Chapter 11
‘Ça devient du théâtre, mais ça vient de la musique’: The Music Theatre of Georges Aperghis
Matthias Rebstock
Georges Aperghis is certainly one of the most prominent, influential and active figures in the field of Composed Theatre. Especially in the late seventies and the eighties he determined the genre of the théâtre musical in France in a way that today this term seems to be directly linked with the name of Aperghis.1 And even though today Aperghis has reduced his work within the théâtre musical to give more space to concert music it still can be seen as anchor of his whole OEuvre and a lot of the features of his working process spread from his experiences in music theatre to his concert pieces – and back again.
To grasp the aesthetics of the music theatre of Aperghis is a difficult task as the only constant element in his work is the constant search for new ways, new possibilities, new adventures, is a great dynamics with which he explores and combines what even might at first look like antipodes. There is – different from Heiner Goebbels, for example – nothing like a certain working method Aperghis would try to follow, no wish to work under the same preconditions or circumstances twice. But there are some basic assumptions and convictions that shine through the different pieces and often enough there is a certain tension between these “regles du jeu” (see Durney 1990), so there is always a rest that doesn’t seem to fit, that you cannot explain or grasp, just as in his pieces.
Early experiences with music and theatre
Aperghis’ way to his personal style of music theatre is as interesting as it is revealing for his further career. Born in Athens he grew up in an artistic ambiance. Both his parents were fine artists and for a long time Aperghis was uncertain whether to follow his artistic or his musical talents. In 1963 the 18-year-old Aperghis went to Paris where he has lived and worked since. Actually, coming to continue his studies in music, right from the beginning he got in touch with the theatre scene of Paris. Among others he met the actress Edith Scob, whom he later married, and became close friends with the theatre writer Arthur Adamov and the director Antoine Vitez. On the other hand he devoted himself to composition but never enrolled at Conservatory. He followed the concert series of Pierre Boulez, the Domaine Musical, and was deeply impressed by a performance of Sur Scène in 1964, one of the first pieces of the Instrumental Theatre by Mauricio Kagel. In 1971 he presented his first music theatre piece, La Tragique histoire du nécromancien Hieronimo et de son miroir at the Festival in Avignon. 1973, also at the Festival of Avignon that had become a kind of artistic home for Aperghis in those early years, he premiered his first opera Pandaemonium and in 1976 a second: Histoire de loups.
But not enough writing for both the théâtre musical and the opera Aperghis also wrote music for theatre plays working regularly and very closely with Antoine Vitez and the set designer Yannis Kokkos. So Aperghis is one of the very few composers of his generation who have worked in all three fields of music theatre (excluding the musical) and who got to know the different working methods, the different ways of producing, the different institutional contexts and, last but not least, the different compositional possibilities, challenges and demands the different genres offer.
Moving in these different fields between music and theatre Aperghis started to develop his own visions for the kind of music theatre he wanted to explore: “I have always dreamed of creating a working space where actors, musicians and painters can work together on projects and explore the relationships between music, theatre, painting and film” (Aperghis 2001: 156, translation M. R.) In 1976 Aperghis got the chance to realise this vision. With subsidies of the Ministry of Culture and the Festival d’automne he and his wife Edith Scob founded l’Atelier Théatre et Musique (ATEM), first in the suburbs of Paris, later hosted at the Théatre des Amandiers in Nanterre. And it was only after 20 years of directing ATEM that he left in 1997.2
With the work at ATEM Aperghis’ approach to music theatre changed radically. Looking back from today Aperghis describes two topics he wanted to explore in his work with ATEM, topics that determine his aesthetics up till now:
Le travail était comment trouver un autre genre de personnage qui ne sont pas des personnages de Tchekhov, mais qui sont des personnages musicaux. Donc il y a un accent rythmique, une intensité de couleur particulière. Voilà des personnages qui existent comme ça, par une intensité différente. Et ça devient du théâtre, mais ça vient de la musique. Et l’autre problème était – venant alors de l’opéra – comment est-ce qu’on peux mettre sur le même plan la voix, les éclairages, l’installation, le son et le texte – ou pas texte –, musique – ou pas musique –, musique visuelle et tout ça. Il y a donc une hiérarchie à l’opéra. C’est une pyramide en fait, avec un texte qui est mis en scène par la musique, qui est ensuite mis en scène par un metteur en scène, et tout ça converge pour faire un objet unique autour d’un seul texte et avec des situations théâtrales comme dans le théâtre classique en fait. Donc, comment libérer tousles éléments et essayer de
faire une autre syntaxe qui n’a rien à voir avec une histoire unique mais qui a plusieurs histoires, qui est polyphonique.3
And in addition to these Aesthetic concerns, the searching for musical characters and for a non-hierarchical way of organisation of the theatrical elements, there was also a strong social or even political aspect to his work at ATEM:
C’était quelques années après 1968 donc c’était une utopie. Mais il n’y avait pas un intermédiaire entre l’artiste et le public. Là, il y avait un public qui ne connaissait pas du tout le théâtre, qui connaissait la télévision, et c’est tout. Alors, qu’est-ce qui se passe s’il y a des gens qui travaillent sur le théâtre et la musique, comment ça se passe? C’était la question. Et c’était très intéressant parce qu’il y avait des ateliers d’amateurs, des vieux, des petits, et ça a créé un public en fait.4
The social aspect of his work in that explicit way has certainly become less important since Aperghis has stopped his work at l’ATEM. But it gave rise to two more threads that have kept to characterise his whole work: on the one hand his interest to work together with other people and his curiosity to get to know them, to discover their abilities and to challenge them; and on the other the experience with what one could call oral composition:
C’était pour moi très important que c’était des acteurs parce que je ne voulais pas me cacher derrière une facilité musicale où je pourrais écrire des choses musicales. Mais je voulais simplifier pour faire un travail oral comme au théâtre, et dicter la musique juste
par coeur parce que les acteurs ne lisaient pas la musique. Pour moi ça a été un travail très, très difficile. Un acteur n’est pas un musicien mais un acteur. Il faut arriver à lui faire sortir la musique ou le théâtre par lui-même, avec lui, qu’il fasse tout un travail intérieur. Le musicien lit la partition et ca va.5
These topics form the core of Aperghis’ aesthetics and in the following I will explore them in further detail. At the same time they seem to be essential for the whole field of Composed Theatre, even though each composer will find different answers to the same questions.
