«Art is life in the face of death», says Moroccan composer Ahmed Essyad in conversation with sound artist and researcher Gilles Aubry as part of his Norient Special Sawt, Bodies, Species. In this extended interview, Aubry speaks with Essyad about a great variety of topics, including performance in electroacoustic music, cultural roots and identity («my identity isn’t fixed»), the importance of music («music fructifies me. It’s my daily wine»), the voice and the body and its significance in the canon of Western art music («intelligence sent to the body produces insanity»), and, last but not least, nature and ecology («to make art, you have to reduce nature because it’s too complex»).

Ahmed Essyad is a composer born in 1938 in Salé, Morocco. After studying music at the Rabat Conservatory in Morocco, he moved to Paris in 1962, where he became a pupil and then assistant to Max Deutsch. Interested in ethnomusicology, he focuses his research on orality and notation, as well as on musical time and pulsation. His music blends Berber oral tradition, serial writing, and Gregorian and modal influences. Between 1972 and 1974, he composed a series of electroacoustic pieces in the Centre Américain studio in Paris.1

[Gilles Aubry]: Good afternoon, Ahmed Essyad. The purpose of this interview is to immerse ourselves in listening to your electroacoustic pieces composed in the 1970s. Little known and unpublished until now, these pieces were produced in the studio using Moog synthesizers and effects modules. They evoke a radically modern aesthetic, seemingly at odds with so-called traditional music. Our goal today is to go beyond these clichés to delve deeper into your work. The first piece is entitled «Toubkal» (1972) and was premiered in Paris at the Festival de Montparnasse as part of the Grands Concerts de la Sorbonne. Let’s listen to an excerpt.

Toubkal (1972): Between Timbral Exploration and Melodic Articulation

[GA]: Listening to this piece today, what do you hear and feel?

[Ahmed Essyad]: I’m a little surprised because I’ve completely forgotten about this work, and I’m astonished to find this melodic aspect, and also counterpoint and polyphony. I remember that this was fundamental at the time because it set me apart from the current trend which held that composers should necessarily be far removed from polyphonic preoccupations and above all from melodic quality. For me, these two things are linked and have always been at the heart of my work: the quality of the melodic phrase and concern for its polyphonic consequences in the writing. Looking back, I’m touched to see that this is present in this piece. And that comforts me. You can make music with a lot of things. The studio is still an instrument like any other. But this instrument is frozen in time. And there will only be one interpretation of this work: this is it. You can only play on its dynamics, its spatialization, the place of the loudspeakers. And I’m also struck by this movement of sound. Something that was later called the spatialization of sound phenomena, and which was to be taken much further with instruments that were more powerful than what was available to us at the time.

[GA]: The composition dates from 1972, ten years after your arrival in France. You were a student of the Austrian composer Max Deutsch and developed your own work. How did you come to produce this first electroacoustic piece, and how did you go about it?

[AE]: First of all, it was an important concern for me. In other instrumental works, I always had a problem communicating with the performers about what’s behind the notes. This presupposed a common cultural core to share. Our references weren’t always the same, with performers as talented as Pierre-Yves Artaud or Jacques Parnin. They belonged to a different cultural and musical horizon. What I shared with them was that (musical) horizon, which I made my own. But they didn’t share my native culture. So, at times, we were strangers to each other. For example, the use of time, this diluted time, this imprecise time – although the notation gives it an apparent precision – in and through its duration, it remains an indefinite time. The micro-interval too, which is not just a timbre parameter, but also a melodic articulation. I could control that in the studio because I was in charge. But when I put it in a score, it was the performer who was in control. So I refused to put it in the score. I came back to it four years ago, because I seem to have found a method for controlling these intervals. In my latest opera, there are two scenes where this phenomenon is present and decisive.

[GA]: We’ll no doubt be going back and forth between the present, where you’re currently working on a new opera, and the past, summoned up in these recordings. As you said, there’s this idea of sound circulating in an almost virtual space. It’s an electronic space, different from the one that emerges through instrumental music. How do you conceive this space?

