menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis
menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis is a series of short works for guitar and electronics based on the Chansons de Bilitis of Debussy: not on the fairly well-known song cycle Trois Chansons de Bilitis, but rather on the version of this work in which the poetry of Pierre Louÿs is spoken between short instrumental interludes for two flutes, two harps, and celesta. The title is taken from a section of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs in which he describes his existence as an ‘objet au milieu d’autres objets’ [an object among other objects] as he is subjected to the ‘regard blanc’ [white gaze] which constitutes him as an object [Editions de Seuil, 1975: page 88]. The Chansons de Bilitis of Louÿs present a regard of a constituted other in a singular manner. When Louÿs published his Chansons de Bilitis in 1894, he initially passed them off as his own translations of poetry he had supposedly discovered by a formerly unknown lesbian courtesan, a contemporary of Sappho. He thereby appropriates the regard of his fictional lesbian poet, both of herself and of her lovers; one could view this as exalting the female point of view, or rather as a means of camouflaging an objectifying gaze of the female body and lesbian sexuality, as well as of an ‘exotic’ culture, as it is somewhat orientalised by Louÿs. My approach to this work was to problematise the relationship between the musical materials derived from the Chansons de Bilitis of Debussy and its execution by the guitarist. Several different recordings of performances of Debussy’s instrumental interludes were superimposed, in a procedure that I have used for several recent works involving spectral analysis and proportional time stretching. All of the material for the instrumental part and electronics of this work was derived either from the score of Chansons de Bilitis or from spectral analyses of the material derived from this process. There is some degree of alienation between the guitarist and his instrument, as the guitarist employs playing techniques that do not optimise the response of the instrument. The electronics contribute to this distancing by employing physical modelling to create virtual strings set into vibration by the guitarist but nonetheless inevitably separated from the instrument. In other movements of this series, the guitarist uses an electric guitar, the strings of which are excited by the transmission of sound from the acoustic guitar to it, so that he may play the electric guitar without actually touching it.
This work was commissioned by the Jerome Foundation (the Jerome Composers Commissioning Program) and was composed for the most part during my residency at the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France), while the electronics were realised in the studios of SARC. It is dedicated to Mauricio Carrasco and Daniel Zea. I would like to thank Pedro Rebelo for his input during the composition of this work, as well as my SARC colleagues Miguel Ortiz Perez and Justin Yang; the artists and academics I encountered at the Camargo Foundation, for the conversations that also informed this work; Fernando Gualda for making its premiere in Brazil possible; and Mauricio Carrasco for his considerable contributions to the development of this work.