‘C’est la musique qui amènet le theatre’
One prerequisite for the kind of theatre that Aperghis strives for, one that retains its musical nature, is that characters and narratives should not be classifiable within existing schemata. Characters should not be psychologically legible, and narratives should not be contiguous in a conventional logical way.
Je ne parle pas des situation théâtrales. Ca ne m’intéresse pas. Mais il faut faire une sorte de personnage, de musique que quelqu’un joue ou chante – qu’est-ce que j’écris pour lui amener l’idée d’un personnage vague, abstrait ou parfois pas précis – qui se contredit et change. Mais je n’ai pas envie que les gens jouent du théâtre. Je suis content si la musique et le travail qu’on fait ensemble les amènent à exister de manière très forte. Et on est touché par l’énergie ou la qualité de ce qu’ils font. Mais mon effort, c’est qu’on ne sait jamais ce qu’ils font vraiment. On peut approcher un peu mais quand on sait, on n’écoute plus la musique. Si on dit: ‘Ah bien ! C’est ça !’, c’est fini. Les gens rentrent les antennes et c’est fini.6
Aperghis’ rejection of theatre and theatrical situations is shaped by a more classical idea of the theatre. Nevertheless, this passage is of particular interest because it suggests how Aperghis’ approach may be differentiated from forms of Postdramatic Theatre (Lehmann 1999) as well as the anti-psychological approaches of the twentieth-century avant-garde, for example, Edward Gordon Craig or Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus stage studio or other forms of abstract or mechanical theatre. These theatrical forms also push back the basic theatrical principles of psychological characters and logically sequential narration, focussing instead on the performativity of actions. And in this context, it is revealing that Lehmann repeatedly highlights the trend towards the musicalisation of contemporary theatre. Yet Aperghis is not concerned with the renewal of theatrical language – thinking it from the problems of classical theatre – but rather with enabling listening in the theatre, that is to transport the audience into a musical perception mode. And this musical perception mode is disturbed by characters and actions that are immediately comprehensible and classifiable because one involuntarily switches to a perception mode that tries to understand what is perceived, that looks for psychological coherence, reasons and causes and brings it under concepts instead of focussing on what is perceived as such, on its phenomenological qualities. For Aperghis, making the theatre musical is not a means to an end, but rather an end in itself; it is about making the musical organisation of elements – and that is what music comes down to – truly available to apperception. Musical structures need not compensate for the possible lack of coherence that results from dispensing with the context previously supplied by narration. Instead, the dissolution of narrative allows the basic musical character and musical syntax of Aperghis’ theatre to unfold and reach the surface of the audience’s perception. Meaning as the goal of the theatre experience is not simply suspended; it is splintered into a kaleidoscope and placed as an assignment, a challenge, to each individual audience member.
We cannot do anything other than impart meaning to things, and that’s what I find interesting: how the audience can understand something even before it reaches their consciousness. What has it understood? The whole thing works as long as the viewer’s mind is telling itself stories. You have to hold their attention for one and a half hours; they have to tell themselves stories constantly without me telling one.
(Aperghis in Singer 2001, translation MR)
In order to achieve this openness and plurality of possible horizons of meaning, and not a theatre of ‘histoire unique’, it is not only necessary to avoid clear contexts of meaning; one must also load the different elements with proposals of meaning. And that is precisely how Aperghis views his work as a composer.
If the interpretive possibilities are so multifaceted that I can no longer control them, then I stop writing because I have managed to understand something different each time I read the score. In the final analysis, one has to build something that is very abstract.
(Aperghis in Singer 2001, translation MR)
Another motif appears to surface here that is typical of Apherghis’ working process: he constantly seeks a position from which he can encounter his compositions from the outside, as a reader or performer, in order to find something that he has not yet seen: something that is hiding in the music, in the score, without him being aware of it during the writing process.
On entend des choses, on se dit, mais c’est pas possible que ces choses étaient dans cette musique-là. On la croyait gaie, par exemple, et voilà une musique terrible. Ou l’inverse. […] Ça m’excite beaucoup de voir une musique qui change d’aspect, et du coup, ça me donne des idées de mise en scène, de mouvement ou de jeu. Et donc ça fait une espèce de boule de neige en fait, par-ce qu’ un élément amène un autre. Et il y a tout ça qui joue ensemble.7
For Aperghis, psychology is circumvented in three ways: the figures of his musical theatre do not comply with psychologically motivated patterns of signification; Aperghis attempts to touch upon an understanding that precedes the conscious act of comprehension; and he himself tries to locate in his compositions that which has made it past his conscious control and been inscribed into the music.