[AE]: It’s mobile. An orchestra occupies a space. It’s a defined space in which the musical act evolves. And you have a first violin that is answered by a horn at the other end, or a trombone. You have a percussion instrument at the far end, to which the cello’s ponticello responds, so that too is a space. This spatial experiment has been taken a step further by composers. I’m talking about Stockhausen, in particular, with «Carré», a magnificent and unique work that has yet to be surpassed. But it remains a defined, stabilized space. Electronic space is mobile. It changes both in terms of the position of the loudspeakers and in relation to the room in which we are. The result is very different each time. Perhaps this is the only way to interpret this recorded music.

[GA]: Electronic music of the 1970s is often associated with science fiction cinema or psychedelia. The idea of sonic futurism that prevailed at the time seems now a little old-fashioned – paradoxically, you could say retro-futuristic. What’s your relationship with this aesthetic today? Does it still make sense, or does it seem dated?

[AE]: I’ve been away from electronic music production for a while now, simply because I felt it was too far from the embodied relationship with the performer. And for me, the performer is essential because in writing music there’s the voluntary act. And then, behind the voluntary act, there’s a whole oblivion, a whole unconsciousness buried in the score, and it’s only the performer who reveals it to you. I don’t have that here. I’d have it if it were a dancer dancing to this music. A bodily interpretation could reveal this shadowy zone of the act of writing. Because electronic music composing is also a form of writing. But it’s not the same technique. It’s about the ear, the ear that’s there, that manages the musical act, the act of sound. And then there are the imperceptible, subterranean changes in timbre. This technique that was used a lot at the time, and I also use it in my latest opera. It’s a way of making timbres evolve imperceptibly. You suddenly find yourself somewhere else, without knowing how it happened. I discovered these phenomena in electronic music. They can also be found in Luigi Nono’s extraordinary scores. Spectral music also evokes these phenomena. But for me, these phenomena are always managed not within the supposedly possible harmonies, but within the precise interval, which is a way of being in the tradition, indebted to both the immense Viennese school and the great French school.

[GA]: Farbenmelodie?

[AE]: Absolutely. The timbre melodies in Schönberg’s five orchestral pieces. The third is fabulous. You mentioned film music earlier, but Hollywood has plagiarized everything. Mahler in particular, and electroacoustic music has also been plagiarized, sometimes happily, but it’s still plagiarism.

[GA]: Certainly, but it was also part of the popular imagination. The question of the future is important. Societies need a future in which to project themselves in order to continue to exist in the present. Synthesizers first appeared in the post-war era, a period characterized by faith in technological progress. The synthesizer arrived to illustrate this potential, with the aim of creating unheard-of sounds and music, something entirely new that would help us project ourselves into an emancipating future. However, doubts soon began to emerge. Things become dystopian, and the promises of perpetual progress left much to be desired.

[AE]: What is the future for us humans? It’s death, that’s our future. And so art, its first preoccupation, is life in the face of death. And then the second thing is love, passion. And love is also a central element in Sufi practice. It’s the instrument we work with. But our problem is always the same. It’s always there. So we believe in the eternal. And we can also believe in nothingness, that the Earth will soon be gone. Just as there are many stars that are no longer there. All we have is a trace of them. These are huge things that preoccupy us, and which art, unconsciously or consciously, has made its subject. When I listen to a church organ, it’s monstrous. Such a palette of timbres, extraordinary registers that are sublimated in their momentum toward light.

[GA]: The synthesizer of the time...

[AE]: Yes, it’s fabulous. And this instrument has been sublimated by the genial hand of Johann Sebastian Bach. His choral pieces are fabulous. And suddenly the instrument fades into the background. The means by which music was made vanishes. All we’re left with is this thing, music, which says little or nothing, but a breath of life, a breath of love, a breath towards a divine possibility. And that’s all there is to it.

