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What is music? Can our everyday voices and conversations, arranged in a tight polyphony, be perceived as music? Answer from composer and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti, who suggests we change our listening habits.
I'd like to open this interview by evoking your Pièces à pédale, which the Marseille Gmem presented on March 15. These are five independent pieces, but I believe they share the same spirit of doubling the voice through an electroacoustic device. How did you come up with the idea for this cycle?
The cycle began with two solos: one for Vincent Lhermet (accordion), the other for Gareth Davis (clarinet). Afterwards, I co-wrote a solo for Anne Gillot (recorder), and I realized that all three pieces shared the same very simple electroacoustic device, reduced to a pedal, and a way of doubling the voice, declined each time in a different way, i.e. I take the voice of the instrumentalist and put it back into play, using it as musical material. I was then approached by Athénor (the CNCM in Saint-Nazaire), with whom I'd already worked on educational projects. They suggested I collaborate with a mathematics laboratory at the University of Nantes. I had already worked with one of the researchers in this group, Assia Mahboubi. We had worked in parallel in high schools. I asked her about the structure of my voice-based pieces, the conversations: "How could you, a mathematics researcher, formalize these pieces in mathematical language, these mechanisms formulated in a musical language?" or again: "For my part, I use more or less traditional scores (sometimes just protocols), but can we imagine the score as an algorithm, or a mathematical formula?" And we thought about this together.
Eventually, all these pieces converged into a new one, Sistemawhich is nothing more than a conversation with four of the group's mathematicians, modulated by a system of instructions: they talk about what they want, but around them there's an instrumental ensemble playing a musical score, and as they play, they operate pedals, which give instructions that have the effect of modifying their conversations.
This led to the idea of grouping these five pieces together in an ensemble that was initially a little kaleidoscopic, but which obeyed the same principle.
What preoccupies me in all these pieces is the friction between two forms of language: a formal, rational, exact language that formalizes things, which is peculiar to mathematics - and also to music in more ways than one (if we think of harmony, or the form of grammar that describes musical events) - and a natural language that I use a lot in my pieces, and which is actually a kind of chaos, a blur, something that's difficult to formalize, and which obeys a very simple score. The instruction would be: "Say what comes to mind"! We do this every day, but depending on the context (intimate or professional), our words are more or less formalized. As Dante Alighieri wrote in The Divine Comedy (Purgatory XVII,25): "it rained in high fantasy", which suggests that fantasy is a space into which the rain penetrates.
For this reason, the way we express ourselves orally has always struck me as very interesting, because there are always micro-variations, both in grammatical constructions and in prosody, and that's hard to formalize! I'm interested in the friction between these two forms of language. That's the heart of Pièces à pédale.
You've long shown an interest in orality, improvisation and conversation. That's pretty rare among composers! Where does this taste for the impromptu and the indeterminate come from?
Well, that's hard to say. I've always had an instinct to look for "objets trouvés" in everyday reality: seeing people talking, for example! This "found object" has an aesthetic interest for me, which I don't find in rational or constructed objects. Of course, I can intellectually construct harmonic relationships (mathematically, I construct the octave, the fifth...). And when I do field recordings, when I listen to people talking, I realize that there are rational harmonic relationships in the order of the spectrum in this speech, but there's a more chaotic factor in reality, in the field, which gives us harmonic objects that aren't rational, and that's very stimulating! For example, we think we've found a major third in a voice, but on closer inspection, this third isn't really right, it's a bit distorted.
So I realized very early on that I had to adopt certain strategies when dealing with this kind of material. I don't just look for my objects on the work table, but outside it. I escape! I find things that take me elsewhere. There's a kind of tension between these two objects, and it's very interesting.
For you, voices are often abstract objects, cut off from the bodies of these voices. At the same time, you often intervene on stage with your own voice. An example of this is the Portraits de voix recently performed at the Nouveau Théâtre de Montreuil. You share the stage with the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart. So there's still an incarnation?
Yes, and no. I have different functions or positions depending on the context, the score.
In Portraits of voices as in Plane-Talea, I engage in a somewhat absurd exercise in the idea of disregarding biographical identities, gender and the bodies of the voices. It's a paradox, because a voice cannot exist without the body that produces it!
In this composition, I'm acting as a portraitist: I'm on stage as Alessandro Bosetti, but I'm interviewing voices, talking to the singers of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, who allow me to complete these sound portraits using anonymous voices. I like this form of anonymity
It's a little different in Pièces à pédale. The musicians/performers are present with their identities, in a context where identity is normally annulled, because often, in instrumental music, we don't address a particular performer. I do things differently. My pieces are very much linked to the individuals for whom they are written. Double, for example, was really written for accordionist Vincent Lhermet. It's a portrait of him, bringing his character into play. The piece can be performed by someone else, but who will enter into a dialogue with Vincent's voice and experience, and you really have to take that into account: it's him, and no one else!
"Portraits of voices" Alessandro Bosetti (teaser) from Alessandro Bosetti on Vimeo.
