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With Erwan Keravec, we're off on a great journey, full of promise. When we write "bagpipe", "piper" and "Morbihan", we know that this expedition will take us to the heart of the Breton musical traditions that make this region so vibrant. Like any tradition that wants to live on, these musics invite a renewed desire for creation, the only condition for continuing to exist without becoming a dusty museum. These are the very values that make up Erwan Keravec's DNA.
Interview conducted on December 15, 2020
You play the Scottish bagpipes. This instrument was integrated into the Breton instrumentarium a century ago. Can you tell us more about it?
The Scottish bagpipe was played wherever the British Empire was established. In some cases, musicians imported it into their traditions, as in Brittany, little by little at the end of the 19th century, then it became more widespread in the middle of the 20th century. The Scottish bagpipe was mainly introduced to create sections in a large ensemble, which became the bagad after the Second World War. It diversified the timbres and, above all, created a different relationship to the bombard, traditionally associated with the biniou, the Breton bagpipe. The biniou is tuned an octave higher and has only one drone, compared with three on the Scottish bagpipe.
Why do we say "bellringer"?
The word is used for all blowers. The Breton tradition of ringing is that of the binious and bombard, instruments that play loudly. To "sound" is like to send far away. It's not a word shared by other bagpipe traditions, such as those of Central France; it's specifically Breton.
You used it in one of your presentation texts, almost like a manifesto: " Erwan Keravec is a piper... Erwan sounds his compositions... Erwan sounds in contemporary music... Erwan sounds for contemporary dance... Erwan sounds improvisations... Erwan sounds traditional music...".
Yes, because the fact that I move around and play in situations other than those of traditional music doesn't prevent me from being an heir, with roots. What remains with me from all my experiences is that I'm a ringer. I'm part of this community of sounded tradition, I was taught in a bagad, and I still consider myself a ringer whatever music I play, even experimental or contemporary.
In your bagad practice, you were introduced to improvisation in 1995-1996 through an encounter with the Marmite infernale, the big band of Arfi (Association à la recherche d'un folklore imaginaire), an artists' collective based in Lyon, during which you first rubbed shoulders with Jean-Luc Capozzo, with whom you still play. Then you joined Arfi and worked with choreographer Gabrielle Bourges, who opened up the world of dance to you. Your aesthetic mutation seems largely due to the chance of these encounters.
It turned my desires upside down, and I explored places I'd never been before. Then you have to go for it! If you don't transform your instrumental playing, it won't fit in with these new directions. You have to be able to go somewhere else. I've had the opportunity to be "moved" thanks to improvising musicians and choreographers. And in 2007, I launched into Urban Pipes, my first album and solo program. Bagpipes have deep roots. If you ask someone what image comes to mind when they think of a Scottish bagpipe, nine times out of ten they'll picture a piper on a hill, which corresponds to this Highland instrument. But isn't it possible that this instrument could be a vector for something else, that it could be displaced into a different imaginary world? That's what interested me, placing the bagpipes in an improvisational situation, at the heart of choreography and later as part of music commissions. I had to move as much as my bagpipes. Our ability to imagine music goes hand in hand with our heritage: it's what we've received that we transform, that we knead and that we manage to send elsewhere. I find it hard to believe that things can emerge from nowhere.
Do you still play traditional music?
Unfortunately, less and less. When I do, it's always as a duo with my brother Guénolé, who plays the bombarde.
It was in parallel with an experiment in "imagined traditional music" with the four musicians of the Niou Bardophones group, including your brother (bagpipes, bombarde, baritone saxophone and drums), that you embarked on your solo projects, initially materialized by the album Urban Pipes (2007).