Sultane (1973): Popular Expression Integrated in a Sophisticated Electronic Gesture

[GA]: Let’s move on to the next piece, «Sultane», which premiered in Paris as part of the Festival International de Musique Electronique.

[GA]: A very interesting piece, lasting 14 minutes and divided into several movements. The composition is also seductive with its insistent rhythm, from which notes emerge, the timbres we were talking about earlier. Then there’s the voice, a recorded human voice. Whose is it?

[AE]: It’s my voice. I began this work by thinking about the earth, the soil, and therefore Morocco. I had recorded popular music in the years 1958–1959 with Maryvonne Sauvage and Ouahid El Omari. This piece is the fruit of a work of memory. Remembering the music I’d recorded and trying to do something with it. Not to reproduce it – I’ve never done that and never will. Taking popular melodies is an act of artistic impotence. Popular music is wonderful and doesn’t need me. I need it for my imagination. And so, for me, «Sultane» evokes some of the music I listened to in the Bouyeblane region. The first movement is very festive and joyful. Each of the five movements has its own characteristic. I wanted to create a single work. And this voice came to the fore at a certain point, as did the title «Sultane». At the time, we were living in Morocco under an authoritarian, violent regime, and I had found a magnificent Persian poem called «Sultane». And so I took this title, because there’s a provocative side to it. It’s not «sultan», it’s «sultane». Not a diminutive of the sultan, but rather a transcendence of the sultanate. At the beginning there are no words, it’s a vocalization. At the end of the last movement, this voice returns with the phrase, «Sultane. The people revolt.»

[GA]: The use of your voice is a powerful act. Is it also a provocation against the sophistication of experimental electronic music?

[AE]: It’s an artistic act, a musical act. When Günther Schüller heard the piece, he was immediately seduced. He programmed it for his festival in New York, because all of a sudden, the raw act of popular expression integrates the sophisticated electronic act. It’s electronic music, but with something more: human soul and imagination. It’s the primary physical act, that of the human voice, which announces, «Be careful!»

[GA]: It’s very beautiful, and it also denotes a form of politicization. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Morocco, we witnessed a return of popular culture in music, through bands like Nass El Ghiwan, but also in the arts, with the School of Casa movement. Artists and intellectuals in the wake of independence were concerned with repositioning themselves in relation to vernacular art and Western aesthetic canons. Did you take part in these discussions?

[AE]: The period you’re talking about was haunted by the concept of identity in art. And it seemed to me that, at the time, the problem was posed in a somewhat erroneous way. Because identity isn’t just about returning to one’s roots. You don’t need to go back to your roots when you come from them. I come from the countryside. My father was a farmer. I looked after the cows, mules, and camels while going to school. Yes, I come from the straw, I come from the manure, I come from the cow dung, and I also come from the working class. When we’d finished working, we’d sing and dance. So I don’t need to go back to my roots. But my identity is also the one in front of you. Me, here, now. But who am I, if not what I’ve learned? My encounters, my discoveries, my sorrows. I’m all that! And it’s the other who has shaped it. This identity that you see before you now, me, Moroccan, modern, is the result of these interactions. My identity isn’t fixed, it’s in motion, it’s dynamic, it’s not stagnant. An identity that doesn’t alter, that doesn’t open up, dies. The traditional Moroccan proverb says it well: «He who has not lost himself will never know the quality of men».

Impossible Cultural Synthesis

[GA]: In a recent interview, you deny any identity-based motivation in your relationship with traditional music. You add that you have to take from tradition that which bears fruit and questions the achievements of musical modernity. In your music, this translates into a form of hybridization, through the use of the Arabic language in your opera work, or Ahwash grammar in Le collier des ruses, for example. What are the limits of this experimentation and hybridization? What lessons have you learned from them?

[AE]: The lesson that seems clear to me now is that synthesis is impossible. Why impossible? Because there’s the unpredictable. To synthesize is to foresee, to know. As for me, I’m increasingly in the dark. I’ve acquired this profound awareness that if I already knew what I was writing, I wouldn’t do it. I’m not interested. I do it because I don’t know it, I’m learning it. Music feeds me, it fructifies me. It’s my daily wine.

