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Composer, performer and sound artist, Loïc Guénin (born in 1976) likes to encourage exchanges and collaborative work with his performers in an approach that combines research and experimentation, sound installation and performance. His desire to create and explore has led him to invent, alongside traditional scores, other reading supports, graphic boards and interpretation grids situated between the written and the unwritten, an in-between that he tries, for us, to define.
Loïc Guénin, your graphic writing work and your projects linking architecture and sound universe place you at the tenuous border between music and plastic arts...
I have the feeling that my way of apprehending sound can sometimes be closer to that of sound artists who make installations and happenings than to so-called "contemporary" music, which is very written, with a specific work on the instrumental technique and very often constructed and transmitted in a rather descending gesture, from the composer to the performers and then to the public. I am associated more with an artist who explores sound and invents concepts than with a composer of purely classical writing.
You often point out the presence, in the environment in which we live, of "functional sounds" which, in your opinion, "gradually standardize our environment and transform our listening"...
This observation is linked to the Walden project. We evolve in a world more and more noisy which invades our daily life; manifestations close to the sound design which can carry information or imply specific behaviors; sounds sent to make us react, ringing of cell phones and other signaling jingles; in short, a whole phonic universe which takes the top and trivializes the listening more than it invites to tighten the ear. For my part, I try to give him back his active part and to stimulate an acute listening by paying attention to all the sounds. As I like to say and write, I am convinced that listening is the key to the social relationship, to the positioning of the world around us.
I'd like you to introduce us in more detail to this Walden [a place]project that has occupied you for nearly ten years...
The first Walden was brought to the stage in May 2015. It was created by theensemble C Barré directed by Sébastien Boin and was hosted by the GMEM-CNCM in Marseille as part of the festival Les Musiques. Christian Sébille and Paul Fournier were the first to give me the means to bring this crazy project to life. Today there are 14 Walden and as many places that I have been able to invest with renowned performers to share this experience together: Ars Nova, L'Instant Donné, l'Intercontemporain and other musicians outside the ensemble.
What is it specifically about?
Walden refers to the story published in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden or Life in the Woods, a best-selling book of citizen ecology and reflection on the place of man in his environment. The book is a diary in which the American writer and philosopher recounts his existence, alone for two years in his cabin on the shores of Lake Walden, in the state of Massachusetts, where he spent his days listening, surveying, walking, drawing, recording, thinking and writing. It is this posture, this porosity with places, but also with people, that I have sought to adopt in each of the Walden [a place] projects. This implies long residencies (sometimes a year) in the places concerned, which allow me to soak up the atmosphere, the configuration of the buildings and to collect forms, materials and words, a multitude of things and materials that I gather in small notebooks and which I then use to write scores that I call graphic boards.
How are they presented?
These are scores that use little or no traditional writing. The scores are very different from each other and each one is unique, derived from the collection I made and attached to the place where it took shape: the Château de Ranrouët for the Athénor center, the Cité Radieuse in Marseille, the Abbaye de Noirlac, the Royaumont gardens, the Mont Ventoux, the Cité de la Musique in Metz or the Philharmonie de Paris, etc. These colorful graphic representations use symbols related to my collections. They are intended to be interpreted in the very place of their creation, and for varied and sometimes even free instrumental nomenclatures. These are really the scores that are placed on the stands and played by the musicians, they are not just diagrams or drawings that would give free rein to the performers, they are simply the scores, full of constraints.
The process is reminiscent of Éliane Radigue's work with her performers and the part of oral transmission that she claims?
As far as I know, Éliane Radigue starts with images shared with the musicians but does not necessarily conceive graphic supports. However, I am well aware that my way of working requires long moments of exchange and sharing with the performers. This conveys things that are not said because they cannot be (de)written, but they appear little by little, in the discussion and sometimes even simply in the feeling of the thickness of a place, of a graphic line. These scores that I submit to the performers require a long maturation process: I want them to see the places before the rehearsals, to better impregnate themselves with the collected material. It takes time for them to become familiar with the complexity of the symbols used, to decipher the signs and to grasp their deep meaning. There is thus a permanent back and forth between architecture, sound, writing and creation. This oral transmission is also effective in the case where other musicians - the case has already arisen - would like to play a score again, in the same place or, why not, in other structures. But I particularly like the idea that the concert that is given in situ is also the unique moment when the place resonates, in the moment of the performance. The Walden pieces are not necessarily intended to be played again or recorded.
Is there any space left for improvisation during the concert?