In Double, there are two types of voice: Vincent's pre-recorded voice and his live voice?
Yes, it's like a montage of a radio play, but in which all the fragments are triggered by pedal strokes. So Vincent has a score to play, but he can manage his timing as he likes. He has to launch all the fragments that make up the montage of this piece. We recorded Vincent's voice as he discovered the instrument, which was totally new to him: a toy accordion, enclosed in a box. He opened the box and discovered the instrument. The recorded part is Vincent's ten minutes of wonder and surprise at the instrument, and his first attempts to play it. This toy instrument is a miniature version, obviously imperfect, of his superb concert instrument.
We could also mention another Pièce à pédale, Wild broadcasting, composed for Anne Gillot, musician and radio woman, in which she improvises and simulates an on-air blackout?
Anne came to me with an idea for a solo. I wanted to put Anne's two faces into this solo: the magnificent musician - she plays the flute and bass clarinet - but also the radio woman, the moderator (she presents music programs on Radio Suisse Romande). I wanted to articulate these two identities. There are moments when her recorded voice interrupts her flow of words, and after a while, her identity as a flautist integrates with her identity as a radio voice.
While we're on the subject of radio, I know that this medium is very important to you, and that you have a strong bond with radio creation. Is this because radio is linked to a form of orality?
For me, radio corresponds to a form of utopian listening. I've always been interested in musical objects that are problematic for listening, or, let's say, hybrid. We all know that we listen differently to music than to someone speaking in an audio room. It's a different kind of attention.
As early as the late 1990s, I was experimenting with language that was problematic in the musical context, because it was no longer perceived as music, even in experimental music circles. It's a real question, to be honest! Is it still music? How do you listen to it, in what posture? Our brains are quickly lost when faced with speech.
I had utopian visions of an intermediary form of listening, one more in tune with the groove of speech, almost ecstatic, which didn't really exist. In the early 2000s, I arrived in Germany to join a musical movement linked to improvisation (the "reductionist" movement). I had in my corpus as a composer these creations with the spoken word, for which I couldn't find a place, and there I discovered the world of radio creation, in particular the Akustische Musik studio at WestDeutscher Rundfunk, and the coexistence of non-hierarchical sound objects: voices, noises, sounds, on the same level. It gave me a lot of freedom! It was a new way of listening. That's what radio has always been for me, a medium that broadcasts sounds, whatever they may be: silence, noise, speech, a chronicle, composition... But I must say that I also have a fascination for the more classical world of radio: the Hörspiel, as produced in German studios. I've been nourished by this tradition, from Bertolt Brecht to Kagel and current experiments.
What about opera? I'm not forgetting that you're Italian; what's your relationship to this form of vocality? After all, you yourself describe some of your compositions as "pocket operas"!
Of course, like all Italians, I've been immersed in opera... and I've always hated it! But like everything you hate, at some point in your life it resurfaces and you have to come to terms with it.
So I took a closer look.
In many of my pieces, there's a plot. They're conversations, free voices, but they function like radio operas, even if they're performed in concert. People often say to me: "Your pieces are like operas", and that's probably true, but without the staging!
One thing helped me a lot. One day, choreographer DD Dorvillier reminded me of Robert Ashley's definition of opera. He refers to opera as "voices in a landscape "*, and that helped me a lot, even though I don't claim to do real opera (because I don't belong to that world and I don't have the codes...).
There's a paradox though; I dedicated Sistema to Rossini, and there are echoes of his music in this piece, a kind of free chattering of the four voices. I've always been attracted to tight polyphony and the "chattering" side of polyphony. I find this in the madrigal, in the finales of Rossini's operas. Of course, at no point do I quote Rossini, but it's a reference that I keep at a distance in a way.
Are your Portraits de voix more like madrigals?
Yes, it's a tight polyphony, a counterpoint. I've always been sensitive to the polyphony of everyday life. We've all had the experience of a family meal, where ten people speak at the same time... and yet all the voices find their space in there! It's like birds in the forest: each has its own spectrum and there's a "timing" of responses. If you analyze it, it's obviously more chaotic than a Bach polyphony, but there's a kind of coherence there. In this register, there's also material that I've never used, because of its negative karma; for example, those TV debates, where the guests shout at each other and speak together in a form of counterpoint...
This complexity interests me, and I find a reference to it in polyphony and in Renaissance madrigals: it's fascinating! Over the years, I've tried to delve deeper into these writings, to immerse myself in them. The first reference is obviously Gesualdo, which has led me in many other directions, including towards more modern things: towards Aperghis, Sciarrino, and even Ashley, who uses this a lot with a very different technique.
Portraits de voix is all voices, unprocessed and without a body. It's a choral piece: nothing but voices, even if there is an electroacoustic part!
"Portraits of voices" Alessandro Bosetti (teaser 3) from Alessandro Bosetti on Vimeo.
What do these voices have to say?
