : Xavier Garcia

3. Charles Juliet, Rencontres avec Bram Van Velde, P.O.L., 1998.

4. « Light Wall System was developed in LiSiLoG by Christophe Lebreton and Jean Geoffroy. See LiSiLoG, Light Wall System

5. SmartFaust is both the title of a participatory concert and the name of a set of applications for smartphones (Android and Iphone) developed by Grame using the Faust language. See Grame, Smart Faust.

6. Claudio Bettinelli, percussionist, Saint-Etienne. See Claudio Bettinelli.

7. Vincent-Raphaël Carinola, Typhon, the work is inspired by Joseph Conrad’s story Typhon. See Grame, Typhon.

8. “On Notational Spaces and Interactive Works”, 2.3, 2nd paragraph.

9. Thierry De Mey, Silence Must Be: “In this piece for solo conductor, Thierry De Mey continues his research into movement at the heart of the musical ‘fact’… The conductor turns towards the audience, takes the beat of his/her heart as pulsation and begins to perform increasingly complex polyrhythms, …3 on 5, 5 on 8, getting close to the golden ratio, she/he traces the contours of a silent, indescribable music…”. Grame

10. “On Notational Spaces and Interactive Works”, op. cit. 3.1.

11. Thierry de Mey, Light music: “musical piece for a ‘solo conductor’, projections and interactive device (first performance March 2004 – Biennale Musiques en Scène/Lyon), performed by Jean Geoffroy, was produced in the Grame studios in Lyon and at the Gmem in Marseille, where Thierry De Mey was in residence.” Grame

12. Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions, trad. P. Verdevoye et N. Ibarra, Paris : Gallimard, 1951, 2014.

13. “On Notational Spaces and Interactive Works”, op. cit. 3.2.

14. See Monique David-Ménard, « Agencements déleuziens, dispositifs foucaldiens », in Rue Descartes 2008/1 (N°59), pp. 43-55 : Rue Descartes

New Notation Literature – Carl Bergstrœm-Nielsen

Western music tradition has a speciality in writing down music. After 1945, non-traditional forms emerged, on the background of changes in culture, society, beliefs and lifestyle. « Graphic notation » is just one notion among others – some notations are like drawings, but many kinds of signs, layouts and the use of verbal means also exist.

 My bibliographies at IIMA, International Improvised Music Archive, aim at mapping literature dealing with this territory, among other related ones connected to improvisation. The full title is Experimental Improvisation Practise and Notation. An Annotated Bibliography, and there is both one volume 1945-1999 and one with addenda thereafter. Presently there are more than 115 entries on notation with summaries of their contents. However, not included in this number are published editions of works, as well as publishers’ series and anthologies. See it all at www.intuitivemusic.dk/iima/legno1uk.htm .

For the most part, universities and related institutions are behind the research and publishing activity, but it should be noted that in many cases the researcher is also a practising composer and/or musician. In the sixties, many works were published on paper both in Europe and USA by commercial multinational publishers – among many others, Stockhausen, Wolff and Cage have been well documented in this way. More recently, the Notations 21 book by Sauer documents renewed interest from composers. In my bibliography referencing usage, this is called Sauer (2009;E1) – E1 refers to the systematic category of general writings on new notations. Exhibitions of new notations have taken place all the time since the seventies – more than sixty have till now been detected and listed, some with catalogues (see category K).

 Cox (2008+2010;E1) open ups a historical perspective: notation has functioned to supplement a primarily oral tradition as a mnemonic aid, as can be found in the neumes of Gregorian Chant – later the function of notation became to provide a product that could be transmitted through a market. Then, after mechanical reproduction was invented, standard notation was no longer the only way to document music. Therefore, composers could feel more free to use notation to make the idea of the work clear, while leaving detailed documentation of the performance to the electronic media and, one could importantly add, leaving the production of details of the work to the performer. Later, computer and internet technologies made information more sharable, also between art forms, Cox states further.

 Not only from published editions and anthologies of entire works, but also from a number of articles and historic treatises it is fairly easy to acquaint oneself with many different types of new notations through excerpts. Brindle (1986;H1) is an allround book on the history of Western new music with many illustrations. Bosseur (1979;H1) + (2005;E1) have a similar aim – the first one is a music history book, and the second deals with notation and provides a direct supplement to the former. It presents examples in order of increasing openness. Karkoshka (1966;E1) and its English translation (1972;E1) is a book on notations – of special interest is the section at the end of the book presenting entire works.

 Sauer (2009;E1) was already mentioned as a recent window into contemporary activity in the field. Storesund (2016;G3.1) reflects the mature development of the field of open works with new notations: focus is consistently on how to realise such works, which require a more co-creative performance practise than traditionally. Improvisation is becoming more and more a part of conservatory curriculums since the nineties, and so non-traditionally notated works also receive renewed attention. The book provides inside information for all interested musicians and could also directly serve as a basis for teaching. A number of « showcase studies » discuss the challenges and dilemmas one may encounter as a musician in nine works. Five are even featured with all nescessary playing materials available, and composers include « classics » from the fifthies and on as well as three pieces written after 2000.

 A considerable number of writings describe certain well-known works or composers. Earle Brown’s December 1952 is topping the list. Cardew’s large collection of graphic scores Treatise is frequently performed from. Christian Wolff has a special status with his introduction of cue systems in the sixties which focus on performers’ interaction. With the growth of improvisational practise later, this appears as a pioneering discovery. Roughly two decades later, the younger Zorn took up this aspect in his game pieces of the eighties which are still popular.

 Of course the common area between visual art and music notation also has its devoted authors. Buj (2014;E1) connects both worlds, investigating the significance of circular forms in graphic notations.

 Introducing, showcasing, discussing, elaborating on history, theory, philosophy, practical issues – it can all be found in the literature on new notations. To reduce the overwhelming complexity that looking at a whole library would induce, the bibliography has summaries, longer than just the titles and not the whole story, but they attempt to capture some essential aspects and keyword-like characterisations so as to make the road easier to travel for the searcher.

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