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At the Théâtre Marie Bell in Paris on 5 April, the composer Bernard Cavanna is organising a concert to mark the release of his new album, with the complicity of theEmpreinte Digitale label and Florence Riou. The release of this new monographic album, combining his two violin concertos and his "Geek Bagatelles", in the splendid version of the violinist Noëmi Schindler and the Orchestre de Picardie, gives us the opportunity for a casual conversation, as Bernard Cavanna likes it. A look back at his career, his 1001 lives, his vision of composition, his tastes, his resistance...
Bernard, there are twenty years between your two violin concertos. It seems to me that the first one is more in the romantic tradition, while the second one, "Scordatura", really takes us somewhere else. How do you see this evolution?
I don't quite understand... It's true that in the first concerto, there are classical archetypes, even if, as I like to say, the soloist is crushed by the orchestra rather than magnified! It's true that it yields to a certain tradition, but it's almost a writing tradition (i.e. we start from a "non-octave" mode, in reality a mini-chromaticism that is broken up, but these are speculations on notes), whereas in "Scordatura", which is nevertheless closer to the classical tradition in its three-movement form, it's rather objects that are manipulated, a bit like a painter who makes collages. I take these objects elsewhere; they become a kind of organic soup, with layers that clash. In the first one, you can almost have an idea of the vertical, you can align things that are coherent, which is not the case in "Scordatura": the strata are autonomous.
And then "Scordatura" is crossed - and this is linked to old age - by the idea of the old world; the one in which I lived, with its great values - the great monuments of the centuries of music that preceded us - in opposition to our new society. I think that we are currently experiencing the beginning of a change in civilisation, with reflexes that are more primary, harder, and that I have symbolised here by techno: it just came to me! And often, what you hear in techno - even if there are certainly some great things - is the "beat", i.e. a rhythm summarised in a single pulse. Compared to the finesse of Alban Berg (I'm thinking of the "Concerto in Memory of an Angel", where everything is chiselled, beautiful and poetic), it's something else... I wanted to confront these two things.
And in the second concerto there is also another 'situation'. I wanted to imagine Noëmi as a child - she lost her father at a very early age, as she saw him fall into a precipice. I thought of this little object, this clown (a music box that she has kept) that plays a little Brazilian music. It's a very naive idea, but I wanted to imagine her playing this music on the violin, to her mother or father (in fact, Noëmi started playing music with the cello). It's a biographical situation, but I used it to take her elsewhere!
You once said that you had a "pragmatic" approach to music, at least not only cerebral or conceptual, and that for you composing was above all "giving life" to thoughts...
It's also linked to my background, because I didn't have any training. In this case, you build yourself with what you hear; concerts, and especially records. When you're a kid, it's more like that, it's the LPs. And then you make your own choices. It didn't make sense to compose in the aesthetics of a particular place, played by a particular conductor or performer! Obviously, you can make mistakes, and that happened to me sometimes... And I asked myself questions. For example, to understandOhana 's music, which I didn't understand at first, and Xenakis ' music, which was almost a terrorist for me! When I heard "Nomos Alpha" for example, I didn't understand that music at all.
Or post-serial music, which I've always had trouble with. However, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, I copied a large part of "Séquence" for voice, drums and instrumental ensemble by Jean Barraqué - this was before the Marteau sans Maître - to understand the series that were combined (it's a complex work!). I was trying to get into it; I said to myself: "you're useless, you don't know it, these guys are world famous, you have to know it"! But today, still and always, even if I recognise a certain grace, a delicacy, a strength in their music, it's not my way, because it's too complex, too "cerebral". I prefer more pragmatic composers, like Xenakis sometimes is, with a tribal, pulsating sound, or Ligeti when he sends us all his sounds, his polyphonies, without caution: there, we are immediately seduced!
In Gennevilliers, for example, when we did Ligeti's "Ramifications" for string orchestra for the kids, it spoke to them much more than the Bach concerto. Because Bach consists of notes, and you have to understand the harmony, the modulations... This is different, you get the sound live! That's also pragmatism.
And pragmatism in music also involves the relationship with the performer? Do you move forward with the performer?
