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The Berlin-based Mosaik ensemble has just launched a website dedicated to François Sarhan's L'Encyclopédie du professeur Glaçon . This colossal, polymorphous, surrealist and Kafkaesque work, which he has been working on since 2007 and which irrigates many of his musical works, is also for its author a way of "desesthetizing" and "disinhibiting" his practice as a "contemporary composer".
"Specialization is more of a disease than a solution". We've never forgotten these words from composer François Sarhan, in an interview conducted in 2018 for the issue Alternatives théâtrales magazine devoted to the relationship between theater and music (1). Since graduating from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, this musician, born in 1972 and now based in Berlin after several years in Prague, has been committed to putting this credo into practice, shaking up the habits and customs of the "contemporary music" milieu. Writing, drawing, collage, film, directing and performance are just some of the mediums he has undertaken to practice and explore - among others, we have fond memories of his beautiful short film Corps aveugle/Blind Body, shot in 2013 at the Olšany cemetery in Prague (2) :
Mediums including L'Encyclopédie du professeur Glaçon since 2007. It was while working with South African visual artist William Kentridge that he was inspired, he says today, to "take the plunge", even though he has no legitimacy whatsoever as a writer or visual artist. Through this demiurgic and derisory, Promethean and propaedeutic project, François Sarhan and his avatar (Professor Henry Jacques Glaçon) take pleasure, with poetry and humor - reminiscent of a Luc Ferrari hijacking the codes of biographies and program notes of "contemporary music" - in "perverting a little the conventions of knowledge transmission: historicism, verifiability...".
A project which combines many registers of image and text - between micro-fictions, imaginary lives and descriptions of chimerical composers and other perfectly non-existent objects, and which the artist presented in these terms ten years ago:
Francois Sarhan: "Ce qu'il faut savoir sur l'Encyclopédie du Prof. Glaçon" from CM Culture on Vimeo.
A project that has given rise to numerous performances and offshoots (exhibitions, "artist's" books), and that has above all since irrigated many of his musical works - think, for example, of the happening Ephémère glacé, a "working stage" of his Ephémère enchaîné project, presented in October 2015 at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris with the ensemble L'Instant Donné and the Muse en circuit.
The reason we're talking about it today is that the Berlin-based ensemble Mosaik - with whom François Sarhan has a long-standing collaboration that has produced ensemble pieces, four short films and, soon, a stage project - has just launched an online version of part of this work in hypertext mode. This "encyclopedia of imaginary music" is at once Kafkaesque and surreal, based on the premise that "true knowledge, especially musical knowledge, exists only in the imagination of each individual, and that it is up to each individual to construct it":
http://ensemble-mosaik.de/encyclopaedia/
Of the sum in question, however, the site presents only a small part (3), involving the ensemble's musicians in particular. Most of the videos on the site are fragments of a forthcoming medium-length (or feature) film entitled Aberwasistabermusik, which, in the words of its author, should "interweave these sequences into a plot ". To the question "What is music? - a question which ultimately underpins his entire encyclopaedic project - François Sarhan intends to answer "by showing what musicians are, what happens before they play and after they've played". We can discover the existence of Mario Bossi, "the composer who wrote contemporary music before anyone else" (a sort of musical transposition of Georges Perec's wonderful Voyage d'hiver ); see a pianist "foil" Schumann's Kinderszenen with shoes around his neck; see a musician draw strange sounds from her partner's inert body before fainting in turn, as if she had transmitted (and abandoned) life to him through music; or witness this very spectral piece of music:
If we're talking about it today, it's also because the questions this encyclopedia project raises, both aesthetically and ethically, seem to us to be both sound and eminently topical. Referring to the Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer (to whom he has dedicated several films) and his idea of "self-therapy", François Sarhan today speaks of this project as a form of"spiritual exercises", of the order of " automatic writing, collage, automatic musicology, automatic composition (and therefore improvisation)". Exercises in the sense that "you can't give it away: it's extremely difficult to find this fiber, this type of concentration, this way of writing that's detached from any literary ambition or concern for quality, to concentrate solely on sensations, emotions, snatches of dream... I think that in early Surrealism, and in automatic writing in general, there's an asceticism - and I think this is a great misunderstanding of Surrealism: when Breton and the Surrealists talked about freedom, it wasn't about doing anything, but rather about knowing where to find that inner freedom. "
He continues: "It takes work to free yourself from literary complexes and reflexes. These exercises, which I do all the time, do me a lot of good, because I'm always starting over - because you're never free of a literary ambition. Above all, it's changed the way I think about composing, because in music, the weight of tradition, of the institution, of technique, of the need to tick a certain number of boxes in relation to the environment in which you find yourself (to be playable, to be stylistically within the bounds) are even heavier than in literature."
We venture the verb "to unlearn". He approves, and goes on to speak of "desesthetizing" and "disinhibiting". What does knowledge matter, as long as you have wisdom?
David Sanson
