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Hector Parra is a versatile artist, composer, designer and performer, but also a lover of nature and the mystery of its emergence: a field of knowledge that he is constantly expanding and which leads him to develop visionary projects in collaboration with specialists in the galaxy.
How long have you been interested in the cosmos and astrophysics?
My father was a physicist who awakened me to natural phenomena at a very early age and who passed on to me a love of nature. In my childhood, I drew a lot, represented things until music took over. This passion for the space in which we evolve, this mystery of life which questions me, nourish today my sound imagination. In 2005, I started to read popularisation works with a view to an opera project with the great Lisa Randall. I wanted to have concrete data on particle physics and the gravitational force that can reveal other dimensions of the universe. We made the libretto together, taking as an example the scientific approach of the researcher who climbs the steps of knowledge little by little. Hypermusic Prologue, my chamber opera, created with the forces of the Intercontemporain and Ircam at the Centre Pompidou, is the dream of a utopia that invites the audience to have a new and unexpected acoustic experience, leaving the three-dimensional world of the auditorium to enter a fifth dimension where sounds and voices are transformed. I tried to imagine what a "fifth dimensional" voice could be: very fast, like the buzzing of an insect; I tried to create a multidimensional space with the phonatory apparatus. The research on vocal language inspired me a lot for the instrumental writing. The opera was first performed in Paris and staged by the Anglo-American visual artist Matthew Ritchie, and was revived in Berlin and Basel in 2013, with a production by Benjamin Schad. For me, it was a very beautiful adventure...
It will continue with other projects and a new collaborator, still an astrophysicist, Jean-Pierre Luminet. Under what circumstances did you meet him?
It was on the occasion of a new commission from the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Caressant l'horizon, a piece for large ensemble created at the Cité de la Musique in 2011, which was inspired by his book on black holes, Le destin de l'univers. The EIC asked me to interview him for the presentation of the piece. We have since become friends and collaborated on other projects.
I was immediately seduced by this sensual title, which may come as a surprise, given such a terrifying subject!
I am not a cerebral person. I live in my own body the gravitational waves that I translate into my sound language. I worked on wave models proposed by researchers because we were not yet certain about this. I imagined the activity of this gravitational well, intuitively evaluated the deformation of materials during the fall into the black hole and expressed all this, very precisely, through my musical notation; inspired and helped by the two volumes of Luminet, whose extraordinary pedagogical dimension I want to underline. In Caressing the horizon, as in all my compositions, I combine perception and architecture. The piece as a whole more or less follows the trajectory of a sonata form, with exposition, development and a final return to life on earth, with a certain fragility that characterises our situation as human beings faced with these phenomena that are beyond us.
Let's come to the two collaborations with Jean-Pierre Luminet, a scientist and researcher who is also a graphic artist, poet and musician.
He is a complete artist, a true Renaissance man! In 2016, he invited me for three days in Marseille, where he now lives, to initiate theInscape project. I forbade myself to think about it before that first meeting. We built the piece together and Jean-Pierre wrote a text that runs through the whole composition, as he had done for Le Noir de l'Étoile with Gérard Grisey. I drew up the graph of the form with him and left with the overall architecture of the piece. We met again at Ircam, in the presence of the RIM (Réalisateur en informatique musicale) Thomas Goepfer, to design the electronic part. I wanted his voice to be imprinted in the sound material. We had a real three-way musical dialogue, from the physical to the aesthetic.
In the meantime, together with the Belgian cellist Arne Deforce, you conceived Limites les rêves au-delà, a work whose title raises questions...
Limites les rêves au-delà was supposed to be a smaller version ofInscape for cello and electronics. In fact, it is the longest single movement piece I have ever written - 70 minutes. The title, taken from a book byEtienne Klein, is an anagram of 'the speed of light': an absolute! Nothing can exceed the speed of light. Our dreams are limited beyond, hidden behind this threshold. With Arne Deforce, we improvised a lot, tested the material, worked on the beats between two frequencies like the fragility of life on the planet. We are like grains of dust; we resist gravitational forces thanks to matter and the electromagnetic force, even if I imagine myself falling permanently.