Yes, or let's say that it's often the performer who pulls me along (laughs)! This relationship with the performer is a bit like with Georges Aperghis. When I met Noémi, a lot of things changed; there was a shift towards strings. Until then, I had been working more with the winds, the saxophonist Daniel Kientzy, or with the percussion, the zarb, Pablo Cueco... Like Varèse, I had a kind of distance from the strings, and this reflex of telling myself that they represented the bourgeoisie, whereas the winds... that was jazz. TheArt Ensemble of Chicago, for example, influenced me enormously; the saxophonist in the group, the pianist McCoy Tyner... all these musicians, and Charlie Mingus too, a lot!
Do you still listen to jazz?
Oh yes, two or three years ago I even did a Mingus summer. I reread his book "Less than a dog", and other books about Mingus. I had films about Mingus and CDs at home. For a month and a half, two months, I was with Mingus, from morning to night!
And Thelonious Monk?
When I was 16, I bought a jazz record that included all the greats of that era: Fats Waller... and of course Monk. I still have the record, I bought it back. By Monk, there was "Round Midnight", which I transcribed when I was 16, listening to the LP: I still have this transcription in my head, I can play it for you if you want! Besides, I had a completely rotten ear, since I had worked for a long time with a piano tuned a tone and a half lower.
Monk also often played on rotten pianos...
That's what's extraordinary about Monk: even with a rotten piano, he did something, it's not like Keith Jarrett!
So like many self-taught people, you listened to and analysed a lot of music; in the end, was that your school?
Yes, I did the analysis myself. But at university, I had a wonderful teacher, Francis Bayer, except that I often contradicted him in his analyses. For example, he said that in his four operas Wagner had tried to create a cycle of keys, that it was an intellectual process, that there was a logic in the fact that Rhine Gold begins in E flat and Twilight of the Gods is in D flat.
I told him that if he had written Twilight of the Gods in D flat, it was mainly because of the brass, because it sounds much better in that key. There were disagreements about things like that, and also about Berg, Mussorgsky... But I really liked this guy!
There is almost a paradox, Bernard - or perhaps a logic - in the fact that you were a self-taught musician and yet you became a conservatory director...
Yes... "dirlo", without ever having attended the conservatory! I was 33 years old... At the beginning, I was shy about people with prizes, composers with writing prizes. What's more, there were teachers there like Amy Flammer or Claudine Mellon... But right away, it took! One is always wary of the principal, because there are many lousy principals, and they can destroy a conservatory in no time... I learned a lot from the teachers, and that's how I met Noémi. She was a student. I remember very well when she put her backpack down. She was from Switzerland. I was immediately fascinated by her, from the beginning she played with an incredible sound. As soon as she played it was something! We did the Schubert quintet with two cellos. She played the second violin part, and I much preferred the second! After that, we did some film music with her, with that fascinating sound, always! Afterwards, she continued her studies with Amoyal in Switzerland and especially with Aïda Stucki-Piraccini, who agreed to take her on as a pupil, even though she was already very old. She listened to Noëmi, and took her on without hesitation. There was a very strong bond between them.
So you weren't really into strings, and it's thanks to Noémi that you came to strings!
Yes, it's almost an exaggeration, all these pieces written for strings! I was happy to meet her again for the second concerto "Scordatura" in 2019, but we had to look for things together, especially with those out of tune, deformed violins. There was a connection to my deafness. At the time - but fortunately this has changed with prostheses - the same interval could sound different to my ears in the treble and in the midrange. By changing all the positions on these violins, I found myself on instruments that became "foreign".
Did you immediately think of four violins tuned differently?
I wanted seven at the beginning, because I started with the "Seven Words of Christ", as seen by Michel Rostaing (the author of the novel "The Son"): he was the director of the Scène Nationale de Quimper and a stage director. He was the director of the Scène Nationale de Quimper and a stage director. He was the one who directed Georges Aperghis's "Récitations" at its creation: a wonderful guy! I reread the book he wrote, his vision of the "Seven Words of Christ" - after the death of his son at the age of 22: there is in this book all the expression of his pain, his metaphysical doubts.
In the concerto, there was to be a violin part, in and out of each Word of Christ, and I wanted seven violins out of tune. In the end, it took a different path.
Another difference between the two violin concertos is the instrumentation. In the first one, there are no bagpipes, for example, nor mandolin!
That's true, but there is an accordion!
