SYNERGIES

Hysteria, improvisation and enthusiasm may or may not be collective, but to apply this epithet to a concert seems at first sight a pleonasm. There is hardly any music that is not a team effort, and the composers who are most jealous of their solitude are not averse to handing over the fruits of their labours to the eighty musicians of a symphony orchestra. But that is not the point. The community in question and the novelty of the undertaking lie elsewhere.
The Group of Six (who were only five at the time) had already combined their talents in 1920 for a joint work, the ballet Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel, for which Auric, Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Milhaud and Honegger had each written an entry. There had already been “Tombeaux”, suites, in which several composers combined their tendencies or their tributes. In a sense, Mozart’s Requiem and Mussorgsky’s Khovantchina are also collective works. But in reality, as far as we know, there has never been the kind of exchange of substance between composers that has just taken place over a year between the nine participants in this experiment. At most, they shared tastes, biases and a few new ideas, but never the scores themselves. And that’s what we’ve just done, without wishing to doubt anything other than our preconceived ideas.
Of course, the undertaking seems crazy: in this barbaric feast, we were both the food and the guests. More than a few of us got a bit nauseous at times, but we all ended up enjoying it. We were constantly having work meetings or chance exchanges of ideas, discussions or arguments to keep our research going in a great movement that Pierre Schaeffer made sure never slowed down. Logically, with work like this, we should have unearthed a monster or a masterpiece. If the Concert Collectif is neither of these things in the end, it’s because it’s not really a work, or even a collection of works, but an experiment: the productive activity was more important than the product.
We had wanted this from the outset: by pooling our musical fragments, we did not so much hope that they would be improved, and that a sum of talents would necessarily be greater than the best of the components; on the other hand, we suspected that we would not be dealing with a summation, but with a multiplication of our inventive faculties, and this hope was much less disappointed than the first.
Composers, traditionally perhaps the least open of creators, have had to sit down to sequences made by others according to principles different from their own. They have accepted as a rule of the game that they must transform these foreign products into their own work, and this difficult assimilation has not been possible without a liberation and broadening of musical thought. It is this intellectual discipline that constitutes the most original aspect and the most positive outcome of the experiment.
(concert programme 18.3.1963)