The HANATSUmiroir ensemble, founded in Strasbourg in 2010 by Ayako Okubo and Olivier Maurel, is developing a certain conception of contemporary music performance, combining musical creation with scenography, video, dance, visual arts, lighting design, theater and poetry. Since then, HANATSUmiroir has initiated a number of commissioned works, experimenting with new ways of representing and listening to music.

What is contemporary music? What is experimental music? How can we clearly name singular forms of writing, without creating boundaries that artificially oppose them? Scholarly, academic music? Experimental, open music?

The questions posed by Ayako Okubo and Olivier Maurel could not but intersect with those that drive us in Hémisphère son: re-interrogating musical writing (at the table, on stage, improvised, etc.) as much as the formats in which music is performed (indoors, outdoors, collective, interactive, virtual, etc.).

All of which the HANATSUmiroirensemble, accompanied by double bassist Louis Siracusa Schneider and Maxime Kurvers, explores with composer Elsa Biston in a new creation: Attentifs, ensemble

Attentifs, ensemble is a listening experience and concert situation, which attempts to align the attention of listeners, in order to experience the strength of a shared perception. It's a reflection on music as a creator of bonds, a collective experience that intensifies our relationship with the present, that builds a shared history by inviting us to be demanding, together, of the quality of our attention to the world.

Indeed, how can we experience the concert as an inclusive and welcoming place, where we " make music " together, to use Christopher Small's beautiful expression? A space where shared listening creates links, relationships - relationships between musicians, between musicians and listeners, between musicians and sound.
Where " music-making deals with relationships between people, between people and the rest of the cosmos, and perhaps also with ourselves, our bodies and sometimes even the supernatural world - provided we believe in it. "

Attention is a political and collective issue. It's what connects us to reality, what enables us to build a shared, common reality. At the same time, however, it is a commercial commodity and the battleground of a permanent war. We urgently need to realize that attention is a common good that must be cultivated, defended and preserved, and that it is the foundation of our power to act on the world around us.

Sound informs us about the state of things and beings.
It creates a relationship between two people or groups of people; it is the vector of an attention to the world - to the nothings, the little nothings, the details, the complexity, the thickness of a situation - to motives, intentions, sensibilities; it is the vector of an attention that rhymes with a form of availability to reality, of empathy.

The structure of the show is that of guided listening: phrases are projected onto a screen, offering participants different ways of listening. The writing of the piece is a weaving together of these phrases and the music or actions of the performers. In this way, musicians and spectators, through their listening, activated by the proposals of this silent "voice", are linked in a single form in which they become equal players.

The "voice" will borrow from composers, thinkers and musicians who have reflected on listening, in the form of theoretical phrases or concrete, pictorial proposals: quotations from John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, John Corbett, Alexander Baumgarten or Hildegard Westerkamp, who tells us that " Western aesthetics separates musical experience from its context. When someone is moved in this sense, they are moved inside, intimately, privately, as an individual ".

This conception of music as an objective entity is accompanied by an individualization of listening - so even at a concert, emotion is not shared between audience members, it does not pass through the collective experience; on the musician's side, whether the audience is there or not, it's more or less the same. But for Makis Solomos, " this conception of music tends to depoliticize listening in the original sense of the term, i.e. to take it out of the sphere of the polis ".

With phonographic reproduction, the work is detachable from the context in which it is heard, and it is possible to listen to it in a domestic context; then to take it with us wherever we go, in order to build a bubble, a territory that separates us from the outside world. The use of cell phones has transformed music into a tool for isolating ourselves in public spaces, and we are losing the habit of reading our surroundings and our contact with the world.

In contrast, in Attentifs, ensembleposes the question of a music that would develop and enable attention to the world and the awareness of sharing a common space. This music cannot be reduced to an object - recordable and transportable, for example. We'll be listening together, with musician and audience observing each other in this collective experience as we try to better perceive what's at stake in attention and listening.

Attentifs ensemble is a collective experiment in attention.
An invitation to synchronize our listening, through a projection of phrases, suggestions and quotations that suggest different ways of listening.

With :
Elsa Biston: electronics, Ayako Okubo: contrabass flute, Olivier Maurel: percussion, Louis Siracusa-Schneider: contrabass, Maxime Kurvers: collaboration on stage set-up, Raphaël Siefert, Léa Kreutzer: lighting

Coproductions: Hémisphère son-Paysages Humains, La Pop-Incubateur artistique et citoyen Paris, Centre Culturel André Malraux, Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, GMEM - Centre national de création musicale, Marseille.

Dates:
- April 5 & 6, 2023 at 7:30pm at La Pop - 61 Quai de la Seine, 75019 Paris
- May 20, 2023 at 5pm at Festival Musique Action - Centre Culture André Malraux - Esplanade Jack Ralite, 3 Rue de Parme, 54500 Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy.

The HANATSUmiroir ensemble is the winner of the Prix Régional 2022 pour l'égalité femmes-hommes awarded by the Région Grand-Est.