naked empty silence in Hannover

My new piece for cello (Martha Bijlma), electronics, and Jean-Francois Laporte’s self-made compressed-air-driven instrument the Bol was premiered on November 19th 2023 at the Rampe in Hannover, Germany. This was part of the Zeitlupe series initiated by the Hannoversche Gesellschaft für Neue Musik. In these concerts, a new work is presented twice, with other works perhaps, and with a discussion led by a moderator, in this case the WDR3 journalist, author, and music critic Raoul Mörchen. The discussion follows the first performance of the work and precedes a second performance:

programme note

Samuel Beckett’s mirlitonnades are small poems in French, described by the author as “gloomy French doggerel”. I first came across them in Harper’s magazine (US) in 2006. Several contemporary writers had translated a single seven-word poem into English, illustrating perfectly not only the difficulty of poetry translation in general but the rich abundance of meaning that can be mined from a few well-chosen words: “rêve / sans fin / ni trêve / à rien” (“dream / without cease / or treaty / of peace” according to Roger O’Keefe).

I found more of these translated in a blog post by Eric Hoffman. I was struck by one in particular: “naked empty silence / will never / be / empty silence”. There is an obvious musical link here to Cage and what we might call the impossibility of silence, but naked empty silence is no silent piece. There is however a concentration on extremes of dynamic, for the most part extremely quiet but significantly amplified and thus inviting the listener to hear the (almost) silence, the delicate playing techniques through the sonic microscope that the microphone can be.

But what really attracted me to the musical potential of these short translated poems was the connection to the impossibility of an exact but always obligatory translation of a music score’s symbols into sonic structures—or even the desirability of an attempt at such, whatever that may entail.

Jean-François’ instruments, even when screaming, are delicate, unpredictable beasts. Writing for them necessitates navigating the unknown, to a certain extent, along with everything that can happen within it. A complex live electronics system increases the unpredictability and the need to think on your feet and react quickly during the performance. Choosing unstable sound production techniques on the cello seemed apt in this context, as well as the presentation and re-presentation of structures created with fragile sonorities on both instruments and elaborated with electronics. This double coupling forms a certain translation and re-translation, here by the same musicians rather than by different authors. It offers both players and listeners the opportunity to hear the same short musical utterance several times, extracting different significance upon each apprehension.

naked empty silence was written on the invitation of Gordon Williamson for Jean-François Laporte and Martha Bijlsma for the zeitlupe 2023 concert series in Hannover, and for Jean-François with Émilie Girard-Charest in Montréal.