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Prix PRESQUE RIEN 2011 - PRESQUE RIEN Prize 2011

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Prix PRESQUE RIEN 2011

Notre Association est très heureuse d’annoncer le succès qu’a rencontré sa proposition aux compositeurs de participer à son premier Prix PRESQUE RIEN. En effet, des pays les plus proches et plus lointains, nous avons reçu 34 œuvres dont le jury a pu apprécier l’engagement et de la qualité.

Ce dernier, composé de :

- Olivier Bernard__SACEM

- Arnaud Merlin__Radio France

- Markus Gammel__Radio Berlin

- Irvic D’Olivier__Silence Radio

- Vincent Laubeuf__Motus

- Anne Gillot__Radio Suisse Romande

- David Jisse__La Muse en Circuit

- Brunhild Ferrari__L’Association Presque Rien

  

s’est réuni le 6 septembre 2011 et a décerné son prix à :

- John Palmer pour son œuvre Mémoires

mp3 - pdf

Deux mentions spéciales ont été attribuées à :

- Elsa Justel pour Casi Nada

mp3 - pdf

- Daniel  Blinkhorn pour Le son de la lumière

mp3 - pdf

Le but de ce Prix PRESQUE RIEN est de permettre à des compositeurs d’utiliser dans un nouveau projet musical, des sons d’archives de Luc Ferrari mis à leur disposition sur notre site.

Nos très chaleureux remerciements à tous les participants pour leur travail et leur disponibilité en temps et esprit.

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PRESQUE RIEN Prize 2011

Our Association is very pleased to announce the success that our proposal to composers met for our first PRESQUE RIEN Prize. From the most near and distant countries we have received 34 works of which the jury could appreciatethe engagement and quality.

This jury composed of:

- Olivier Bernard__SACEM

- Arnaud Merlin__Radio France

- Markus Gammel__Radio Berlin

- Irvic D’Olivier__Silence Radio

- Vincent Laubeuf__Motus

- Anne Gillot__Radio Suisse Romande

- David Jisse__La Muse en Circuit

- Brunhild Ferrari__L’Association Presque Rien

  

met September 6,  2011 and awarded the prize to:

- John Palmer for his composition Mémoires

mp3 - pdf

Two special mentions were awarded to :

- Elsa Justel for  Casi Nada

mp3 - pdf

- Daniel  Blinkhorn for Le son de la lumière

mp3 - pdf

The purpose of this PRESQUE RIEN award is to allow composers to use in a new musical project, sound archives from LucFerrari. These were made availableon our website.

Our warmest thanks to the participants for their time and creativity they have put into this project.

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Liste des contributeurs - List of participants

- AARON SHERWOOD                  

"Ensō"

- ALEXANDRE HOMERIN

untitled

- ANDREA BELFI

"Portrait d'un plan séquence-description"

- ANTHONY J.HART

"Chronopolis - Sons tendus electroniques" (Imaginary Forces Remix)

- ARDEN DAY & WYSOZKY

"Musical Banks"

- BENJAMIN AIT-ALI

"Etude N°2 Figures sur Fond"

- BIRD & RENOULT                                                     

"No clouds at all"

- DAVE ALLEN                                            

"Inverted Ferrari"

- DAVID FENECH          

 "Saint Antoine"

- ERIC-SCOTT                                            

"Horspiel : Chronopolis Dub"

- FRANCO DEGRASSI                              

"Deux mondes"

- FRÉDÉRIC BOUVIER & ERIC MEDINILLA                         

"Melbourne Stimuline"

- GERALD FIEBIG                                      

"Industrie lourde"

- GINO FAVOTTI                     

"Clade" ou musique intuitive de la variation-sélection

- GIORGIO MAGNANENSI                    

"LF rmx"

- GUILLAUME LAIDAIN                         

"La mécanique du 6"

- IIKKA S. VEKKA                                      

"Apeiron"

- JEAN-BAPTISTE FAVORY                   

"Blues for L"

- JO LANGTON                                            

"A Day out at Dungeness: Acoustic Mirrors and Memories"