[GA]: This desire always to learn, always to surprise, echoes the need for innovation in modern music?

[AE]: I’ve learned through life that you always have to pay a price to be free. Freedom is not free. But what is the freedom to write? The first thing is to be aware that there is a mainstream. And that mainstream can be deadly and dangerous. But to exclude yourself from it, you have to pay the price, sometimes, of marginality. You have to cut back on your needs, but not on the essentials. For me, that essential is my music and my work. It’s what I live for. I’m prepared to make any sacrifice for music, even to break away from the mainstream. In 1964, my first work won the prize at the Paris Biennale and was performed. I received a letter from Domaine Musical2 raving about the work. I was invited to a great restaurant on Boulevard Saint-Germain. I was poor, so all I ordered was a coffee. And the composer across from me is having dinner, and we’re talking rags. And what was on our minds back then, in 1964? It’s serial music, Domaine Musical, Donaueschingen. And I tell this man that I’m not from that school, that for me the series isn’t a mathematical problem, that it’s not the question of sound either. It’s broader, it’s a methodology for managing intervals. And this man replies, «You’re either with us or against us.» I said, «No, I’m right next to you.» And today I’m still in this position.

A Difficult Start in Paris in 1962

[GA]: I was going to ask you about your arrival in Paris in 1962. The contemporary music scene in the 1960s was made up of an elite group of white men, many of whom came from affluent backgrounds. How have you been received?

[AE]: When I entered the Conservatoire in Paris in 1962 I had the impression of entering the Middle Ages. In Rabat, we had studied Le marteau sans maître, Pierrot Lunaire, I was listening to Pierre Henry’s Symphonie pour un homme seul, Pierre Schaeffer’s étude sur le chemin de fer. And when I arrived at the Conservatoire National and uttered the name Schönberg, I felt like I was blaspheming. I’d read Diderot in Arabic before I arrived, and that opened my eyes. I’d also read Sartre’s La Nausée, and that really moved me. For me, France was this spirit that was so open, so luminous. And to arrive there, in this conservatory, where the name Schönberg was cursed, or those of Berg and Webern were unpronounceable … I wasn’t impressed by the place. But I was doing my homework in a bistro that didn’t close at night...

[GA]: I was going to say that there had to be life outside of the conservatory.

[AE]: I had my wife, whose father didn’t want an Arab. He didn’t want to go with us to the pool, because an Arab has dirty feet. I lived under the Sainte-Geneviève bridge, except for one night a week, because my wife was giving a French course to the Israeli cultural attaché, and with that money, we paid for a room in a cheap hotel to sleep in that night.

[GA]: And you lived under bridges?!

[AE]: Yes, under the Sainte-Geneviève bridge.

[GA]: That’s a very different situation from that of most of your colleagues, I imagine. However, Pierre Boulez, Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer, Xenakis, all these important figures were in the city and I assume you must have bumped into each other on certain occasions. Were they able to see you?

[AE]: I met Xenakis. I knew all those people, not personally yet, but at every Domaine Musical concert I went to the henhouse. And I’d come down during the break, trying to avoid meeting Max Deutsch, because I’d met him before at Jolivet’s seminar in Aix-en-Provence. For a month, I was invited as a Moroccan and I was so impressed by Max Deutsch’s analysis classes that I quickly became one of his disciples. Deutsch told me, «As soon as you get to Paris, come and see me.» I didn’t dare. I went to his house, 23 Rue de Constantinople, and I didn’t dare go up. I’d stand there for an hour and then leave again. But I knew he was at the concert because he never missed a Domaine Musical concert. He and another character, Marcel Mihalovici, were both handsome. They were the handsome gentlemen of Paris. They knew they were handsome and elegant. They stood at the top of the podium, and I knew they were there. I looked at them without them seeing me. But at one concert, I didn’t see them and I felt free. And so I was walking through the audience and all of a sudden a hand came to rest on me, I turned around, it was Deutsch: «Ahmed! You’re in Paris.» – «Yes, I’m in Paris.» – «And since when?» And I didn’t dare say since when. I said, «Since six months.» – «For six months you haven’t come to see me? You’re coming tomorrow! You bring me your work!» I brought my work and arrived at Deutsch’s at 10. We read everything at the piano until 5pm. All we had was a cup of coffee together. After the last page, he tells me,«This is for Domaine Musical. Come back tomorrow with ‹Tristan›’s score.» That was my first composition lesson.

