Through sound, nature

Jean-Luc Hervé studied music composition with Gérard Grisey, who influenced him deeply¹. In these early days, he immersed himself in spectral music – whose techniques he continues to use today – working with the notion of the “sound image.”

“It seems to me that one can distinguish two levels at which one understands a musical work: the material level and the level of the sound image. At the material level are the internal aspects, those things with which the work is constructed, such as harmony, or parametrizable and quantifiable durations. Sound images are the broader aspects of a work – its musical contours, such as texture, register, orchestration, nuance – its relative, quantitative dimensions. Sound images are musical entities that are meaningful in and of themselves, whereas the material is not. One generally perceives a sound image immediately, whereas the material is rather hidden” (Jean-Luc Hervé, 1997: 161).

His first pieces – for example, Dans l’heure brève (1997) – undertook to invent or to reinvent sound images, which may be abstract textures resulting from the work of spectral writing (or “liminal,” to use Grisey’s word, 2008: 114) or from characteristic figures – such as birdsong or long trails of sound evoking far-off airplanes². By highlighting those musical elements most directly linked to perception, Jean-Luc Hervé sets himself apart from other spectral and post-spectral musicians, notably through his focus on rhythm (cf. 2, 2002). But his most striking preoccupation – which also persists in his work today – is his questioning of time. It has often been said that spectral music, because it is process-based, is music of temporal flow – as opposed to the spatialization of time that is foundational to serial fragmentation. This observation applies perfectly to Hervé, who has written:

“Nature’s time is directional; it goes from birth to death. It is the time from sunrise to sunset, of living organisms; it goes from the formation to the dispersion of galaxies. It is the time in which we are embedded, our temporal landscape. Creating musical forms that remember this natural time is a way of setting music within the movement of nature – a motion that is both pleasurable and unsettling, familiar and unknown” (Jean-Luc Hervé, forthcoming).

This is not to say that his music has settled for linear time: it seeks to give body to musical forms that change continuously as they unfold. Indeed, expanding on Grisey’s idea of an underlying timescale – one recalls his three temporalities: bird time, human time, and whale time³ – Hervé seeks multiple, layerable temporalities, and even “several different qualities (sensations) at the same time” (Jean-Luc Hervé in Jean-Luc Hervé, Anne Cauquelin, 2018: 17). Anne Cauquelin, in her interviews with the composer, describes this in terms of a garden:

“In this temporal diversity, noises have their own time, too – they burst forth and die out. Listening out for cricket time, measured by the sundial and warm pine forests, for frog-croaking time (in the evening, but before sunset), for the mute crackle of insects – all day long – for the rustle of wings above water, is adding other times to plant, human, and mineral time, for stones, too, have their own temporality, and crack, and bask (like a lizard in the midday sun). These noises cannot be layered over each other, they cannot be added together; nor can they be added in to the colors and scents of plants; rather, they swirl together in an ongoing concert. They each have their place in the multiple temporal modalities that ‘make’ a garden” (Anne Cauquelin in Jean-Luc Hervé, Anne Cauquelin, 2018: 17).

What Hervé took from spectral music in the end was the foundational idea of a music that has transcended the abstraction of the note and returned to sound – living, complex, non-reifiable. The orchestration-composition of a global sound in measures 221-222 of De près (2014) is an excellent example (Example 1): the instruments play harmonics of the fundamental frequency (C) which are “distorted” (the 2nd harmonic is lowered, becoming a si+), which produces beating; in parallel, the flute overblows a trill, the English horn plays multiphonics, and the strings are muted, adding to the complexity and the internal energy of the global sound. Grisey (Grisey, 2008: 28) dreamed of “an ecology of sound, like a new science made available to musicians.” Working from acoustics and the physical properties of sound, one rediscovers sound’s reality, without reducing it to an object; in this way, it is possible to enter the very nature of the sound – and, sound, being a “living” thing, to enter nature itself. Here, ecology means a door opened into the “environment,” into the world (which the note had reduced to the score) and that which working with sound does or does not bring to bear on natural acoustic models: “To base composition on acoustic phenomena is to establish a relationship between a musical work and the physical world around us, it is, therefore, a way of situating that work in the world,” writes Jean-Luc Hervé (Jean-Luc Hervé, forthcoming).