- LAURENT AGLAT                                                      

"Promenade no3 avec Luc Ferrari"

- LUDOVIC POULET             

"Onirique promenade" (avec Luc Ferrari)

- MARTYN SCHMIDT                              

"La lucarne de Ferronnier"

- MIKE PURSLEY                               

"Features of Restatement"

- NICOLAS BERNIER                                  

untitled

- PATRICIO CATALAYUD               

"Factory RMX-TMX"

- PETER FRANSEN                                    

"Monastere Remix"

- PHILIP DITULLIO

"Origins"

- PHILIPPE BERGER

"Une ravachole

- RAVI SHARDJA

"Cellule ciliée 69"

-VASSILIS ROUPAS

"Duels"

- VIRGILE ABELA

"Remembrances of a premonition"

Dampfzentrale

Tranquilles Impatiences (Quiet Impatience) by Brunhild Ferrari

First there was Et tournent les Sons dans la Garrigue. This piece by Luc Ferrari from 1977 for tape and free instrumentation was based on 7 Exercices d’Improvisation; that means 7 different tapes in 7 different pitches on which professional or amateur musicians were supposed to improvise.  When we played this piece with the GOL musicians in 2010 on a concert in Paris I was so fascinated by Luc’s tapes that I could not resist to compose a new piece out of them that I played at the famous  Dampfzentrale in Bern, Switzerland on 1^st of July 2011.

- Programme

- Listen to an excerpt

Tranquilles Impatiences (Ruhige Ungeduld) von Brunhild Ferrari

Zuerst war das Et tournent les Sons dans la Garrigue. Dieses Stück von Luc Ferrari aus 1977 für Tonband und freie Instrumentenbesetzung basierte auf 7 Exercices d’Improvisation; das bedeutet 7 verschiedene Bänder in jeweils unterschiedlichen Tonlagen, zu welchen Berufs- oder Amateurmusiker improvisieren sollten.   Als wir dieses Stück mit den GOL-Musikern 2010 in Paris aufführten, hatte ich mich so stark mit Lucs Bändern befreundet, dass ich es nicht unterlassen konnte, daraus ein neues Stück zu komponieren. Dieses spielte ich am 1. Juli 2011 in der Dampfzentrale, Bern in der Schweiz.

- Programm

- Einen Ausschnitt hören

Tranquilles Impatiences de Brunhild Ferrari

Au début était Et tournent Les Sons dans La Garrigue. Cette pièce de Luc Ferrari de 1977 pour bande et instrumentation libre  était basée sur  7 Exercices d'Improvisation, ce qui signifie sept bandes, chacune dans des tonalités différentes, sur lesquelles devaient improviser des musiciens professionnels ou amateurs. Quand nous avons joué cette pièce en concert à Paris en 2010 avec les musiciens GOL, j’étais à tel point imprégnée de ces bandes que je ne pouvais résister à me les approprier pour en composer une nouvelle pièce. J’ai joué celle-ci le 1 juillet 2011 à la fameuse Dampfzentrale, Bern en Suisse.

- Programme

- Ecouter un extrait

eRikm & Luc Ferrari

Visitation

(1avril 2011 / April 1sr, 2011)

Durée / Duration 25’23

- écouter un extrait -

A la tombée de la nuit du premier avril 2011, j’entendis à travers les fenêtres de ma maison le chant répétitif d’un oiseau de nuit. « Madeleine » qui me ramena immédiatement à la pièce électroacoustique de Luc Ferrari « Presque Rien N° 2 ».

Curieux de comparer l’oiseau qui officiait dans le jardin de Cap15 (situé dans les quartiers nord de Marseille) avec l’oiseau de « Presque Rien ».

Je décidais comme presque irrésistiblement de diffuser la pièce de Luc dans l’acoustique de ma maison. Muni d’un enregistreur rudimentaire, je me déplaçais à l’intérieur puis à l’extérieur en faisant des allers retours entre ces deux espaces. Je jouais avec les profondeurs de champs, les battements de ces deux oiseaux espacés de 34 ans et m’imprégnais de tous les événements acoustiques.

