“Ainsi continue la nuit dans ma tête multiple”. Behind this mysterious subtitle hides a musical suite, entitled Presque Rien, initiated by the French electroacoustician Luc Ferrari in 1967, whose second development was recorded in 1977. Before going further into the presentation and analysis of the second number of the Presque Rien series, it is appropriate to give further explanations on this suite. Presque Rien is part of a type of recording that is called field recording. This means that a given, and precise environment is captured by the intercession of a microphone and then transcribed into a sound document.
Without necessarily evoking the distinctions inherent to field recording, one is essential to further define the composer’s issues. From a sound recording made outside, since it is about outside spaces, the collector can choose or not to modify the sound space that he seizes. The field recording can then become a “mixed” piece, modified, arranged, ordered, the sounds being modified to answer a musical or aesthetic will.
This is the case of electroacoustic pieces such as Grand Bruit by the composer Christian Zanési, whose 21 minutes of sound recordings of an RER journey between the composer’s home and his working studio at the Maison de la Radio in Paris form a sound block that will be subject to transformation in view of an inexact musical restitution. By inaccurate, we mean that the original sound material has undergone a series of modifications of the sound itself before arriving at the result. Thus, it is the listener’s mind that is put to work, shaping a mental image from the sound of what he knows he is listening to. In other words, the screeching of the RER car’s brakes is not perceptible and recognizable as such because their initial sound nature has been modified with different processes and effects for electroacoustic production.
The field recording then exists on the horizon of a mixed and altered creation compared to the initial sound recording. It is thus a support, a material, like Grand Bruit, for the development of a creation that goes beyond the simple framework of the sound restitution of an environment. This first part of the field recording comes in contradiction with what will occupy the reflection here, the free expression of a sound space.
The first number of Presque Rien, entitled “Le lever du jour au bord de la mer” (Daybreak by the sea) is more inclined towards this conception of sound material. What is it about then? Staying in front of the Adriatic Sea, Luc Ferrari installs in a fixed way microphones in the windows of his home. From the stable equipment, he captures the awakening of a fishing village in the Dalmatian archipelago in Yugoslavia. One hears the sounds and noises that such a situation can produce, such as the mind can imagine: the movement of the surf, a boat engine, children, the song of cicadas. A whole precise world is awakened.
However, for this Presque Rien N°1, the composer leaves it to the technical tool, the microphone, to appropriate and transcribe the phonic movement that is played out beyond its membranes. Luc Ferrari’s originality in proposing this first suite is to install the soundscape as an already completed musical score. Not seeking to modify the sonorities that the recording instrument captures, he approaches the sound environment as a coherent and constituted musical whole. Presque Rien N°1 delivers to its listener an intact restitution of the musical space. This is the primary intention of this recording: without making any cuts, the composer invites the listener to pay attention to the noises he has become accustomed to, which he no longer necessarily notices. It is a challenge to the listener, reminding him or her of the existence of the surrounding noises in a context, Presque Rien N°1 proposes an island sunrise.
Conceptually speaking, the first episode of the Presque Rien series invites us to think about the duality of recording a soundscape: the intensity and fugitivity of the sound being played are captured in a fixed manner and the movement is transcribed as such, without altering the nature of the sound beings that compose the work. The microphone serves as a point of view for the listener, like an eye contemplating a scene that is playing out before its eyes. There is a fixity of capture that transcribes an incessant agitation.
These notions of stability and movement will be further explored for the creation of Presque Rien N°2, since a reversal of point of view takes place in the way the composer apprehends the sound environment he seeks to capture.
Its creator defines it as follows: “Description of a night landscape that the sound recordist tries to capture with his microphones, but the night surprises the “hunter” and penetrates his head. It is then a double description: the interior landscape modifies the exterior night and adds its own reality to it (imagination of reality); or, can we say, psychoanalysis of its night landscape? Lasting 21 minutes and 29 seconds, this Presque Rien, the second of this signature, offers the listener to explore a soundscape while an intuitive narrative, introduced by the composer, comes into play.
