Some people are possessed by their subject. They have chosen it, or so
they think, and will revolve around it until all of its substance has been
extracted. They will exhaust the issue in the same way one would drain a pail
drawn from a well, yet the mystery will remain intact. These people handle a
foreign reality, a reality with which they will remain unfamiliar. Their
sympathy is of little depth.
Others, among them Annette Vande Gorne, let
themselves be captivated by an object, by the object, since there is only
one: the universe, whose disproportionate but rhythmical breathing constantly
sparks the quivering that brings us into being, along with the world of
life.
They are the chosen ones; they have found the strength and wisdom to let
things be, to become the smallest possible obstacle between dreams and
reality, between the two inseparable sides of a reality that is listened to,
looked at, tasted, smelled and felt in the flavor of its fragrance, in the
texture of its skin and in its text restored to speech, to music and to
silence.
From then on, it is the universe that revolves around them, with them,
that carries them along and tires them out as they create being, allowing
themselves to be emptied like the flesh from a fruit. Annette Vande Gorne’s music takes part in what was once called
the music of the spheres, when a god who didn’t have a voice would speak to
men by singing.
So it is of creators who draw from within themselves this little nothing
that nothingness concedes to emptiness in order for the whole to find its
place (within us?) and vibrate with everything. One can call this harmony,
and indeed it is the only law — irreducible to formula, but restored in the
expression it establishes, reinforces and justifies — that can bind all
others in a happy and complete relationship, one that may be called beauty.
Beauty, as the fundamental law of the universe, appears only in the distance
it keeps, in the space that makes it bearable. Beauty is terrible because of
the limits it imposes, like a fleeing horizon, on desire.
Annette Vande Gorne’s music is terrible, terribly
beautiful, because it rejects easy ways, it discounts traditional masks and
screens, it requires adherence to the primeval, and allows the shameless,
direct touching by our senses of the extraordinary bareness of sounds.
What is left to be said is the fever that takes a hold of us and that only
a poem could summon from oblivion. This is why Annette
Vande Gorne’s music is so poetic. This is why it demonstrates so well
its effectiveness of never ending cosmogony. This is why it reveals itself to
us as contemporary, as we look to the stars as a return to the future and see
in the eternal moment the infinite space, greater than the sum of all our
solitudes, and alive with more than the total of our existence. Which, in the
end, would be a good definition of love.
Tao revolves around the emptiness that creates us;
Annette Vande Gorne’s music expresses the diverse,
often gentle rubbing that warms one’s soul, as one would rub two pieces of
wood for the fire of a primitive encampment. Which, in the end, would be a
good definition of happiness, however precarious it might be, among those who
will have sat to listen. Only in incompleteness are there satisfying limits.
This is what feeds what is called a work of Art.
Tao is the discourse of active contemplation:
Annette Vande Gorne knows how to take her time. With
her, filling temporal space becomes an essential concern since her music,
written for duration, also comes to terms with duration. This building of a
suspended time constitutes in my view one of the main affinities of this work
with the Eastern world from which it draws its inspiration.
Perhaps the Eastern influence also dictates the concern with sound
recording, I mean this intense attentiveness to the sound world that the
composer explores, calls on and gathers (componere), and at which
she marvels to the point of presenting it at times in its dazzling bareness,
like a Chinese painter would the pureness of a gesture.
Schaeffer and Cage have
already invited us to this concert of our everyday life, the latter allowing
the ear to freely wander, to follow the windings of chance which,
Cage believed, knows what it’s doing. Sentient but
more deterministic than the composer of 4:33, and the
more Schaefferian for it, Annette Vande Gorne
invites us to a guided listening: renewed weaving of material presented from
a thousand perspectives — an attitude so remarkably centered on phenomena, in
the diversity of its multiple aims — play-sequences in which emerges the
memory of Pierre Henry, the composer of Voyage and of Variations pour une porte et un
soupir (an explicit reference to this work is indeed used as a linking
element in Bois (Wood), kaleidoscope of the repeated
capture, imitation, mutation of a single event.
The restriction of means and the ad infinitum proliferation of a few
objects unto themselves around a thematic axis thus become rules of writing.
Extremely tenuous details and shades (to be listened to on headsets),
intimate variations of this music that is all strata and tiling. Indeed,
rarely will we find the sudden breaks, the constant anacoluthon and the
gasping tension that make the strength of some of the classics of the
acousmatic repertoire. The voluntaristic and provocative montage fades behind
the continuity of a writing that is strong, smooth, in which each period
latches on to the preceding one and covers it, like the eras of History in
the linear unfolding of time. Time… again!
An unfolding which, in this instance, will lead us from the realistic to
the artificial, from the anecdotal to the virtual, from the figurative to the
abstract. Thus, from the landscapes of materials of the first element,
Eau (Water) — exhibiting a barely retouched naturalism
— to the pure mental structures of Terre (Earth) — the
last element and climax of the work (in its complexity, its length, the
compelling nature of the digital processing, and its construction of space) —
Tao appears to distort reality and progressively
dematerialize itself. Through different stages of initiation, this long
course achieves a kind of transfiguration of the preceding states, of which a
few traces will remain and appear recurringly.
The work is acousmatic by its attachment to “sound images” (François Bayle) and by its morphological language, a work with a
philosophical bend, a secret work, a chronicle of the flow of time,
Tao requires from the listener — and it is only a fair
demand — that he too knows how to take his time.
Francis Dhomont,
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (France) [ix-92]
The most extraordinary is that the universe might probably have
meaning.
— Einstein
Taking Taoist thinking as the ‘foundation’ for a work might seem to be
vain exoticism. However, Myths and great trends of civilization all carry
archetypes.
Acousmatics, with its ranges of expression oriented towards direct mental
perception, a perception devoid of intermediaries, is the ideal medium for
the image I have of the world, an image understood by everyone. Perhaps the
time has finally come for a language of sounds that is universal, because it
is laden with archetypal signs. A new wave of civilization is engulfing us
and, while awaiting a new spirituality, is urging us to find in Myths the
roots of another sensitivity.
Isn’t nature the ideal dwelling place for a knowledge common to all men,
this nature that ecological awareness has again placed at the centre of
Western concerns? But what attracts me in the Taoist vision is the fact that
nature doesn’t exist as distinct from man: it is a notion of life that
encompasses the essence of the universe and man in his flesh and spirit. Then
again, an analogical classification, while surprising to a rational logic,
allows for a transfer of meanings that the artist feels is possible and
valid.
[What we call poetry is perhaps the presence, suddenly made perceptible,
of consonance with the universe. Whether the artist seeks it or not, such
presence becomes one of the features of the creative work, and is only to
be found there.
— André Malraux, Le
musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, 1952]
Art of mediation, of transformation, acousmatics turns any metaphor to
advantage: another way of thinking with sounds.
[To ecologize thinking is to extend the capacity to understand modes of
understanding other than ours, to conceive conceptual structures other than
ours; in short, to allow the possibility to invent.
— Edgar Morin, La
méthode IV — Les idées, 1991]
The entire Taoist system that connects time and space is based on a few
fundamental numbers and sounds. Each piece corresponds to a different tonic
axis chosen according to the scale of fifths derived from the length of the
twelve primitive sound pipes, and attributed to each orient. But every
musician knows that the world is all vibrations, unified and convergent…
provided we believe solely our ears! The five pieces in this Tao are proof of it.
Annette Vande Gorne, Ohain (Belgium)
[xi-93]
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Annette Vande Gorne: Tao (CD): liner notes