« …Alors je suis cerné à mon tour et, pourrais-je dire, pénétré en échange. » Cet Ursprung, ou bouteille de Klein temporelle, a été tourné-monté en un seul plan séquence.

eRikm2011
Alga Marghen | Italy

 

 

When the sun set on April 1st 2011 I heard through the windows of my house the repetitive song of a night bird. « Madeleine » brought me immediately back to Luc Ferrari’s electroacoustic piece « Presque Rien N° 2 ».

I became curious about comparing the bird that was officiating in the garden of Cap15 (in the North area of Marseille) with the bird of « Presque Rien ».

My curiosity triggered the desire to play Luc’s piece in the acoustic space of my house. With my rudimentary recorder I moved inside and outside the house moving back and forth between both spaces. I played with the depth of field, the beat between these two birds separated by 34 years and immersed myself in these acoustic events.


« …Alors je suis cerné à mon tour et, pourrais-je dire, pénétré en échange. » 
(Thus I am surrounded on my turn and imbued in return.) 


This Ursprung or temporal Klein bottle was recorded and edited in one single sequence shot. 

eRikm2011

Alga Marghen | Italy

La radio de Luc (et ses auditeurs)

Article paru dans Syntone

actualité et critique de l'art radiophonique le 29 mai 2011

Pour aborder l'oeuvre radiophonique de Luc Ferrari en non-spécialistes, nous avons simplement demandé à des artistes et des compositeurs actuels de choisir une pièce de son répertoire et de l'investiguer par l'écrit. Bien sûr, nous ne sommes pas allés vers eux par hasard... Ayant pour certains été mêlés au destin de la production radiophonique de Ferrari (tels José Iges, Götz Naleppa, Lucien Bertolina), ils ont tous une relation forte à la radio. Avec eux, Chantal Dumas, François Parra, Irvic D'Olivier et Alessandro Bosetti nous livrent leurs parcours d'auditeurs à travers anecdotes et analyses personnelles de l'oeuvre d'un compositeur qui, c'est un euphémisme, ne les a pas laissés indifférents.

Afin de mieux connaître la relation de Luc Ferrari à la radio et peut-être commencer à comprendre pourquoi celui-ci reste en mémoire comme un des maîtres de l'expression radiophonique, nous nous sommes en outre tournés vers la documentariste Jacqueline Caux, auteure d'un recueil d'entretiens écrits et d'un film tous deux parus sous le titre Presque rien avec Luc Ferrari. On retient souvent l'usage des sons non musicaux et de la voix narrative, deux matériaux très nouveaux dans la musique de l'époque, qui appartenaient au domaine radiophonique : Luc Ferrari aurait-il été marqué par l'écoute de la radio ? “Je pense que l'influence la plus importante quant à l'utilisation des sons non musicaux, c'est celle de John Cage que Luc admirait beaucoup et, avant John Cage, celle de Varèse qu'il était allé rencontrer à New York” nous explique Jacqueline Caux. “Les avancées technologiques n'ont pas été pour rien, non plus, dans cette démarche, puisqu'en effet l'invention du magnétophone que l'on a pu alors sortir du studio, lui a permis de partir à la recherche des sons de la vie, des sons de la ville,  des sons de l'intime aussi. C'est certainement ce désir d'aborder l'intime ~ ce qui était un tabou à cette époque, dans la musique ~ qui lui a donné le désir d'insérer une voix narrative dans ses compositions radiophoniques, soit des voix de femmes, ce qui lui permettait de jouer avec la sensualité ~ autre tabou ~, soit la sienne, dans l'esprit des monologues intérieurs de James Joyce. Cela lui permettait aussi de mener des expérimentations sur le langage et sur les “mélodies” vocales plus ou moins conscientes, la parole devenant alors révélatrice d'une psychologie.”