The score oscillates between writing and drawings; it reflects the energy that runs through the writing. It seems to me like a ship pitching on the sea, with sails that are being hoisted. The notation is on two staves: at the bottom the four strings, a sort of tablature, and at the top the five-line staff for the notes; there are four layers of reading and the pitches sometimes disappear in favour of the graphics. Do you leave any space for the performer?
It is absolutely essential! Everything is scrupulously written down, but I ask the performer to go beyond this writing threshold. We can mention Liszt or even Chopin, who leave a lot of space for the performer. Arne Deforce, as well as Agustí Fernández in the FREC series, must feel free, must have his own breath, beyond the notation. I like to work with the performer's imagination. The aim is to sculpt the sound conglomerate, a bit like Bach with his great polyphonies. But here it is not a question of melodic lines but of timbral microstructures that act like a body, organic or inorganic. I have a deep attachment to the High Baroque, for the masterly convergence it brings about between melody and harmony. I also love the sensuality of baroque voices, their humanity. They count a lot as models for my instrumental writing. The voices ofAgustí Fernández and Arne Deforce can be heard in the pieces they perform, they blend in with the sound material. I have also recorded the rough and timbred voice of the cellist Pierre Strauch, whose tone is inspiring.
...limits dreams beyond - Hèctor Parra & Arne Deforce from ARNE DEFORCE on Vimeo.
Let's go back to Inscape, one of the largest pieces in your catalogue: an orchestra, a solo ensemble and electronics. How should the title be translated?
You could say "journey to the interior". I wanted a short title that would contrast with the enormous deployment of the device. The proposal came from François Bou, the current general director of the Orchestre National de Lille, and at the time, of the Orchestre National de Barcelone; he had suggested that I do a piece with the EIC, Ircam and the Lille and Barcelona phalanges conducted by Kazushi Ono and Alexandre Bloch. Then François-Xavier Roth gave a similarly wonderful version with his Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne.
The formation evokes the baroque concerto grosso, like Bach's 'Brandenburgers'; but one also thinks of Boulez's Répons, with the orchestra, the six soloists and the action of the electronics.
Répons was played in Barcelona when I was still very young; I couldn't attend the concert but I bought the record as soon as it came out, and then I listened to it live in Paris several times: I am always amazed by the freshness of the electronics, despite the heaviness of the means used; the harmonies of the central period attract me very much, as does the reference to the latest Scriabin, of which I am a passionate fan. The beginning ofInscape pays homage to Gérard Grisey with a percussion part evoking the pulsars of Le Noir de l'étoile. The score establishes a poetic relationship with Jean-Pierre Luminet's text, which underlies the entire piece. But the pure electronic parts look towards Répons, as does the coda, which is particularly successful in Boulez's work. I also have a very strong memory of Pli selon Pli heard in the Grande Salle Boulez when I was composing Inscape : I thought about it a lot while writing the piece. I like to create windows within the form for the time of writing. Composing puts me in a trance-like state where I try to forget all the work of reflection beforehand (I read about twenty books before I started writing!). Whatever time I am given, I feel a kind of shamanic brutality in me that is almost uncontrollable, forcing me to compress the time of the writing. My most fruitful ideas have often emerged in this state of urgency.
The virtuoso writing is commensurate with the performers for whom it is intended!
The language is extreme for the EIC Soloists but I want to write everything in a quasi-traditional way. I don't subscribe to the "new tablature" trend that advocates globalized twenty-line notation. I don't want to eliminate the classical notation that guarantees precision. György Ligeti goes very far in his vocal research in Aventures and Nouvelles aventures but everything is clearly notated. In the same way, I distance myself a lot from a Lachenmann-type music and the notion of sound objects that are distributed in a structure; on the contrary, I am looking for continuity; the thing that fluctuates and transforms, the transition from one thing to another. The sound "crushed" on the string is, for me, a concrete state of the vibration of the chord. There is physics behind it. These are physical deformations; I am not reproducing an abstract mathematical model; on the contrary, it is to explain aspects of the nature that surrounds us that I make these deformations. The process is part of my attachment to things and to the earth. As a child, I was in contact with nature, in close communion with the trees; I was obsessed with wild animals.