The creator is the piece, he is also in the piece, but the piece exists independently of him. Indeed, if the soundscape pre-exists Luc Ferrari, it is he who gives it a body, a materiality since he comes to seize it with his microphone. The sound reality that he proposes is reality since it finds a concrete existence through the recording, but nature objectively produces sound outside of him. He is also in the piece since he intervenes, commenting on the creative itinerary of sound discovery that he pursues. There is thus for the listener a double intervention: that first of an environment that the creator goes to gather, then that of the voice of the creator himself. But this double irruption also occurs at the stage of the composition: the night penetrates Luc Ferrari’s mind as much as he comes to penetrate it by modifying the spectacle to which he attends through the intercession of his voice.
Two phenomena then come into play, on the one hand the omnipresence of the natural phenomenon, with a nature whose sound unpredictability is retranscribed, at the same time as a human presence that comes to accompany this nature. The question that we can ask here is the following: in what way does Presque Rien N°2 propose within a musical creation a confusion between, on the one hand, an anchoring in a sound landscape, a concrete terrain, and on the other hand the appropriation of this terrain by the one who collects the sounds? In other words, doesn’t Luc Ferrari, acting both as a collector and a composer, modify the nature of the landscape he records by merging with it?
Through an analysis of the work, we will see that the ambiguity between, on the one hand, a sonic naturalness and, on the other hand, a human imprint is not based solely on the presence of a human voice. Other disruptive elements enter the piece, putting the piece in a new configuration, assimilating what belongs to the landscape with what belongs to the composer’s mind. The creator goes through a night that ends up crossing his mind to end up with an equivocation of roles within the piece.
Luc Ferrari presents himself in the description of his piece as the “hunter” of the sounds he captures. What does this mean? The reversal of point of view that we were talking about corresponds to a discovery of the sound space. The microphone is no longer a fixed point, a receptacle that collects the sound information that is played around it. With Presque Rien N°2, it is the composer who goes in search of the sound, accompanying and guiding the listener in this discovery. We perceive from this sound walk different moments belonging to this night that the composer shares: first crickets, night birds, the tinkling of a bell later, a barking, insect noises.
We were talking about narration mixed with the transcription of the sound landscape that the collector travels through. If the piece begins with an exposure to the sounds of crickets and night birds broken by sounds that remind of footsteps, the intervention of the creator does not wait, giving to the general atmosphere of this night a whole other dimension. If the listener was alone until then, he suddenly finds himself accompanied, indexed to the spirit of the composer.
It is suddenly that, at the thirty-third second, the piece is thus interrupted: “ I try to determine… to penetrate a landscape, it is not easy […] “. A certain height is introduced, a sort of metaphysics of the piece. The listener is introduced to the soundscape while the composer who introduces it interferes himself, delivering a commentary on his state of mind at the time of the seizure of this sound space.
The listener is no longer alone, he is on the same level as the composer and at the same time subject to him, since he hears what the composer gathers for him. Throughout the piece, we hear Luc Ferrari’s voices, linking the path of sound discovery.
To understand the narrative intention at work behind Presque Rien N°2, we can return to the subtitle of the piece, “Ainsi continue la nuit dans ma tête multiple”. The expression indicates that it is the night that continues in the composer’s head and not the composer who progresses in the time of the night, going from discovery to discovery, from sonorities to sonorities. The night was present the first one, it becomes as second, subordinated to the apprehension that its contemplator makes of it. A new reversal occurs it is no longer the composer who discovers an objective night that he tries to restore. This sound capture becomes a personal experience, and the night becomes “his” night. The listener is faced with a night that bears the mark of a certain objectivity of the sound environment, that it contains what can be expected from a nocturnal sound production, while at the same time it is apprehended under the gaze and the domination of the composer.