- lire la suite de « La radio de Luc (et ses auditeurs) »  

sur le site de Syntone

- télécharger le texte au format pdf

Luc Ferrari's Exploitation des concepts:

the case of an auto-generative archive

by Alessandro Giovanucci

The relationship between science and art has often been based on a collaborative model according to which researchers from both fields were able to share tools and methods. Sometimes, this synergy has even blurred the line between the two disciplines: suffices to say that, for example, in the curricula of medieval clergymen music was not rated among the liberal linguistic-philosophic arts of the trivium, but rather among the scientific arts of the quadrivium.

"Hortus deliciarum" by Herrad von Landsberg (XIIth century)

Even before that time, as during the Ancient Greece period, music was primarly considered as the discipline of calculation and proportions.

Clark Art Institute Library

The relationship between science and music, however, did not express itself only through mathematical or speculative paradigms. In many cases, the scientific and technological research had an active role in the musical practice. As a matter of fact, the conception and realization of musical instruments represent, most assuredly, a significant trait d'union between science, or technology at large, and musical practice.

Since all musical instruments are technical apparatuses, one can state that every musical performance is a technological process where man and machine interact equally. Musicians act directly with the means of musical production, since music, to exist, needs instruments.

From the first records of Isidoro from Seville’s Etymologiae  to the speculations of André Schaeffner, the description and the history of musical instruments represented, even with ups and downs, a source of analysis for the comprehension of the reality of music and of socio-historical contexts. Recently, with the introduction of electrophonic musical instruments, the interest about methods of sound production has provided some insights into the analysis and comprehension of the musical repertory of the 20th century.             

 Although the interest in sound production procedures represents only one of the multiple possible approaches to musical research, and not even an exhaustive one, no musician has yet been able to abstract from the practical means of his own historical time, since otherwise they would have been prevented from the realization of their performances.

Anyway, the impact of technological innovations in music does not solely concern the figures of the composer and the performer, but also that of the user. A clarifying example is that of sound recording.

The possibility of fixing sounds on supports and using them in times and places different from the ones of its own effective production contributes to radically changing the musical experience in its own essence. Many scholars commented on the implications of recording. However, in my opinion, scant attention has been given to a rather important aspect: intimacy with sound.

This concept does not uniquely concern the creators of the musical phenomenon or its users, but rather the relationship established between the two categories. The visual element of the instrumental performance starts losing ground in favour of a dimension that could be called diffused acousmatism. Thus, musical communication experiences a new quality based only on the auditive element.

Musicology has wondered for a long time about how this changing paradigm would affect the role of the musician; while, with respects to the figure of the listener, so far most contributes come from experimental studies in psychology and sociology.  Still, this acousmatic dimension of listening, beyond some implications linked to mass and individual behaviours, suggests a series of new techniques which relate specifically to the musical field and on which musicological research should focus.

Recording and reproduction techniques concur to thoroughly configuring listening techniques which were previously unknown. These new procedures are brought about thanks to the manipulation of musical equipment. Transferred on the wax cylinder, vinyl or magnetic tape, music becomes an all-purpose object that can be damaged or even destructed.

The possibility of direct manipulation of the equipment allows the listener to have a personal approach to the experience of sound material. This direct and unmediated access to the sound source makes indistinct the borderlines between performer and listener since one can “perform” a listening exactly as one “performs” a musical piece. Thus, recording and reproduction technologies start to be converted into actual musical instruments and their diffusion increases the active role of the listening.

image by Beatrice Capone

In this image, some of the most significant actions that listeners can perform thanks to musical equipment take place. These listening techniques contributed, in different ways, to confer to the listening a role more and more oriented towards productivity. 

This idea reaches its highest point when the musique concrète establishes as a musical practice. In this case, the technical apparatus of microphones, earphones, and recording supports become the tool for the construction of sound and of musical composition. The composer is no more supposed to know in advance the scale of sounds he may use for his performance, since all sounds are entitled for appropriation and re-elaboration. Thus, the chain of musical communication is no more bipartite into musical production and listening but rather is tripartite into listening, musical production and listening once again.

According to this kind of setting, embraced not only by many figures of the musique concrète, the composer must be a listener in the first place. This aptitude is traceable in the production of different authors as in the case of Luc Ferrari. The peculiarity of Ferrari as a composer is the immersion into sound during the composing phase. His Exploitation des concepts is a case in point of this procedure.

