Francois Sarhan on his Encyclopaedia
Read my interview with Francos Sarhan on his book The Encyclopaedia Glaçonnica. It is a general project that tells an alternative version of history, sciences, technics, arts, etc. The composer says that this project is purely imaginative and it may include stories that wouldn’t occur in real life. It makes these ideas somehow possible, by presenting them under the form of books, shows, by using archive materials and making associations between the various materials, such as text, images, music scores and so on. He intends to release 12 volumes to discuss different topics — music, zoology, architecture and more. Text version of interview is created by Armands Stefans Sargsuns.
Was this book commissioned or did you create it out of free will?
I started it 15 years ago, on a purely personal investigation. There was no institution, no project for release, publishing of any kind. I first accumulated articles and ideas, collages and images in a notebook. Only after a while, realising that I had so many of them, I decided to make them accessible and to print them, to publish them. So that’s the result that you have now (volume 1 and 2).
How many volumes do you plan to release?
Twelve. At first i thought of 36, like Buffon, but given the amount of time each book requires, i found more reasonable to reduce it. I’m not even sure i’ll ever have time to finish it.
What is the main narrative or the main message of this volume?
Well, the general idea of the 12 volumes, first, is to provide alternative musicology or alternative zoology, alternative architecture and treaties on all possible topics. However the content never coincides completely with reality, without being 100% imppossible. I invent composers, I invent instruments, scores, stories, animals and so on. It’s not really meant to be realistic, but it’s more about being somehow possible. My goal is to suggest the vastness of possibilities, by improvising and extrapolating on usual motives of our world.
Watch full interview:
Is the book your imagination of an alternative history?
Yes, of alternative repertoire, alternative instruments, alternative composers, alternative places, alternative traditions. It’s not only about the history of music, that’s only one part of the whole project, described in the first volume. The second volume will also be a little bit about music and then it goes to zoology, architecture, biographies, magic, architecture, technics, etc.
The collages included in the book are also important, which go with a certain article, because they expand the meanings, and suggest mental gymnastics by associating these different media. The article exists separately and the image also, but they meet on the page, and this confrontation provokes an unavoidable interpretation, although sometimes the copresence is random. It builds another language, another meaning, another possibility. So it’s a lot about connecting things which are not used to be connected together.
What are the most interesting concepts that are included in the book, but do not exist in the music landscape?
I’m not in charge of charting the interest of this or that. What I try to develop is a lot of different possibilities, and everyone will react according to their interests and personalities. In the first volume, musicians are more inclined to be interested, because it refers to instruments, musical traditions etc. For instance, an article presents the one hour songs. They are songs which always last for one hour. The adjacent page presents the one second songs, which last only one second. From this very simple proposition I developed some fake musicology around it. If this existed, how would a musicologist approach it? I put myself in the position of a musicologist and I write as a musicologist about something that doesn’t exist.
The whole thing works like a dictionary or an real encyclopaedia: it doesn’t have any direction. One can open any page and read. If you open another page, the two pages are connected by a common procedure, common state of mind, but the topics are completely different. The stories, the articles, the themes are different, but they touch each other.
Some are directly influenced by some philosophical concept. For instance the sound shadows proposes that there’s always a shadow in each sound or each object in the world. Everything possesses a sound shadow. It’s a hypothesis which is a based on the Platonic idea that there is an ideal form, which is abstract, each thing having a pure abstract existence. This Platonic idea gave me the idea that maybe each object of the world possesses a sound that we don’t hear. I propose the existence of a researcher, Paul-Emile Descatiaux, who invented a machine able to uncover the sound of any object. So we are surrounded by an enormous complex of sounds that we don’t hear, because we are imperfect, we are only human. But science can help us shaping the intuitions of Plato.
Behind lies also the antique idea of the harmony of spheres, presented for instance by Boethius. In this theory, planets and stars have a sound and the harmony of the stars is due to their numerical relations. The harmony of spheres is the perfect music, the absolute music, given by the stars. It’s, of course, abstract, because nobody has ever heard that. A lot of discussions accord by then, as to justify that we can’t hear it: “Yes, we cannot hear it, because it’s a constant sound. We are so used to it that we don’t hear it anymore.” Why not? It’s this kind of background idea which gave me the idea of shadow of sound.
Can you elaborate on the bravest ideas that would only work in this format, but not in music nowadays?
Most of them offer near-to-impossible aspects. For instance, this composer who made music only with his body. He made self-surgery in order to become a music instrument himself. Then performed on stage, as composer, performer AND instrument. He composed a self-opera, in which he’s the singer, the orchestra himself. He wrote the music and the libretto himself. The subject is of course the life of Jesus, ending with the sacrifice. He performed it only once, because the end of the opera shows his death. It’s a completely different approach than the sound shadows. It’s an idea where the human is the music and it’s from the body and only from the body. It looks like a journalistic article, but reflects on many actual questions: the body providing the music, and to which extent, etc. There are many stories like this. They always have a dimension of an anecdote, and a concept behind.
What was the process of collecting the material?
I accumulated hundreds of old books, old magazines and I cut out a lot of images. Sometimes I have the text in mind, so I write the text and then I put images around. Sometimes it’s the other way around: I make collages, I put some images, because I like how they connect or I like the design or I just find them absurd, funny, interesting or questioning. Most of the time they make me question things for some reason. The text becomes a development of the images. I’m trying not to make it neither predictable nor logical, and to play around plausibility. I’ll always try to have some weird connections between things.
What was the process of creating the book?
