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Georges Aperghis has built up an extensive body of work across multiple genres. Stage music, musical theater, operas, and instrumental pieces — the last still commonly described as “pure” music, demarcating it from the rest — are just some of the genres he has produced. Aperghis is a dramatist, a composer, and, at times, a pedagogue. His works are informed by a deep sense of questioning and are devoid of any message, advice, or definitive statement on a potential truth. Their questions often translate into a flurry of activity, in which each fragment interrogates a new aspect of the problem.
Aperghis explains that his piece Commentaires (1996) is a “kind of circuit, a machine spinning like a carousel and revealing the facets of a body made up of all those events.”2 His reference to a machine provides the framework for another of his compositions, Machinations (2000). Yet, Aperghis’s work exhibits his meticulous struggle against mechanization and reflexes of any kind, which he calls “clichés”: “Above all, most of my work is about avoiding clichés and stereotypes […]. The first stage of development is this process of fighting against clichés.”3
He both obliterates his subjects and makes them present at the same time, as evident in his constant engagement with language and play with phonemes. In Récitations, for example, he plays with fragmenting language in order to better grasp its substance. Indeed, one of the most prominent aspects of Aperghis’s output may well be that with whatever subject matter he works, he breaks it down into all its components so as to engage with extreme presence. He has grasped the ability of language to act as a structure, as well as the ability of verbal intention — that is, words, interjections, and the combination of word and gesture — to be a primary element of theatrical performance. Borrowing from writing, he uses the devices of splintering, fragmentation, permutation, and repetition, as laid out by musicologist Daniel Durney4 and as they appear in Aperghis’s collected texts Zig-Bang.5 Verbal intention conveys an outlook on the world, even when the meaning of the sounds is stripped away: “Gouinzabbeviliennaguë vémabordail.”6 In abolishing the rules of syntax and dissolving meaning, Aperghis revives a quality of uttering as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception:
The phonetic gesture structures the experience and modulates the existence of the speaking subject and those who listen, just like a behavior of my body invests for me and for others the objects that surround me with a certain meaning.7
Accordingly, as in Cinq Couplets (1988) for soprano and double bass clarinet, to speak is to structure, to animate the body is to state. Merging sound and movement is certainly paramount in musical theater. Aperghis writes:
Through all these dynamic pulverizations, we are witnessing a possible polyphony consisting of multiple micro-languages that can bring on physical or emotive energy by causing violent collisions between the meaning of an image or sound and a purely formal meaning.8
Aperghis is a man of situations. He has a way of bringing a situation into the present, giving his work a scenic quality that he has explored ever since his early works presented at the Avignon Festival. Whether it is musical, theatrical, or visual, this situation is meant to bring the audience into observation and discovery. The situation is posed as an entity in itself, as it brings into play protagonists or symbols. Example situations include male dominance in Fidélité (1982), mobile music in Musical Box (1970), the death of a composer in Oraison funèbre (1971), baroque oratorio according to Handel in Vesper (1971), Bach cantatas in BWV (1973), harassment and power in Rire physiologique (1982), behavioral disfunction in Les Sept crimes de l’amour (1979), and a story tinged with Freudian symbolism in Histoire de loups (1976). The Atelier Théâtre et Musique (ATEM), which Aperghis founded in 1976,10 is a situation in multiple senses. It is first of all a geographical situation: the ATEM is located in one of the housing project high-rises in Bagnolet, France, where it is a space for collective creativity and interaction among the residents. The collective’s theatrical and musical work is based on group exercises and improvisations that center around the micro-dramas of everyday life and the stories imagined by the children who live there.11
Many of Aperghis’s situations do not force a preestablished script onto the work. They reject linear narrative and are rather absorbed by dramaturgy and setting. “I’d rather follow pieces of stories,” Aperghis says about Commentaires.12 He is an aggregator. He layers scenic and musical resources, and superimposes video and music, just as he works with multiple actors for the same character.
