{"id":2288,"date":"2019-01-18T17:39:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T16:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/?p=2288"},"modified":"2022-09-01T08:55:28","modified_gmt":"2022-09-01T06:55:28","slug":"musique-et-poesie-aujourdhui-entretien-avec-laure-gauthier-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/musique-et-poesie-aujourdhui-entretien-avec-laure-gauthier-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"MUSIQUE ET POESIE AUJOURD’HUI, Entretien avec Laure Gauthier (2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTERVIEW<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. Laure Gauthier: What is your relationship to poetry, and more particularly to contemporary poetry? <\/strong><\/p>\n

PL<\/strong>\u00a0: Since adolescence I have carried within me the imprint of Symbolist poetry, a bond that I then maintained and developed, as a reader, in a diffuse way, navigating from the avant-gardes of the 1910s-20s up to the 1960s.
This bond was later enriched through my work as a researcher on the side of sound poetry. For all that, I do not have a homogeneous view of the evolution of written or sound poetry and their many aesthetic ramifications.
If poetry has always fascinated me for its capacity to formulate in words what consciousness or feeling may hold that is most complex to express, my relationship to music is more organic, more carnal, more sensual.<\/p>\n

2. LG: In what ways did your 10 years of radio art at France Culture, where you coordinated the Atelier de cr\u00e9ation radiophonique (ACR) with Frank Smith between 2002 and 2011, shape your perception and conception of contemporary poetry? <\/strong><\/p>\n

PL<\/strong> : This period was very rich and allowed me to discover a whole strand of sound poetry whose great diversity of contemporary forms I had been unaware of. Let us recall that sound poetry and the radio medium were born almost simultaneously, a century ago, in the 1910s-20s. These two modes of expression and communication are therefore inseparable. At the head of the ACR, we were naturally placed to continue this radio tradition and to encourage the production of new works. We therefore logically invited many sound poets to come and confront their expression with the writing of the radio medium.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0LG: How do you conceive of your collaboration with Frank Smith, for whom you have composed several film scores? Does the poet-filmmaker let you intervene in the conception of the work? <\/strong><\/p>\n

PL<\/strong>\u00a0: Although I have known Frank Smith since 2001, I only composed the music for one of his films in 2015.
We began working together, then, after having shared the artistic direction of the Atelier de cr\u00e9ation radiophonique, where we also edited, mixed and produced countless programmes. Over time, an uncommon mutual understanding was forged between us.
What these film scores have in common is that the soundtrack was thought out before the shoot, from the writing of the screenplay onwards, which means that the music subsequently evolved along with the evolution and elaboration of the film, and with their constraints.<\/p>\n

4. LG: You have worked with several filmmakers, but Frank Smith is the only one who is a writer, a poet who makes films. Did this change your approach to film, and initiate another way of coming to music and to the relationship between music and image? Was the work on the sound image renewed? <\/strong><\/p>\n

PL<\/strong>\u00a0: This collaboration with a poet did not fundamentally change my way of working, whether in the relationship between music and image or in the way of approaching the subject of a film. Frank gave me carte blanche\u00a0! I did what I wanted\u00a0!
What changed was taking into consideration, as a starting postulate, the fact that the music must absolutely not hinder or be an obstacle to the understanding of the text, which occupies almost the entirety of the film. That said, I had already been confronted with the same problem in Foudre<\/em>, Manuela Morgaine\u2019s tetralogy, where the text also occupies a large place.<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0LG: What did your work as a composer consist of in Le Film des questions\u00a0? Frank Smith published a book, which appeared with Plaine Page in 2014, and a film (commissioned by the Hors-Pistes Festival, 2015, Centre Pompidou) that shows a landscape in Alabama where a young mass killer murdered ten people at random on 10 March 2009 before taking his own life. Frank Smith says that his film asks questions and \u201cthat every question asked is a bifurcation, a deviation, a proliferation before the road that hurls itself straight ahead of us\u201d. What was your work in this film? Does the poetic status of the text change the conception of the music? <\/strong><\/p>\n