If there is an objectivity of the field recording, a pure form which would correspond moreover to Presque Rien N°1, this second part of the series comes to propose the opposite of a sound landscape which would be a musical score already formed. The night becomes a singular night and the support of a more intimate creation. Presque Rien N°1 captured the objectivity of a given moment, the birth of dawn, in each space, a fishing village on the Adriatic. This moment and this space form an integral environment, suitable, according to its composer, for a capture and a transcription that does not require any retouching, any cut and that must be heard as it is.
Presque Rien N°2 breaks up the soundscape to create a double soundscape, both objective and existing outside the mind of the composer, at the same time as it has everything to do with the perception of the composer. “[…] the night surprises the “hunter” and penetrates his head”. Luc Ferrari, actively tracking down the sound issue that occurs around him, comes to lose a form of distance. This is perhaps partly due to the opaque nature of the night, distinctions are made less easily and the biases of apprehension, rather than functioning more intelligibly, are sensory. The night penetrates the mind of the hunter, and this loss of distance can also be explained by the involvement of the composer in his field of activity.
He composes actively, that he operates a sound walk. As it was already said, unlike Presque Rien N°1, “ Ainsi continue la nuit dans ma tête multiple “ is active research of the sound phenomenon. If for the first movement of the series it is the microphone which acts as a fixed receptacle of composition, the second movement asks the composer to “seek” the phenomenon. This active discovery of the sound landscape, contrary to a passive reception, explains the disorientation of the composer and the loss of reference between a night which is at the beginning an object of seizure, facing a night which becomes the incarnation of personal projections.
This disembodiment of the night as a natural and objective phenomenon (let us understand here that the objectivity of the night corresponds to a certain cyclic habit that we all share, the sun rises then finally sets to leave room for the night), then its incarnation in the mind of Luc Ferrari leads us to approach the following point of analysis of his work Presque Rien N°2. Confusing the night with his own, transforming a common landscape known to all, the nocturnal environment, into a personal landscape, Luc Ferrari can allow himself the introduction of electronic phenomena.
It is because the untouched night of Luc Ferrari’s intervention has become a night subject to a personal experience that the composer is entitled to alter it, thus breaking with a faithful transcription of field recording. Let us then see how the composer shifts his work towards new dispositions, coming against the principles introduced with Presque Rien N°1. The soundscape is no longer a musical unit formed for its capture, it is the place of an experience between composer and environment. The point of view of the one who perceives the landscape shifts the intentionality of the piece, from an objective restitution to the listener to a listening tamed by the impressions and perceptions developed by the composer.
Presque Rien N°2 first presents a whole night in its organism: the recording of the sound environment serves as a backdrop to a more intimate expression. One can distinctly perceive familiar noises that the consciousness associates with the night space (crickets or night birds for example). Then a night altered because subjected to the impression that the creator who is about to transcribe this night. A “falsified” night, if one can say so, since it becomes the empirical object of the one who lives it, the entirety of the sound phenomena which constitute this night are supervised by the superimposed comment of the composer. From then on, this night, now tamed, becomes a terrain for the exploration of Luc Ferrari’s impression. The personified night is entirely in the hands of the composer who can modify its course and therefore its nature.
The piece continues and experiences a gradation in its intensity. The sounds of insects become louder. “Thus, continues the night in my head multiple … Here. This sentence pronounced shortly before 12 minutes and 20 seconds marks the beginning of a new sequence for the piece. Electronic sounds mixed with classical music sound loops, string instruments, winds and a flute are heard. The whole is shrouded in a carnivalesque and melancholic aura.
This gradation of intensity finds a spectacular climax towards the end of the piece. Thus, at 17 minutes and 28 seconds, after a short phrase: “It’s true, my head is completely torn apart […]”, a frightening crash of thunder is heard, roaring and echoing for the seconds to come. The flow of a violent rain follows, with an eruption of lightning sounds. The violent amplitude of the soundscape of thunder and rain is complemented by the assertion of electronic notes, sound artifacts directly produced in the studio.