Example 1

De près, measures 219-222

An aesthetic of surroundings and concert/installations

The importance of nature to Jean-Luc Hervé will have become clear to the reader by now. But in writing that it is a matter of “situating the work in the world,” one imagines he is describing a rupture with the classic naturalist aesthetic and a desire to move toward an environmental aesthetic. “situating the work in the world” – this phrase was taken from a major article in which the composer was proposing a qualifier for his aesthetic. Not spectral, not even liminal, but an “aesthetic of surroundings.” Criticizing idealized visions of nature – he mentions the aesthetics of just intonation, but he could just as well have been referring to Olivier Messiaen’s, birds, prisoners of equal temperament and of human temporality – Hervé wrote, “In opposition to this type of idealist abstraction, deaf to the world, I defend in my work an immanent art, characterized by a posture of listening, of pricked ears, attentive to the rush and tingle of the vitalities present in our environment. I have based my work on the relationship between art and the world, an aesthetic of surroundings” (Jean-Luc Hervé, forthcoming).

But is it possible to render concrete an aesthetic of surroundings if one stays within “music”? Jean-Luc Hervé is still a spectral composer; he continues to employ the techniques of composition, to use scores, which symbolize (and idealize) sound. Even when one is using dirty sounds (as opposed to the aesthetics of just intonation) and exploring micro-time or micro-temperament, music remains music; that is to say, a closed universe that claims to stand in for the real world, recreating it within, “figuring,” “symbolizing” it. Moreover: the ultimate musical practice, the concert, is predicated on the idea that one has cut oneself off from the outside world – from one’s “surroundings.”

Hervé found the way out of this antinomy in Japan. “During my time in Kyoto in 2001, I was struck by the relationship that is maintained in Japan between art and nature, and, more particularly, the way in which the highly-constructed architecture of gardens is designed with regard to their natural environment”, Hervé wrote in his notes for En découverte (2004). The point was not to shift into an environmental aesthetic, renouncing music in favor of acoustic ecology or field recording. Rather, the point was to think of the musical work as a (Japanese) garden; in other words, to compose it discerningly, with reference to “surroundings” and at the same time not to lose sight – both literally and in listening terms – of these surroundings. The first condition was already fulfilled, as we have seen, in the idea of a new science, an ecology of sound, evoked by Grisey, which spectral music brings to life. The second would be fulfilled for the first time with a pivotal work, Effet lisière (2003).

Effet lisièrewas created in collaboration with the visual artist Natacha Nisic for the Hakusasonso Garden in Kyoto. Based on the layout, two spaces are delimited: the garden itself and the central pavilion around which the garden is arranged. It is a two-part piece; the first part takes place in the garden, and is composed of electroacoustic music broadcast over a network of loudspeakers. The listener hears environmental sounds slowly transforming into instrumental ones. During this part of the piece, the audience walks through the garden. The second part of the piece takes place in the central pavilion, and the audience is seated. They listen to music written for two violins and electronics. “The concert was scheduled in order to coincide exactly with sunset, so that the second half began in the daytime and finished in the dark. Thus, the sound transition in the work (natural sounds/instrumental sounds) associated with the topography of the space (garden/pavilion) was paired with the transition between day and night” (Jean-Luc Hervé, 2006). The piece explores the idea of “edges” (lisièrein the French title): “If I had to describe my work with a single idea, it would be that of the edge. When we walk for a long time in the forest and arrive at its edge, we discover a new perspective. Standing in contrast with this uniform place, a world closed in by tree leaves, is a new and open biotope. It is as if we were moving from the shadows of an interior toward the light of an exterior. We stop. We contemplate the landscape. All of our senses are awakened, we are filled with wonder. My project is to bring the listener toward these edges,” explains Jean-Luc Hervé (notes forDe près, 2014). Indeed, as we will by now have understood, the “musical” part of the piece (its second half) is composed like a Japanese garden: “it is a technique known as Shakkei or ‘landscape capture’ where one lays out the different elements of a garden, stones, bushes, etc., based on the landscape one sees in the background. The garden is integrated into its natural environment, its architecture rooted in the landscape, and thus takes on another dimension: buttressed by the nature around it, it takes on a singular artistic force and at the same time reveals the landscape in the background” (Jean-Luc Hervé, forthcoming).