Each event occurring onstage is layered and connected. Each sequence can then be defined by its valence, or its ability to swap one or many constituents with the next sequence or another scene. The higher the valence, the more cohesive are all the parts, even when their arrangement may seem disarrayed. Indeed, the high-valence sequences facilitate remembering, an important concern for Aperghis: “How can I find the energy and make things recognizable so that the audience can play with memory?”13 Commenting on La Tragique histoire du nécromancien Hiéronimo et de son miroir (1971), Durney shows that this attitude traces back to Aperghis’s early works: “The composer has a very personal style of observation that is both surprising and roundabout. But its disconcerting quality is offset by the unique charm of distant connections.”14 As in the editing of a film, a medium to which Aperghis repeatedly refers, layering scenes that are logically or chronologically disconnected creates an assemblage that bears new or hidden meaning. Evan Rothstein refers to this as “indirect speech,” borrowing the concept from Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes: “juxtaposition that […] establishes unexpected lines of connection.”15 This tool also brings to mind a principle set out by Sergei Eisenstein in Montage 1938: “Two random fragments, spliced together, inevitably combine into something new that emerges from this juxtaposition.”16
In La Tragique histoire du nécromancien Hiéronimo et de son miroir, the stage elements are action, dialogue, and commentary. Each operates independently of the others and occurs at the same time. The fact of multiplying the possible readings of an event elevates the commentary to poetry. It also transposes to the theater what was noted above about language: to break up the stage action is to assert it. To arrange actions on several simultaneous levels is to link gestures that structure our experience across an even wider register and create a connection between oneself and the world.
About Die Hamletmaschine-oratorio, Aperghis writes,
The text doesn’t require any music. It only requires a state to tell it. A bodily state of a dancer who will locate it, as well as a written state, written by me: range, speed, breath, spoken, or not spoken…17
From Pandæmonium (1973) to Dans le mur (2007), Aperghis writes out these states and steps. It is within this writing process that the structuring of experience takes shape.
Aperghis does not assume total control during the creative act. He is willing to give the work a degree of autonomy, almost as if it had a will of its own: “It all depends on the piece,” he writes.<a href= »#fn19 » id= »ref19 »>19 He provides the starting material but does not impose a course of direction, building up the composition piecemeal: “I’ve often written pieces with no beginning or end, meaning I would come in for rehearsal with about a hundred little scenes, but I didn’t know which one came first, which one was second.”20 There are various ways of arranging a piece, whether working from a libretto or script, or working with the actors, singers, or instrumentalists. Sextuor (1992) was developed in rehearsal, as was Commentaires. Aperghis describes the rehearsals this way: “They improvise … I tell them stories, what I wish would happen basically, and then they start working within those parameters and propose things.” In these settings, “the music hinges upon the other elements, whether it is the text, the lighting, the acting, or the positions of the actors on stage.”21
But it is important to maintain, even on a subconscious or symbolic level, some overall consistency within the ensemble: “The mosaic needs to live, and this implies a chemistry that moves through the scenes.” That chemistry originates from the compositional procedures that proliferate an idea or break apart the initial situation(s). It would be inaccurate to consider fragmentation as antithetical to composing. Fragmentation indicates an action external to the object, which negatively constructs. In Aperghis’s work, this negative construction occurs through a series of compositional techniques that allow units of time to be broken up and randomly rearranged. Performers can also permute various elements, as in 280 mesures pour clarinette (1979), and generalize certain structural principles, as in major works such as Récitations, Vesper, and Je vous dis que je suis mort (1978).
