M&W
July 1-2, 2004
La Grande Halle de la Villette
Paris, France
9:30 pm
http://www.villette.com/manif/manif.aspx?lang=US&id=388
Music: Marc Mellits
Libretto: Célia Houdart
Art installations: Anne-Marie Cornu
Program notes
1. Driving Acoustic Forces
In the texts I enjoy reading and reworking, certain phenomena always call my attention. Rhythms, inflexions and melodic potentialities signal the presence of driving acoustic forces acting in secrecy - sounds and movements that summon me to carry them to the stage.
In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, the story of Agatha and Ulrich struck me as a sequential suite (the siblings’ attempt at complete unison) dilating narrative time and, above all, enabling the emergence of a third voice - that “other state” according to Musil – as strange as a waking dream.
While reading The Blue Book, Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lecture notes, I discovered that the philosopher’s critique and clarification of language, far from keeping music at bay from words, produced a music of constriction. By tightening language, Wittgenstein wrote a sort of melody.
I wanted to explore these distant yet related acoustic spaces as two poles of a single world (M/W).
I wanted to hear and make heard a melody from the moment it emerges to the instant it threatens to disappear, to follow a melody’s unfolding from the time it strains to reach music’s horizon of harmonic consonance (M) to the moment sound reaches its own vanishing point (W).
M = two voices meld to exist and to materialize dreamed-of love.
W = a voice is clarified, rarefied, until it becomes the sound of a philosopher’s very thought.
I selected texts and composed a two-part score: the twins’ duet and W’s solo. Around this diptych I gathered a pluridisciplinary group of artists and performers: a composer, a visual artist and six performers (two actors, a dancer and three musicians). My goal was to create a score for an oratorio-diptych made of moving images, bodies, sounds and voices. These multiple scores are meant to prolong and sound Viennese modernity’s ethical and esthetic interrogations. Espousing these interrogations is, for me, not only the foundation for but also the very context in which could emerge a form of contemporary lyricism.
- Célia Houdart
2. Musical score
I often think that the highest thing I could wish to achieve would be to compose a melody.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
From Marc Mellits, young composer of the New York avant-garde who frequently collaborates with such ensembles as Bang On a Can All Stars, I commissioned an original score for musical instruments and natural voices. I sought out Marc Mellits because I wanted M/W to be treated in a way that crossed over such musical boundaries as pop, repetitive minimalism, and musical memories of the School of Vienna.
Texts presenting evident rhythmic and acoustic qualities are treated as recitatives. The performers will first and foremost speak their texts. It seemed more natural to bring non-singers to the edge of song rather than to ask singers to explore the spoken word, already subject to strong conventions of diction and intonation in lyrical art.
The musical performers will be occasionally involved vocally in scenic actions alongside the other performers.
We will attempt voices without affect by means of acoustic repetition, mirroring and desynchronization.
Unlike the set instrumental score the vocal score is only partially written out, indicating when to start, how high to go and how long to pause.
Far from any attempt at virtuosity, the performers will explore an infra-lyrical chant through mini-melodies and spoken song while borrowing from both the Baroque repertoire and minimalist pop.
- Célia Houdart
M/W is scored for piano four-hands, cello and three voices. The piano and cello are amplified; the cello also uses some digital delay. The three vocal scores, one male and two female, consist of both sung and spoken text. The music itself relies on rich thematic and harmonic development incorporated into a repetitive acoustic canvas. Individual melodic lines intertwine to create moving harmonic and melodic material. The result is a music that is tonal within modes, but eschews functional tonality. The repetitive nature of the music propels itself into spiraling dances, always with a forward motion, into sometimes dark and sometimes bright areas of a spectral musical canvas.
The musical score is expected to last 30 to 40 minutes.
- Marc Mellits
3. Lighting score
The visual artist Anne-Marie Cornu has designed two autonomous installations for each panel of the M/W diptych. The performers are lit by and handle luminous objects made of coneless beams (fiber optic beams and electro-luminescent diodes).
The first architecture is a net of screen strips which form a bedroom’s luminous framework. The twins’ movements and the exploration of their meeting plays against light’s meshing paths.
For W’s solo, fiber optic beams transport light either issued by a generator or produced by fragmentary moving images.
These vibrant light installation are a live interpretation of a visual score conceived in parallel with the musical score. Whether constant or sporadic the luminous flux neither illustrates nor emanates from the scenic action. It is to be seen in and for its own spatial and temporal development as a vibrant energy coexisting with acoustic phenomena.
4. The twins’ duet (M)
W’s solo (W)
The twins’ duet
Sylvain Prunenec and Johanna Korthals Altès interpret (M), the “twins’ duet”. Upon the death of his father Ulrich rediscovers a sister, Agatha, whose existence he had all but forgotten and in whom he recognizes his own, feminine, double.
For (M), we take on certain narrative and formal conventions: the transgression of archaic taboos, the love duet and we cross over scenic and musical genres by permutating voices and genders, as by drawing on both pop and opera duos.
W’s solo
A solo performer enacts texts drawn from Wittgenstein’s lecture notes and correspondence in which the philosopher exposes certain fundamental aspects of his thought: language is not a key to explaining the world but belongs to it. Man thinks only within grammar and words themselves are but the shadows of ideas and things, pure abstractions without direct links to any real object.
The Wittgenstein character is subject to a highly stylized treatment: his gestures are extremely precise, his words and acts repeated or frozen in time.