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texts

"Listening as a compass", conversation with Myriam van Imschoot published in the magazine watt, #3, April 2019

"Choral singing, chorality and ethics", December 2017 - February 2018

"The aesthetics of power", translation in progress (text available in French here), 2010-2017

"andante", text commissioned by Tiago Bartolomeu Costa for the Portuguese review OBSCENA #11/12, April-May 2008 

"stasis as a way of relating to one's memory", autumn-winter 2008

references

[ quotes are here translated by myself ]

 

It is certainly the privilege of music. Not that it speaks a universal language as it is often pretended, but because it doesn't speak any language at all. Music has nothing to tell, and that is why it expresses so much. It interposes no discourse (discursive information) between living and expressing, it only extends the living into sound creation and listening.

Nicolas Go, Les Printemps du silence, Buchet/Chastel, 2008, p.123

 

I work on things that everybody knows, i think one can never discover but one needs to recognize, therefore i work on things that are extremely simple and not at all intellectual.

Christian Boltanski, TV programme Le cercle de minuit, broadcast on 21 21 May 1996

 

I am always looking for alternative forms to concerts. I love concerts, and I love their rituals. I will always write pieces for string quartets facing the audience in silence - with good acoustics, this will always be magical. But I would also like to experiment with other types of interaction between musicians and the audience. The many different ways of expression through the plastic arts - performances, happenings - greatly inspire me … to come up with ways of creating a musical language using non-musical techniques. I am greatly interested by all this. To sum up, essentially, it is all about how to change the nature of a concert, how to create different ways of making the musicians and audience interact with each other.

Alexandros Markeas, Miniatures / Cécile Gilly, radio France culture, 22 march 2007

 

"The area of the sound is beyond the image, the radical, the first birth". The living meaning appears in a sonorous energy which acts before metaphor and before concept - and creates, from "non-figurative" roots, "primitive sense". Something of a "logical anteriority to the arousing of the signified", the structuralist shrink might say. Something, says Bely, that happens "in the mouth, obscure part of the head".(...)

We have lost what was before metaphor, before concept, before predicating, before the agglutination signifier/signified. We have lost the thing itself, "underlying, obscure and silent". We have lost the meaning of the "gestures of the sounds" ; these dynamics (Bely always speaks of "flow", "speed", "movements", "fluid lines", "vibrations") generate simultaneaously, by fission, schizogenesis, differentials progressively drawn, the living diversity of reality and of the differentiation of the words and the languages.

try-out for a translation of Christian Prigent, in "L'halluciné logogonique", 2002, NOUS
preface to Andrei Bely, Glossolalia, 1917