In Récitations, Je vous dis que je suis mort, and Machinations, multiple operations on the text and the music happen concurrently, bringing the text’s musicality into focus. The erosion of a sentence, the verbigeration, or the numerous operations performed on the text or libretto bring text into the realm of music, with erosion or accumulation of melodic phrases, breaks, rhythmic effects, and symmetries. Rhythmic symmetry is used in Je vous dis que je suis mort, and symmetries of the basic musical material in Vesper.22 These operations allow musical ideas to regenerate. As Pascal Decroupet notes about Karlheinz Stockhausen, permutation is the consequence of a “general aesthetic intention to show an unchanging universe in ever changing lights.”23 In this respect, Aperghis ultimately achieves a result not far removed from serialism:
What I was most interested in was how the [serial] system produced random events that didn’t make it possible to immediately control the entirety of the work. But soon enough, I realized I could get the same result with my own resources.24
Over the whole of Aperghis’s output, his path took a series of clear turns. His later compositions move toward twenty-first-century aesthetics. While earlier pieces, such as La Tragique histoire du nécromancien Hiéronimo et de son miroir (1971), feature melodic and rhythmic associations and disassociations, the later pieces are built on complex materials and layers or blocks of very different kinds of sound. Acoustics may supersede arrangement, and movement, sound, space, and image are aggregated into sound hyperobjects — an augmented expérience concrète.26
Aperghis, who claims to share a lineage with John Cage and Mauricio Kagel, has successfully assimilated the “musical body” within the act of composing. The musical body acts within the gap left between the writing and its application onstage. In Avis de tempête (2004), the body of the dancer-actress develops gesture, voice, and image. In Machinations, the hands of the diseuses are projected on a large screen as they manipulate elements, while their voices are filtered through processors. “Instead of resulting from will or the manipulation of structures,” Aperghis says, “composition results from a struggle between those structures and the behavior of the performer in the production. And the premier performer is me, because I refuse to wear the straitjacket of the system. I fight it.”27 Such an attitude is certainly clear in his work, in his undetermined arrangements in which sections can be swapped around and new sequences are created by accumulation or erosion (Conversations, 1985).
In his late productions, from Machinations to Dans le mur by way of Avis de tempête, Aperghis pursues a new challenge, creating additional layers in the performance through the body using real-time electronics and video. In Luna Park (2011), sensors and accelerometer gloves enable the performer to modify language in real time through gesture. Hand movements, for example, bring about changes in the instrumentalists’ live vocalizations. Aperghis works with electronics as if they are actual matter, as in Dans le mur, where he sees electronic equipment as something to grapple with. “I don’t like the idea of the device being an extension of the singer or the instrumentalist,” he said in an interview. “To me it’s more like something that creates conflict.”28 Thus, interactions between the indicated sounds and the performer’s body create a gestural quality in the music, as in Dark Side (2003). In these pieces, bodies move the sound, connecting within the music and suggesting another issue.
In time-bound art forms such as music and performance, a basic question lies in knowing whether the core elements of the form, including the text or narrative, are preestablished and arranged from outside, or are structured intrinsically by rules of composition derived, perhaps, from their starting materials. The composer can arrange sequences of music around a particular text. Or the composer can observe as a composition forms — similar to how a living organism comes into being or a school of fish gathers — as sounds, gestures, and actions, as in post-dramatic theater, result from forces in the moment. In one case, the form preexists and dictates its constraints. In the other, the form results from forces and constraints triggered at the event’s beginning. This is the shift in Aperghis’s work in recent years. The sonic and gestural results he produces have increasingly influenced structure and foundation, because they are either aleatoric or complex. Aperghis, a musical body, consistently pursues a premise he formulated several years ago: “No libretto, but a score.”<a href= »#fn29 » id= »ref29 »>29
