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.
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.
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.
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.