more at the french page music and direction-georges aperghis-libretto-georges aperghis and peter szendy, including fragments of texts by herman melville, franz kafka, charles baudelaire, william shakespeare, victor hugo conductor-Georges-Elie Octors Donatienne Michel-Dansac-soprano-Johanne Saunier-actress and dancer -Lionel Peintre-baritone-Romain Bischoff-baritone Kaatje Chiers-horn-Paul Declerck-viola-François Deppe-cello-Dirk Descheemaeker-bass clarinet-Jean-Luc Fafchamps-keyboard-Tom Pauwels-electric guitar-Alain Pire-trombone-Jean-Luc Plouvier-keyboard-Philippe Ranallo-trumpet-Michael Schmid-flutes computer music design-sébastien roux-video-kurt d’haeseleer-de filmfabriek stage and light design-peter missotten-de filmfabriek music software-ircam-sound-alexandre fostier-direction assistant-émilie morin Avis de Tempête is a production of Opéra de Lille, in coproduction with Lille 2004, Opéra de Nancy et de Lorraine, Ircam-Centre Georges Pompidou, with support of Fonds de Création Lyrique and Fondation Beaumarchais. Avis de Tempête, commissioned by Opéra de Lille and the French ministry of culture was premiered at the Opéra de Lille on November 17th, 2004.
storms Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern. A stark bewildering feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. Before writing a single note of his opera Avis de Tempête (Storm Warning), Georges Aperghis had given the watchword to his collaborators, the librettist, the video artists, the singers, the computer technician, the conductor, the scenographer and the musicians: “an opera that is a storm”. Here are a few fragments of what has been noted down since then.
...storms... Construct – relate. Then disturb – erase. Storm in the mind, in the text, in the music. The instruments, the voices, the electronic sounds write, erase, write, erase, in turn, like some vast breathing process. Like a story forever beginning again. The main part of the spectacle troubled by internal disturbances. Moby Dick, King Lear, The Lightning-Rod Man: allegories of the mental storm that rips through the text and subverts the spectacle from within. Immobile storms too. A kind of novelty of our century. Vertical storms – almost calm – much more terrifying than countryside thunder. (GEORGES APERGHIS)
...electronic cut-ups... When Georges Aperghis tackled the theme of dysfunction, of the virus – allegories of the storm – and knowing of his work on the voice and on words, I at once thought of the process of cut-up. This technique, made famous by the American writer William S. Burroughs (whose voice appears in one sequence!), had been developed by the latter and by Brion Gysin. The cut-up consists of reordering a text by cutting it up into fragments and randomly linking these fragments together again with the aim of revealing or giving new meanings to the text. How can a cut-up be effected with the tools of computing? The most pertinent process seemed to me that of granular synthesis, the theoretical foundation of which has been established by the researcher and composer Curtis Roads. This technique entails cutting up a sound sample into fragments that last a matter of milliseconds, the so-called grains. These grains are then randomly reordered to form a complex sound object. By extending the size of the grains to one second, the granular synthesis becomes a fullyfledged compositional tool, a truly digital cut-up. (SÉBASTIEN ROUX)
...whale-text... What could I answer when he said to me (it was three years ago) that he would like something for a forthcoming spectacle on the storm? On the storms, all storms? And how did that word canvas come about, the one we have become accustomed to calling, between ourselves, our whale-text? As regards my contribution (before he reintroduced loops, repetitions, sculpted syllables and phonemes, even scattered fragments of texts garnered from here and there, from Kafka, Shakespeare et al.), here is what happened. Like Sheherazade, for whom the future depended on a continuing succession of stories, a voice – that of a narrator – speaks to you. This voice does not invent fiction with which it tries to converse with you and hold you: it manipulates it, it borrows it (mainly from Melville) and it adds endless commentaries. It reiterates its glosses, all of which deal with reading, with the act of reading as an opening out to a prophecy or to a future promise, like exposure to an improbable, unpredictable and ‘unprereadable’ event, the figure of which is the storm and its various forms (thunder storm, cyclone, flood, etc.). (PETER SZENDY)
...from one world to another... Fluids, sounds, images, information: they all pass through us and it becomes very difficult to focus on any one thing. Electronics enables me to realise this state of perpetual transition, to jump from one world to another. An abstract sound becomes the voice of an actor, a phoneme becomes running water, a character may be divided up and then reconstructed elsewhere. I work on two electronic worlds, a harmonic world built on distorted octaves and a world of very low-level noises progressively amplified until they swamp everything. The electronics is there to destabilise the ensemble but also to sweep it away as a real storm would, to outstrip it, to catch it unawares. Compared with the storm everything becomes small and ridiculous. (GEORGES APERGHIS)
