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A violinist by training, Benjamin de la Fuente took composition classes at the University and then at the Toulouse Conservatory, with Bertrand Dubedout. He then entered Gérard Grisey's class at the Paris Conservatory where he made a very strong friendship with Samuel Sighicelli, pianist and composer. Together, they founded the Sphota company and then Caravaggio.
Benjamin de la Fuente looks back on the stages of this beautiful adventure .
Benjamin de la Fuente, it was at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris that you met Samuel Sighicelli and that your musical career took shape
We were together at Grisey's and we both enrolled in Alain Savouret's generative improvisation class, a class that until then had only existed as an option. It was then that I took out my violin and began to envisage a path that would combine composition and improvisation. In the wake of this, I did the composition course at Ircam and went to the Villa Medicis in 2000. It was at this time that we decided to found Sphota...
... a company that looks more towards theatre.
Exactly. We all came out of Alain Savouret's class, Benjamin Dupé on guitar, Mié Ogura on flute, Mathieu Fèvre on clarinet, Samuel Sighicelli on keyboards and myself on violin; and we wanted to go further in the field of improvisation, in connection with gesture, space, light, sound and electronics. We had ideas and a great enthusiasm for work. Our shows started to go well and we got residencies on national and international stages, with time to rehearse and all the conditions to work. We also collaborated with silent films for the Louvre, with dance... The adventure lasted eight years during which we gave a lot of ourselves. Then the group broke up because everyone's workload became too heavy.
Caravaggio has been around since 2004! In what context was the group born?
I had written a piece for percussion and sampler, Samuel Sighicelli had written another for double bass and sampler and the four of us, Eric Echampard, the percussionist, Bruno Chevillon, the double bassist, Samuel and myself, went to La Muse en Circuit (National Centre for Musical Creation) to record them. The work was done fairly quickly and we took advantage of the remaining studio time to improvise all four of us: with Samuel, who was at the Villa Médicis at the time, we took the time to rework and edit the seven hours of recording to make a record that was produced by the Groupe de Recherche Musical. The album was heard by the director of the Mouvance jazz festival in Marseille, who invited us to perform on stage. The challenge put us to work and at the same time led to the birth of Caravaggio.
In 2007, Sphota switched to Caravaggio...
Sphota became a production cooperative that took over Caravaggio and managed Samuel's and my personal projects. It was at this time that Caravaggio's activity really started. The Larrieu brothers heard our second album and asked us to write the music for their next film, L'amour est un crime parfait. We still have a very strong relationship with the image and the cinema, as shown by our fourth CD Tempus fugit released at the beginning of the year. See Michèle Tosi'sreview on our website
To discover their previous album, Turn up, released in 2017
How is the work going in the group?
In friendship and with each other's motivation. As composers, Samuel and I bring our ideas and a global conception of the project. But the material as well as the realisation are collective and could not exist without the contribution of the two improvisers, Bruno Chevillon and Eric Echampard. The difficulty is to bring this common energy to the highest level.
Does this practice of improvisation spill over into your composition?
It obviously feeds it, but today I try to separate the two areas more clearly: by digging into the abstraction and the conceptual dimension in my scores, where I call on improvisation less and less; by going more and more into non-composition - by which I mean being in the sound and not in the reflection - when I play live. I don't want to be the same in both situations.
In a country like France, where people like to separate genres and create categories, do you feel that you are recognised in both areas of your activity?
What interests me is the quality of the projects and the collaborative work with musicians who are committed to research and thinking about new concert formats. I am thinking of my last collaboration with the Soundinitiative ensemble, with whom I had such enriching exchanges, both human and artistic. I would also like to get out of the hexagon, where we sometimes suffocate: to collaborate with the ensembles Recherche or Musikfabrik, whose work I really like.
You have just created a new project with Caravaggio and the ensemble Court Circuit at the Festival Présences at Radio France in Paris: the written and the unwritten are always in conflict!
It was commissioned by Radio France and we are very happy about it. The conditions are not the same as for Zones libres insofar as it is our own ensemble Caravaggio. Fluid mechanics is a two-headed composition, Samuel's and mine, in which we sought out the qualities of each group, without asking the Court-Circuit musicians to improvise much. The show is immersive with a lot of spatialization work done with Ircam technology.
Fluid Mechanics, on France Musique, from the 45th minute
How did you experience this second confinement? Did it have an impact on your work?
12-hour days of composition, rehearsals, Ircam studio, production, interviews, photos, writing texts, etc. A life in a hurry has meant that I have not had time to really suffer from this second confinement. I think it will be much harder in the coming months and years.
For the moment, it has not affected my work. I worked with the same conviction and real excitement. It was also important to keep this state of mind in order to unite the whole team, musicians and technicians, and to create a good working atmosphere.
However, I am strangely aware of one small thing: the theme of Fluid Mechanics is that of the City, and yet, with Samuel, what we have mainly retained in our phonographs (sound recordings of the real thing) are rather gatherings of humans, stadiums, demonstrations, stations, places of worship, squares. This has disappeared today. This is totally unconscious on our part, but certainly not by chance.
Did the planned concerts and shows take place? Under what conditions and in what state of mind?
The concerts have become mere recordings. I can live with it for the moment, but this job is most meaningful when you share it with a live audience. Especially as our music is more difficult to understand on record or streaming. In the end, it is the concert that provides the best listening context for creative music.
What projects are you working on today?
I am planning to write another string quartet, to make a solo record (violin, tenor guitar and electronics) and to take up a musical show Crash Bang for a percussionist and electronics with the director Jos Houben. I also want to take advantage of the slowdown in activity to work on the instrument in order to "sound" differently and to bring new musical proposals to Caravaggio in particular. And then the carnal link with the instrument is irreplaceable and indispensable for me.
Benjamin de la Fuente - Ex Nihilo- Bruits Blancs Festival 2020 from dautrescordes on Vimeo.
Finally, despite the period, I started to think about writing an opera.
An opera!
I must admit that I have been thinking about it lately. But I fear the heaviness of the institution and the work with singers who are often less experienced than instrumentalists in contemporary writing. I have my director but not yet my subject. I need a good team, time and reflection: the idea should emerge, something that touches us, that is neither too abstract nor too intellectual. I think of the Malcolm X text that I have a woman say in French, with a piano and an orchestra that explode under her words in One fire, created during the Présences 2015 festival. It's this kind of subject anchored in the collective memory that I would like to deal with.
Does this define new challenges in your composition?
There will be fewer projects in the future for everyone and great difficulty in producing them. That is a certainty. So I'll have to carefully choose the one I'm willing to put all my energy and creativity into and that I feel is essential in my artistic path and Fluid Mechanics is absolutely representative of that state of mind. I will no longer be satisfied with writing a good piece, well written as a good professional. Everything must gain in strength, beauty and give me the feeling of necessity. By the way, with Sphota we have a saying: "produce less but (much) better".
I have never felt so much that each project could be the last. But I'm not sad about it as long as this new constraint encourages me to dig deeper and strengthen the artistic dimension of my work as a composer and musician.
Interview by Michèle Tosi