The bagpipe is an uncompromising instrument; you can't do anything with it! Either it plays or it doesn't. It crushes, it dominates. It crushes, it dominates... but I love this timbre (which I hated when I was a kid): it's a very captivating timbre, it's primary! It's one of the first instruments. When you read Plato, he says that the Aulos - even if it's different from the bagpipes - was an instrument that was too "exciting", and that it should be thrown out! So there was a form of censorship of the double reed and it reminds me of the reservations we have with the bagpipes. And I also like the idea of associating an instrument like the violin, which is rather delicate, with a rather rough instrument.
There is also the "Geek bagatelles" on this record. It's a very endearing work with several entries, with the reference to Beethoven, therefore to the music of the past, and the link to modernity, with smartphones, tools that are a bit "barbaric" for you...
Modernity ... or old-fashionedness (!), because when Damien Pousset from the Grame de Lyon suggested it to me, I had just come out of "A l'agité du Bocal", where I'd had a lot of trouble with the controversy surrounding the work; I was practising a form of musical expressionism that was too exaggerated. I said to myself: "maybe I need to calm down, to find other things", and the fact of having this old-fashioned instrument, the smartphone, with the pretence of being able to compete with the magnificent instruments of the orchestra, of great tradition, could help me, by contrast.
And then, it coincided with the destruction of the temple of Bêl in Syria by Daech... There was this barbarity, which can be found in the whole human race! Moreover, no one escapes barbarism and I am part of it! Like all of us, I remain in my comfort zone... We all live parallel to the misery of others, despite our ideology of sharing. Look, today in France, during the election period, we only talk about money and migration, and especially not about degrowth, to ensure the future of the planet...
So for "Geek Bagatelles", there was this barbarity, and I imagined this idea of an imaginary archaeological field, but musical, with a work that would be destroyed, one of the monuments of thought, because the most beautiful in the history of humanity - if there are any left - is Beethoven's 9th, it's Schubert, it's Rabelais, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, these monuments, which give a semblance of hope to our species... compared to Putin or the others!
And the monuments of today? Cavanna for example ?
Oh no, not at all... I told you one day, what I hope is that my music is like a small stone that I throw on the surface of the water and that makes waves ! I hope that it does for as long as possible... But I also know that the stone will eventually fall, and that doesn't matter! The important thing is to communicate with people, like at the concert on 5 April at the Théâtre Marie Bell, this relationship we have with our contemporaries is essential for me. Moreover, that was the ambition in Bach's time! We made music to share it with our contemporaries, we didn't make it so that we could hear it three centuries later. We need to exchange, to forge links; that's what's most important to me. So I could totally die right now... because the most beautiful thing in life, the fact of weaving links with others, we did it together!
Precisely, Bernard, you have made many connections: as a composer, as a conservatory director, as a composition teacher too, I think? Did you have students such as Bastien David?
Yes, for a year, but I was doing too many things, and I entrusted him to José Manuel López López, who is wonderful and whom I like very much. But we did everything we could to produce his pieces well, to record them well, and to give young composers the means to do so. We brought in Court-Circuit, TM+, 2e2m... so that they could have the truth about their music and a good sound track. And this enabled him to go and work with Gérard Pesson afterwards. Bastien is also a magnificent human being; he has a great curiosity. He has travelled a lot, and that has allowed him to escape formatting. His music is very appealing. He is so intelligent and fine!
In Genevilliers, I had little kids (they were 9/10 years old). You give them two chords, and you ask them to find other chords that are a bit enigmatic, often in modal universes. The tonality comes later. I've stayed in touch with some of them; I'm godfather to their children now! Afterwards, as I had too much work, I appointed a teacher only for the little ones, well children up to 16 years old.
Because in the end that's how I started! My piano teacher, who was very old (she was born in 1888), had inherited an Armenian method: she gave me a chord and I had to invent a melody. Or the other way round, she would give me a melody and I would look for the harmony. I did the same thing when I was teaching, I would play the same games with my students. It's a way of appropriating the material. You go beyond reproducing a written text. You look for things yourself, like a gypsy guitarist who invents on the instrument, or a jazz musician... The score can be sclerotic!
So you chose not to be only a composer. We could say that you are "a musician in the city", because you have invested yourself on several levels.
