)
The idea of challenging the frontal space of the concert is not new. In fact, even as the notion of the paying concert was being invented at the end of the 17th century, other arrangements were being tested. For ideological, scenographic, narrative or aesthetic reasons, numerous organizers and artists proposed alternative forms, breaking away from the unique model of the Italian stage. But these ways of experiencing music come from much further back, and the frontal concert has never been taken for granted. Here's a brief, non-exhaustive history.
Long before the emergence of the Italian stage in the 16th century, there was no shortage of examples of immersive, interdisciplinary, audience-participation and performance-based scenography in places not originally intended for musical dissemination - five notions that seem so contemporary, but which probably go back to the origins of music. It should be noted that, in many traditional cultures, the difference between the musician and the audience does not exist or is much less rigid, the musical performance is by essence collective.
In the Middle Ages, liturgical dramas and mysteries, performed on church porches and forecourts, are typical examples of a scenography at the antipodes of our traditional concerts. Some mysteries, half-popular, half-sacred theater supported by music, were held on a circular stage surrounded by an active audience, totally involved in the fiction, sometimes over several days, representing, for example, Christ's passions truer than life, in the intense fervor of a popular collective devotion, still found today in some religious processions.
Later, between the Renaissance and the Baroque, we can note the spatialized sound immersion made possible by the double choir, the split orchestra and the soloists distributed in the galleries at the four corners of religious buildings, from Giovanni Palestrina in the 16th century to Claudio Monteverdi or Isabella Leonarda in the 17th, or even Antonio Vivaldi in the following century. There is no shortage of enthusiastic accounts of these fascinating voices and instrumental sounds, like angels descending from heaven, for example in St. Mark's Basilica in Venice (the works of Giovanni Gabrieli at the turn of the 17th century) or in one of the four churches attached to Venice's ospedali , where young orphans with extraordinary musical talents performed until the end of the 18th century.
The discipline of the front concert
The construction of the frontal concert scenography, which is now commonplace, never flowed naturally. In the first place, it took a long time for audiences to adopt the quasi-religious silence expected of them (many musicians complained about this, as did Joseph Haydn on his two London trips). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a virtuoso stroke was applauded in the middle of a piece, and enthusiasm or disapproval was expressed at all times, especially between the different movements of a work. It wasn't until the second half of the 19th century that new habits slowly took hold: a discipline governing the meeting of professional musicians in front of an anonymous, attentive and silent audience, within the framework of an exclusively musical performance. A strange ritual if ever there was one, where "the audience, by institution, is always in a contemplative attitude towards music considered as an object. The works are performed before them as a spectacle for the ear"(1).
Music of the French Revolution
At the end of the Enlightenment, just as this ritual had begun to take shape over the past century, particularly in France, through various societies such as the Concert spirituel or the Concert de la Loge Olympique, the ten years of the French Revolution invented new ones. The aim was to get people to adhere to the new political ideal under construction, at a time when the foundations of our understanding of the world were crumbling under the Ancien Régime, culminating in regicide. The period invented immense outdoor ceremonies, combining theater, solemn processions and battle re-enactments, with the participation of gigantic orchestras, rich in wind and percussion to be as sonorous as possible, in the service of edifying spectacles commemorating great dates, heroes and martyrs, to the music of François-Joseph Gossec, Etienne-Nicolas Méhul or Jean-François Lesueur.
Romantic spatialization
Romantic symphonic music owes a great deal to these performances, starting with Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, known as the "Eroica", directly derived from this aesthetic model. Hector Berlioz, who was a pupil of Lesueur, also drew much inspiration from them. In addition to his Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840) for wind instruments, he championed immersive spatialization. His Symphonie fantastique (1830) features a funeral knell in its last movement, "Songe d'une nuit de Sabat", placed in the courtyard of the Conservatoire, resounding from outside the auditorium to the great surprise of listeners. However, this was still a poor substitute for the unleashing of the brass instruments in his Requiem (1837), divided into four groups and placed in the four corners of the Invalides, to resemble the trumpets of the Last Judgment in the "Tuba mirum", Overlooking the audience in the Eglise des Invalides, they swirl their questions and answers overhead, before a prodigious mass of sixteen timpani, two bass drums and four gongs descend on him, this time head-on, pierced by the sounds of the brass instruments as they continue their quadraphonic dialogue.
Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) devoted the last years of his life to an unfinished work that was to fulfill his vision: Mystère. Only the "Preliminary Act" was sketched out. Through this composition, which appeals to all the senses and integrates dance, the active participation of spectators and various rites - which he imagined would be created at the foot of the Himalayas, in a spherical temple created for the occasion - he was to bring about the apocalypse that would put an end to the Universe and free Man from his carnal envelope. Quite a program - but never realized...
Furniture music
Erik Satie, on the other hand, followed through on his less ambitious (or megalomaniacal) "musique d'ameublement" project: "fundamentally industrial" music intended to provide a pleasant background for conversation or strolling. The first attempt is Vexation (1893), composed at the end of his relationship with the painter Suzanne Valadon, a repetitive piece of music if ever there was one: "To play this motif 840 times in a row, it will be good to prepare beforehand, and in the greatest silence, by serious immobilities." Satie perfected the experiment in 1917 with the Carrelage phonique and Tapisserie en fer forgé, music intended to be played by small ensembles to accompany a visit to a painting exhibition. Then, in 1920, he collaborated with Darius Milhaud on music for an intermission(Chez un bistrot, Un salon), during which he was annoyed by the attentive silence of the audience, who sat down when the music resumed: "Mais parlez donc! Keep moving! Don't listen!"
Happenings by Cage and Fluxus
In fact, Vexation was the occasion of a happening organized by John Cage on September 9 and 10, 1963, at New York's Pocket Theater, where he presented a complete version (which Satie had probably never really fantasized about), with twelve pianists taking turns from 6pm to 6:40am the following day. Twenty minutes spent at the concert meant a five-cent refund on the admission price. If you stayed for the whole concert, you even earned twenty cents. Such was the case of a certain Karl Schenzer who, after more than twelve hours in the concert hall, declared: "I'm all revived, not tired at all. Time? What is time? In this music, the boundaries between certain aspects of the different art forms are abolished"(2).
The post-war happening is one of the most fertile avenues for questioning the traditional concert. In his first musical happening in 1952, 4'33, John Cage knew in advance that the sounds of the audience's reactions of expectation, questioning, impatience and disapproval would fill the silence of the three-movement piece notated tacet (the term used in Western notation to indicate that an instrumentalist should remain silent for the duration of the movement). The same is true of Fluxus performances from 1960 onwards, which call everything into question, from the concepts of instrument, stage, spectator and musician to that of music itself. For example, La Monte Young's Composition 1960 No. 3, performed in Yoko Ono's loft, announces to the audience that they can do whatever they like, while No. 6 invites us to invert the relationship between performers and audience members, with the former sitting and observing the latter.
Stemming from the Fluxus movement, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman illustrate the abolition of boundaries between artistic languages (beyond opera, of course), through their multiple performances mixing Paik's video installations and Moorman's cello, or even a hybrid instrument between cello and television sets.
The United States is also a hotbed of musical performance, with its share of improvisation, indeterminacy, fragility and, above all, experimentation. Sonic Arts Union was formed by four composers, successors to John Cage: Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma. They performed from 1965 to 1976 in America and Europe. Their performances sometimes emphasize loss of control over sound matter, producing interesting magmas. Using tape recorders or devices such as the ring modulator, they process live sounds from synthesizers or microphones (including contact microphones placed on instruments or manipulated objects).
Hornpipe by Mumma (1967) presents a horn played live and processed by various means. A cybersonore console, a reference to the rapidly developing field of cybernetics, is worn on the horn player's belt. Three types of sound interact: the naturally emitted sounds of the horn, these same sounds distorted by the cybersonore console, and finally the resonance with the hall, which returns new acoustic effects.
Alvin Lucier, in Bird and Person Dyning (1975), walks around a hall, in the middle of the audience, with two binaural microphones fixed to his head, generating feedback that is modulated by an electronic bird song.
