KORWAR

In a cycle of works in which a magnetic tape of raw sounds is thus linked, or juxtaposed, with various instrumental pieces of music, I thought I’d do something rather similar. The same magnetic tape is used in Agiba, where it is bare, and as a support in Rambaramb, where it is surrounded by a symphony orchestra, and in Korwar, where we are dealing with a harpsichord. Other variations followed, each time featuring not only new instrumental groups, but also new types of relationship between the tape and the instruments. There is one important difference, however: although the recorded part is composed exclusively of ‘raw’ sounds, there is nothing natural about their choice and arrangement, and they constitute, in a new sense and to a degree that is not as minor as it may seem, an act of composition for which I am responsible.
This approach was inaugurated in 1967-1969 when I produced Rituel d’oubli commissioned for the Ars Nova ensemble. But in Korwar the tape and the instrumental writing are much more stripped down. The crudeness of the animal voices is deliberately emphasised because it seemed to me that the more extreme the realism, the closer you came to the fantastic, provided you succeeded in shifting the meaning necessary for a shama, a guanaco, orcas etc. to emerge from their sound zoo and provoke a musical listening experience. I have been confirmed in this view by a number of unusual testimonies from listeners with acute hearing who often could not identify a sound that was nevertheless familiar: some had never heard it, others could no longer recognise it outside its real context. Incidentally, I believe that the identification of a sound, even a common one, is not enough to erect an insurmountable barrier to musical perception, any more than the subject of a painting or even a photograph obliterates its style.
Like Rituel d’oubli, but more incisive and abstract, Korwar is an attempt to respond to the nature-culture dilemma. The role of the harpsichord is not to oppose or comment on the sounds recorded, but more often than not, as an overlay on them, to signify the profound identity between the musical gesture, the animal cry and the palpitations of the elements. I make reality my own by putting a mark on it, but I am also an element in this territory of sound.
The bird I recorded, a Malaysian shama, imitates certain musical motifs that it often hears. The harpsichord in turn imitates the bird. Who can say where the music is? Birds have a reputation among zoologists for singing only for very specific purposes: to find a mate, to defend their perch, but not “for pleasure”. The same zoologists implicitly believe that the same is not true of humans, which is why they are wary of anthropomorphism. Korwar is not expressly intended to provide me with a wife or to assert my exclusive rights (my ‘aesthetic originality’) in this particular ‘branch’ of naturalist music; but some malicious sociologist might think so all the same… For my part, I prefer, conversely, to say that birds and frogs experience at least something like physical pleasure when they screech, and why not call this pleasure ‘musical’?
These tendentious reflections clearly show that the “realistic” musical poetics defined by works like Korwar is not just a whim that is more or less readily shared by listeners. It is also, on a very modest scale, a kind of political gesture, a farewell to a certain humanism. There are two main ways of breaking free from musical routines: a renewal of practices or a renewal of writing. The first route involves playing anything, but outside a concert hall, while the writing remains conventional. Pop music, for example, establishes a social contact quite different from that of most other popular music, but remains musically backward: modal harmony, rhythmic clichés, electronic gadgets from the 50s. Conversely, many “avant-garde” creations are stuck in the ritual of the classical concert, and are therefore seen as mere extensions of tradition. The struggle should therefore be waged on both fronts, to avoid both a decline or regression in writing and a compromise with conventional communication circuits. But it is practically impossible to play different music differently if you want to create it for someone else: no one would listen to it, and this is because creation is never a direct response to an explicit public need, but always the unexpected and even embarrassing revelation of an implicit need of which it helps – more or less laboriously – to make people aware. Since social and musical change cannot be brought about by a simple decision of the mind, any more than revolution can be brought about on paper, it can be initiated by naturalism, which contains this dual musical and social rejection.
Unlike “revolutions” like serialism, which inherited and exalted to the extreme the rational combination of counterpoint, a typical expression of the West, naturalism has only isolated representatives in history (Mussorgsky, for example). Their apparent “modernity” is the result of chance, which organises such and such a distant encounter with a successor whom they did not influence. Of course, naturalism is no more sufficient to wipe the slate clean and destroy history than, for example, a change of location is sufficient to liberate music; because conductors who have swapped their tails for turtlenecks often retain the same ambitions and play the same social game as before, and a wig does not make the Revolution.
What a work like Korwar is perhaps trying to do by blurring the boundaries between nature and culture is to suggest a counter-culture, playfully turning all the weapons the human mind has acquired (including the logic too naively rejected by some) against official seriousness. Although it includes birdsong, it is the opposite of pastoral or descriptive music, because the aim is obviously not to evoke nature more or less faithfully through musical means, but to manifest the music present in natural sounds. If language is what makes us human, then music is what links us to the rest of the world. The more a piece of music transcends mere language, the more liberating it is from all historical references. Going beyond a signifying language is irreducible to either a conventional tonal, serial, jazz or other code, or an original one. But total freedom from any code means shapeless, unpredictable music, mere background noise, and this extreme will have the same effect as the most restrictive combinatorics, as long as human beings are not truly free, i.e. as long as each of them is not musician enough to experience reality as music. This is why some of the most boisterous improvisations can be compared to military music or pure intellectual speculation: they all impose a stultifying totalitarian regime on the mind. The hypnotic music fashionable in America is hardly different: it temporarily liberates the unconscious, but at the cost of a serious lack of other things, and risks, through the atrophy of the intelligence, becoming in its turn a source of alienation. Between these extremes, old boats traditionally sail on the dull, murky waters of sentimentalism. Musical naturalism is certainly no way of joining this flotilla either. Rather, in my opinion, it is a new method for balancing what in music interests the intelligence and what affects the spirit as a whole, but with the emphasis on the role of biological function that music plays in the human species, much more than on pure combinatorics.
For the moment, and in the case of Korwar in particular, this balance is uneven and unstable; but whatever the failures or successes, the conviction that sound reality is inexhaustible is one of the most precious acquisitions of electro-acoustic techniques, and it is enough to sustain an approach that presents itself as a new rereading of this reality, once the cultural veneers that, over time, had become too opaque have been stripped away.
Korwar is dedicated to the great harpsichordist Élisabeth Chojnacka, who premiered it in Bourges on 30 June 1972.

The elements of the magnetic tape were assembled by the author with the help of the C.N.R.Z, Jouy-en-Josas (Pr Busnel), the Biological Sonar Laboratory (Pr Poulter), and for the score in Xhosa, Miss E. Dlulane. The production was completed in the G.M.E.B. studios in Bourges.