There are, upstream, and for each instrumentalist, choices to be made but once the decisions are made, the writing is fixed and measured and does not really leave any space for a real free improvisation. On the other hand, certain scores allow for choices of circulation according to which the overall course can change within the limits of a controlled randomness.
You also mention two fundamental principles in the work that takes place from your graphic plates: " Here, everyone has his or her role to play, his or her freedom of interpretation, of reading and listening, respecting the double principle dear to John Cage of interpenetration and non-obstruction." What do you mean by this?
Theseare the principles of his master Suzuki, enacted by Zen Buddhist philosophy (in theAvantamsaka sutra). In collective work, these principles apply here to sound practice: what I do must blend and interact with the work of others (interpenetration); I avoid doing something that would obstruct the proposals of those around me (non-obstruction). As the project leader, I sometimes have to moderate certain impulses and regulate things when ego problems disrupt the collective effort...
The Walden (Philharmonie), performed last June, brought together under your direction seven soloists from the Ensemble Intercontemporain and a group of amateurs who participated in the collection of materials and in the elaboration of certain parts of the graphic board. They had at their disposal sound objects and small percussion instruments and worked in pairs with the members of the EIC. Wasn't the idea of confronting the best of the contemporary scene with non-professional musicians risky?
Ilike challenges. The quality of the sound reproduction rewarded my expectations and the work in pairs between professionals and amateurs confirmed the benefits of oral transmission. By working in this way and by entrusting the performers with my graphic scores, I seek to reposition the roles predefined by a social history of music. The composer, the conductor, the musicians, the listeners... Today I have about thirty graphic scores that I would like to have published so that musicians can take them over: this would be a way of closing this project that has kept me going for ten years and made me work with fabulous ensembles in France, abroad and in different places each time.
The Cry of AntigoneYour musical show, directed by Anne Monfort, was created last May in Marseille and has just been revived at the Arsenal in Metz. The score mixes traditional notation and graphic boards, for example in table 2, for the guitarist who is not a reader. It also brings out drawn matter guiding the performers' play with the polystyrene or dead leaves they have at hand. We are once again in an in-between with porous borders...
The space is indeed difficult to define. I have around me performers who are very comfortable with the codes of written music and who also have this ability to listen to the other and to react to the demands of the moment. There are many of them today who link these two dimensions in their practice. I want to give them the possibility to assert themselves as unique artists by allowing for this in-between which means that the music will not sound exactly as one would expect, but with that little extra something brought about by the singularity of the person. This is the primary meaning of interpretation, it seems to me. In Le Cri d'Antigone, this can be heard particularly in the solos that I wrote for some.It is not written down, it cannot be explained, but it can be felt and worked on by the nose, "by the sheet" as we say among ourselves... What interests me through the notation that I propose is to draw from the humanity of each person something unique in the service of a collective project.
Besides your work as a composer, you also improvise within the noise duo NOORG or with musicians like Serge Tessot-Gay, Audrey Chen or eRikm...
In his book Improvising freely, a primer on an experiencethe improvising musician and thinker Le Quan Ninh, with whom I had the chance to work a few years ago, asks this question: "What do I have to give up to start improvising freely? Do I have to? Shouldn't I leave what I know, for good?" I really have this feeling of abandonment and letting go towards a state of total and absolute porosity when I improvise for example in the duo NOORG, alongside Éric Brochard. Before each of the duo's concerts, we never talk about music, nor even about form, direction or objects to be crossed. We literally dive body and soul into the sound without anything or anyone seeming to drive anything. It is an experience that accepts no concessions. It is very difficult to talk about it and to describe the state in which free improvisation puts us.
How does this practice fit in with your composition?
I don't have this feeling that free improvisation can demand that you totally abandon another practice, for example that of composition, writing or an approach to playing under constraints. For my part, I navigate in different practices that feed each other. My approach to composing and sharing with performers to create sound objects, paths, shapes, thicknesses and materials, never places me in the position of the knowing, untouchable demiurge genius who would master all the parameters of sound and give birth to music with his recognizable and admirable gesture... In the projects that drive me, the boundary between the written and the unwritten is very blurry. The sonic result of a collective experience around a score, whether graphic, aleatory, open or more classical, will of course be very different from what will be played in a free improvisation, if we can really imagine being totally free in the improvisation. These two experiences make me happy and transform my relationship to things, to others.
Interview by Michèle Tosi
Article photos © Vincent Beaume
Photos partitions © Loïc Guénin