Immediately after recordingAir de rien in 2005 with the Niou Bardophones, I had to move away from the notion of a group to carry out my choice to extract myself from my place of origin. I had to go through with this idea, which I didn't want to give up, and which couldn't be shared. In a group, decisions require collective approval. Furthermore, the Scottish bagpipe is historically a solo instrument. I wrote at the time that it was a utopia: to imagine that my instrument could be universal, to take it out of its original cultural zone. So this record was a cornerstone, enabling me to formulate my abilities and inabilities. Today, when I'm in discussion with composers, it's still the reference disc that I take as an example.
Then there's a new stage in your career, that of contemporary creation, far from your homeland: you commission composers to write scores for you. Originally, brass band music was based mainly on oral tradition. With these compositions, you have to make someone else's thoughts your own, to inhabit the work that is theirs, that they have written and thought out for you. In so doing, you create a repertoire of original creations for your instrument. You began working on these commissions in 2013, and today you're working on around thirty scores with just over twenty composers, including, not least, internationally renowned contemporary music artists such as Eliane Radigue, Bernard Cavanna, Benjamin de la Fuente, Samuel Sighicelli, Philippe Leroux, Zad Moultaka, Heiner Goebbels, José Manuel López López, Oscar Bianchi, Dror Feiler and Wolfgang Mitterer. How do you choose the composers you commission?
You mentioned orality. In fact, I grew up in a dual culture. Even though I never went to conservatoire, all Scottish music is written. So I read the music and I know how to set up and conduct, which is a big advantage of playing bagad. When you play twelve bagpipes, you have to be very precise. This has enabled me to become relatively comfortable working with composers. The first works were commissioned in 2010. Having leftUrban Pipes, I was trying to figure out how and with whom to achieve this new music for my instrument, totally disconnected from tradition. I didn't come to contemporary music through aesthetics, but through this quest. I'd already been meeting jazz musicians for eight years, and I could have gone to them. But they would have written me global forms and asked me to improvise within them, knowing my practice. I wasn't interested in that. I wanted to be sent somewhere else. So I wanted them to write everything for me, without giving me a choice. When I heard Georges Aperghis's Deux cent quatre-vingt mesures pour clarinette (1979), I decided I had to go in that direction. My first encounter was with the composer Susumu Yoshida, who was in residence at the Théâtre de Cornouaille in Quimper. After that, I did a lot of listening, and every time a work moved me, I went to meet the composer. I knew almost nothing about composers, apart from Steve Reich and Philip Glass. I wasn't even necessarily familiar with the music. On the other hand, I didn't want to be educated, I wanted to maintain an intuitive relationship with it. This manifested itself in encounters in the field, as with improvisational music. Nor did I want to be solely an interpreter of French composers. With improvised music, I'd met a lot of foreign musicians, and I'd realized that the practice is extremely vast. I wanted to rediscover this diversity in contemporary music, which is based on very different ways of exchanging depending on the country.
An evening at the Mucem, organized by the Gmem in Marseille in January 2021 - Dror Feiler "Disobedience in B - D - eF".
Since 2010, you've been working to create a repertoire of contemporary bagpipe scores that other pipers can use. To your knowledge, have any pipers already appropriated these works?
Unfortunately, very few. Bernard Cavanna's L'Accord ne m'us pas la nuit was played by another piper in my quartet. But the idea of a repertoire didn't come to me until later. I was thinking above all of my own displacement. It's only now that I'm faced with this massive repertoire of thirty works. On the other hand, I don't think bagpipes have yet been appropriated by contemporary music composers. The example of Matthew Welch comes to mind, for whom American composers such as Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton and Julia Wolfe have written. The works I play only exist because I create them. Only Bernard Cavanna has ever systematically written for the bagpipes in his orchestral pieces.
I'd like to talk about your work with the voice, accompanied as your projects often are by a record release, Vox (2015). You've brought together three remarkable voices: Beñat Achiary, a traditional Basque singer open to all kinds of experimentation, whom you met in 2010 and with whom you've been improvising ever since; baritone Vincent Bouchot and soprano Donatienne Michel-Dansac, with whom you play works by four composers in a trio. Among them, José-Manuel López López, who composed a magnificent, dramatic and disturbing work, a cry in the face of death, "No Time". Can you tell us about this work?