These two pieces - and so many others - shatter the notion of stage and concert.
Sound installations
And then there are the sound installations, which let listeners control the sound through a variety of processes. Max Neuhaus 's installations have challenged the notion of the traditional concert by encouraging interactivity with listeners, as in his 1966 radio experiment Public Supply. Radio listeners can take part in the work by calling in. Neuhaus mixes their voices together live (up to ten simultaneous calls), playing with the feedback that is triggered when their radios are switched on (their voices pass into the radio, which passes back into the telephone, and so on).
His first installation (also interactive), Drive-in, in New York, dates from 1967. Along six hundred meters of street, he placed some twenty radio transmitters that broadcast different sounds according to the speed and trajectory of passing cars, as well as the weather and time of day.
Many others followed, such as Time Square (1977-92). A masterpiece produced between 1966 and 1968, this Listen composition takes its audience on a bus ride through various pre-existing sound environments, from power stations to the subway. It takes Cage's 4'33'' a step further, this time freeing itself from the concert hall and the performer. The world is offered to listeners as a musical discovery.
At the crossroads of the arts
New York's The Kitchen, founded in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka, is home to the entire scene that emerged from John Cage's early experiments, including Charlemagne Palestine, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, Nam June Paik, the Englishmen Michael Nyman and Brian Eno... Everything is regularly called into question: stage space, the temporality of the work, the difference between audience and performer, the boundaries between the arts... With the performers of her company, Meredith Monk fuses music, dance and theater, without hierarchy.
In the same minimalist vein, composer Julius Eastman (a former member of the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble) composed two pieces, Masculine and Femeninewhich he had performed simultaneously during the summer of 1975 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, one indoors, the other outdoors. Audiences were invited to switch from one to the other at will. Unfortunately, Masculine is now lost!
"We have to burn down the opera houses!
Such was Pierre Boulez 's assertion in 1967(Der Spiegel, September 25, 1967). For a long time now, the avant-garde has been at a loss as to what to do with this genre from another era, a marvellous bastard resulting from the sometimes difficult union of theater, poetry and music. Few still find it of interest in the age of cinema, television, musical theater, performance and the open work, while narrative in its traditional form is often rejected. Yet the genre is never abandoned, and never ceases to renew itself, as in the case ofEinstein on the Beach (1976).
The five-hour duration of this opera by Philip Glass and Bob Wilson (assisted by Christopher Knowles, Samuel L. Johnson, Andy De Groat and Lucinda Childs), premiered in Avignon on July 25, 1976, allows the audience to leave the show and return at will. Although the scenic vision remains frontal, the duration and (non-)narrative form, not to mention Wilson's dreamlike staging, make this show revolutionary.
Opera soon incorporated spatialized magnetic tape broadcasting, photography, cinema, video and filmed projections, as in Luigi Nono 's Intolleranza 1960 (1960) and Bernd Alois Zimmerman 's Les Soldats (1965).
Opera, too, moved out of traditional venues. Luigi Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore (1975), first performed at Milan's Teatro Lirico on April 4, 1975, was staged in Lyon in a disused factory in 1982, directed by Jorge Lavelli. Politically committed, Nono asserts that"it is true that a certain conception of opera is over [...], but not musical theater in the dynamic continuity of its relationship with history and society". The composer defends "a theater of the struggle of ideas, closely linked to the sure and laborious progress towards a new human and social condition of life".
Orchestral gigantism and total spectacle
On March 24, 1958, the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra was split into three groups surrounding the audience, conducted respectively by Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer of Gruppen, a fabulous, totally immersive work.