In this piece, as in Plane-Talea, I chose to intersect fragments that have a real beginning and a real end, and I chose elements that lie just "before the meaning", so that you can't really guess what is being said. The Voice Portraits follow a particular strategy: I chose people because of their voices and what interested me in their voices. I was transparent with them about this: "It's not you I'm interested in, it's your voice". So we spent time together, moments in life, but I concentrated on the voices and not the people. I chose little bits of these voices that touched me and spoke to me, beyond what the person was telling me. It's a bit of an absurd exercise really; it may even be impossible to go through with it; it's almost a form of listening meditation! It's almost a form of listening meditation. You may hear bits of conversation, words, but it's not that important, there's nothing to understand.
In Sistema (and therefore Pièce à pédale), it's different. The conversations are free, so yes, things are said, but the conversation, the libretto of the piece, is completely free: the four people on the stage say the first thing that comes to mind. They have very precise formal rules to respect - when to start, when to stop, with whom to enter into relationship, opposition, approval, or whether to sing or speak - but the subject matter is completely free. They can talk about interesting or boring things, about themselves, about the set-up, or explain what they're doing, explain very technical things about their job, they can also talk about train delays before arriving at the concert venue: it's completely open! And I intervene only on the rational side of the conversation. It's the friction between these two aspects that interests me: the irrational and the rational.
It's true, then, that language has been emancipated. We don't care about meaning, we're only interested in phonetics, in sounds. At the same time, it's a language that never stops saying things, even if I look at it with the "ecstatic" gaze of someone doing meditation, disregarding what these people are saying, I know very well that they are saying things (declaration of love, political speech...). The score doesn't forbid anything, so there's always a tension there.
Alessandro Bosetti - Journal de Bord - 1ère étape ( captation intégrale ) from Alessandro Bosetti on Vimeo.
The Plane-Talea cycle comprises some thirty pieces. You've accumulated a lot of archive material that you've selected and combined. Do you plan to continue this cycle?
It's an old project started in 2016. I'm surprised to see that it's continuing. It's a voice archive, in which I currently have around fifty voices that have become anonymous. I'm trying to classify these voices according to their owners. They're all arranged in thousands of little fragments. I'm still collecting voices, and I'm also interested in doing performances with this project.
I arrive on site, three or four days beforehand, and meet people; that in itself is a beautiful thing. I do portrait sessions with people, taking an interest in their voices, and I'm enjoying it more and more. In the course of this exploration, I have real conversations, but I don't feel obliged to reproduce these moments in my piece.
The cycle continues: there are two new pieces in progress.
I should add that every time I go into this archive I find new things. It's so vast!
The music that comes out of it works a lot on accidents. There are lots of things to find in this archive, surprising associations, and I try not to use the voices from this archive for other projects.
It's sampling without processing: small fragments of voice only cut at the beginning/end of the vocal emission. It's a work of sampling and permanent recombination. It's very simple technically, and it's a kind of simulation of what vocal writing could be. It's a vocal writing laboratory that coincides with my musical fantasy.
I remember a Plane-Talea performance at Densités a few years ago. You were behind the computer and the audience was surrounded by loudspeakers; you had installed a form of acousmonium..
For me, it's not exactly an acousmonium insofar as what I'm doing is multi-mono. All the voices are recorded in mono. I don't use space simulation, there's no idea of spatialization. It's a multiplicity of mono points in space, each arranged in an improvised way, according to how I feel about the space I'm in. It's much simpler than an acousmonium, even if it is an orchestra of loudspeakers.
Are there times, Alessandro, when you just can't get enough of human voices, of the human? You must be haunted by all those voices?
No doubt! It's my interest in language that drives me here. There's an injunction inside me that's always pushed me to make music with language. I don't know why! I even envy musicians who start from the principle that music doesn't have to say anything. For my part, I've always been confronted with the obligation to express things. Hence my great mistrust of, and respect for, language. Sometimes, I try to get around it. In political discourse, for example, there are situations where you feel the limits of language. You can find yourself faced with someone who tells you that they love you, that they want your freedom, and who at the same time murders you! And that can drive a human being mad... So language isn't everything. I'm forced to find ruses, to sublimate language...
In your book Thèses/voix, published by Les Presses du réel, you express things that are essential to you, but this time through writing. It includes work texts, but is also a work of poetry and an essay.
In one way or another, these texts are extensions of my work on the voice. At the root of my interest in language is obviously an interest in literature, even if I've mainly worked on orality. Many texts have been generated in this way. At the same time, a whole body of theoretical work developed, and it seemed to me that these texts had a beauty about them. Everything gradually took shape. It's a hybrid object, with, on the one hand, autobiographical essays in the tradition of Brodsky, Walter Benjamin or Sebald - because this type of writing has had a strong influence on me - and also dialogues in the tradition of the philosophical or scientific dialogues of Galileo or Giordano Bruno, or transcriptions of my own plays.
It's a series of texts that run parallel to my work in sound creation, that are intimately linked to my work on the voice, and which at the same time have an aesthetic and philosophical interest.
Interview by Anne Montaron