In fact, I made a very good living by writing for the cinema, advertising and the theatre. The theatre taught me a lot. The cinema was harder: you're less free... And the more I did that, the more I wanted to get back to contemporary music, "my milieu" in the end, because there, you don't cheat, you go as far as you can, whereas film music is more like a craftsman's job. I wanted to find that again, and when I came back from the Villa Médicis, I decided to go back to the source and work for myself, and there was the post of director in Gennevilliers, with a brilliant and understanding town hall. I was very free. I never went in the morning, but I could stay late at night. I composed in the morning, and especially during the holidays. A guy like Bartok, a genius like him, also worked during the holidays. We lost a lot of his music because of that; he didn't have the time. What madness!
I liked working in Gennevilliers: it was a real-life experience. All the problems that we encounter during this election period can be found here in Gennevilliers. This town hall is unbelievable: it has always put a lot of emphasis on culture, and that doesn't bring in any votes, or very few...
La peau sur la table from Delphine de Blic on Vimeo.
This work in Gennevilliers allowed you not to be in your bubble, to be active!
Yes, and it also allowed me to bring the works to as many people as possible. Because in the end, the "heritage" repertoire (a strange word!) is very little promoted. When you see a cleaning lady from Gennevilliers crying while listening to Berg's "Concerto in memory of an Angel", you get the impression that something has been done! And we fight! I have never gone to Gennevilliers "backwards". I've always enjoyed being with them.
For me, real life is here! Composing is too solitary, it's painful...
I also have a handicap, if I think of someone like Yoshihisa Taïra, whom I often worked with and who made a living from composing (quite badly in truth). The problem with me is that I don't produce! The first movement of "Scordatura" is a year's work, for only eight minutes of music. I'm no good; it's laborious, lamentable, if I compare myself to a Benoît Menut or a Pascal Dusapin: those guys, they go for it! Or Hector Parra, whom I saw recently in Rome ... He's working on an opera that he thinks he'll finish in four and a half months. When I was working on my opera before, I thought one year would be enough ... and I took seven years!
To each his own, Bernard: we have other examples of this!
How do you see yourself in relation to your French contemporaries and the music being written in France today, you who say you are more in the vein of the composers from the East: Stroë, Ligeti, or Xenakis, that Greek born in Romania?
Yes, that music was a shock! For example, Xenakis' "Orestie/Oresteïa"!
But I am also sensitive to other music. For example, Yann Robin. I discovered his "Papillon Noir"; a real shock! He constructs a completely personal sound material, with things he has worked on enormously, and which he manages to transmit to the performers. He invents a whole language, and it works! He has found his way, just as Bastien David has found his way, which is different from mine. I'm still too attached to the note, to the pitch. That's why I say I'm a 19th century composer. I don't dare enough. But if I dared... maybe I wouldn't be real!
Research, so-called experimental music, avant-garde, modernity... do these words mean anything to you?
We've had enough of modernity! Boulez' "Penser la musique aujourd'hui" traumatised me when I was young. And I also subscribed to the magazine "Musique en Jeu". It was up to the person who had the most obscure discourse, even to express simple things! You had to show your science, come with your briefcase to justify the piece. Coming from a rather modest background, I didn't trust that, I tended to be rejected.
I have always been a bit wary of anyone who wanted to be "avant-garde" to justify their position as a prophet.
There was a phrase by Cocteau who said that a work was obscure for its contemporaries, but that it was no longer obscure 50 years later. We were in that ideology, and now it's false, because we know very well that certain works from 60 or 70 years ago are still just as obscure today, they have not been enlightened by time. So I've always been suspicious of them! In my time, there were these postures of modernity. I remember that at the Royan Festival in the 1970s and 80s; it was up to the one who would bring the greatest modernity with incredibly complex scores. You have to find your way, in relation to the dominant ideas. It's not that easy!
When I sit on juries at the Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique Danse in Paris, I sometimes see young Colombian, Chinese or Taiwanese composers who put aside their sensitivity and gradually become formatted. They go toIRCAM, they make the same music, and complicated things! For me, it's a bit like denying themselves. In fact, they didn't make these choices, they follow a movement. You have to avoid imitating composers who are well established.
So for you, Bernard, IRCAM is "a mould", a place of formatting?