[GA]: You’ve often expressed the strength of your bond with Max Deutsch and the role he played in your training. You’ve paid him a very fine tribute. What strikes me in your story is the discomfort you describe in relation to your condition. The question of marginality has a different consistency if it’s solely for aesthetic reasons, or if it’s for reasons of social or geographical origin. In my opinion, art music is still very Euro-centric.

[AE]: Yes, but there’s something important: we mustn’t confuse the social with the artistic. There has always been a gap between what is done, what is written, and the public. Schönberg defined it as follows: the public lives with an ear for the past, formed by what was. Only the artist, composer, or painter listens to the present. We believe that music is the search for consonance. Consonance has never been music’s concern. Music’s primary concern has always been to conquer dissonance. The very fact of this dissonance creates an enormous gap between a conventional ear and a writing that escapes the conventional, hence the difference between a traditional musician and a composer. A traditional musician’s concern is to remain faithful to tradition, to reproduce memory, to be exact. A composer is not concerned with fidelity. He is insubordinate, if not sometimes treacherous.

[GA]: The logic of reproduction in the sense of oral music is totally linked to the question of survival. It’s imperative for the group, for the community...

[AE]: Of course, there’s a whole sociocultural structure that preserves oral heritage. But once this structure is altered, the heritage finds itself in danger, threatened with disappearance by dominant cultures. At the moment, young people are living with techno music, they’re content with it. How can they listen to the subtle five-beat rhythms of the malhoune?3 Or the evolving rhythms of Andalusian music? And how can they be sensitive to the inordinate time of a msaq, the most complex form of High Atlas music? When society can no longer ensure the continuity of the learning chain, heritage dies. In the Tassaout valley, there’s the village of Magdaz. In the 1970s, there were three ahwash groups. By 1991, there were none left. In Ichebbaken, another village, there were some absolutely exceptional troupes. That’s all over, the elders are dead; the moqadem (band leader) died ten years ago. His wife is too old to lead the women’s choir. The young people have gone off to work on the plains, and the apprenticeship chain is broken. No one to take over.

[GA]: It’s a fact, the chain of oral transmission of village music has been broken by the rural exodus and societal changes. In my opinion, today’s young people are satisfied with techno music because it provides them with a satisfying social context. This is where the link between musical aesthetics and sociality is established. The idea of contemplating music for its own sake is a characteristic of modernist music.

[AE]: Music has always responded to a need. The more demanding that need, the more complex the music. In the days of Mozart or Bach, who listened to this music? It wasn’t the people, it was the notables. But why? Because there was a culture, a knowledge, a demand. It was the same in the Arab world, in the great Andalusian salons of Granada. Poets were surrounded by other poets, musicians, and scholars, including the prince, himself a poet. Milan Kundera evokes this problem, telling us that we’ve been reduced to fascist times. I wouldn’t be surprised if a new Hitler appeared, because our demands are becoming increasingly minimal. But music is what structures a society. Because it's the only thing that doesn’t have a precise accounting value. Music is wind. But when you invest in wind, you invest in fundamental, founding research. The great sadness for me is specialization. What does it mean to be a specialist musician who doesn’t read Kundera, who doesn’t read Céline? Who doesn’t read Giorgio, who doesn’t read Camus? What’s a musician then? Who would I be if I weren’t with the poet Mohamed Bennis? If I’m not with Mahmoud Darwish? Will I only be a musician? No, I won’t even be a musician.

