Sensitive to the imprint left by sounds on media as varied as records or magnetic tape, Pierre-Yves Macé, 43, has developed, with home studio tools, music that makes collecting a founding act and the treatment of the archive a quasi-philosophical positioning. Without equivalent in contemporary creation, the composer now plays with samplers as much as with acoustic instruments.
I met her in 2005. My work interested her but she did not yet see how to articulate it in her programming. Then, in 2012, she offered me the possibility of a monographic concert with L’Instantdonné. At the time, I composed very few works for concerts, and it was she who allowed me to do so. It was a decisive step in my journey: everything I had previously done in my home studio, I was able to project on stage.
By experimenting with software that my little computer, an Atari, had. I must have been 13 or 14 and so I set up a sort of home studio.
A bit of both. I first came to music as a listener. I listened a lot to English progressive rock bands from the 1970s, such as King Crimson, Yes and Genesis. Then I discovered Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari and Denis Dufour, big names in musique concrete. And on the instrumental side, a rather American tropism with Morton Feldman or Steve Reich.
Yes, in 1996, when I got a sampler. Being able to record any sound and extract music from it, this idea seemed revolutionary to me.
Yes, recording is often the raw material for my pieces: in Notes pour les diapasons invisibles, I work on recordings of bird songs, of which I vary the playback speeds to make them coincide, or not, with the registers instruments. Elsewhere, the archive can touch the metaphysical vertigo of what has passed and can no longer return except as a trace. When, for example, I compose Passagenweg from instrumental introductions to retro songs from the 1930s or 1940s, I take these archives not so much as the testimony of a specific era but as the past of the “dialectical image” according to Walter Benjamin: “The Past of a specific period is at the same time the Past of always. »
Absolutely. We can also say that technologies are linked to issues of power: let’s take the example of Muzak, this American company which specialized in the production of “elevator music” since the 1930s. By documenting myself for my Contre-flux project, I discovered that this company had invented its own technology: microgroove records which were neither 33-rpm nor 45-rpm records, and which required a very special player. They wanted to invent everything, control everything: their repertoire as much as the technology to distribute it. But it didn’t survive…
Brian Eno, a musician who was very important to me during the transition from the pop world to art music. In the instructions for Music for Airports (1978), he explains that he wanted to make a sort of anti-Muzak, music which dresses a place without resorting to a set of standardized affects, and which on the contrary tends towards creating a space conducive to thought.
In fact, I sent several labels, including Zorn, a model of my first compositions. It was he who, in 2002, produced the CD, thus proving that he was capable of trusting a young unknown resident on the other side of the Atlantic. As a musician, Zorn taught me to embrace the heterogeneity of materials, to draw from them the living force of an expression.
Quite. On the subject of Muzak, discussed with Contre-flux, I have done two and I have a third in the works. My cycles often have three parts, as was the case with Jardinsshares, which uses oral tradition music from around the world. I like the idea that the same conceptual proposition gives rise to very different music.
I don’t mind the “classical” concert, but it is true that I prefer to think about the entirety of an artistic proposal. At the Autumn Festival this year, I am lucky enough to have two monographic concerts whose coherence and progression I can establish. At the Théâtre des Abbesses, on October 24, it will be a Palimpsest program, for which I am reworking old pieces: a cantata on a text by Pierre Senges, an opera from a show by Sylvain Creuzevault, and commas radio broadcasts brought to the stage.
The fundamentals remain the same: the primacy of the recording and the loudspeaker as a stage object, the dialogical relationship between the instrument and electronics, the influence of popular music… However, my relationship to musical time is is distended. When I listen again to pieces such as Segments et Apostilles (2012), I am struck by how dense and tight they are in the moment whereas today I give the material more time to develop.
Indeed, it is the framework work: it will open and close the portrait in two different forms. I was commissioned for this electroacoustic piece to celebrate the centenary of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, and it was originally intended as a sound installation. To tell you the truth, I thought I’d leave it there. However, while working on it, a form gradually emerged, calling for linear listening, like a piece performed in concert. Added to this was the idea of ??completing the sound part with a visual surtitling of the poem, entrusted to the videographer Oscar Lozano. We will therefore be able to listen to Ear to Ear in Saint-Eustache with the freedom to wander around the space, and make it a more “temporal” experience at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.