Yes, completely! We're involved in something that costs a lot of money and employs a lot of people, and we can't stop this thing, we have to pay for the heating of the building, so we continue! But this money would be given to musicians, performers, composers, it would be much better, and it would reduce the cost of concerts.
It's the same in the theatre. We have beautiful, magnificent hulls! If you think of Chaillot, just the heating bills alone... it's perhaps the budget of the Théâtre du Soleil, or of the Théâtre la Tempête at the Cartoucherie. But this is a very French way of operating; we give more to the building and the administration than to the people who actually do it.
So obviously, the Manifeste festival at IRCAM, I don't dispute that, it's magnificent! They have the means. Some of the works programmed are great, but there are also more "childish" things: sensors, that kind of thing... Jimmy Hendrix had two pedals, and he handled them very well, and that also distorted the sounds! And besides, even the audience is not really convinced. I've never seen a real effervescence, a desire...
We're in the process of "farting the music" with these people! Contemporary music is becoming a caricature, with these stupid patches... that don't even work!
Have you ever been tempted by electronic music?
I tried... when Laurent Bayle was at IRCAM, he invited me for four months, but I did "one month" (smile)! I worked with the OpenMusic software. I tried to formalise what I had written for my fake Mass, but each time, the software offered me shit. I couldn't take it anymore, I gave up!
I had a piece for them though, for bontempi organ and real time device (the consecrated formula). They didn't want it. Yet I had the title: "Well, too bad"... It's a pity!
But there can be great things. I heard a piece by Jesper Nordin with optical sensors and bells, performed by TM+: that was nice!
But otherwise, we are often in a kind of impasse. When you come with your computer, you are a bit far from the music. Music is not that for me; it's matter, rich sounds. Digital sounds are often poor. When you compose music, you sculpt matter, and behind a violin sound, there is a performer.
Is one an interpreter behind one's console?
I'm mean... ?
You once said that you had little to say in music and that you had said it all in three works? Is that true?
Yes, it's true! I have few ideas. In reality, you only have one or two ideas. For Picasso, it was maybe two, or three, but Ravel had one idea, or one and a half, which he declined, and that's great! I love it! It's like a musician who takes a raga mode and develops it for sixteen hours. I love it, but it's an idea!
The same goes for Chopin, for Schubert; his "Impromptus", his "Musical Moments"... it's very beautiful, but it's just one idea!
What music are you working on at the moment?
At the moment I'm working on arrangements for a record by Louise Jallu, her third album, and that makes me feel good. Sometimes I work on her own music, or heritage music, classics or tango standards, and it's comfortable because we have fun! Otherwise, I still have a piece for bandoneon and orchestra to finish for the Orchestre de Bretagne and Louise Jallu.
I would also like to do a show for children (or rather for adults, but sung by children) on the words of real dictators (Pinochet, Mao Tse-tung, Goebbels ...)!
And that these words reflect on the adults.
And I would like to take as my last song Tsvetaeva's poem that I once set to music in my "Five Melodies in Key, with Expiry Date".
I hope to have the time...
What kind of dictator's words would the children sing?
It will be nothing but nice, harmless words, not warlike things. It could be the PSG anthem too, "We shall overcome...".
It's hope ... but you can see where it ends up, when you put Pol Pot in front ...
You said that with "A l'agité du Bocal" you had gone too far in the expressiveness, the excess, that you wanted to take a distance from that. Did you want to move towards a form of abstraction? Abstraction isn't really your thing?
No, indeed... it's not really my thing. I don't like it!
There has to be life in your music?
Yes... life is the hardest and most important thing in my music, including in the arrangements I make.
I'm thinking of Beethoven, for example. If you take his first sonatas, often the first themes are quite simple, even naïve (sings). But he manages to bring these little objects to life, throughout the movement, and that's what's interesting! Much more than the emphasis of a beautiful Liszt theme; once you've heard it, you don't remember much, it's like a marshmallow... Whereas in Beethoven's work there's life! For example, the motif in the "Appassionata" is very simple - in the first and third movements - but there is such energy in it! In fact, it's the energy that's important; something that's a little bit alive and tense, and you follow its evolution...
Tensions, energy, ruptures, that's what characterizes your music?
Exactly... that's it! but not necessarily with a very beautiful object at the beginning.
Are you talking about beauty?
Yes, you're right, what does beauty mean?
Interview by Anne Montaron