Independence of elements
Aperghis has developed a fundamental conviction from his experiences with ATEM, among others, that remains unassailable to the present day:
The visual elements should not be allowed to reinforce or emphasise the music, and the music should not be allowed to underline the narrative. Things must complement themselves; they must have different natures. This is an important rule for me: never say the same thing twice. […] Another thing has to emerge that is neither one nor the other; it is something new.
(Aperghis in Singer 2001, translation MR)
The individual elements should remain independent of one another and self-sufficient – meaning not in the service of illustrating another element – as well as related to one another. This approach has nothing to do with the unrelated juxtaposition of various events that we know from the works of Cage. The musical model here is polyphony. When we speak of polyphony and counterpoint, we are not speaking in a purely metaphorical manner; rather, we are describing precisely the point at which the organisation of heterogeneity according to musical principles comes into play: tempo, rhythm, colour, density, direction, variation, morphogenesis of motifs, repetition, movement types, etc. are categories according to which different materials can be structured and set in relation to one another. Aperghis structures his musical theatre at a level that has nothing to do with the content or the dimension of meaning. It does not revolve around the question –a typical one for (traditional) theatre – of ‘what should be narrated’, a question that provides orientation for material and structure, but rather the reverse: to build up a complex structure that is so loaded with potential meanings that the viewer can – and must – distil his own stories from it. This is also what the phrase ‘la musique amène le theatre’ means.8
This aesthetic programme is inherent within Aperghis’ individual pieces. But there is no piece in which it was actually so schematically and completely realised as I have just described it. Music (understood as the organisation of sounds and noises) stands fundamentally in the foreground for Aperghis. Unlike in Goebbels’ or Tsangaris’ works, there are relatively few moments that are completely determined by visual or scenic action in which the musical dimension is fully absent. The beginning of the piece Zeugen (Witnesses, Witten 2007), with hand puppets by Paul Klee and texts by Robert Walser, is all the more striking for this. The piece begins in absolute silence, and the audience sees nothing other than the slow, macroscopic movement of a video camera over the planks of the puppet stage, relayed to a projection screen above as a strange, inhospitable landscape. The music abruptly begins after over two minutes. More often, there are passages in his pieces in which text is simply spoken, as semantic islands in a polyphonic flow of signs, so to speak.
The working process begins most often with musical compositions that – in contrast to the early years at ATEM – are written down as scores. Aperghis frequently makes use of the fragment form. For his children’s musical theatre Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Cologne 2001), for example, he initially composed 23 ‘extraits’: individual short pieces that, although they had some relationship to one another, did not have a set sequential arrangement and did not correspond to the final version of the piece. It is typical for Aperghis that these fragments are not composed for the subject of the related piece and have neither a clear beginning nor end:9
Le but est que la musique soit indépendante, qu’elle n’ait pas à raconter quelque chose de la pièce, qu’elle existe pour elle-même. Et si après il y a le choc avec le texte, c’est là où elle devient le théâtre. Mais si la musique change le texte, ça fait un autre théâtre. La musique n’est pas colorée au début pour jouer tel ou tel rôle. C’est du matériel sonore.10
This ‘shock’, in which the variously prepared materials collide, occurs at the rehearsals. Aperghis then works together with the musicians and/or performers to develop the piece out of what emerges from this collision – some ‘third entity’ – so that the musical ‘extraits’ also find their place and their final form within the overall musical structure. Accordingly, Aperghis considers it his task during rehearsals to discover what the fragments ‘want’:
La difficulté, c’est d’identifier l’interet de chaque fragment. Sachant qu’un fragment tout seul n’existe pas, qu’il n’existe que dans une syntax. Ensuite il faut déterminer à partir de quel moment un fragment se met à vivre. À respirer. À quel moment il peut se confronter à une autre. Un fragment est faible et tout de suite avalé par ceux qui sont autour.11
On one hand, the form of the fragment has a technical compositional rationale. Long, self- contained musical compositions cannot be integrated in an open and equal conflict with other materials at rehearsal, leading to the imposition of hierarchy from the beginning. The fragment as a form however has an ideological aspect that only finds its equivalent at the level of procedure:
I don’t believe – how should I say this – in a world where harmony and coherence of thought rule the day. I don’t see any connections between things. That doesn’t interest me. I believe more in small fragments, pieces of life, that randomly come into contact.
(Aperghis in Maximoff 2006)
Unlike, for example, Heiner Goebbels, who after a phase of intensive rehearsal and improvisation backs out and composes the piece alone, this phase of Aperghis’ composition, in which different materials are brought into relationships with each other and create a compositional form, can only be done in rehearsal with the collaboration of participating musicians and performers. Sometimes, this last stage of composition is not even written into a score; instead, it is based on agreements and intensive rehearsal work, similar to a theatrical working process.12 This phase recalls the techniques of oral composition and can be traced directly to the experiences at ATEM. In the context of the composition of the various extraits in Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, this process is particularly evident in the sextet, which is performed as concluding music in accordance with the moral of the fairy tale, before the piece starts from the beginning again with the repetition of the beginning text.13 Yet there is no sextet in the musical fragments that Aperghis brought with him to the rehearsals. The sextet arose from two other overlapping fragments that are both played in their original form in the final score, namely as the duet for two pianos that stands in the first place in the fragments and is played in the score at the letter F, and the quartet for two clarinets, saxophone and violin, which is on page 26 in the ‘extraits’ and is located in the score beginning at the letter I.