How to explain the emergence of these deafening electronic noises, this musical cloud at first and then this hammering of electronic sounds, mimicking the bursting of thunder? We can find an answer in the comment made by Ferrari of his work: “[…] the interior landscape modifies the exterior night and composes it, adds its own reality to it (imagination of the reality); or, can we say, psychoanalysis of its landscape of night?
The interior landscape, it is that of Ferrari, it is his imagination of composer which takes the top on the reality of the external night. He interprets the dazzling nature that the night produces on his psyche and speaks then about “psychoanalysis of his landscape of night”. The night becomes the reflection of its own impressions and the night which corresponds to him exists with the irruption of these sound phenomena directly resulting from the studio. He saw in this night something to introduce a personal musical commentary, i.e., the inclusion of sound loops and studio artefacts.
What can we say then about these sound interventions with purely human and technological consonances in contrast with the ambient soundscape of the night? They rectify the first neutrality of the night. Neutrality that it is however necessary to measure and to nuance since we said that for Presque Rien N°2, the composer hunts sound, what already constitutes an act of modification of the sound landscape. Nevertheless, the night still presents itself with the sound elements that are its own.
The intercession of electronic sounds acts as a transformation of the general composition. To illustrate this idea by analogy, we can take the simple example of the digital treatment of the image. Taking a landscape shot, then digitally modifying it to add or subtract elements of the setting is an act of personal appropriation and transformation of a given setting. Luc Ferrari does the same with Presque Rien N°2, first seizing a certain atmosphere that seduces him to the point that he allows himself to be penetrated and gives free rein to an interpretation of the space in which he bathes.
The omnipresent sound phenomenon, if it presents at first sight a certain neutrality of which we spoke, sees itself transformed into an artistic and aesthetic experience. Artistic because the sound becomes musical during this operation of modification, of arrangement and of imbrication with elements external to the pure night soundscape. Aesthetic then because the production of sound artifacts that come to hammer the piece is part of a composition contemplated by a listening eye. It is in a way a hubristic position, revealing a certain omnipotence and a control of the collector on his creation.
Luc Ferrari, if he manages to reflect a precise terrain, also inscribes himself in this terrain and modifies it. From the transcription of the sound environment that he makes, he allows himself to propose a personal version of it, evolving towards a mixed musical piece, where the extra-musical, the processes of composition, normally never revealed to the listeners, become audible. This means that the listener does not have access to the composer’s wishes, he only hears his musical translations. We do not hear the impressions of the creator in the middle of a musical piece. We hear the result that these elaborations produce musically.
However, “I try to determine… to penetrate a landscape, it is not easy […]” is there, the vocal occurrence surprising at the thirty-third second by its character of setting at distance. A distancing that corresponds to the degree of interpretation and impression that the night produces on Luc Ferrari. Luc Ferrari speaks to himself, but he also speaks to this landscape. The landscape is his instrument, his sound material and he decides to make it live in the musicality of his piece and in his commentary. This operation would be like listening to a composer who, playing his sonata on the piano, would simultaneously deliver comments on what he thinks of the sound arrangement. The piano would then be the heart of the musical but also caught in the extra-musical.
It is the same with Presque Rien N°2. The night is at the same time the sonorous raw material, translated into musical, and at the same time the extra-musical since Ferrari addresses it, breaking the “fourth wall” for the listener. He comes to share with those who listen to him the singularity of his sound factory, providing the listener with a mise en abyme between on the one hand the raw material of sound, its musicality, the vision that its creator has of it and the way in which he has to apprehend it, to speak about it.
Presque Rien N°2 then develops an eminently complex dimension, blurring the tracks on the magnetic tape. The density and the opacity of the levels of reading of the piece that Ferrari proposes leads to rethink the musical work at the same time as the way we apprehend it. The mise en abyme that it undergoes shows us that the environment that appears to be virgin of any human imprint is finally under the sway of the one who contemplates it: more than contemplating it, the composer tracks down the sound of the landscape, beating his way to meet the sounds of the natural world.