...in the flood... Among the fragments read, interpreted and translated by this voice, two narratives by Melville act as golden threads that crisscross as they interact and entwine each other: the short story entitled The Lightning-Rod Man and the great novel Moby Dick. In the story, the one who speaks and who says “I” holds not only the text of an unfolding storm, but also, within himself, a focus of intrusion that flows back towards him and enrages him: dislodged in the deluge. From the novel, on the other hand, come many scenes representing a reading of the novel as a drifting, a loss of anchorage, a splitting, in which, paradoxically, prediction and presage are achieved by breaking the horizons of expectancy, to the point that, since everything has already happened and there is nothing more to verify, the event seems to have free range: it starts up again, as if the Leviathantext, infinitely reworked and glossed, had let a bubble escape from itself. The result is repetition, that is to say the unheard of. (PETER SZENDY)
...to be grasped... An incredible characteristic of Georges Aperghis’s works, and one that is ever a surprise, is the contrast between the limpidity of the score and the lively, organic profusion of the musical result. In opening a score by Georges, you feel you can smell the wooden desk at which it was patiently written, note by note, in his tight, fastidious hand. The simplicity, the transparency, the rigor might have presented the performer with frightful constraints; but nothing of the kind: the score is laid out in such a way that the musician can grasp it as a whole, and everything motivates him to give it life. And the basic reason for this is that his style, even at its most idiomatically instrumental, is first and foremost and fundamentally vocal. (GEORGES-ÉLIE OCTORS)
... enough of laughing... During the first rehearsals I was struck by the ‘fauvist’ character of the instrumental writing: lively, acidic, metallic, appliqué colours without depth and without any light and shade. The whole score seems to be laid out on a thin film, smartly unrolled under people’s noses to frighten them or make them laugh, then put away as soon as the crime is committed. And when I say “make them laugh” I am not at all so sure of it. Formerly, this was the essence of the Aperghis charm, it was part of its relative good nature, all this: this enjoyment of profusion, this multiplicity of communicating vessels, of false bottoms, of machines that control and dislocate each other, infinitely, scattering meaning to the four winds... Yet in this present work, the flattening of the polyphonic levels, their compression into a single plane, reaches such a level of crudity, of panic... ‘Enough of laughing’, ought to be the motto. It clashes in a highly interesting way with Szendy’s libretto, for whom the storm seems to be a promise, despite everything, of an unparalleled performance. Yet the music proves itself to be much more brutal than the libretto; a dyke seems to have broken, and nothing now can ensure a felicitous superimposition of the plurality of voices, burnt to cinders by the lightning. (JEAN-LUC PLOUVIER)
...spectrums and skeletons... this opera is a mixed work, comprising an acoustic part for instruments and voices and an electronic part. This latter consists of sequences, the development of which preceded the instrumental score which thus came to be enriched with the electronic material. The sequences, set off in the course of the work, act like punctuation marks in the score, like a counterpoint to the orchestra as touching both tone-colour and space. With a view to translating the storm of the mind through the electronic medium, Georges Aperghis’s idea was to apply to samples of instruments or voices transformations able to indicate dysfunction. Georges thus established a list of themes for research, poetic evocations of algorithms: virus, skeleton, tone-colour enrichment, the notion of vertical, of octave, of harmonic add-on. I based myself on this vocabulary in order to make some computer tools, storm machines, a personal interpretation of the main lines proposed by Georges Aperghis. (SÉBASTIEN ROUX)
..lightning-rod... for Avis de Tempête, we created a video installation above and around the singers and players, as though to protect them from a hostile world. Seven screens in a structure inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s kite hang about a great tower saturated with electronics. The tower resembles a lightning-rod but can equally put one in mind of a huge antenna fixing a reference point. Before World War I kites were used by the secret services; on the stage of Avis de Tempête, the hanging screens are like an echo of this practice, constituting a veritable ‘observation machine’ that records, from all possible angles, the acts and gestures of the performers. One after another the singers are forcibly projected as images in a multiplicity of virtual environments. The actions of the singers are as it were dictated by the video installation that surrounds them and which they inhabit. (PETER MISSOTTEN AND KURT D’HAESELEER)
...virus... the sound peculiar to digital error has also formed an area of exploration. The notion of the digital virus has already been explored by artistes such as Yasunao Tone, a former member of the Fluxus collectivity, which worked with the sounds produced by reading errors of a CD, by using prepared CDs (scratching the CDs, sellotape collage on the support). With Oval, from the early 1990s, this sound became known as the digital click (the sounds you hear when a CD jumps), the veritable signature of a musical movement called electronica. It seemed to me crucial to introduce this sound translation of digital error into instrument samplers, as if a virus had penetrated to the core of the sounds. (SÉBASTIEN ROUX)
> The libretto for Avis de tempête was turned into a book: Peter Szendy, Les prophéties du texte-Léviathan. Lire selon Melville, Éditions de Minuit, 2004 (with a foreword by Georges Aperghis).
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