This compositional process can also be observed in Machinations (2000) for four women,14 electronics and video. The piece is distinguished by a powerfully stage setting: the four performers sit in a row at small tables. They produce a music that is comprised solely of phonemes. At the same time, they are working with small objects on the tables, and these are being filmed by a mini-camera and projected onto a projection screen above each performer. The objects are simple and primarily organic things: leaves, bark, hair, seeds, the performers’ own hands, etc. Across from them, Olivier Pasquet – no accident that he is a man – stands behind his computers and operates the live electronics, which work exclusively with material from the female vocalists, collecting, alienating and thereby manipulating the voices (and perhaps the women). A text by François Regnault is woven throughout the piece, “a kind of time travel that begins with the game of dice and, through various stages, leads to the programs of our contemporary computers” (Aperghis in Polzer and Schäfer 2001). The first step in the composition of Machinations was the composition of individual phonetic texts for the four women. These texts were also composed without regard to staging or subject. The second step consisted of rehearsals with the four women in which the texts were read and assigned to the performers. Only after this did Aperghis ask François Regnault for a text that could provide a brief history of devices up to the computer. This means that the semantic context in which the music of language and phonemes would surface in the performance was determined in retrospect, independent of the musical material. Aperghis pursued the same process for the electronic music, first making recordings with the performers and then using these recordings as the basis for electronic processing. He then returned to the rehearsals with these electronic recordings and worked on the overall structure together with the performers. The stage arrangement first developed in this final rehearsal phase.
These two examples allow us to discern another important feature of Aperghis’ aesthetics that seems symptomatic for Composed Theatre in general: there is no separation between composition and staging. Or, to put it differently, the creation of relationships between the various elements of the theatre, such as music, text, action, crafting audiovisual connections and the development of the overall structure, does not fall under staging as it would in classical opera; instead, the creation of correlations between these elements is an important part of composition itself. Aperghis extends the compositional process into the rehearsal process, including the entire path to performance.15 The entire score of the piece is not the point of departure, as it is in classical productions, it is the end point. Only after going through the entire process does the score arrive at its fixed result. Up to that point, notation serves to fuse together the musical material, meaning the individual ‘extraits’.
In this way, composition touches to an important extent on what the performers bring to the piece. In Machinations, for example, Aperghis largely left the selection of visual objects to the performers: “Ils ont aussi beaucoup amené sur le plan visuel, parce que tous les accessoires, tousles objets – je leur ai demandé d’amener ce qu’ils veulent. Ces sont que des choses d’eux. Ces sont des choses que j’ai jamais imaginé.”16 This also shows on one hand how Aperghis takes seriously the people with whom he works, and on the other hand how he allows himself to be surprised by material that emerges in this way and to a certain degree how he deals with his own conscious control of the material.
If composition is related to the (musical) organisation of all elements of the theatre, in which composition includes working with the staging material, it would be obvious that this would also be reflected in the scores. One would expect that – as for example with Mauricio Kagel – stage actions, passages, spatial dispositions etc. would be notated in the score. But Aperghis only does this in rare exceptional cases.17 For the most part, the scores contain only the music and the text. In Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, for example, alongside the music and the text, there is no information what so ever that points to the visual dimension of the piece. Even the tuba and the tap shoes, which play a major role in Aperghis’ production of the premiere, are not in the score. In Machinations, the score only contains the texts and the cue points for the electronic music; everything else remains open. Aperghis, who is a great admirer of Kagel, clearly draws from his experiences with Kagel’s works: “C’est dommage qu’il n’y ait pas la possibilité pour chaque interprète d’un peu tout respirer. Ca m’a donc beaucoup conforté avec l’idée de ne pas écrire dans ce sens là. Moi, je suis aussi maniaque que Kagel mais je laisse des paramètres ouverts.”18
This desire to avoid specifying stage components in the score is associated once again with the special relationship to the performers:
Le corps d’un acteur ou d’un musicien et sa façon de se tenir, ses intérêts, sa vie, son passé et tout ca, c’est très important pour moi. L’action n’est donc pas la même si c’est Jean Paul Drouet ou Françoise Rivalland qui joue par exemple. C’est complètement différent pour moi. Pour moi, c’est toujours très important de partir des gens qui sont là. En fait, je n’aime pas écrire en général. Alors une fois, c’est écrit, et après je fais confiance aux gens qui suivent.19
Viewed analytically, Aperghis’ approach holds a certain contradiction: what does a certain composition consist of? What are its conditions of identity? If the scenic part were an essential component of a composition, then, strictly speaking, it would be impossible to choose a completely different stage production for a new performance of the piece in which the relationship between music, text and action could be completely different. The scenic part necessarily becomes just as much a component of the piece as the music itself.20 If the staging or the scenic part, however, is not essential for the composition, then the argument for balance between the theatrical elements and their interplay within a musical structure cannot be maintained in a strict sense. And the example of Kagel actually demonstrates that – at least in some of the early works of his Instrumental Theatre – he used a similar rehearsal process as Aperghis. The scenic part of Sur Scène, for example, was done initially in collaboration and testing with the performers. The difference is that afterwards Kagel wrote down the found version exactly, thereby making it binding. Kagel does this not only to determine the character of future performances, but also to secure the status of an artwork of his scenic compositions. Only stable conditions of identity that are fixed in the score guarantee the work’s individual character (see Rebstock 2006: 310). Aperghis, in contrast, does not assign much value to such theoretical or even ontological considerations. He views his compositions as a processes; for him, his pieces are not closed or finished objects. They are written for the moment of performance. And new performances, new performers, new spaces etc. may necessitate changes for new performances.21 “It’s free: you can make a new version, another stage, etc. I like that. The first time I am happy to make that because it is part of my work of the composition. But after it’s ok” (Aperghis 2010).