José-Manuel López López' s starting point was a very short poem by Dionisio Cañas, "No Time", which evokes the urgency and distress of the people trapped in the fire at the World Trade Center, throwing themselves into the void without being able to say goodbye to their families. I followed José-Manuel's composition for two years. Its architecture is formidable: on the one hand, we find all the harmonics generated by a drone in C, linked to the poem; and on the other, rhythmic variations generated by the differentials between two drones (the beats), quantifiable, which I generate throughout the piece. It's like clockwork, extremely rigorous in its construction. But what José-Manuel is looking for above all, well beyond his very solid structure, is the power of dramatic expression. I saw him every two months, and he regularly insisted on this effect, which he so ardently desired.
In the project that follows, "Sonneurs" (2017), you form a quartet with four instruments from Brittany's bagpipe tradition: the biniou, the Scottish bagpipe, the bombarde and the trélombarde.
I wanted to extend what I'd been doing with my own instrument to the other three historical instruments of the bagad tradition, which I brought together in this formation. Anecdotally, there's also a reference to the symbol of the classical quartet.
In this project, I really liked the work by Austrian composer Wolgang Mitterer, Run. In this piece, you take on the role of conductor, triggering the electronic sounds of each new sequence by foot. Can you tell us a little more about this?
I first encountered Wolfgang's music in his opera Massacre, with vocals, orchestra and electronics. I was blown away by the relationship he managed to establish between voice and electronics. He's an organist and has often flirted with improvised music, so we have a lot in common. He's not afraid to use the instrument as it is. He has respected the bagpipe's primary characteristics, while integrating it into his sound universe: continuous breathing, drone in C, diatonic scale.
I'd like to talk to you about a last work, which was eagerly awaited: a commission to Eliane Radigue, "Occam Ocean XXVII", recorded on your Goebbels Glass Radigue disc (2020). One could legitimately wonder what the work would sound like, since we know that, for the twenty years or so that she has been writing for acoustic instruments, Eliane Radigue has been working on extreme finesse of treatment and above all on pianissimo or mezzo forte sounds. With such a sonorous bagpipe, she was faced with a considerable challenge.
I was almost as apprehensive as Eliane. I didn't really believe in it. A friend, Cyril Jollard, director of La Soufflerie, kept talking to me about it. I finally went to meet her. You can't really place an order with Eliane Radigue. She doesn't want deadlines or premiere dates; she wants to be able to stop the process at any time. It's a very particular kind of work. She describes what it has to be. She sets out a playing situation, and the musician she's working with has to feed it. If you're not there, nothing happens. She says it herself: she's not there to give you the notes you have to play, she doesn't even know them, she's not interested. The Occam Ocean cycle always starts with a reference to water. I described a place to her in the Golfe du Morbihan. It's a landscape with no cliffs, no prominent relief, the environment seems very calm, while we know that navigation is paradoxically very difficult there, due to numerous currents. This was the basis of our work. She interpreted it in words and descriptions. She doesn't write a musical note, but gives extremely precise indications. You can't do whatever you want with Eliane Radigue! A fundamental is played throughout the piece, but she wants us to forget it completely in favor of all that is generated around it by the beats and fluctuations of sound. We then waver, losing our sense of temporality. I'm almost a little drunk by the time I've finished the piece. The greatest difficulty is that it doesn't want any accidents. The drones have two tones, because they have ligatured reeds. The first emission of sound goes up to a certain level of air, which then leads to a second emission. I had to find ways of masking this. The greatest complexity is that his music demands a particular state. It's not virtuosic, but it's all about fine-tuned control. Nothing can escape.
"The Sound Universe in its integrity, the one in which everyone, the one/someone who listens can hear, find, rediscover, create, their own inner music, let themselves be lulled and travel endlessly." Eliane Radigue
Interview by Guillaume Kosmicki