There is no plan whatsoever. If there was a plan, I wouldn’t be able to finish it, because it would be too complex. Who is able to create a consistent world? So i imitate the reading process of an Encyclopaedia: a wandering through a a collection of articles about anything. One can remove an article and the encyclopaedia will still exist. It’s like a dictionary, except that in the dictionary there is an alphabetical order. In my case I pretend that there is an order, but actually there is none. It’s fake. Even the chapters, summaries are fake.
Could we say that in this book the purest form of music would be imagination?
It’s exactly that. Maybe Peter Ablinger had a little bit of a similar idea when he composes music which exists only by a description and a title. He provides a sort of a concept of the piece, but it’s not realised, precisely because it’s not possible or maybe it’s not interesting for him to do it, I don’t know. It’s the same idea except that Ablinger does it as a composer and it’s his pieces. They don’t exist as sound objects, or concert products, but they’re still his pieces. For me the encyclopaedia is not intended to reflect my work as a composer, although, of course, it necessarily does. It’s because I am a composer that I can do it, because I have the ideas to imagine music like a composer would, but I don’t want to compose the music of these people.
What are the most intriguing ideas that you would like to see come to life?
Well, I’m curious about all of them, but I still think that it’s better not to listen to them, because they probably are disappointing when you realise them. The same way one is necessarily disappointed when seeing an actor incarnating the hero of a beloved book. The context makes it also unrealistic, for instance, say, I don’t know, this Italian composer whose grandfather was an organ player, using in the choir the voices of non-yet born people. To me this anecdote is very important, because it gives the context and then it makes the music more attractive to think of.
In this sense it’s conceptual music, in the meaning given nowaday by the conceptual composers. It’s connected to real music, it’s still an object of speculation, but the actual sound of it is hypothetical. It doesn’t require being in the real world and that’s the reason why I can do one volume about music, another one about zoology and another one about architecture, although i don’t have technical knowledge of architecture. It doesn’t call for reality, it calls for the imagination, the development, the possibility and thinking of something new, but it’s not an instruction manual.
Could we say that the ideas described in this book are also multimedia or multi-sensory?
They definitely involve multi senses.
Do you have a story where the music is, for example, edible?
Not exactly. I have a story of a cook who was a composer. He organised his food according to the sound that the food was producing. When you cut something it produces a certain sound and when you eat it, when you chew it, it produces a certain sound as well, so that’s what he composed. There s another one of a musician who offered his body as a meal during a concert. Probably other ones, but i can’t recall them at the moment.
Can you elaborate on the choice of visuals for this book?
It’s mostly a collage, recomposition, arrangement, mix of archive material. There are drawings, maps, portraits, schemas, graphs, all sorts of non sensical pseudo scientific obscure models. The general principle is to connect one thing with the other by choosing different fields, for instance, a map and a medicine book. I put them together, so that the country starts looking like an inside part of a body, for instance, or I put a score and then I put a little advertisement on the score. It all works by double reading, evocation, superimposition, disruption. I try to find different strategies on how to associate images, but I want the material to be very recognizable — it’s a person, it’s a map, it’s a fish, it’s a score, because the first idea we have on this thing is the trigger for imagination. If it were abstract, if it were only collages without a connection to the real world, then it would become a pure visual work for an aesthetic purpose, which is another purpose — not mine. Of course, it’s also aesthetic, but I don’t try to, at first, make something beautiful or something that looks nice. I’m trying to provoke a new possibility, a new association.
Is it only possible to conceive the ideas of the book only by reading it?
No, this Encyclopaedia, built on the process of imagination is both universal (we all have imagination, it’s a birth-right), and a personal and individual process. That’s why it’s difficult for me to explain it, because if I explain, it’s only my relation to the meaning. If it strikes one for some reason, find it ugly, find it funny or intriguing, then it will start the process of interpretation, which will be necessarily different from mine.
Did you create the book yourself or did you collaborate with others?
No, I did everything myself.
What were the main things that you learned during the creation of this book?
Well, what I learned, I don’t know, but there is a very intense and childish pleasure to do it. Writing an encyclopaedia is a transgressive pleasure, because somehow, it’s not possible. An encyclopaedia, by definition, is bigger than the knowledge of one person. For me to do it alone is like a child who runs in the garden with a plastic sword and says “I am the king”, it is a victory against my smallness, it’s a megalomaniac gratification. When the child does it, he sort of believes it, but he also knows that it’s not true, so it’s sort of a symbol, it’s a game, and the key is the pleasure in making this game. If there is any success in the Encyclopaedia project, it’s this feeling of childish joy that comes when one opens the book. The reader has the same feeling of joy, of invention and joy of absurdity, connection, concept, music, funny, weird and this sort of feeling. “Oh, wow! Is it really possible to be in space with these monsters?” This sort of SF feeling is what I’m trying to find. If I find it, maybe, I can provide it also a little bit to the reader.
Where can one get the book?
You have to write to me and I will send one to you, because it’s not distributed in stores. It’s such a private book company and such private writing that it doesn’t exist in the market. I tried, first, to send it to publishers, but they were like: “HAHAHA!” It’s so expensive to produce, because it’s big, it’s full of colours and the publishers (reasonably) said: “and who is going to buy that? Who is going to read it? No one.” Of course, that’s correct. It’s a very very small audience project, that I decided to do it myself. Then the people who want it will find me on the Web, on Facebook, and I’ll be happy to send them one copy.
François Sarhan is noted for creating his own music theatre in which he himself often performs. His works have been presented at international festivals, including Musica (Strasbourg), Donaueschingen, Wittener MusikTage, Ars Musica (Brussels), Holland Festival, Maerzmusik (Berlin), etc. He refuses all awards and honours because he believes that music and art have nothing to do with this “monkey” business.