Effet lisièrelaunched a practice that Jean-Luc Hervé called “concert/installations.” The trajectory may go from the outside toward the inside (concert location), but it may also move in the opposite direction. This is the case of Germination (2013) for instrumental ensemble and electronics, for example. Created for the IRCAM campus, it connected a sound installation to a concert piece: “At IRCAM, research and composing take place below ground. […] The paving stones of the Place Stravinsky mark a strong boundary, because from this perspective, the underground floors of the IRCAM are the opposite of the life above. The project is to traverse this surface, the paved surface of the Place Stravinsky, which is also a metaphorical one. […] To create a relationship between the surface and the depths of the underground floors and musical creation, to bring the latter into the light of day” (Jean-Luc Hervé, proposal forGermination). The first part of the piece takes place in the concert space of the IRCAM (the Espace de projection), where the audience hears a piece some twenty minutes long. Then, the audience goes upstairs, where, on the Place Stravinsky, an approximately fifteen-minute-long sound installation is present, using a custom-built integrated sound and plant set-up. To make the source of the sound as hidden as possible, small mp3 players linked to tiny loudspeakers gave “the impression of a multitude of insects hidden in the grass at the audience’s feet. […] This idea of organic music could be found in the ensemble score, as well, whose material was drawn from models of plant growth” (Jean-Luc Hervé inJean-Luc Hervé, Anne Cauquelin, 2018: 81-82). Moreover, organic matter (mostly grass and fallen leaves) had been left to accumulate and grow in the cracks between the paving stones on the Place Stravinsky, giving the impression that the square had been neglected and that plant life was beginning to take hold there (cf. example 2).

Example 2

Germination, Place Igor Stravinsky ©Astrid Verspieren

The idea of concert/installations flows through his concert pieces, as well. Thus, in En découverte (2004), which is a concert version of Effet lisière, Jean-Luc Hervé returns to the idea of a trajectory from the outside inward; here, metaphorically. In the performance, violins begin by imitating the song of a Japanese nightingale. As the piece goes on, their playing transforms into gestures typical of the violin canon, and finish with bariolage that recalls Paganini’s First Caprice (cf. example 3). In another concert piece, Des oiseaux (2003) the inverse occurs: at the very end, we hear recorded birdsong and a pastoral ambiance. (Re)Transmission (2017) is a piece midway between pure concert work and concert/installation. It is performed in a concert hall, but abolishes the border between the stage and the audience. Singers, dressed in ordinary clothes, are hidden in the audience, and begin very discreetly, in soft tones, which resemble a murmur rippling through the hall; they then begin to participate more and more in the music being performed on stage, playing small instruments (duck calls, kazoos) and turn on mini-mp3 players with tiny loudspeakers hidden under their seats. We may end by mentioning what might be considered the opposite situation, a garden of sound. For the Paris City Council, Hervé developed a project (which has yet to be realized) in which visitors would be led from an urban environment to a natural setting, and then to a situation resembling a concert. At the entrance to the garden, a waterfall wall was to be installed: as visitors walked, they would discover sounds broadcast over hidden loudspeakers that revealed the garden; finally, in the part of the garden that was naturally the quietist, two seating areas were to be set up where “the sounds [would be] organized in more constructed forms to achieve greater complexity from time to time” (Jean-Luc Hervé, 2011).

