An Interview with Annette Vande Gorne, Part

Elizabeth Anderson An Interview with Annette Avenue de Monte Carlo, 11 1190 Brussels, Belgium [email protected] Vande Gorne, Part One Annette Vande Gorne (see Figure 1), a renowned Annette Vande Gorne: I discovered electroacoustic composer of electroacoustic music, explores dif- music at the age of 25, having previously completed ferent energetic and kinesthetic archetypes in her classical piano studies and parallel coursework works. Having accidentally discovered acousmatic in Belgium, as well as written musical studies, music in France in 1970, she became convinced by including harmony and counterpoint. I was also the revolutionary character of an art which permits doing theoretical studies with Jean Absil in Brussels, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/comj/article-pdf/36/1/10/1855741/comj_a_00102.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 her to use nature and physical worlds, among other notably in harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and sources of inspiration, as models for an abstract and orchestration. expressive musical language. Her contributions in- In the summer of 1970, I went to Vichy, France, clude pioneering research on space—a fifth musical for a training course in choral conducting. While parameter, the other four parameters being pitch, du- there, I walked down a hallway one day and heard ration, intensity, and timbre—and the relationship unrecognizable sounds coming from a room. The between words and meaning, as well as between door was closed. I was timid, but I pushed the words and vocal material. Of equal importance door open, walked in, and saw nothing except has been her exploration of gesture in acousmatic people seated with their eyes closed in front of two music, which is founded on a keen awareness of loudspeakers. I sat down, like them, and closed the fundamental link between the musician and my eyes. And I am certain that if I had not closed the machine, a concept that carries as much weight my eyes, nothing would have happened, because, in composition as in interpretation. Through her then, a whole universe opened up—a whole universe teaching, Vande Gorne (born in 1946 in Charleroi, that I did not know as a classical musician. It was Belgium) has conveyed these notions, alongside the a universe of mental and physical sensation, one French electroacoustic aesthetic, to several genera- of images of rhythms and lines, and the physical tions of composers in Europe and beyond. She also impression of floating, of completely losing my offers diverse opportunities for composers, inter- references, of being in myself and out of myself at preters, and researchers at Musiques & Recherches, the institute for electroacoustic music she founded in Ohain, Belgium, in 1982 (see Figure 2). This interview was conducted in French on 18 July 2005 at Musiques & Recherches. It was subsequently translated, edited, and updated through additional interviews with the composer at Musiques & Recherches between 2005 and 2011. [Editor’s note: This interview is published in two parts, with the second part appearing in the next issue (Volume 36, Number 2).] Elizabeth Anderson: You have had a diverse career in electroacoustic music as a composer, researcher, teacher, and founder of Musiques & Recherches. Yet you were trained as a classical musician and discovered electroacoustic music by chance. Can you share this serendipitous experience and explain Figure 1. Annette Vande Gorne during the spatialization what effect it had on you? of a monographic concert on “The Electroacoustic Project” acousmonium at the Technische Universitat,¨ Computer Music Journal, 36:1, pp. 10–22, Spring 2012 Vienna, Austria, 28 November 2010. (Photo by Thomas c 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gorbach.) 10 Computer Music Journal Figure 2. Multichannel studio “Metamorphoses´ d’Orphee,”´ Musiques & Recherches, Ohain, Belgium, 2006. (Photo by Annette Vande Gorne.) were the two professors. Schaeffer gave the seminars and Reibel supervised the weekly assignments. Anderson: What was it like at the Conservatoire with Schaeffer? Vande Gorne: It was really like another world. It was a bit like the type of experience that, these Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/comj/article-pdf/36/1/10/1855741/comj_a_00102.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 days, I advise my students to seek out. It is really necessary to forget the knowledge that one can have, the references that one can have, while listening to any music. If not, one’s listening isn’t good. It took me three years, about the length of my studies, to understand that morphological and acousmatic listening were necessary. It was definitely about that, morphological listening—where one listens to a sound object as it unfolds in time, with its energy, with its movement—and acousmatic listening, which, at the beginning, are difficult to develop in parallel. So, this influence by Schaeffer was absolutely predominant, because if Schaeffer had not written the Traite´ des objets musicaux [T.O.M.] this music could have remained, as in Pierre Boulez’s description, “tinkering.” Instead, the T.O.M. permits, from the system of sound description, to think about this music as another language. The system permits me to “find myself” by classifying the sounds. Pierre Henry said, “I classify, therefore, I compose,” and I think that it’s true. By virtue of this classification, the same time—the sensation of a complete loss of one can give a personal vision to the entire sonic stability, movement, dynamism, and energy. universe that one has recorded at the tip of a micro- At the end of the experience, I immediately phone. One can then make relationships between decided that this was what I wished to do. I didn’t different sounds through the typology. Something know who to speak to, so I went to Vichy the follow- that I also discovered, and which I think is very ing year and enrolled in the electroacoustic training important, is the notion of “grain” that Schaeffer course, which was given by Joanna Bruzdowicz and developed in his classification system. This really Franc¸ois Delalande from the Groupe de Recherches helped me to think about sound as matter. One Musicales. In 1977, after having participated in doesn’t think about this in the European classical many such workshops in France, I found myself, at music world where, on the contrary, one avoids the the age of 28, as one of twelve students from a group imperfections in sound material. I think it’s also a of fifty candidates who passed the entrance exam characteristic of Belgian electroacoustic music. at the Conservatoire National Superieur´ de Paris. Anderson: And Reibel? It was difficult and, by the way, it’s the same exam that I give to my students now. At that time, there Vande Gorne: One thing that he worked on, and that was an enormous number of people who wished to I really appreciated, was the notion of gesture, the penetrate the electroacoustic universe, particularly physical relationship with sound that performers musique concrete.` Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel experience every day. The human body always Anderson 11 has a physical relationship with sound through and, above all, aesthetic. It took me a long time to gesture, which allows the body’s interior impulse understand what it was about. To respond, I would to unfold in time. Reibel reintroduced, in this very first like to go back in time and explain the path that general universe, a traditional and musical approach led me to acousmatic music through Bayle’s theory. to gesture in the construction, by the body, of One thing that seemed essential to me was to a given musical time through the sequence-jeu´ be able to communicate with the listener, with [play-sequence-jeu], a type of improvisation with a others. If one is an artist, one is not an artist for Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/comj/article-pdf/36/1/10/1855741/comj_a_00102.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 corps sonore [sounding body]. The play-sequence-jeu oneself; one is an artist for others. We are only a constitutes a musical entity that could give birth sounding board for something that does not belong to a piece. It’s the first connection the composer to us during the moment. We create it and, even has with the future work, and it prefigures what less so during the moment, we communicate it. Art the piece will be. By making play-sequences, the belongs, at that moment, to the person who receives composer deploys, in time, interior and physical it. So, consequently, I never considered that the impulses by way of gesture, and the resulting aural work of an artist is a work of personal expression. trace carries the personal signature of the body I do not have a romantic vision of art, in other and the composer’s interior sense of duration. This words. “time” is important to me as the base for the From the moment I left the cultural codes of following work in the studio, which is “out of Western and classical music, its harmony, its time” where, in contrast, the body is “in time.” beautiful evolution towards the perfect forms of the As a composer, I can render my own temporality 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries that I audible thanks to having composed on a fixed had learned up until the age of 25 and even beyond, medium. I asked myself, “how does one communicate if one So, on the one hand, there was [Schaeffer’s] leaves these codes? By taste?” I always loved nature. solfege,` with its system of description of the ma- I always loved to observe nature from all its angles, terial and approach, and on the other hand, the not as a scientist, but as a poet.

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