MANUEL DE CONVERSATION

Dialogue begins with whispers of synthetic voices, then with speakers of languages so rare that we give up listening to them as anything other than musical presences. They come from the Caucasus in the form of Cherkessian-Adyghe, from Mexico in the form of Mixe, from Canada in the form of Tuchone, and from Papua in the form of Arapesh and Autu. With the exception of Cherkessian-Adyghe, these languages are now spoken by only a few hundred people.
The often virtuoso dialogues continue with sounds and music from every continent. I was traveling in Black Africa and Asia while composing this piece, and African trumpets and percussion, as well as Japanese koto and Tibetan bowls, left their mark on part of the work. Finally, the soloist no longer dialogues with humans or music, but with nature, and in particular the sounds of rain. Archetypes such as play, echo and response are present in this work, as they are in most human and animal music. If we are willing to admit that they themselves belong to nature, this Manuel de conversation perhaps abandons its initial purpose, in the long final contemplation, to move from dialogues to a kind of “rêverie du promeneur solitaire” (reverie of the solitary walker), as Rousseau would have said.

Comment
For all the talent of the programmers, the Max MSP software, perhaps because of its very sophistication, has once again justified the long-standing distrust alluded to in the manual. Broadcasting incidents are all too frequent for us not to resign ourselves to abandoning the flexibility of “real time” and reverting to the more reliable rigidity of recording. The performer himself feels safer with the latter than with the random defects of “score tracking”. For the listener, in any case, it is generally impossible to perceive whether it is the loudspeaker accompanying the performer or vice versa, and in the end this question has no decisive bearing on the music itself.