Examples 3a and 3b

En découverte: beginning and end

Fifty years ago, with Terretektorh (in which a large symphonic orchestra was scattered throughout the audience), Xenakis, anticipating the political revolution of May 1968 which he transposed into music, sweeping aside traditional musical practice. With his concert/installations (or their equivalents in pure concert music or in the proposal for the garden of sounds), Jean-Luc Hervé is closer to the discourse and practice of “transition” that one encounters in the political environmental movement today, and which presents itself as an alternative to the dilemma of revolution versus reform. If we are to stay in the art of sound, this is the time to evoke the composer’s problematization of listening. Distinguishing among several types of listening – sensual listening, listening based on the expressive power of music, etc. – he ultimately has argued for acute listening, “with ears pricked,” an “active, attentive listening that sharpens, like the gaze” (Jean-Luc Hervé in Jean-Luc Hervé, Anne Cauquelin, 2018: 69). This form of listening is sensitive to the materials and the forms set in motion as time unfolds, “that give music its deep meaning. It is this multiplicity that is called upon to listen to art music, so-called “classical” music, and that makes the concert a unique listening experience” (ibid.: 72). This listening, he tells us, bears a strange resemblance to an ornithologist listening to birds in a forest, in the case of new music:

“I have always thought there was a great similarity between listening to a new musical work and bird watching in the forest. In both cases, we are expecting sounds, some of which are never heard. In the forest, you cannot see the birds, which are generally at the tops of trees, hidden in the leaves. It is through listening that we can find them and recognize them. We are in a perceptive situation that is analogous to that of music being broadcast by hidden loudspeakers” (ibid.: 62).

Sound biotopes

Jean-Luc Hervé worked as a guide in an ornithological reserve when he was eighteen. Moreover, in parallel with music composition, he studied the natural sciences, and even wrote a doctoral thesis on the role of behavior in species differentiation during evolution, studied in a family of beetles. It seems natural therefore that at some point his musical ideas would benefit from this initial field of inquiry. Without abandoning concert music – as his catalogue shows for example with his 2018 String quartet – he is now further exploring the idea of the installation/concert and the aesthetic of surroundings.

It is important, in introducing these new ideas, to explain that neither his “pure” music nor his concert/installations, contrary to a current dominant trend among “sound musicians” (cf. Makis Solomos, 2013: Chapter 4), follow a logic of “immersion”. Rather, he invites us to listen and to feel what, since Murray Schafer, have been called “soundscapes.” Where sound immersion pushes toward fusion and – if we understand fusion from the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective and its critique of the “oceanic feeling” – sometimes all the way to madness, soundscapes preserve perspective and balance. This is why, in technological terms, he rejects the logic of spatialization in favor of localization: “Localize, rather than spatialize. Make sure that at every point in the venue (concert hall or outdoor venue) a sound repeats, develops, transforms. So that it has its own life, independent of others, while participating at the same time in the building of musical polyphony. […] Contrary to the spatialization of a sound space, localizing each sound around oneself creates a sonic perspective” (Jean-Luc. Hervé in Jean-Luc Hervé, Anne Cauquelin, 2018: 126).

In the relationship to the environment, this manner of doing things is one that favors discretion: the loudspeaker systems in gardens and other chosen locations are hidden, and the sounds they emit are soft. One of the most striking examples is a project for the Abbaye de Noirlac – which, like the garden of sounds, has not yet been realized – part of a design for the site by the landscape architect Gilles Clément. In it, Jean-Luc Hervé returns to some of his ideas for the garden of sound. Noting that the visitor’s first impression is of deep silence, Hervé deploys a sound device in the cloister built from models of sounds in the area – for example, the frequencies of the machines in the saw mill or the marble workshop in the neighboring town were chosen to provide the principal harmonics of the composition. The loudspeakers are oriented toward the vaulted ceiling, and make use of the acoustic properties of the structure – the sound, bouncing off the curves of the vault, appears to be emerging from the building itself. Another system of loudspeakers is also set up in the cloister garden, here, hidden in the ground and pointing toward the sky to form a kind of carpet of sound. The sounds “dialogue with the movement of the clouds in the sky. They move across the surface of the ground, their motion determined by algorithms that reproduce the trajectories of groups of individuals, like flocks of birds (or schools of fish), a sort of antiphony between the sky and the earth, between the choreography of the clouds and the music of the garden” (Jean-Luc Hervé in Jean-Luc Hervé, Anne Cauquelin, 2018: 109). In this dialogue, in this multi-vocal play between music and environment, between culture and nature, the music is discreet, not dominant. But it hardly disappears. Indeed, Hervé tells us, “to orchestrate is to guide us toward musical listening, toward the incorporeal material of the sound liberated from its cause. […] To move from the noise of a thing (bird or violin) toward an incorporeal musical sound is to acquire the magical power of music” (ibid.: 122).