As a series of six pieces, Exploitation des concepts revolve around the idea of re-utilization. The sound material used by Ferrari is, in fact, created through the manipulation of previous compositions or through the re-elaboration sound fragments extracted from his own sound archive.

The idea of re-utilization and re-exploration, however, does not only involve the substance with which the compositions are realized, but also the techniques and the forms of musical organization.

image by Beatrice Capone

In this image, one can see the pieces that compose the musical cycle. The stylistic range expressed by these compositions suggests Exploitation des concepts  as a sort of summa of Ferrari's poetics. As the composer himself explains:

   Ces Exploitations vont dans toutes les directions: la tautologie, les cycles superposés, le minimalisme des Presque Riens,  les architectures du hasard, l'anecdotique, la narration, le quotidien, l'art pauvre, les souvenirs […] dans toutes les directions possibles. Aussi bien en écriture instrumentale, qu'en électroacoustique, en vidéo, en installation multimédia, en utilisation des nouvelles technologies, aussi bien que des anciennes, […] touts ces concepts qui sont passés dans me préoccupations, mais que jusqu'alors je n'avais pas vraiment exploités.

It is worth underlying that Exploitation des concepts keeps a very strong link with the idea of the musical archive; it represents an inspired example of how technological progress can lead to a creative use of the archivistic sources. In order to verify this statement, it is worth to pay some attention to the creative process of this series of compositions.

Exploitation des concepts had a fortuitous genesis. In 1999, an hydraulic breakdown causes the flooding of Luc Ferrari's atelier. Because of the contact with the water, several magnetic tapes, containing 40 years of field-recordings and sounds, risks of becoming unusable. For this reason, Ferrari decides to digitalize his own personal sound archive.

In touch with the sounds of his past, Ferrari reflects on his musical activity. This process will be at the origin of the project Exploitation des concepts, as the composer himself tells:

En copiant ces éléments, j'ai été pris de désir de transformer ce travail fastidieux en imagination. Et au lieu de copier, je me suis mis à composer.

Thus, digital dump technologies not only lengthen the life of Ferrari's archive, but they expand it by realizing new compositions. It is for this reason that one can talk of an auto-generative archive, as the case of Archives sauvées des eaux, the first track of Exploitation des concepts. In this piece, the sound material is made up exclusively of sounds extracted from Luc Ferrari's archive and later explored by improvisation. In its practical realization, this piece counts two performers who, improvising with CD players and turntables, juxtapose sound fragments from Ferrari's archive, thus creating a new dimension of it. The chain of elements is generated by the musicians' will to act in an open opera perspective, following in every performance different paths with pre-given sound material.   

Archives sauvées des eaux  was been performed by Luc Ferrari in fits and starts between 2000 and 2004 with different musicians all coming from the djing world. Some of them are worth remembering: DJ Olive, Erikm, Martin Tétreault, Scanner and Otomo Yoshihide. During these performances Ferrari appears as both an improvisor and a performer of his own music. Among the reasons of this choice, once more randomness plays a very important role. As a matter of fact, it is a sheer coincidence that Ferrari was appointed to collaborate with DJ Olive just when he was digitalizing his own archive.

However, this lucky event found a fecund ground in Ferrari's musical and speculative activity, all along focused on the listening concept meant as an autobiographic act. Being the concept of autobiography extremely rooted in Ferrari's poetic, one can state that all sound materials used in Exploitation des concepts refer to the presence of the human author.

In fact, for Ferrari, the sound selection, the microphone techniques and sound treatment are neither simple musical techniques nor “trade-marks” of composers.  The traces of the human presence, of the man behind the microphone, of the ghost that haunts the machine, are rather evident. In every track of Exploitation des concepts, the use of fields recordings points out the two subjects of listening and autobiography as founding aspects of the idea of the sound archive itself.

In the specific case of Ferrari's sound archive, the employment of the sources occurs live and in combination with technologies used in the practice of turntablism. A performance structured according to these modalities presents a lot of interesting aspects, first of all a changed relationship between performers and listeners.