Immanent and imaginary theatre
In addition to the polyphony of elements, there is another form of theatricality in Aperghis’ works that arises directly from the musical gesture of composition and is therefore immanent in the music itself. This form is found not only in the explicitly musical-theatrical works, but also in his instrumental music and especially in his vocal music. Of central concern here is the virtuosity of Aperghis’ music. The vocal works in particular require a special physicality, a physical energy, to master their enormous difficulty, an act that inherently ventures into the territory of the theatrical. Accordingly, the Quatorze Jactations (2001), a collection of 14 solo works for baritone that Aperghis wrote for Lionel Peintre, are described in the program notes as ‘théâtre vocal’, although explicitly there is no theatrical layer composed:
I am attempting to collect a number of phonemes or sounds until I get a texture that, when they are spoken or played, are no longer just music after a certain point; I hope that they lead to a comportment (comportement). It only works with a certain kind of energy, in a certain situation, a physical condition.
(Aperghis in Maximoff 2006)
This type of theatricality is based on the performativity of vocal and instrumental actions. It is composed in the sense that it is evoked by the musical text. It is not composed in the aforementioned sense of a polyphony of elements, because it cannot be understood as self- sufficient material and accordingly cannot be expressly arranged but has to stay immanent: “Si tu as besoin de bouger pour respirer et chanter, tu le fait. Mais il ne faut pas le faire consciemment. Si c’est conscient où tu commences à jouer un truc, là, c’est fini.”22
The immanent theatricality of the Jactations is not based solely on these ‘comportements’, but rather on the type of composed texts, namely a special form of composition with phonemes, that has become a red thread in Aperghis’ entire oeuvre since 1976. This unique kind of music of language appears for the first time in his opera Histoire de Loups, which deals with Freud’s Wolf Man:
[L]’homme était russe. Freud était Viennois. […] Et donc, c’était là que j’ai commencé à fabriquer des syllabes qui ne voulaient rien dire mais qui me donnaient la couleur russe et la couleur allemande. Et c’est ça qui m’a donné après l’idée que ces syllabes pourraient fabriquer des mélodies. Pas des mélodies de sons, […] mais des mélodies de syllabes, des couleurs de syllabes. Et donc j’ai commencé comme ça.23
The first work to be based entirely on this new compositional form were the Quatorze Récitations pour voix seul (1978) for female voices, which were the prototype, so to speak, for the Quatorze Jactations for male voices. These compositions are among the most popular pieces of New Music in France. In these works, phonemes that resemble French, German and English sounds are invented and combined, yet without making any sense; and, unlike the Histoire de Loups, without any thematic context. Existing words and syllables are mixed in among the imaginary images. The listener always believes that they have extracted a certain amount of meaning that does not actually exist. The audience member attempts, with this hermeneutic attitude towards listening, to understand the music like a language, but collides again and again with the syllables’ pure tonality and colourfulness. This desire to understand, to comprehend, coupled with the inability to do so, ensures the ‘open ears’ with which the listener inevitably must follow the Récitations. At the same time, the listener begins to associate meanings through the Fata Morgana of semantics. And together with the rhythmic gestural character that Aperghis imparts to this music of language, the great physicality that the work’s virtuosity demands of the (female) vocalist, small scenes appear before the mind’s eyes or ears of the audience. A kind of imaginary theatre is created. The audience begins to narrate stories, each to their own, even though a story is not being performed. The clue is that the singer must remain completely immersed in the music for this imaginary theatre:
The problem is that it can become too precise. That people think, ‘oh yes, they’re shouting at each other…’ When you come to such a conclusion, then you aren’t listening anymore. Then you aren’t listening to every individual sound. As long as you are constantly scrutinising the whole event, the ears are unlocked and listening.
(Aperghis in Maximoff 2006).
Figure 1: Georges Aperghis: Le corps à corps (1978). In the first line the vocal actions are notated, in the second the percussion actions on the tombak. Copyright by Edition Salabert, Paris.
This textual form and writing for voices define Apherghis’ oeuvre. The vocal works, with the operas, the théâtre musical, the solo vocal works and oratorios comprise the majority of his complete works. But in a number of instrumental pieces, performers also have to speak or perform vocal actions. André Gindt has gone so far as to say that the instrumental voices in Aperghis are treated basically as vocal parts. But the opposite is the case, too: the vocal parts are dealt with like instrumental parts. This is expressed most clearly in passages in which text and music are closely associated in a special way. The best example of this is Le corps à corps (1978) for the tombak, a hand-held Persian drum.