If music holds this power – the power that has always been attributed to sounds, whether by the Pythagoreans or by others – it is not because of its supposed intrinsic properties (for example, its hypothetical “immateriality,” as the Romantics believed) but because, of all the arts, music is perhaps the one that brings us closest to the Other. As Deleuze and Guattari have written, music has a tremendous capacity for deterritorialization; it mobilizes multiple forms of becoming: “What does music deal with, what is the content indissociable from sound expression? It is hard to say, but it is something: a child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, 1987: 299). The music of Jean-Luc Hervé abounds with birdsong – two of his pieces are even named for birds, Les oiseaux (1993) and Des oiseaux (2003). But it also abounds with all sorts of insects and animals. It is overrun by plants, too, as in his Éloge de la plante (2016), whose title was taken from the title of a book by the botanist, biologist, and dendrologist Francis Hallé (1999), which develops the idea that the evolutionary forms of the plant world, very different from those of the animal world, call into question our theories of the evolution of living creatures.

We encounter these “Others” in what Jean-Luc Hervé has recently called (sonic) “biotopes” or “timid acousmatic devices.” Carré magique (2016), designed for the Abbaye de Royaumont, is the first of these. It consists of an interactive sound installation that broadcasts sound over multiple loudspeakers hidden from the public’s view. This installation – thanks to a generative and non-repetitive system that constantly renews its sound contents and its variations in timbre, rhythm, and spatialization – generates sound in interaction with the environment in real time:

“The device behaves organically, like a population of invisible animals that react to atmospheric changes (light, temperature, humidity) and to the presence of people. The sounds one hears in a garden (birdsong, insect stridulations, etc.) are not the same depending on the time of day, the temperature, or the light. Birdsong is different in the morning or in the evening at sundown; certain insects do not sing when the sun is high. By the same token, the system that generates the sounds is weather-sensitive. Light, humidity, and temperature sensors transmit information to the computer, which “performs” musical models depending on these data” (Jean-Luc Hervé, proposal for Carré magique).

This does not mean adding music to the environment, he specifies, “which would have the effect of transforming the natural environment into a spectacle, but rather, returning to a strong (symbolic) relationship with the garden” (idem).

A second “timid acousmatic device” – also subtitled “polyphony of sound-emitting organisms” – called Biotope, premiered in 2019 for the Pompidou Center’s La fabrique du vivant (Designing the Living) exhibition (cf. example 4). Commissioned by the IRCAM and the Pompidou Center, it also featured an interactive system, this one more developed, thanks to significant team work⁴. The exhibit spaces were equipped with hidden speakers, which, as in Carré magique, broadcast constantly changing sound in real time. Each loudspeaker was identified with a sound-emitting “animal” or “agent” which together formed a “population.” There were six populations of sound-emitting animals, whose sounds were defined based on concrete or instrumental noises: mouth noises, duck and other bird decoys and whistles (electronically-processed flute sounds), small percussion instruments (Waldteufel), cup sounds, the sound of trombone being struck on the embouchure. It should be noted that the sources of these sounds are not important for themselves – they were chosen because of their ambiguousness, between nature (animal) and abstract. These populations developed a song, hesitant at first, then more intense, paying attention to one another to avoid singing all at the same time. The system was “timid” as a living creature would be: if a visitor approached, it stopped making sounds and its neighboring devices emitted warning noises. These could end up being cries of panic, which were followed by silence, which lingered for several minutes before timidly starting up again. It is important to specify that these sound-emitting populations did not correspond to real species: the sounds were neither recordings of animal sounds nor imitations (except for the bird whistles, of course). They were sound gestures (or sound images), brief and marked, which varied in length and number, timbre and sound morphology (combining duration, pitch, and nuance). These sounds came from recorded samples, both concrete and instrumental, as mentioned earlier, and the computer created montages from them in real time. The resulting whole was not spatialized, but localized, creating perspectives and inviting the public to listen as they would if they were walking through a forest. In the end, both the sounds and the situation were constructed, not natural, but their organic complexity evokes nature.