PL<\/strong> : It should be recalled that Frank Smith\u2019s work follows in the wake of the Objectivist poetry of Charles Reznikoff, and that, as an observer-writer, he works from testimonies, existing texts and official documents that he recomposes, with which he attempts a form of neutralisation, an emotional distancing, proposing another gaze, disaffected, free of the emotion proper to the events that punctuate recent or more distant news.
It is this sidestep, this distancing, that I like to accentuate and create with the music.
The theme of the film takes up a news item that occurred in Alabama, in the United States, in 2009, in which a man murdered ten people before taking his own life at the end of a police chase. The visual device reconstructs in real time, thanks to the animation of images taken from Street View<\/em>, the entirety of the killer\u2019s final journey, from his home to the place where he ended his life.
The musical material is simple and is reduced to two elements. A theme partly inspired by the standard Alabama<\/em> by John Coltrane, transposed into a new temporality and a new harmonisation, played very slowly on the piano, accompanied by a drone that I shall come back to later. This theme, which repeats, unfolds and folds back on itself over the whole duration of the film, in an obstinate mode, is transposed onto C. It is itself made up of repeated and augmented motifs, of ritornellos, of convolutions, of comings and goings, as if to figure the state of obsessive rumination in which the killer was probably immersed at the time of the events. The sustain pedal is permanently engaged, prolonging at length the dying away of each note.
The constraint for the music is that the film is conceived with a performative dimension, in which the film\u2019s soundtrack \u2013 the actors\u2019 voices and the music \u2013 must be able to be performed live, as at the first screening, within the \u201cHors Pistes\u201d festival at the Centre Georges Pompidou in January 2015.
During rehearsals, we immediately realised that we must on no account try to harmonise the actors\u2019 text, spoken by Garance Clavel and Adrien Michaux, with the phrases played on the piano, but on the contrary accentuate the fact that each entity \u2013 image, text and music \u2013 pursues its own course without concerning itself with the others.
The film took its final form by taking into account this collision of the different temporalities at work in the film\u2019s mechanism\u00a0: the deferred time of the killer\u2019s last journey reconstructed on screen, the real time in which the viewer witnesses this last journey, the distortion of the time that separates these two moments.
As for the more direct link between music and poetry, it is found in a conscious and illustrative way by drawing on the prosody of an interrogative sentence, which recurs in most of the motifs, most of which end on ascending intervals.
This is La musique des questions<\/em>.
The second element, which also plays with time, is the low drone of a synthetic nature that unfolds over the whole length of the film. This continuous bass supports the theme\u2019s harmony, close to a mode of A, and has several functions. First, its persistence is found in the image and represents the preview lines of the route that are permanently superimposed on the road in the Street View<\/em> images. More symbolically, the drone also makes it possible to represent inexorably the fixed idea and the morbid obsession of this killer in his macabre undertaking.<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0LG: You also worked on Le Film des visages . Here again, in 2016, Frank Smith published a book with Plaine Page and made a medium-length film (commissioned by the Centre G. Pompidou, Hors-Piste Festival) in which he conducts a poetic and visual reflection on the faces of the revolt of the Arab Spring in Egypt. He defines this film as a poetic film. What was your role in this film? In what way could the music be described as poetic? <\/strong><\/p>\n