The figure of the DJ itself, to which Ferrari associates in Archives sauvées des eaux, is the product of the hybridization between the musician and the user of musical products.

.

As French musicologist Peter Szendy highlights in his book Ecoute, the DJ could be defined as “a listener that performs in a concert”. This hybridization happens under the sign of technology, thanks to the more and more sophisticated possibilities of sound equipment manipulation.

In Archives sauvées des eaux, the composer’s opposite party is just a DJ, an “operating listener” that gets possession of Ferrari's sound archive and manipulates it adding his own sounds as far as sharing its paternity. For this reason, one finds himself not in front of a performer, but in front of a co-author that realizes what at the beginning of this paper was identified as “creative listening”. 

In Exploitation des concepts, the listening oscillates continuously between action and contemplation, thus permeating all aspects of the musical opera.

This background instability deeply emphasizes Exploitation des concepts, an opera that lets experience a migration of different sound elements from one composition to another.

image by Beatrice Capone

In this diagram, one can see highlighted the pieces where the same sound materials appear manipulated or arranged differently. As one can point out, Exploitation des concepts n.1, 3 and 4, share the same sound legacy that appears both manipulated through djing techniques and through acoustic instruments in the form of a mixed composition and then fixed into an acousmatic composition.

The analogies, the quotations and the auto-quotations in Exploitation des concepts are several. This process happens consciously, as Ferrari himself explains:

l'idée d'exploitation me permet de revenir sur des sons et même des séquences déjà utilisées, mais toujours avec des idées différentes et un point de vue compositionnel méconnaissable. Une relecture de mes éléments de travail des années 70 m'a entraîné dans le désir de faire du neuf, sans nostalgie et sans allégeance au passé. C'est aussi l'idée de exploitation qui m'a donné une liberté très grand et une désinvolture par rapport aux concepts. En effet quand j'en parle il ne s'agit pas de faire reconnaître le concept comme cela se faisait à l'origine, mais d'en retrouver l'idée trente ans après, et comme il se frott aux autre expériences vécues, comme il se déforme ou prend forme autrement. Ou disparaît. Il s'agit même peut-être d'utiliser de manière provocante le mot “exploitation” comme concept, amis avec légèreté.

D'ailleurs je me sens le droit d'exploiter mes idées aussi bien que mes sons. J'écoute, et je fabrique du présent riche d'une certaine mémoire.

Ainsi ces archives sont profondément et même peut-être génétiquement modifiées.

The continuous damaging of the elements is quite far from undermining the existence of Ferrari's archive, on the contrary, it guarantees its surviving in some way.

The sound bulk behaves like a living organism, reacting and fortifying itself during all the attempts at its destabilization. This reaction, from a musical point of view, materialized into the composition of musical pieces, according to a process that one could describe as auto-cannibalism. 

Looking for a correspondence with this process in figurative field where the source and the final product feed themselves mutually, one could refer to the famous lithography Drawing hands of Maurits C. Escher.

"Drawing Hands" by M.C. Escher

Exploitation des concepts is a very explicative example of a creative use of the archive. Ferrari draws from his own sounds, as if it was an out-and-out warehouse, a sort of “listening deposit” or, better, of “possible listenings”. The sense of finiteness that, in the common mentality, accompanies the concept of the archive, is strongly put into crisis. Thus, the archive becomes a means of comparison between what it was and what it is.

This mobility, this dialectic function is guaranteed by musical technologies that provide instruments for the exploitation of musical potentialities, as well as their sharing. In this kind of composition, the most interesting aspect is probably the possibility of penetrating into a biographic path that does not belong to us, in order to internalize it.

Likely, the most interesting developments for the fruition and the production of cultural handmade, will come from the thinking orientation that states the collectivity of the creative act, notwithstanding the fact that musical and cultural industry trends up more and more towards a horizon of ownership.

As matter of fact, it would be extremely interesting to observe which changes would happen if, apart from basic musical education, development and massification of the familiarity with sound were encouraged.