«Lectures pour bandes magnétiques» (1974): The Body as Primary Instrument

[GA]: Hearing you mention the names of literary authors brings me to what I was thinking of listening to next: the «Lectures pour bandes magnétiques», which date from 1974 and consist of two parts, one based on a poem by Rilke and the other on a poem declaimed by Bona de Mandiargues. Both are short pieces based on sound recordings enhanced by electroacoustic treatments. Rilke’s fragment is taken from Les Élégies de Duino, a collection of poems published in 1923: «Death is hard, yes, and what is there to make up for before you feel a little eternity! But the living all make the mistake of distinguishing too well.» This phrase is repeated over and over by the performer in different registers.

[GA]: The voice is whispered, and the performer explores the musicality of language without necessarily understanding what she is reading. On the subject of the voice, you said in an interview: «The voice is the body, and the relationship with breath is the foundation of all musical phrasing. In all music, there is at least [the] virtual presence of a voice. It’s a question of giving precedence to the concreteness of the bodily act over the abstraction of formal schemes» (Essyad and Clément 2007, 177). Now, body and mind are linked in Islamic scholasticism through the notion of tawhid. How does this enrich the notions of voice and body?

[AE]: There’s a saying from my teacher, Max Deutsch: «Music is vocal or it isn’t.» And I believe that deeply. Our body is our primary instrument. The one with which we shout, whisper, strike, and stamp our feet. The body is an extraordinary orchestra. And then the invention of language. So many timbres, invented, put into the mouth, uttered, heard, and sometimes understood. But this invention is extraordinary, and where does it come from? It comes from the body. It’s the body that produces it. Of course, the mind manages it, fortunately, otherwise it would only be in its infancy. And so, because the mind manages what it invents, manages its deep, primary instrument, it produces the sentence; in other words, it produces meaning. And what meaning does music have? Well, it's itself. That’s it, there’s nothing else. We spoke earlier of the indefinable, the unspeakable, the unnameable. But we sing about it. We don’t say it, we sing it. And so, this relationship with the body is first and foremost. Then there’s the relationship to the instrument, the object outside the body: my violin. But my violin has no meaning, it’s an object. When does it live? When I make it sing. I make it sing because my imagination sang before. And my imagination sang inside a breath, not outside my body, it sang inside my body. And that’s what’s fundamental. When I write for an instrument, I hear the breath of the instrumentalist at the same time as I write for that instrument. Even when it’s a piano. Forget that it’s a piano and listen! The adagio of a Mozart piano concerto. The slow movement of Beethoven’s 15^th string quartet...

[GA]: I hear you loud and clear. Yet the body has been deeply and systematically repressed in Western art music. It’s actually quite astonishing that this phrase should come from Max Deutsch, who was an heir to serial thought. Seriality is perhaps an example of a cerebral, mathematical approach to composition, from which the body is seemingly excluded. The opposition between body and mind is something profoundly Judeo-Christian. If we rethink the musical gesture in terms of a body-being, a body-mind, where these two terms are no longer systematically opposed to each other, but go hand in hand, then what new possibilities does this open up?