PL<\/strong> : There is no specific desire, either on my part or on Frank\u2019s, to make the music describable as poetic. The music operates at different levels and seeks to materialise different ideas that run through the film. The point was to start from the text material and deduce from it a musical architecture to support it. Like Le film des questions<\/em>, Frank Smith\u2019s entire film output is built around a document, in this case, for Le film des visages<\/em>, a three-minute report on a demonstration that took place in Alexandria in 2010 to protest against the regime of President Hosni Moubarak and the killing of the young activist Khaled Saeed by the police, an event that would trigger the Egyptian spring.
The main idea of the film rests on the desire to go towards the image, to go out to meet the image, to always draw closer to it until one can grasp the faces of this insurrection. To do so, like Michael Snow\u2019s film Wavelenght <\/em>(1970), the film rests on a long 45-minute forward tracking shot that slowly approaches a screen on which this report is projected in a loop. In the course of the camera\u2019s progress towards the wall, the space gradually narrows and is regularly interrupted by the intrusion of still images of demonstrators\u2019 faces, of intertitles of chanted slogans, of close-ups of soldiers\u2019 faces, until it becomes a \u201cface to face\u201d between the faces of the demonstrators and that of the spectators.
To accompany this zoom effect of one image within another image, of one screen within another, and to seek to inscribe the sound of this report in the film\u2019s soundtrack, I started from the three minutes of the soundtrack of this report, stretched by means of the Timestretching <\/em>technique over the whole duration of the film. The result is a striking sonic slow motion in which the clamour of the demonstrators turns into successive waves of unrecognisable cries, appearing and disappearing in the mix following the inflections of the music and of the picture editing.
I also drew on the centuries-old musical tradition of Egyptian sung poetry, the melhoun and the cha\u00e2bi, free in essence, traditionally accompanied by an oud, taking inspiration from the great musicians who carry this tradition, notably Yusuf Al-Manyalawi, Ali Abd al-Bari, Salama Higazi and of course the great priestess Oum Kalthoum, in her immortalisation of the famous poem El Atlal <\/em>(Ruins). Accompaniment motifs on the oud were sampled, transcribed and then transposed to the piano in a maq\u00e2m (mode) of B. To play these motifs, the way of playing the piano is highly evocative. The idea was to create a hybrid instrument, neither piano nor oud, a \u201cpianoud\u201d, obtained by muffling the piano\u2019s natural resonances with felts and then amplifying the resonance by means of the sustain<\/em> pedal. The result is a singular sonority, approaching the oud without really being able to reach it, because of the quarter tones that are impossible to produce on this instrument. Symbolically, this way of playing is also linked to the Egyptian insurrection, at once muffled and amplified by the infinite resonance that reverberates on its people today.
On this pianoud, <\/em>the singer Sapho agreed to improvise. The texts she whispers and sings in Arabic come from personal texts, from extracts taken from L\u2019art d\u2019aimer <\/em>by Mahmoud Darwich, and from a free interpretation of El Atlal<\/em> after the poem by Ibrahim Nagi.
Around these very identifiable motifs, a whole palette of synthetic sounds was modelled so as to create a kind of musical no man\u2019s land<\/em> running through all the notes of the maq\u00e2m of B, up to the so-called \u201cleading note\u201d, altered with a flat on the note \u201cA\u201d. These immaterial sonorities then create an interstice, a gaping hole, into which it would be possible to slip an eye or an ear, external witnesses of the drama that played out during this Egyptian spring.<\/p>\n

January 18, 2019<\/p>\n

DOCUMENTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Document 1<\/strong><\/p>\n

Le film des questions<\/em>\u00a0:<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a9 Le film des questions, Frank Smith (2015)<\/p>\n

Document 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

Le film des visages\u00a0:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a9 Le film des visages, Frank Smith (2016)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Interview originally published at https:\/\/remue.net\/Musique-et-poesie-aujourd-hui-entretien-avec-Philippe-Langlois-et-documents<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

See Laure Gauthier\u2019s book, D\u2019un lyrisme l\u2019autre, La cr\u00e9ation entre po\u00e9sie et musique au XXIe si\u00e8cle <\/em>published by \u00e9ditions mf in May 2022, collection r\u00e9percussions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
https:\/\/www.editions-mf.com\/produit\/115\/9782378040475\/d-un-lyrisme-l-autre<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ENTRETIEN 1. Laure Gauthier : Quel est votre rapport \u00e0 la po\u00e9sie et plus particuli\u00e8rement \u00e0 la po\u00e9sie contemporaine ? PL : Je porte en moi depuis l\u2019adolescence l\u2019empreinte de la po\u00e9sie symboliste, un lien que j\u2019ai ensuite entretenu et d\u00e9velopp\u00e9, en tant que lecteur, de mani\u00e8re diffuse, naviguant des avant-gardes des ann\u00e9es 1910-20 jusque dans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,62,176],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-bibliotheque","category-publication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2288"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2331,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288\/revisions\/2331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}