Concert venues are invented at Musica – ResMusica

Investigate the places where music is listened to. Make music heard in the places that inspired it. These are all projects that animate the spirit of Musica and its director Stéphane Roth, inviting listeners to new listening experiences.

The concept is new to Musica and has met with some success. The “concerts for oneself”, subtitled “Secret Music”, concern about fifteen unusual places, private or disused, in the city center of Strasbourg where a performer and a listener meet face to face. The appointment is made upstream, according to the time slots offered, but the address of the place is only revealed by SMS 48 hours in advance.

We cross the threshold at the appointed time, introduced by a Musica receptionist. The concert lasts twenty minutes, the content of the performance being specified only after the fact, during the other twenty minutes of exchanges with the interpreter who gives us his room program. This is the protocol of the “concert for oneself”; the experience is to be lived personally, in this intimate relationship with the sound and the space where it resonates: so many feelings and emotions in the moment of the music, which everyone can, or not, testify after the fact.

Musica’s fictional music

After Data port, in the Strasbourg district of Port du Rhin in 2021, Ensembles 2.2 are continuing their project of literary and musical writing on the territory. Designed by Sébastien Dicenaire, Oniropolis is a science fiction story whose chapters are geolocated in Schiltigheim, not far from Strasbourg. “Dreams are the spinal cord of this story” specifies the writer. The music and sound recording were produced by Gaëtan Gromer and Antoine Spindler, with the participation of students from the Leclerc college in Schiltigheim. It is up to the listener (Onironaute), headphones on, to invent their journey through the streets of Schiltigheim and live the story according to the trajectory they have chosen: an immersive wandering that opens up new spaces and modifies perception. places crossed.

On the TJP stage, with Accroche Note and Cairn

Two concerts in the morning are given on the stage of the TJP, Center Dramatique National de Strasbourg.

The first gives carte blanche to the legendary duo Françoise Kubler/Armand Angster (respectively singer and clarinetist), founders in 1981 of the variable-geometry ensemble Accroche Note that Musica has programmed every year since the origins of the festival. “We wanted to hang the notes together and help so-called contemporary music be less feared by the public”, sums up the clarinetist.

We learn more about the two heroes of the day with Mugwort and Moisare, very funny mirror pieces by Zad Moultaka which features our two musicians. In Mugwort (2011) for video and clarinet, Françoise is filmed, answering a phantom interlocutor whose questions (or not) we guess when Armand (around whom the subject revolves) is on stage and plays continuously on the spoken voice of his companion. Moisare (2022) reverses the scenario. Armand Angster, filmed, talks to us about his partner while the singer in live adorns, by multiplying the comic situations: musical theater which borders on the universe of Georges Aperghis, also on the concert poster. Half-words (2022) is a fusional duet between voice and clarinet, tender, sensual and full of finesse in the interpretation of the two musicians and fellow travelers to whom it is addressed.

“I have always been attracted to electronics in dialogue with the voice, like an extension of it, in resonance”, says Françoise Kubler, who then interprets, with her partner, the mixed piece by Daphné Hejebri , a young composer who studied composition in Strasbourg. +1 for voice (without text), bass clarinet and electronics establishes a space of tension where opposing energies intersect and collide, camped in a register of slightly repetitive gestures that struggle to generate a real dramaturgy.

With the equally enigmatic title, NN 3:4 / Speak! by Zeynep Gedizlioğlu (she also studied composition in Strasbourg, with Ivan Fedele) brings together soprano, clarinet and string quartet (the Strasbourg phalanx Adastra). In this music of gestures, full of vitality, where the composer maintains the discontinuity and a certain roughness of the material, the text only comes at the end, passing through the voice half-spoken, half-sung and letting a dimension unexpected theatrics.

The next day (same room, same time), the Cairn ensemble honors the Japanese composer based in Paris, Noriko Baba, with three of her works on display, including a world premiere: the opportunity to better understand the singular universe of this musician in whom the ambiguity of things, shadows and dreams compete with the fantasy and colors of childhood. A toy piano is within reach of Caroline Cren and a red matryoshka thrones, next to many other accessories, on the table of the percussionist.

bonbori (2008), which today is translated as “paper lantern”, takes on another meaning if we go back to the origin of the word, the composer tells us; it designates a foggy state with blurred contours, the one that Noriko Baba wants to suggest by a game of appearances/disappearances of sounds, “like the elements of a decor lit by candles in a dark room”, she further specifies : ephemeral and fragile music, touches, filtered sounds, breath and silence. It is the reflection of things that the composer wants to capture, the beauty of shadows more than the objects themselves. The piano is prepared in shiosai, tumult of the waves (2012), for piano, violin and cello, letting hear a dull and low sound, obsessive, over the entire duration of the piece. It is written in the memory of the 2011 tsunami, with the idea of ​​evoking the wave and the cry of seagulls doubled, submerged by more disturbing noises (sounds of works, helicopter traffic): an in-between, poetic as much as tragic, where the sounds of the composer slip into.

Fond of a sound world in which the elements of nature, birds and animal cries participate, Noriko Baba has embarked on the composition of a bestiary (in progress) in the form of an alphabet. The sound imagination is at work for each of the species, Noriko Baba providing instrumentalists with his set of familiar accessories, calls, harmonic pipes, harmonica, slide flute, music box (the matryoshka) and other rhomb whistling in the air for the first four numbers given in world premiere. Melodic swinging (toy piano) and other oscillations/granulations for Aspis the serpent; hesitant glissandi and flexatone signals for Bernacle the goose who risks death (beginning of funeral march) by falling; Cuculus (Coucou) evolves in a clearer and more joyful register before the arrival of Draco who reigns terror and opens the field of resonance (thunder plate, harmonic pipes, kazoo, etc). Humor competes with the plasticity of the material in this work directed by Guillaume Bourgogne at the head of a team as reactive as it is virtuoso.

Two older works complete the program. In Pelle-Mêle (1998) by Thierry Blondeau, an unconducted piece for six instruments, three guitars swing “like indolent pendulums”, in the words of Cairn artistic director Jérôme Combier, simulating a great chime fed by the sounds of the other instrumentalists. With Blondeau, the sound marries the gesture; each sequence of the work invents a new gesture and another theater of sounds. The writing becomes scarce like a skin of sorrow, the work ending with the mimed playing of the instrumentalists, with the gesture but without the sound.

From pupil to master, the concert ends with Talea (1987) by Gérard Grisey, an emblematic piece of spectral aesthetics where the composer claims to exploit two new dimensions for him, speed and contrast. The unflattering acoustics of the TJP make difficult the fusion of timbres and the propagation of the resonance (that of the piano) on which the instrumental synthesis of the second part takes place. Constance Ronzatti’s violin solo in the last pages only seems more dizzying, sweeping the register of her instrument with a dazzling brilliance.

Photo credit © Kyoko Nagashima (Noriko Baba) / Festival Musica

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