“Nevertheless, if art really desires to revoke the domination of nature, and if it is concerned with a situation in which men abandon their efforts to exercise control through their intellect, it can only achieve this through the domination of nature. Only music which is in control of itself would be in control of its own freedom from every compulsion, even its own. This would be on the analogy with the argument that only in a rationally organized society would the elimination of scarcity lead to the disappearance of organization as a form of oppression. […]Only what is fully articulated in art provides the image of an undeformed and hence free humanity. The work of art which is fully articulated, thanks to its maximum control of its material, and which therefore finds itself at the furthest possible remove from mere organic existence, is also as close to the organic as is at all possible”, Adorno wrote in 1961 (1998: 318-319). Is this a gamble, perhaps a way of fighting transhumanism?

Example 4
The algorithm operating the *Biotope* system

1. Dans l’ombre des anges (1999) was written in memory of Grisey, right after his death. Jean-Luc Hervé also published an in-depth analysis of Vortex temporum (cf. Jean-Luc Hervé, 2001).
2. In his dialogue with Anne Cauquelin, Jean-Luc Hervé evokes “the long glissando of a far-off airplane passing through the sky (this is a musical figure I like very much, and which reappears in several of my instrumental pieces, in the electronic parts, and which always plays the “closing” role, transitioning between the concert and the outside)” (Jean-Luc Hervé in Jean-Luc Hervé, Anne Cauquelin, 2018: 69).
3. Gérard Grisey, entretien avec Ivanka Stoïanova, cité par Jérôme Baillet, Gérard Grisey. Fondements d’une écriture, Paris, l’Harmattan, p. 25.
4. IRCAM computer music designer: Thomas Goepfer. Scientific collaborators: Benjamin Matuszewski, Jean-Philippe Lambert (IRCAM-STMS Sound-Music-Movement Interaction team). Prototyping and creation of sound-emitting agents: Emmanuel Fléty, Djellal Chalabi, and Yann Bouloiseau. Sound engineering: Jérémie Bourgogne. Technical director: Jean-Marc Letang.

References

1. Adorno Theodor W. (1998) Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso.
2. Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix (1987): A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, translation by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
3. Grisey Gérard (2008): Écrits ou l’invention de la musique spectrale, edited by Guy Lelong in collaboration with Anne-Marie Réby, Paris, Musica falsa.
4. Hallé Francis (1999): Éloge de la plante. Pour une nouvelle biologie, Paris, Seuil.
5. Hervé Jean-Luc, 1997: “De la Forme aux images sonores,” in Doce notas preliminares N. 1, p. 160-165.
6. Hervé Jean-Luc, 2001: Dans le vertige de la durée,Vortex temporumde Gérard Grisey, Paris, L’Harmattan, 67 p.
7. Hervé Jean-Luc, 2006: “D’Effet lisière à Flux,” in Filigrane. Musique, esthétique, sciences société, N. 4.
8. Hervé Jean-Luc, 2011: “Tobi-ishi, un jardin musical à Paris,” in Filigrane. Musique, esthétique, sciences société, N. 12.
9. Hervé Jean-Luc (forthcoming) : “Une esthétique des alentours,” in Amy Bauer, Liam Cagney and William Mason (ed.) (forthcoming): Handbook of Spectral and Post-Spectral Music, Oxford, Oxford University press.
10. Hervé Jean-Luc, Cauquelin Anne (2018): Les jardins de l’écoute, Paris, Éditions MF.
11. Solomos Makis, 2013: De la musique au son. L’émergence du son dans la musique des XXe-XXIème siècles, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes.