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Always on the lookout for new experimental projects to express her talents as an instrumentalist while questioning her practice, Claudine Simon this time sets out to meet her own piano, which she literally dissects and enriches with multiple machines, while transforming herself into an augmented performer. A story of mechanical hybridization.
You describe yourself as a "pianist, interpreter, improviser and performer". You don't add "composer" to this - already - fine list, even though you sign the music for several of your shows. Why is this? Do you see a separation between the worlds of composition and performance?
I'm not really comfortable with the label "composer", which doesn't fit me in the way the word was used until the 20th century. I haven't yet really found the right term to describe my work; I'd say "polysemic musician". Of course, I'm a pianist, so I do create sound, but it's not in the context of music that can be reproduced identically, that can be fixed to a score.
In my projects, the music is free, it's built in an improvised gesture, it will sound a certain way depending on the context in which I find myself, it will reveal its contours in a kind of "vibratile sound" that is built with the musicians.
This doesn't mean that I can do whatever I like or whatever I want: there are playing constraints that make me evolve in a certain direction, a sort of complex solfeggio. After that, in a stage project, there's also a whole dramaturgical framework, in which the music fits in by placing itself in certain places.
Ultimately, I play with sound energy that evolves and shapes itself in the immediacy and with the people present, it's a way for me to embrace the vibratory and temporal flow, to blend in smoothly.
What prompted you to take the winding path of creative music so early on, right out of the Conservatoire? Why weren't you more "simply" - dare I say it - a concert performer, interpreting a repertoire? What drew you to these more adventurous paths?
The piano has been with me since childhood, and it's never stopped working for me. And then, at the end of my piano studies at the CNSMD in Paris, I felt a kind of asphyxiation, an overflow, with regard to the solo repertoire and my role as a performer. In the end, I reacted to a whole environment, a way of thinking.
I think there's a narcissistic flaw in musicians, no doubt linked to their musical upbringing. There's a reflexivity that's difficult, almost an impediment to thinking. I found it extremely difficult to break away from a practical performance, to move from a form of execution to a form of reflection. But this shift was necessary, because I could no longer feel the music I was defending on stage. I needed to deconstruct this relationship in order to reappropriate it. Creative music was a way out of this impasse: working with composers like Samuel Sighicelli, who writes almost "made-to-measure" pieces for his performers; moving towards the musical theater repertoire; and above all towards improvisation.
Alain Savouret (professor of generative improvisation at the CNSMD in Paris) had a big impact on me. He opened my ears to the realm of "sound" and shattered my beliefs as a classical musician. That said, today I take great pleasure in performing, working with composers and playing the repertoire. I don't really have any aesthetic barriers, but I do have time limits.
One of your many facets is that of show designer. Often, in fact, your shows take an interdisciplinary turn, with other musicians, but also with choreographers, dancers, stage directors and video artists. How did you learn to work in this field, first and foremost in terms of show design and organization?
I have a taste for writing at the frontiers of music, dance and theater, and sometimes with images too. I like to nurture a porosity between these disciplines, to find equivalences, to open up to other artistic territories. There's a lot to share with a dancer, for example: the relationship to the body, to space, to gesture, to time. So working with a dancer inevitably leads to changes in the way I do things. It forces me to assimilate differences in practices, perceptions and sensations. These experiences with dance have enabled me to broaden my artistic horizons, and have shaken up my reference points. Confronting that also means becoming tolerant of other people's differences and grasping their richness. I'm moving more and more towards a hybridization of artistic practices, not with the aim of leaving musical territory, but rather to refresh it.
Has the presence of a sister dancer and choreographer, Pauline Simon, with whom you've worked on several shows (Au fil de Petrouchka in 2010, SOLI.DES in 2017 and currently your Pianomachine), played a role in this opening?
I have a strong relationship with my sister, a fascination too. Her childhood was lulled by the pieces I used to rehearse, and she got into music from the most laborious, repetitive angle! It was through her, of course, that I discovered the world of contemporary dance. She sees me evolve today, and our sisterhood is evolving too. It's precious to have her close to me on creative projects, it really makes sense.
Is this openness still the subject of this latest project, Pianomachine: like an augmented piano, and also an augmented pianist?
Exactly!
We can see something disturbing in all these robotized mechanisms, or fascinating, one not precluding the other. You speak of a personalization, even a sensualization of the machine. What is your relationship with technology?
Technology interests me insofar as it gives me the opportunity to work on perception, the different aspects of the sensible. By grafting machines onto the piano, I come closer to the notion of the "desiring machine", also envisaged as a "body without organs" in the reflections of Deleuze and Artaud. Here, these forces contribute to undoing the hierarchy of the instrument's original organs. The usual zones of listening are thus displaced, even disinvested. A space opens up, made up of sensuality as liberated power, offering the possibility of new mechanisms, arrangements and circulation.
In many of your shows, we see you under and inside your piano, appropriating its geography by exploring and playing with all its nooks and crannies. This is also the case in the short film you made during the first confinement(Confinement / Crisis), where we wonder whether you're fighting against your own instrument or showing it your love, condemned to remain stuck with it.
This new project, Pianomachine, is also somewhere between constraint and liberation. It seems to be addressed entirely to your instrument, like a milestone in your relationship. Is this the case? What is the nature of your relationship with the piano?
That's exactly it, I'm trying to question this relationship with my instrument, with the idea of breaking out of the classical schema, the sometimes very fixed situation of the musician enslaved to his tool of expression. I also feel the need to deconstruct the representations and ideologies, cultural or otherwise, that are associated with it.
Finally, this is the subject I always come back to: talking about desire (this object of desire), with all that this entails in terms of fascination, the challenge of dominating the instrument, a score; and this instrument that sometimes resists, in addition to this permanent inner struggle.
I'm really fascinated by this machinery, by this enormity, this completely unbalanced power relationship with the musician, the tons of tension inside, the symbolic power too, ranging from the phallic to the reassuring. My way of questioning this relationship is to divert, unbalance and shake up the whole thing, with a view to reinterrogating it all.
Why is music the way it is? What about the relationship with the instrument, what about the automatisms we create in our pianistic gestures and in our thoughts, whether conscious or not? Etc.
In the Pianomachine stage version, the texts speak exactly of this, of the primary forces (dixit Freud) that work on this relationship, but with the difference that here the piano expresses itself verbally (via a loudspeaker placed inside), we give it a voice! In particular, there's a crisis scene in which the two "subjects" hurl insults at each other, a verbal violence that precedes physical hand-to-hand combat. All this forces me to take a lot of risks.
With Pianomachine's scenography, the piano is laid bare, as if dissected, its entrails revealed to the public. This is the case in the Labo pianomachine concert version, but even more so in the stage version. He's lost all modesty. This is something we also saw in Heiner Goebbels' Stifters Dinge, where the pianos were also played by mechanical devices. Are you familiar with it?
Yes, Goebbels' piece is magnificent. I haven't had the chance to see it live, but the scenographic universe with pianos played by machines is breathtaking.
The idea of dissection is first and foremost linked to the idea of offering a sort of internal sound tour of the piano. But I also wanted the audience to see its entrails, its viscera, to enjoy all the anatomical beauty of the instrument. And then there's all the machinery at work, which I show in the stage version thanks to mirrors that zoom in and even diffract this scene, a way for me to create a mise en abyme, another point of view. In the concert version, the audience around the piano also gets a glimpse inside. One day, I'd like to extend this scenographic and even plastic work with the piano in the next stage of my work.
How were these devices conceived? Where did the idea come from? How did the prototyping phase go with the engineering students at Insa Lyon? How did you come to meet Sonopopée (and who are they)?
After having done a lot of research into the timbres of the prepared piano, I wanted to extend and deepen this work with an instrument that I had finally imagined made-to-measure. I conducted an initial six-month research phase with some thirty students from the Insa in Lyon, two professors and composer Raphaèle Biston. The students built prototypes that enabled me to carry out the first experiments with machines in the piano, which I was able to play with composer Marco Suarez.
Later, I met Christian Sebille, composer and director of the GMEM in Marseille, who was working on a sound installation with a glass orchestra played by automatons, Paysage de propagations. As both our projects use the same technology, he was keen to move mine forward alongside his, and to produce it. He helped me considerably in my research. He put me in touch with the Sonopopée collective, made up of Vivien Trelcat, Max Lance and Nicolas Canot. This collective specializes in computer, electronic and hybrid lutheries, and totally rethought my set-up. In the end, all the piano's machinery had to be rebuilt.
Tell us about it. You work with a computerized machine performer, Vivien Trelcat: what's his role? Is he also a musician in his own right? Is there any automation? Any randomness?
Vivien's contribution is very important. He developed the entire instrument-software, he operates the machines, he interacts with me as an improvising musician. We form a kind of split four-hands. He transforms the sound in real time and broadcasts it multiphonically. Together, we develop a whole musical grammar, a search for timbres, spaces for playing and listening between what's improvised and the play with randomness, algorithms... We also work on ambiguities, false pretenses between acoustic sounds and electronic sounds, so much so that we don't always know who's playing!
Pianomachine - Claudine Simon from GMEM on Vimeo.
How did you go about setting up the narratology of the show in its stage version?
The idea was to prepare in advance all the textual material written by philosopher Franck Lemonde, as well as the intentions, sound grammar and body arrangements, so as to confront them with a kind of stage truth. I didn't want to freeze the scenes I'd imagined, I wanted to experience them on stage, even if it meant tearing some of them apart. This was the aim of the last two weeks of residency at La Muse en Circuit in February and at GMEM in March. The premiere took place on March 10 at the Théâtre d'Orléans and will be performed again at the Musique Action festival on September 30.
Interview by Guillaume Kosmicki
