ANDROMÈDE

Commentary
At the time I was composing Andromède and writing the above text, I was also preparing for the defence of a Doctorat d’Etat, which took place on 11 March 1980, and the content of which was put together three years later in the book Musique, mythe, nature ou les dauphins d’Arion. A ‘sabbatical year’ offered by the Ministry of Culture had freed me from my classics courses, allowing me to undertake a large-scale work for 4-piece orchestra and double choir. At the time, I was careful to rule out any narrative interpretation implied by the title. Today, I have to admit that, without being a work with a programme, and despite the absence of any sung text, Andromeda took into account some of the imagery linked to the myth. Just as the 50s had had to struggle laboriously against the ‘romanticism’ and literature associated with composition, to impose a formalism that was (too) pure and (too) hard, so the 80s saw the opposite tendencies striving to break this dictatorship of abstraction. Having lived through these two generations, my aesthetic research, however original or aberrant it may have been described, could not fail to bear some traces of the ambient movements. For two decades I had endeavoured above all to reject the conception of music as an arbitrary language, going so far as to attack the cult of writing as “musical paperwork”, and reinjecting a strong dose of informality through the exploitation of natural models. At the time of Andromède, I took part in the anti-abstract movement, but I also rejected the minimalist or neo-tonal consequences that ‘post-modernism’ had often wanted to indulge in. “Neither progressivism nor nostalgia” summed up the third path I was trying to follow on my own.
The composition began with the commission, in October 1977. If I reread today the notes taken from day to day over some fifty pages, I can see that until mid-1978, the initial project included a section of tape-recorded sea noises, as a sort of extension of Amorgos. Even some of the titles noted as possible at the time referred to the marine model, which remained very active: Maris canor, an invented title, or La fontaine du large, borrowed from the topography of my home town, but ultimately rejected as too ‘poetic’. Then came the final line-up, without a band, probably because of the difficulties already encountered in Rambaramb, which would have been even greater for a highly divided and proliferating composition project. Initially, the choir might have sung a Sumerian text, an idea that had nothing to do with the Greek myth, and that would not come to fruition until ten years later, in Kengir. It wasn’t until the end of 1978 that the name Andromeda came to the fore.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can now hear in my work some of the sonic consequences of the narrative inherent in the Andromeda myth, which I detailed at length in my notes at the time. While distinguishing between mythology as a discourse derived from myth, and the latter as an initial impulse inscribed in a universal mental heritage, I recognise that the rejection of the dictatorship of structural formalism normally leads one to take up a certain narrativity as a guide for giving shape to a composition, as is the case with a mythological narrative. Indeed, even Webern and other serial musicians seem to have come to terms with this necessity. The guiding thread of a text in several vocal works of this school served as a remedy for the disorientation inherent in any combinatorics, which would otherwise often be condemned to mere kaleidoscopic effects.
Without becoming a programme work, Andromède is marked by the ternary structure of certain episodes. In his quest to seize Medusa’s head and deliver Andromeda, Perseus encounters several trios of helpers and enemies. Hermes gives him three talismans: a helmet that makes you invisible, sandals that allow you to fly and a magic pouch. They show him the home of the three Old Women, who have only one eye for the three of them, and who know where the Gorgons live. Thanks to these aids, he reaches the three Gorgons: Medusa, Euryale and Sthénô (Mental, Oceanic, Powerful), and manages to decapitate Medusa, whose head, surrounded by snakes and petrifying to behold, will later serve as his ultimate weapon.
The ternarity in question suggested to me the use of three pianos. Other recurring motifs, such as flight, gold and the sea, dominated certain sequences. The entrance of the choir, for example, is made through a shuddering of orchestral waves. But some details of the legend have a more precise musical echo. A golden rain descends in slow arpeggios, ending with exclamations from the female chorus, echoing the birth of Perseus in the bronze tower and the murder of the nurse by order of Acrisios. The unusual sound of the four flexatones, which some listeners thought was an electronic presence, corresponded in my imagination to the appearance of Hermes and Athena. The encounter with the dangerous mystery of Medusa corresponds to whispered accents and dry cymbal punctuations. The petrifications with the help of her severed head also go hand in hand with dry, violent accents. The overall form can be related to the legend in a much freer way: the five parts of the work, which begin respectively at the beginning, around the 9th, 19th, 23rd and 26th minutes, were conceived more or less in connection with the adventures of the birth and exile of Perseus, the quest for Medusa, the deliverance of Andromeda, the return to Seriphos, and the final return to Argos in the company of Danae.
More often than not, however, and as in Danae, which its title links to the same cycle, it is the mythical spirit in general rather than legendary episodes that have inspired me. I’m already afraid that these indications could lead to misunderstandings, so strong is the need for myth even today. But between the danger of too dry an abstraction and the danger of too external a narrative, it’s the latter that has come to seem the less threatening.