1. Excerpt from the libretto of Machinations (2000) by Georges APERGHIS, in Peter SZENDY, ed., Machinations de Georges Aperghis, Paris, Ircam-L’Harmattan, 2001, p. 117.<a href=”#ref1” title=”Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.”>↩
2. Georges APERGHIS, a 1996 interview for the film Sans commentaires by Jean-Paul MATTHIEU. [Translator’s note: The interview used to be available at http://www.aperghis.com/images/video2.html, but seems to have since been taken down].<a href=”#ref2” title=”Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.”>↩
3. Georges APERGHIS, interviewed by Nicolas DONIN and Jean-François TRUBERT, “Noyaux, matrices, oignons (… et corbeille),” Genesis 31, p. 67.<a href=”#ref3” title=”Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.”>↩
4. Daniel DURNEY has dedicated much of his research to the work of Aperghis. His thesis, Les compositions scéniques de Georges Aperghis, une écriture dramatique de la musique (Professorial thesis, EHESS, 1996), can be downloaded from Aperghis’s website: http://www.aperghis.com/lire/durney-aperghis.zip.<a href=”#ref4” title=”Jump back to footnote 4 in the text.”>↩
5. Georges APERGHIS, Zig-Bang, Paris, P.O.L, 2004.<a href=”#ref5” title=”Jump back to footnote 5 in the text.”>↩
6. Ibid., p. 58.<a href=”#ref6” title=”Jump back to footnote 6 in the text.”>↩
7. Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 235.<a href=”#ref7” title=”Jump back to footnote 7 in the text.”>↩
8. Georges APERGHIS, “Quelques réflexions sur le théâtre musical,” in Antoine GINDT, ed., Georges Aperghis, le corps musical, Arles, Actes Sud, 1990, p. 63.<a href=”#ref8” title=”Jump back to footnote 8 in the text.”>↩
9. Excerpt from Conversations (1985) in APERGHIS, Zig-Bang.<a href=”#ref9” title=”Jump back to footnote 9 in the text.”>↩
10. Read his biography on the brahms.ircam.fr database, as well as the biographical note by Antoine GINDT on Aperghis’s website: https://www.aperghis.com/biographies.html.<a href=”#ref10” title=”Jump back to footnote 10 in the text.”>↩
11. Georges APERGHIS, “Georges Aperghis et l’ATEM: Interview by Michel Rostain,” Musique en jeu, vol. 30, 1978, p. 86.<a href=”#ref11” title=”Jump back to footnote 11 in the text.”>↩
12. APERGHIS, interview by MATTHIEU.↩
13. APERGHIS, “Noyaux, matrices, oignons (… et corbeille),” p. 69.↩
14. DURNEY, Les compositions scéniques de Georges Aperghis, p. 61.↩
15. Evan ROTHSTEIN, “Le théâtre musical d’Aperghis: un sommaire provisoire,” in Laurent FENEYROU, ed., Musique et dramaturgie, esthétique de la représentation au XXe siècle, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne, 2003, p. 482.↩
16. Sergueï EISENSTEIN, “Montage 1938,” (translated by Bernadette DUCREST) in Steven BERNAS, ed., Montage créatif et processus esthétique d’Eisenstein, coll. Champs visuels, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008, p. 188.↩
17. Georges Aperghis, “Parallèles (2): Hamletmaschine,” in Peter Szendy, ed., Machinations de Georges Aperghis, p. 104.↩
18. Excerpt from Machinations (2000), p. 117.↩
19. Georges APERGHIS, paper given on 24 March 2011, at the Centre de documentation de la musique contemporaine. Visit http://www.cdmc.asso.fr.↩
20. APERGHIS, “Noyaux, matrices, oignons (… et corbeille),” p. 69.↩
21. Ibid.↩
22. Daniel DURNEY, “La règle du jeu,” in Georges Aperghis, le corps musical, p. 215.↩
23. Pascal DECROUPET, “Varèse, la série et la métaphore acoustique,” in Max PADDISON and Irène DELIEGE, eds, Musique contemporaine, Mardaga, 2001, p. 172.↩
24. Georges APERGHIS, “Entretien avec Georges Aperghis, par Philippe Albéra,” in Philippe ALBERA, ed., Musiques en création, Geneva, Contrechamps, 1997, p. 17.↩
25. APERGHIS, “Énumération (1): notes sur la diction dans Machinations (1999)” in Machinations de Georges Aperghis, p. 43.↩
26. Aperghis is alluding to Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète and idea of the sound object set out in his writings.↩
27. APERGHIS, “Entretien avec Georges Aperghis, par Philippe Albéra,” p. 19.↩
28. APERGHIS, “Noyaux, matrices, oignons (… et corbeille),” p. 73.↩
29. APERGHIS, “Quelques réflexions sur le théâtre musical,” p. 63.↩
Translation by Jean-Charles Ladurelle
Do you notice a mistake?