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Florence Baschet is on the bill for Ircam's Musiques-fictions 2021, alongside Gérard Pesson and Daniele Ghisi. The composer turned to the writer Lydie Salvayre and her novel La Compagnie des spectres for this original project where language and music, spoken and sung voices confront and interpenetrate.
Under the direction of Emmanuelle Zoll, Musiques-Fictions is a new collection initiated by Ircam in 2019, as part of the Manifeste festival. Renewing the radio genre of the Hörspiel, the project combines sound creation and contemporary literary texts, primarily those by women authors. The audience (about fifteen people) is seated under the ambisonic vault (some 66 loudspeakers arranged on a semi-spherical structure) and invited to a collective experience of immersive listening in 3D.
A former student of Philippe Manoury, Florence Baschet (born in 1955) is one of Ircam's leading researchers. Early on, she felt the need for the electronic tool, which she likes to use in real time, working on the interactive relationship between sound (instrumental and vocal) and its live transformation. The challenge here is different, consisting of finalising an electronic part of fixed sounds: with material that she takes from her own sound bank and a musical part written and recorded with the piano of Alphonse Cemin and the voice of Élise Chauvin. The Company of Spectres is in the tradition of Florence Baschet's works for women's voices - such as Femmes (2001), La Muette (2011-2012) or The Waves (2014) -, militant scores that bring the female voice to the forefront and echo the burning issues to which the composer wishes to bear witness.
La Muette, Chahdortt Djavann with Donatienne Michel Dansac and the ensemble Court Circuit
Director Anne-Laure Liégeois has adapted Lydie Salvayre's 200-page novel, creating for this "theatre of the ear" a sort of "Beckett-style closed-door" where the inability of people to communicate reigns.
A bailiff arrives in a flat where a mother and daughter live, charged with drawing up an inventory of the furniture with a view to eviction. The presence of the intruder awakens the old demons of Rose-Mélie, the mother (Annie Mercier with a dark and cavernous grain). She is suffering from dementia and lives simultaneously in the past (1943 to be precise) and the present; haunted by the spectres of Pétain, Darnand and Bousquet, she relives her brother's atrocious death every day: " Every time she looks back on her past, she falls into it ", comments Louisiane, the daughter (Anne Girouard), who is both an actress and a narrator, just like the mother. A devilishly Beckettian and unflappable, Maître Echinard, the bailiff, is content to coldly list the objects in his inventory, with the distance (the abyss) that he puts between him and the two women. In this way Anne-Laure Liégeois constructs the "dramaturgical enunciation", in the words of the composer, the already musical base - the voices were recorded at Ircam - that the music will integrate.
It comments, extends and interferes with the dramatic plot but it is not omnipresent, Florence Baschet often leaving the actors' voices bare, in particular that of the bailiff who is part of another temporality. Music appears at certain key moments in the text: to give depth to the mother's story - like these dense electronic frames that let us perceive rumours of a crowd as distant as they are distressing - or to modify the space where the characters move. The intervention of the sung voice - the soprano Élise Chauvin - is another break in temporality: it is a cappella (" Why this strange sensation [...]") or is superimposed on the spoken voice of Louisiane, the daughter. With the piano played in the strings in cymbalum mode, the song in its middle range becomes this inner voice of the character which joins the spoken word in a very successful integration of music and theatre. It should be noted that this is the first time that the composer has made the French language sing, stretching the words, sliding the syllables, integrating the breath and accentuating the sibilants to enhance the "sound enunciation". The virtuoso electronic part is produced in the Ircam studios with the computer music director Serge Lemouton and the sound engineer Luca Bagnoli; it is with the electronic sound that the fiction ends, in a monstrous stridency that seems to crystallize all the violence of the subject.
Under its ambisonic dome, the collection of Musiques-Fictions (six to date) will soon be available for listening and, what is more, exportable thanks to a lighter, "ready-to-use" device.
Michèle Tosi