These immense edifices would reach their apogee with the works of György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki, but even more so with the veritable sounds and lights of Iannis Xenakis, the series of Polytopesseries, which spanned ten years: Polytope de Montréal, 1967, Polytope de Persépolis, 1971, Polytope de Cluny, 1972-1974, Polytope de Mycènes, 1978, Diatope or Polytope de Beaubourg, 1978. This neologism was coined by Xenakis - from polus ("many") and topos ("space, place") - to describe a concept of total art, bringing together music, light, sculpture, architecture, text and so on. As with many of his other works, Xenakis drew inspiration from his past sensory experiences, particularly those in wartime Athens. He recalls the giant demonstrations against the German occupiers and the street battles. But above all, the Polytopes, which do nothing less than "recreate at a lower level what Nature does on a grand scale"(3), reflect the zest for life and wonder at the world that define Xenakis's personality, as he enthuses about " lightning, clouds, fire, the sparkling sea, the sky, volcanoes ..."(4) They are the culmination of the combination of their creator's know-how and a demiurgic artistic utopia par excellence.
These events took place in places not originally intended for concerts, often outdoors, such as the Polytope at Mycenae, which marked the composer's return to Greece after thirty years of exile. Four evenings in a row, from September 2 to 5, 1978, the spectacular piece was performed on the prestigious pre-Hellenic site: 500 extras (children and soldiers equipped with torches), a herd of 200 goats adorned with bells and electric lights between their horns, lasers, 12 anti-aircraft spotlights, a jet of flame, a mountain fire and a final firework display. The local population is called upon to help organize the event, which turns into a real party. The music matches the event, including Psappha (1975) for solo percussion and Persephassa (1969) for six percussionists. Everything was coordinated by Iannis Xenakis from his control desk, using a walkie-talkie. A total of 40,000 spectators attended the four-date event. It presents a "strange confrontation between technology and archaism"(5).
In 1974, Xenakis dreamed of a worldwide Polytope, an enormous, utterly utopian and marvelous project in which cities in many countries - the USA, USSR, France, Germany, England, Japan etc. - would be linked by laser beams or even satellites to create a huge, simultaneous, international spectacle. - Creating artistic filaments linking the populations of all countries means establishing a new direct contact, over and above local languages, interests, civilizations, races and cultures. This is now possible, provided that the form of this art produces the spark of immediate contact"(6).
The electroacoustic revolution
Electroacoustic music, which does away with performers and instruments, must necessarily invent a new scenic space. The term "acousmatic" describes a listening situation rather than a particular type of music. It originated with Pythagoras, who in the 6th century B.C. lectured behind a curtain so that his disciples would not be disturbed by his physical presence. Writer Jérôme Peignot applied the term in 1955 to Pierre Schaeffer 's musique concrète, to define "the distance that separates sounds from their origin". Schaeffer made it his own, before François Bayle, in 1973, used it to define the music produced at the GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales), and broadcast through loudspeaker systems through which the audience cannot imagine the source of the sounds they hear. The definition was intended to replace that of electroacoustic music, but in the end it never really caught on. Bayle speaks of music that "turns, develops in the studio, is projected in the hall, like cinema", a "cinema for the ears". Broadcast on loudspeaker orchestras (in GRM's case, in the "acousmonium"), it is clearly distinct from any mixed music or live electronic performance. It is a face-to-face encounter with sound, an immersion without the spectacular aspect of a performed concert.
From the 1970s onwards, Éliane Radigue took great care in installing and adjusting the loudspeakers that broadcast her works, composed on her ARP 2500 synthesizer and then by mixing and editing magnetic tapes. She makes a point of ensuring that each listener can hear the sound correctly, wherever they are in the room. Her concert venues are often exhibition halls or art galleries, rather than concert halls. This attention to sound diffusion, its arrangement, color, spectrum, spatialization and density are becoming commonplace in electroacoustic broadcasting. Is this enough, or do we need to do more: lights, smoke, seats...?
Other listening situations are imagined. Thus, in the late 1960s, Pierre Henry, with his pronounced taste for ceremonial, transformed his concerts into veritable electronic rituals, learning a great deal from Maurice Béjart about how to put on a show. On November 17, 1967, he gave a recumbent concert at the Sigma festival in Bordeaux, performing his Liverpool Mass in a boxing ring surrounded by mattresses.