[AE]: There was a time when people said, «The voice is an instrument like any other.» It was a complete heresy; fortunately, the wind blew it away. But I’d like to come back to serious music and «calculated» music. Isn’t the art of the fugue, Bach’s well-tempered harpsichord, theoretical to begin with? But what music! Isn’t it? Why? [sings the theme] It sings, it’s the beginning of the first fugue. Schönberg’s Moses and Aaron. The series brought to a monstrously long and sumptuous opera. Look at the first two pages of this opera, try to find the series form that is used, and you’ll tear your hair out before you find that it was two forms and that it wasn’t the beginning of the series that was used, but the end of the series. And yet, what music! Look at Beethoven’s last pieces. Is there a theme? No, there’s only a polyphonic gesture, a polyphonic calculation! All of a sudden, intelligence sent to the body produces insanity. In other words, madness; the work dominates you, makes you dream, opens your mind and your soul, penetrates you all of a sudden. The Great Fugue, «Opus 31», and its variations. Look at that, if it isn’t a monstrous calculation of a system that’s so simple at first, but produces so much. The Diabelli Variations: a simple, silly theme. But what a monstrosity of intelligence that produces this emotion! Art never separates the intelligence of the gesture from the body, never. Only fools believe there is a separation. And they produce anything at that point and say aberrations like, «The voice is an instrument, like a violin, like a piano.» No. Look even further into the history of music, look at vocal writing, Josquin des Prez, Monteverdi later. And watch how the voice separates itself from the instrument. Suddenly, writing for a violin is no longer the same as writing for a piano. You don’t write for a soprano as you would for a cello. These two elements have their own characteristics, their own bodies. There’s the body and then there’s the breath. What is breath? Essentially, it’s the curve of the gesture. For me, a work of art is a stone in free fall. In other words, a flight and an inescapable fall. There’s something predestined in the gesture. There is no innocent gesture in music, in writing, none at all. If it’s innocent, it has no place in the work. There is no innocence. Look at the first chords in Moses and Aaron. That attraction between the first chord and the second chord. Chain them together and you’ll see this force of attraction. It’s the result of an immense intelligence that produces the inevitable, the fall of the first onto the second.

[GA]: In your mouth, even serial music is full of body and voice.

[AE]: It’s not serial, but take Lulu; what passion there is in this music! Berg’s violin concerto, Webern’s cantatas. But we killed Webern because we reduced him to this little apothecary calculation.

Ecological Voices

[GA]: The word «voice» appears in the titles of some of your compositions: «Voix interdites» (2005), or «Voix du silence et de la pierre» (1984). These titles point to the hidden, the inaudible, which requires a different kind of listening to be perceived, but also to the voices of nature. This is a theme that interested me personally in my research in Morocco, in relation to ecology, listening, the link between people and their environment. The Arabic word sawt means both «sound» and «voice». When does a sound become a voice? What about the sounds of nature?

[AE]: There’s a wonderful saying by Boulez: «Great complexity produces noise.» And so you have to simplify things. When you sometimes attend the bird’s setting, the starlings, you listen to this and it’s extraordinarily complex, but it produces a global phenomenon, a kind of volcanic magma. There’s no other meaning apart from the fact that it’s starlings. But when at four in the morning in spring you hear the blackbird, the territorial song of the blackbird in love, it’s marvelous! Suddenly, he’s alone, and you’re filled with beauty and pleasure. And so there's a simplification of nature. Nature is too complex to grasp, and we can’t reproduce it. You know the anecdote between Strauss and Schönberg. Richard Strauss said to Schönberg, «When you’ve written the Gurre-Lieder, you don’t need to invent the series. The C major chord is like the rainbow. Three colors, C-E-G.» And Schönberg says to him, «Are you sure there are only three colors in the rainbow?» That’s nature. Nature isn’t simple. But to isolate it, to fragment it, is not to impoverish it, but to understand it better and hear it better. There are many people who have worked on sounds collected by tape recorders in nature. And look at the work they produce. They erase the complexity of the sound phenomenon. Nature is erased because nature cannot be reproduced. To make art, you have to reduce nature because it’s too complex.

[GA]: When it comes to the voices of nature, it’s not just a question of reproduction or imitation. It’s also a question of the relationship and hierarchy established between humans and nature. It seems necessary to re-examine this hierarchy, particularly in light of the climate crisis. In the villages here in Morocco, it’s not so much culture that’s opposed to nature. Rather, it’s the boundary between domestic and wild space that organizes community life. And this boundary is more permeable than the one between nature and culture inherited from the Enlightenment. Does this model also permeate oral music? Do the voices of nature carry an ecological message?