This piece focusses on the unity of syllable and rhythm as is typical of playing the Indian tabla: “Back then, I was much more excited by Indian music. The Indian tabla players are known to begin by speaking the beat.”24 Whether language is turned into music or music into language is a question of perspective. This kind of association between music and language is also found today in Aperghis’ works, in which he often divides the unity of rhythm, spoken melody and syllables among several performers:
The forms of the immanent and imaginary theatre therefore are not in opposition to the polyphony of elements; instead, they surface during moments and passages within the polyphonic structure of the théâtre musical. In Avis de tempete (2007), for example, there is a passage in which Johanne Saunier speaks a highly rhythmitised text at extreme speed. The physical effort this text requires is clearly experienced as its own performative dimension. The syllables develop that haze of signification that the audience attempts to follow by making associations and imagining. At the same time, Johanne Saunier turns around herself constantly in a rapid yet flowing movement that contrasts with the staccato rhythms of the text. In her outstretched hand, she holds a small video camera that she looks into constantly. The image is projected live onto a screen. What we see there reverses the live action yet again: the singer rotates about her own axis while seeming to stand still in the projection, with the world revolving around her. In the projection the moment of physical action is extinguished by the relative stillness of the camera in relation to the moving body.
Process and motivation
We can examine the artistic process from an aesthetic perspective. Approaches and methods then appear to be intentional and functional, oriented towards a certain planned aesthetic experience. Yet we can also observe the artistic process through the lens of motivation: it is not just a certain result that drives forward (artistic) processes; the process itself must have some motivating character. In the final analysis, the driving forces for the work – at least for Aperghis – are not simply the results; it is primarily the artistic question that wants to be solved. It is also for this reason that Aperghis refuses to work according to a specific method: “Les expériences les plus anciennes ne te servent pas. […] Je veux me lancer dans des aventures nouvelles, plus difficiles parce qu’il n’y a pas une expérience.”25
For Aperghis, working with and for other people is a crucial motivating factor. During the ATEM period, this was expressed in the social and political utopia associated with ATEM’s founding, and was demonstrated concretely in workshops with laypersons from the suburbs of Paris. Today, this impulse towards collaborative motivation can be seen in two ways: first, the collective processes involved in the development of the pieces, and second, the idea, characteristic of Aperghis, that his compositions are not only dedicated to specific performers, but are also to a certain degree portraits of these performers.
To write for someone you know is something different, because from the beginning you are taking possession of this person – at least that’s how it is for me – and observing him. […] Whenever I observe a performer in his daily life, during rehearsals, while drinking coffee, their everyday gestures, then I discover him as a person and from that point I am convinced that, while I am writing for him, he is much stronger than in reality, from a musical perspective. Often, when they receive the score, they are excited yet afraid at the same time of its difficulty. Because I am convinced – and this comes from love – that they can do everything, and this is true because they do it, but at what a price! (laughs) It is a way of sublimating the performer. […] Whenever I decide to write something for them, I give them an enigmatic puzzle. They open the score, and I’m interested in seeing their reaction, what they will do with it.
(Aperghis in Maximoff 2006)
Figure 2: Letter ‘S’ of Georges Aperghis: Little Red Riding Hood (2001). Copyright by Edition Durant, Paris.
This motivation also releases a special motivation among the musicians and performers. Lionel Peintre, for whom Aperghis wrote the Quatorze Jactations, describes very clearly how the score for Jactations – which initially seemed completely impossible – soon took over his life: “That wasn’t a composition, it was a monster that had it in for me. Really! (laughs) This thing was very aggressive towards me. As soon as I began working on it, it came out of me like a wild animal” (Aperghis in Maximoff 2006). The way in which Aperghis develops his théâtre musical together with the musicians and performers is not based solely on aesthetic considerations and intentions. One cannot simply decide to work together in such collaborative way; it must correspond to one’s very being, and this just is the case for Aperghis. Marcus Gammel, who was assistant director in the production of Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, and a participating observer at the same time, provides this valuable insight into this aspect of the working process:
The most striking feature of his leadership of the group is his extreme reserve about making direct statements. […] If he begins to give directions, Aperghis often keeps his formulations in the subjunctive: “Ce qui serait bien, c’est que tu…” is one of his most frequently used turns of phrase – sometimes also expressed as a question: “Et si tu allais là-bas…?” […] At the same time, the composer is extremely open to ideas and input from his colleagues. He demonstrates a high degree of sensibility for their needs (“C’est faisable ou pas?”) and he is concerned constantly about their safety during rehearsals or on the stage. […] After work is over, the entire group often ends up in a restaurant, where Aperghis displays his brilliant talent for conversation. […] At the personal level, he also shows great interest for the needs of his colleagues.
(Gammel 2002: 56)
Gammel emphasises that this form of gentleness in no way means that Aperghis is not always in control, “effectively steering rehearsal out of the arcane” (Gammel 2002: 56). Conversely, this familiar atmosphere, similar to the aforementioned composed portraits, generates a special motivation among his performers:
With his understated authority, those who work with Aperghis become even more attentive to his wishes and goals – they read it straight from his eyes. […] Just as he is constantly and palpably considering the needs of the musicians, the musicians are trying to make his work easier. […] This is how Georges Aperghis manages to collapse diametrical oppositions, even in group leadership; he only resorts to his authority in the rarest of cases, yet the performers recognise his absolute authority. He doesn’t make any direct demands and receives extraordinary effort from everyone working with him, and he is very talented at channelling this energy. This is how Aperghis creates a working atmosphere that guarantees him maximal creative latitude.
(Gammel 2002: 56)
Looking back to his work with the musicians of Le Petit Chaperon Rouge Aperghis himself describes the challenge and the benefits – both personal and artistic – of this kind of collaboration in the following way:
[M]oi, pour faire ce que je fais avec eux, j’ai besoin de les aimer beaucoup. Donc d’avoir vraiment envie de travailler avec eux. La moindre chose qui va pas, un retard le matin, quelqu’un qui rigole au mauvais moment […] tout de suite, je me rétracte, et je peux plus travailler en fait, parce que il y a quelque chose qui me refroidit. Donc c’est assez fragile tout ça, comment ça se fait. Mais ici je suis bien. Avec eux par exemple je me sens très en confiance, donc ça se passe bien, quoi. Et ça se passe souvent bien d’ailleurs. Et c’est une drôle de chose, parce que c’est aussi une façon de dévoiler beaucoup de ses faiblesses devant tout le monde, de dire: “Voilà, j’ai pas d’idée. Je sais plus, je suis fatigué.” Donc c’est une façon de demander beaucoup mais de donner aussi beaucoup. Comme ça, on est tous dans une espèce d’exigence et je trouve ça bien.26
(Translation: Lee Holt)
References
Aperghis, Georges (2010) Interview by Matthias Rebstock, Paris, 01/05/2010.
—— (2001) “Werkstattgespräch Machinations. Nathalie Singer im Gespräch mit Georges Aperghis”, in Odo Berno Polzerand and Thomas Schäfer (eds.) (2001), Katalog Wien Modern 2001, Saarbrücken.
Durney, Daniel (1990) “La règle du jeu”, in Antoine Gindt: Georges Aperghis: Le corps musical, Arles.
Gammel, Marcus (2002) “Rotkäppchen ist der Wolf. Kreativität im Musiktheater von Georges Aperghis”, MA thesis, Berlin: Humbold Universität.
Hahn, Patrick (2008) “Stoff-Rest-Stoff. Zum künstlerischen Umgang mit Resten in einem spectacle musical von Georges Aperghis”, MA thesis, Köln: Köln University.
Houdart, Célia (2007) Avis de tempete, Paris: Intervalles.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies (1999) Postdramatisches Theater, Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren.
Maximoff, Catherine (2006) Georges Aperghis: Storm Beneath a Skull, DVD documentary, Juxta Productions.
Rebstock, Matthias (2006) Zwischen Musik und Theater: Das instrumentalen Theater von Mauricio Kagel, Hofheim: Wolke Verlag.
Note
1. See Gammel 2002: 7. And different from the English ‘music theatre’ and the German ‘Musiktheater’, which are both rather wide and unspecific. The French ‘théâtre musical’ is interwoven with the concept of contemporary music. See Hahn 2008: 9.
2. Since then it was run by his companion Antoine Gindt.
3. “The task was how to find a different kind of character who would not be like Chekhov’s characters but rather more like musical characters. That means there is a rhythmical accent, an intensity of particular colours – so there are characters that exist of nothing but a special intensity. And that becomes theatre, but it comes from music. And the other problem was – coming from writing for the opera – how is it possible to put the different elements on the same level, the voice, the lights, the stage, the sound and the text – or even no text, music – or even no music, visual music and all that. In opera there is a certain hierarchy. It is basically like a pyramid, with a text that gets presented by the music in a certain way that is scenically presented by a stage director, and all this comes together to create a single object, around a single text and with theatrical situations as in classical theatre. So the question was how to free all these elements and try to build a different kind of syntax that has nothing to do with a single story, but one that produces different stories, that is polyphonic” (Aperghis 2010).
4. “That was a few years after 1968, so that was an utopia. But in those days there was no intermediary between artists and the public. There was a public that did not know the theatre at all, that only knew the TV and that was it. So what would happen if there were people who were working on theatre, on music with them, how could that happen. That was the question. And that was very interesting because there were workshops with amateurs, with elderly people, with children and that actually built a new audience” (Aperghis 2010).
5. “For me it was very important that they were actors because I did not want to hide behind a musical ability, where I could write musical things. I wanted to simplify in order to make an oral work, like in theatre, and dictate the music only by heart because the actors could not read music. For me that was a very, very difficult task. An actor is not a musician but an actor. You have to come to the point where the music or the theatre originates from him, with him doing enormous inner work on his own. The musician reads the score and that’s it” (Aperghis 2010).
6. “I don’t mean theatrical situations. That doesn’t interest me. But you have to do it in a way that the music, that some one plays or sings – that what I write for him – that that carries the vague idea of a character, abstract and often imprecise, that is contradictory, that changes. But I don’t want them to play theatre. I am happy if the music and the work we do together makes them exist in a very strong manner and if one is touched by this energy or quality of what they do. But my aim is that one never really knows what it is that they are doing. You can come a bit closer but if you knew, you would stop listening to the music. If you say: ‘Ok, this is that’, it’s all over. People pull in their antennae and that’s it” (Aperghis 2010).
7. “You hear something and you say to yourself: that’s impossible that this acually is in that music. You thought it was, let’s say, happy and the music turns out to be furious. Or the other way round. I find that very exciting to see a music changing its aspects, and all of a sudden, that gives me ideas for the scenic part, for movements or playing. And that’s like throwing a snowball as one thing is coming to another. And all that plays together.” Interview with Georges Aperghis by Marcus Gammel, Strasbourg, 10 February 2002 (in Gammel 2002).
8. What is striking here is the way in which a certain tension is articulated: on one hand, the elements should remain self-sufficient. And that would also mean that they must be constructed according to their own logic and rules. On the other hand, the overall structure of all of the elements follows an organisation musicale, meaning that they are subjugated to musical principles. Marcus Gammel has found an appropriate way to describe this tension: “The structure of [Aperghis’] pieces is determined by musical principles, without the music dominating the other elements” (Gammel 2002: 9).
9. However, even in this first phase of composition, Aperghis is always clear about the people for whom he is writing. I will return later to the significance of the performers in the compositional process of Aperghis.
10. “The goal is that the music is independent. That it does not need to tell something of the piece. That it exists just for itself. And when later it comes to the shock with the text, then it becomes theatre. But if one changes the text it becomes a different theatre. The music is not made from the beginning to play such and such a role. It is just sound material” (Aperghis 2010).
11. “The challenge is to find out what’s the interest of each fragment. Knowing that a fragment never exists alone, that it only exists within a syntax. Then, you have to find the point when it starts to be alive. To breath. At which moment can it be confronted with another fragment. A fragment is weak and easily swallowed by the others around it” (Aperghis in Houdart 2007: 60).
12. For example, the majority of the score of Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, currently in print with Durand publishers, was prepared by Marcus Gammel, not by Aperghis himself.
13. Letter ‘W’ in the score. I am grateful to Marcus Gammel for granting me permission to view the original fragments.
14. Sylvie Levesque, Donatienne Michel-Dansac, Sylvie Sacoun and Geneviève Strosser.
15. For example, Manos Tsangaris would have pursued the opposite strategy: the staging would have already been predetermined to a certain degree in the act of composition. The score would allow scarcely more latitude for the scenic than for the musical elements, meaning that the interpretative scope of the scenic part would be reduced to the interpretive scope that scores always permit for musical interpretation.
16. “They are also very much involved in the visual aspect of the piece, because all these accessories and all these objects – I asked them to bring with them what they liked. These are their things, things I never would have imagined on my own” (Aperghis 2010).
17. For example in Sept crimes de l’amour. Here, odd basic physical positions are written for the three performers. For each of the seven pieces one position is to be maintained throughout.
18. “It is a pity that none of the players has the chance to breathe a little bit. So this confirmed my idea not to write in this sense. I am just as manic as Kagel, but I leave some parameters open” (Aperghis 2010).
19. “The body of an actor or a musician and the way he behaves, his interests, his life, his past and all that, this is all very important to me. So a certain action is not the same when Jean Paul Drouet or Françoise Rivalland performs it, for example. That’s completely different for me. For me it is always very important to start with the people that are there. Actually I don’t like to write in an impersonal way. But once it is written, I have confidence to other people that will follow” (Aperghis 2010).
20. The line of demarcation in question here does not run simply between the music described in the score and the staging (as in opera). Instead, the music owes its structure – as described above – to the process of developing the musical and the scenic part. The music therefore bears the traces of the scenic work, although this is not represented in the score itself.
21. In his work, Marcus Gammel shows how Le Petit Chaperon Rouge has changed from performance to performance, at both the scenic and musical levels. See Gammel 2002: 15.
22. “If you need to move in order to breathe and sing, then do it. But you should not do it consciously. If it is conscious, or if you start to play something, it’s finished” (Aperghis 2010).
23. “This man was Russian. Freud was from Vienna […] So it was then, that I began to build syllables that didn’t want to mean anything anymore but that gave me the colour of Russian and the colour of German. And this later gave me the idea that these syllables could form melodies. Not melodies built with notes, […] but melodies made of syllables, of the colours of syllables. That’s is how I started” (Aperghis in Gammel 2002: 98. Translation by Lee Holt).
24. Interview with Georges Aperghis by Patrick Hahn, Bern 17 April 2007 (Hahn 2008: 15). Patrick Hahn goes on to suggest that Aperghis’ textual composition has more to do with this line of thought than with Dada, Futurism or Lettrism. Aperghis tends to view Joyce or Beckett as his literary influences. See Gindt 1990: 90.
25. “Your prior experiences don’t help you. […] I want to dive into new adventures, more difficult as there is no experience” (Aperghis 2010).
26. “In order to do what I do with them I have to really like them. That means that I really want to work with them. The smallest thing that doesn’t work, some one being late in the morning or laughing at the wrong moment […] I am immediately discouraged and I cannot go on working because there is something that cools me down. So, it’s all rather fragile how it is done. But for me it is fine. With them, for example, I feel mutual trust so it is going well. And by the way, it’s often going fine. And that’s kind of a funny thing because that’s also a way to show one’s own weaknesses to everybody if you say: ‘Ok, I have no idea. I don’t know, I am tired.’ So it is a way of asking for a lot but also of giving a lot. And like that you are involved in a kind of pretension and I like that” (Aperghis in Gammel 2002: 63).