Music is a fruit of nature, it is nature.
How did you experience this second confinement? Did it have an impact on your work?
Like everyone else, I guess. With resignation and with the same feeling I had during the first containment: trying to contribute, by removing myself from social interactions, with my little grain of sand to the common good. Firstly, this pandemic is a tsunami, a human tragedy on a planetary level, and if the health authorities ask for containment, it is for me an ethical and moral duty to do so, because millions of human lives are at stake. Secondly, as an artist, I have kept myself alive by composing non-stop, and I have attended concerts that have taken place during the low points of the pandemic, such as Ircam's Manifeste festival in September 2020, for example. The level of safety and hygiene standards at these events is so high that they deserve the continuity and full confidence of political leaders, even during the peaks of the pandemic. In every case, in every country, there is a different situation and different decisions are taken.
Did the planned concerts and shows take place? Under what conditions and in what frame of mind?
In my particular case, which unfortunately coincides with that of most of my colleagues, it was an absolute disaster. The German premiere of my opera Les Bienveillantes in the symbolic city of Nuremberg was first postponed without a date, only to be abruptly cancelled by the Nuremberg Opera. Thus, the damage done to this demanding 3-hour score and to the magnificent staging designed by Calixto Bieito was almost irreparable.
Otherwise, my other German premiere for 2020, the monodrama Wanderwelle, for the Cologne Philharmonic and the WDR Orchestra has been postponed until the following season. Let's hope it can happen... With a text by Händl Klaus based on the conversation books of the late Beethoven, we pay homage to him and his incredible Diabelli Variations, on which this work for baritone and orchestra is based.
Another cancelled concert was the German premiere at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg of my ensemble piece A Breath in Suspense, scheduled for December 2020 with the Munich-based ensemble Risonanze erranti and Peter Tilling.
What projects are you working on today?
At the moment I am finishing a one and a half hour poetic-musical cycle inspired by Joan Miró's 23 constellations. I anticipated a possible commission, which has not yet arrived, because it was clear to me from the beginning that this was to be my containment project. And really, Miró's extraordinary plastic explorations, his textural polyphonies, his atavistic lines, colours and signs have nourished me so much during these difficult months! I can say that they saved my spirit.
In this series of 23 small-format gouaches, Miró reflects both his suffering in forced exile in France since the end of 1936 and his unexpected return to Spain in June 1940 due to the Second World War, as well as his intimate and urgent need to escape from this infernal labyrinth reaching one of the great artistic achievements of the twentieth century. Thus, in this cycle, the exploratory piano of Carmen Martínez-Pierret and Imma Santacreu and the poems written by Arnau Pons inspired by each constellation will weave a 'spider's web' of unexpected organic sounds and radical spectral distortions that will seek an emergent form, as it were, of our own experience of the fabulous micro-universe of the constellations, a kind of exploration of the depths of our inner world: our intimate shadows and monsters in resonance with the threatening and deformed human and animal figures so finely drawn by Miró. Thus, throughout the cycle, a series of household objects (metal rulers, glass balls, brushes, metal pliers, turntables, ping-pong balls, children's chopsticks, chains, music boxes) and natural elements (shells, sea snails, land snails, twigs, mother-of-pearl plates, etc.
After Constellations I have planned, hopefully, a chamber opera based on a text by Pier Paolo Pasolini, with Calixto Bieito. The premiere will coincide with the centenary of the Italian creator, in 2022.
Do they define new challenges in your composition?
The confinement and delay or postponement of my opera and orchestral projects has meant a return to chamber music, to deep introspection, which I have had to face with a sometimes fragile and not necessarily optimistic state of mind - different from what I had two or three years ago. The creative impulse, as always, comes from the innermost need for expression and the desire to see an idea come to fruition, giving birth to an organic and expressive form. But I realise that my musical materials and gestures have perhaps acquired a more direct expressiveness, a more marked direction as well as perhaps a certain hardness of spirit and roughness of colour, because they have had to survive a process of more severe self-criticism, no doubt propelled by a certain permanent pessimism in my state of mind. But I am convinced that the exit from the pandemic in 2022 will bring about new changes in this respect...
Interview by Michèle Tosi
