LA TERZA PRATTICA

Monteverdi invented a new style in part by listening to his language as a vehicle for emotions, and therefore for pure nature. For me, listening to all natural sounds, whether human, animal or elemental, also plays a very important role. The most delicate question remains: can we listen to music like any other sound phenomenon in the world, without historical considerations? Can a composer listen to Monteverdi without situating himself in relation to tradition, and therefore without being drawn towards neo-classicism? I’ve retained from my youth a deep aversion to all returns, and the conviction that to be faithful to artists of the past is, in the end, to dare to treat them as lightly as they themselves treated their predecessors. This means being able to converse with Monteverdi without speaking the same language. As I’ve hardly ever considered awareness of the past as a composer’s concern, I’m rather new to this exercise. Cautiously, I have opted in these three interludes sometimes for the humble transcription and sometimes for the gloss, trying to be neither flippant nor too respectful.

Comment

It’s only recently that the ambiguity of my relationship with the music of the past has dawned on me in what seems to me to be its true dimension. My lifelong aversion to neo-classicism and my search for mythical timelessness have always co-existed with a profound desire for innovation, and for me the rejection of history as the sole dimension of musical creation has never been identified with the rejection of modernity as the main driving force behind creation. Beyond my personal case, I believe that this tension between two antagonistic aspirations is the very one our society is experiencing. If the need for timelessness were, as in the traditional societies so well interpreted by Mircea Eliade, to translate into a rejection of historical time, then nostalgia for what is permanent and attuned to the duration of human life would lead to the abandonment of the European dynamic model that has conquered the world today, including certain societies wedded to other values. And if this dynamic were to perpetuate its headlong rush forward, it could only suffocate itself in its own contradictions and dehumanization. The aesthetic crisis of militant modernity that erupted after May ’68 merely heralded that of industrial society, condemned to perpetual innovation that the planet can no longer support. We now suspect that only the invention of an economy based on degrowth could promise humanity a future. We suspect that some of the values trampled underfoot by the advent of industry corresponded to timeless rather than outdated data. The mythical need is irrepressible, and the problem is to integrate it into a history that is no less inescapable.
La terza prattica is no more than a diversion from these perspectives, but they have not ceased to serve as a distant horizon. No return to Monteverdi is on the agenda, any more than to Bach or anyone else, but making the timeless and the innovative simultaneously present and compatible is an interesting goal, or perhaps a rather mad utopia.