Ferrari’s reading of the night is colored by his perception. A bold parallel would lead us to say that it is Ferrari who ultimately substitutes for the microphone, since he gathers much more information about this night than the microphone can. If the microphone is remarkable for reproducing the sounds of the cricket, it is the intercession of Luc Ferrari’s voice delivering extra-sounding information that the microphone cannot pick up that intensifies the relationship between the sound of the landscape, the listener, and the composer.
This hybrid work redefines the usual roles that we find in the process of creating and broadcasting music. The original sound material is not a given, it is a given to be apprehended, which is what Ferrari tries to do, finally allowing himself to be penetrated, in his words, by the power of the night. How does this happen? With Presque Rien N°2, the musical intention is absent since the music is already there. When Luc Ferrari wants to play a C major chord on his piano, he just must press C, E and G. The intention is there: the composer knows what he wants to play, and he can do it. The musicality is first in the head before finding its musical translation.
In Presque Rien N°2, the music is present in nature before being present in the composer’s head and it is precisely for this reason that he is overwhelmed and that the temptation to dominate this overwhelm finds a translation by the addition of sound artifacts produced in the studio. In a way, Luc Ferrari takes back the hand by mentally domesticating this night, using a musical intention of his own, the creation of studio sounds, it is his psychoanalysis.
Two things then to conclude this comment on this work of Ferrari. If he had emphasized the natural expression and without intervention of his part with the dawn in Presque Rien N°1, the principles of composition that he was developing at that time are opposed in Presque Rien N°2. Always leaving an important place to the sound landscape in which he evolves at the time of the sound recording, he deploys however active research of the sound material, tracking it in the manner of a hunter to use its expression.
The particularity of “ Ainsi continue la nuit dans ma tête multiple “, is that it is the sound material that imposes itself to the composer, it is up to him to draw it up, or not. If the choice was made to let express a context and a given situation for Presque Rien N°1, the second evolution of his series knows another treatment. The intensity of the penetrating night provokes in Ferrari a violent reaction towards his field of study. Taming the nature which presents itself to him through a panoply of electronic sounds, loops, and sound effects, of variable intensity and regularity, he produces a mixed creation, at the same time a work in its own right and the explanation of this work. This explanation is delivered by keys of understanding, a kind of monologue that scatters the composition. The intrusion of a narrative, acting as a commentary on the work, further thickens the relationship between the material he maintains and the use he makes of it, admitting himself disarmed by the effect produced by the nocturnal environment.
“I try to encircle… to penetrate a landscape, it is not easy […]”. To encircle the night will come by its transformation. Incurable perhaps, the means that Luc Ferrari finds to seize it is to modify it and to add to it at the same time a narration relating the ambiguity that he maintains with the sound material which presents itself to him, at the same time as a musical commentary, that is to say the intervention of an extraordinary music of studio, in the sense that it does not belong to the ordinary of the piece, the sound landscape.
To answer the question posed in the introduction, we can say that Luc Ferrari allows himself the appropriation of his terrain, an appropriation that seems to be the result of an unexpected impression, too strong for the composer’s mind to resist. The sonic artifices he employs to tame the material he will use to create alter the landscape, changing its nature from a pure soundscape to a personalized one, corresponding to the expectations and projections of the composer. In the manner of the romantic painters and their imaginary and idealized natures, Ferrari produces a certain ideality from the sound collection that he carries out.
Finally, what about Presque Rien, the lexical usage itself? Almost nothing would be the musical content of the soundscape. These noises of the nature would be almost nothing since the man did not impose his influence there. Almost nothing would be the crickets, the night birds, the rain. These almost nothing would correspond to this sound space of a virgin environment that the composer comes to discover and collect. With Presque Rien N°2, it is the sound landscape that is contradicted by a levelling of man and the environment that surrounds him, Luc Ferrari oscillating between the transcription of a space and the modifying apprehension of the place that this relationship between the composer and the sound that gives itself to him imposes.