[AE]: That’s why I said that popular music, or traditional music, interests me at the moment when it challenges me, when it opens up my imagination and gives me possibilities. That’s when I’m passionate about it, when I feel its usefulness to me. And this compels me to defend it, because it’s like defending my daily bread, because I need it. And then the relationship with the Earth, with the climate, with life, it’s a question of life or death, it’s about us, about our children. It's not a figment of our imagination. It’s dramatic. We know that civilizations die, but this isn’t even a question of civilization. If the Earth warms up by two degrees, it’s not music that’s in danger, it’s not Apollinaire who would suffer, it’s all of us. So it’s not the end of a civilization, it’s the end of us all.

La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (1982): The Soundtrack as Body-to-Body Work

[GA]: The last excerpt we’ll be listening to is from the soundtrack of La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli. Released in 1982, Assia Djebar’s film is a montage of archive footage from the colonial period in Algeria. You composed the soundtrack, which functions independently of the images. According to the synopsis, the music contradicts the violence of the colonial images, in an attempt to give voice back to the Algerians, through anonymous, collected, or re-imagined voices. There are also experiments with a synthesizer.

[AE]: At the time, Assia and I were very close. We saw each other three times a week before and after the film. We were good friends and shared a deep understanding of our artistic concerns. Her first film was about women in the resistance, and it’s magnificent. I’d already written a film score, from which I drew a quartet called Nevermore, never again. She said why? I said because it’s a joint project, we have to be partners from the start. And so we teamed up to write Zerda. When I read Assia’s poems, oblivion came to mind, because oblivion was already present in my mind as a concept. And the song of oblivion is to enchant oblivion. The songs sometimes came before the image, making it a completely unique approach. The music was based on her poems. And I’d like to pay tribute to Assia, who did an exceptional job. She didn’t stop at what she initially imagined for these images but took note of the light projected onto the images by the music. And so she searched for images, again and again. Right up until the last song, when she said to me, «The last song is too violent, I don't have the images for it.» So the last song is only in the credits. It’s a work on the flute and the voice with my Japanese friend, Yumi Nara, a wonderful soprano. She had this oriental voice, deeply raspy, tight at times. It was body-to-body work. It wasn’t a score, it was just the two of us singing together. Once I’d established this vocal curve with her, I worked with Pierre-Yves Artaud on the flute, also hand-in-hand. I didn’t write anything down, I just sang for Pierre-Yves and he responded. And that’s how the film came about. Right from the start, the music was an integral part of the creative process. It’s not an accompaniment. There’s also a part for synthesizer and voice. The synthesizer accompanies a song that sounds like a popular tune, but which I invented on the spot, during the recording session with actor Mohamed Kouka, who was part of the creation of Le collier des ruses in Avignon in 1977. And so there was a complicity between Kouka and myself. I could teach him orally a song accompanied by a synthesizer. This synthesizer is not just a voice, it’s a bit complex polyphonically. I also had a spinet that I tuned with modes that I invented and improvised. There was also Yasmina Khlat, a Lebanese actress. I had a hard time with her at first because she had a traditional diction. So we also had to work hand-in-hand to get this text to be said in such a non-traditional way, in personalized associations. But all this is the fruit of our work on Le collier des ruses because this opera is 70% scoreless. And for six months, I worked hand-in-hand with the performers. I slept under the piano in the rehearsal room. And that’s what made it possible to achieve that moment of grace in the film, in this duet with Assia Djebar.

[GA]: Indeed, the film is remarkable, very powerful. Thank you, Ahmed Essyad.

• 1. The S.M.E.C.A. electroacoustic music studio was part of the music workshop founded by Jorge Arriagada in 1970 at the Centre Américain pour Étudiants et Artistes on boulevard Raspail in Paris. The studio was equipped with two Minimoog synthesizers, a piano, a marimba, a xylophone, as well as various percussion instruments, and a magnetic tape reverberator. The studio was in operation until 1974. The author wishes to thank Jorge Arriagada for the information he provided during the preparation of this article.
• 2. Domaine Musical was the title of a series of Paris concerts created by composer and conductor Pierre Boulez during the 1953/54 season, which ran until 1973.
• 3. Traditional poetic and musical form, one voice accompanied by an instrumental ensemble.