This moment corresponds to the great psychedelic rock shows, mixing lights, projections of colored atmospheres (with overhead projectors, slides...), films and smoke, which became popular from 1967 onwards (Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Velvet Underground in collaboration with Andy Warhol at the Factory in New York). Pierre Henry took part in this period, playing with Spooky Tooth for Ceremony (1969-1970).
Underwater concerts
Electroacoustics opens up many other possibilities for diffusion, such as those imagined by Michel Redolfi. Passionate about the sea, he subjugated this interest in Pacific Tubular Waves (1978) and Immersion (1979), pieces containing sounds recorded beneath the surface of the oceans. He fused these concrete sounds with digital synthesis and processing. In the 1980s, however, he took the concept of "underwater music" a step further, first introduced in the USA, where he is composer-in-residence at the University of California (San Diego). He invites the public to listen to his underwater concerts. "Water materializes sound, substantiates it, makes it thick, palpable and penetrable. The notion of a concert is turned upside down. "The listener is free to cross it whenever and however he likes, and to carve out his own personal mental shapes. The underwater concert is a dreamlike reservoir. The first was in San Diego Bay, and the next at the La Rochelle Festival in 1981(Sonic Waters). Submerged soloist, soprano Yumi Nara sings inside an underwater bubble in her opera Crysallis in 1992.
At the dawn of the 1990s, it was the rave that most challenged the notion of the front-of-house concert, along with house and techno culture. Combining electronic music, lights, videos, images and dance, raves take place over a long period of time, without beginning or end, marked by an uninterrupted flow of sound. You can enter and leave as you please. It involves audience participation not only in dance, but also in attitudes and looks, as well as other investments in the party, based on the Do It Yourself principle. The boundaries between stage space and audience are abolished, or at least blurred. Far from the concentrated attitude of listening in concert, rave encourages letting go and trance.
One day, during a concert, a question came to me. I remember it precisely. It was March 26, 2016, at Le Lieu Unique, in Nantes, during an electronic evening that featured sets by Pierre Henry (then ill, the composer was replaced by Thierry Balasse, for an acousmatic performance of Continuo ou la vision d'un futur), Christian Zanési and Arnaud Rebotini as a duo and then Dopplereffekt. On the last two programs, a vast video screen at the back of the stage was animated by VJ performances. I wondered what the point of such a display was, given that Balasse's broadcast of Henry's work was not at all supported by such a device. For this first part, we were seated on the floor, or lying down, perfectly attentive to its spatialized diffusion, concentrated on the music, without the support of any mattress or deckchair. The musician was at the center of the room, on his console, and we could look at him at any time, or choose not to. For the rest of the show, everyone was on their feet, gazing towards the stage, as if obliged to drink in the images that scrolled continuously behind the musicians' silhouettes. I felt that this set design did a disservice to the music, losing the emotion and concentration it required rather than enhancing it, or even the pleasure it could arouse. I missed the concert. I was aware of the extent to which the continuous broadcasting of images was becoming a new - and debatable - standard for electro-dance music, as well as for pop and rock concerts. The question of its presence had never crossed my mind at raves, where sensory overstimulation had always seemed perfectly in keeping with the event's intentions. If the traditional front-of-house concert has never disappeared, it's because it remains a necessity in our apprehension of music.
Guillaume Kosmicki
1. Jacques CHAILLEY, "Concert" in Encyclopædia Universalis (https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/concert/).
2. Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, A l'écoute du XXe siècle, La modernité en musique, 2007, French translation, Arles, Actes Sud, 2010, p. 644.
3. Sharon Kanach, "Les Polytopes" in Iannis Xenakis, Musique de l'architecture. Textes, réalisations et projets architecturaux choisis, présentés et commentés par Sharon Kanach, Marseille, Parenthèses, 2006, p. 287.
4. Ibid. p. 292.
5. Sven Sterken, "L'Itinéraire architectural de Iannis Xenakis. An invitation to play with space" (http://www.iannis-xenakis.org/fxe/archi/archi.html).
6. Makis Solomos, "Immersion sonore" in De la musique au son. L'Émergence du son dans la musique des XXe-XXIe siècles, Rennes, Presses Universitaires, 2013, p. 344.
