I enjoyed the rare opportunity of interviewing one of the leading musicians of our time. Denis Levaillant is a veritable renaissance man, a great composer, a formidable pianist, a publisher, producer, author. Here are his unedited answers to my questions.
How do you feel about a composer performing his own music, as a pianist or conductor?

Well, it is really the normal way for me! Since the Baroque age, composers have been used to improvise, perform and write music. Then in the 1960’s classical composers were more interested in abstract forms than by instrument practice, but you can notice that this question is not valid for jazz, pop, rock, where composers are on stage!
I like to be in what I call a virtuous circle, between the instrument (for me, the piano) and the mind. Playing is a part of my creative process. This union of the instrumental gesture and the writing procedures is a tradition which is central in occidental music. I look forward to improving this union each time I’m writing a new piece. These different practices of music increase your musicality.
Listen to my piano concerto, Echo de Narcisse, which I recorded as a pianist, especially at the end of the first movement: I do improvise the cadence. It was really exciting to decide at that moment of the creation to do that way.

You are one of the rare composers who does not have a day job. This must be a source of great satisfaction to you. How do you account in your success in this respect?

When I decided to be a musician (I was young, 12-13 years old), I promised to myself to never need another job for a living. And, when I actually became a professional (I was 20), I repeated this same mantra to myself: I will make it! Luckily enough I overcame the obstacles and did it!
In the 1970’s and the 1980’s, it was mostly thanks to my involvement in theater and dance shows, along with countless hours of concerts as a pianist performer. Since twenty years, I have focused my work more on symphonic writing, so I have had to renew the sources for my incomes. Composing is very time consuming and is not that compatible with performing. Do not expect to be on tour writing your next ballet!
I am glad to have met a publisher, Frédéric Leibovitz, who has helped me to market my music in the audiovisual field (cinema and television). My recorded catalog is by the fact every year synchronized on many films in the world (in the US I’m represented by Killer tracks), and this activity for now represents the main part of my incomes. But now, I am eager to meet the scene again! I think I will in the next years find a more balanced mix between writing and playing the piano, which I still practice every day.

You are what some have described as a "monster pianist.” Your technique is quite simply amazing. Was there a time when your ambition was to be a concert pianist?

I worked a lot to have a personal access to the piano, with new gestures, without all the bad habits I learned when I was a kid. I had trained very hard to be a concert pianist until I was 26, when I got my first commission for a ballet music by the Paris national Opera...well, I was at the cross of two different paths: playing all my life the same repertory (especially Chopin, I could not imagine), or to be creative as a composer? I did not hesitate very long, and I began to work hard as a composer. The piano is still my source, I still practice every day, I still record pieces I do love (Liszt, Haydn recently), I am still playing concerts of my music as often as possible - but I am first a composer. When I was a child, I wanted to travel the world with my music on my piano, like a sort of Peter Pan-at-the-piano, you see? But these dreams always pictured me as my own composer, I never had to play the others’s music! I have been improvising since the beginning of my studies, at 6. I had two chances: to be really gifted, and to be guided by a professor, Magdeleine Mangin, who encouraged me to create, who taught me harmony, counterpoint and basis of composition when I was 12, so I was since the beginning in a sort of spiral of creation.
But, yes, in another life, I would like to play Mozart’s D minor and Ravel’s G major with the Chicago Symphony. Just once.

You are impossible to pigeon hole as a composer. Your range is very broad from works for solo instruments to full length Ballet, from what might be called modern classical, to avant-garde, to jazz, to blues. You write string quartets and music employing various electronic techniques. And all of your work gives the impression of having been written by someone entirely dedicated to the style and genre in which a given piece is written. It all makes complete sense.

The fact is I am very curious of a lot of things, and I like to transcend traditional boundaries. When I was 17, my heroes were, in equal parts, Stockhausen, Hendrix and Ornette Coleman. What an explosive cocktail! But with the distance, today, this choices seems very revealing. I am always trying to create something new, unlike those (so many!) composers who repeat always the same score. In my music there is a synthesis of varied techniques that are sometimes considered antagonistic, so my catalog is highly various, and I’m glad of that, because it represents exactly what I have in mind thinking about music - I have the capacity to synthesize disparate ideas and approaches. I use the genres, any genre, to build my style. And this style is very close to what I call ‘a new French music,’ sophisticated but popular. So, my catalog is various but very homogeneous, and you can easily recognize my signature.
For me, jazz for example is very important. It is not another world. It is a part of the contemporary music now. My jazz trio is important for me as a form too, like chamber music (The Passengers of the delta).
If you study the new playing techniques for the saxophone for example, you can easily find that they were all invented by jazz players: subtones, multiphonics, glissandis, slaps, all the intonation changes like smear or flip, etc. You can listen to these techniques in my scores: Les Accords secrets in the Manhattan Rhapsody book, or Attractions. Those are not effects but a part of the phrasing. For an orchestrator of today, its very important to know all these new techniques invented in the popular musics. They compose the modern color!
The so-called serious music must stay very close to its roots, popular music, it’s a matter of survival. This particular inclination exists in the French tradition, since Les Indes galantes till Tzigane.

You refer to yourself as a French composer. What does that mean to you? Are you simply a composer who happens to be French, or does being a French composer have, in this global age, a significance that creates an important difference from a composer who happens to be German, or Russian, or American?

No doubt: it is making a difference for real. We are all in the global village, but we do not speak exactly the same language. You do not think the same way should you phrase in American or in French. Same in music. And the colors of the speech make also important differences in music. Debussy wrote about French music in “Mr Croche”: for him, his principal qualities were concision, color, clarity. I feel very comfortable with this description.
I like to create sophisticated music which is within the reach of everyone: a music of today for anyone.
And I like to build the best form with clarity.
A century ago, you had three leaders in music composition: Schoenberg, Stravinsky and…Ravel. Pierrot Lunaire, Trois Poèmes de la lyrique japonaise,
Trois poèmes de Mallarmé. I was wondering, how would sound contemporary music if in the 1950’s one had not decided to follow Schoenberg, but Ravel? Better, I presume!
Like Debussy or Ravel, I am independent of any group or faction, and I make my work as I like it: I invent my own rules. What I know, is that I need new melodies (Echo de Narcisse, movement 2), new harmonies (La Statue from La petite danseuse), new rhythms (La Chute, from the same Suite), new colors (Paysages de Conte), in the continuation of my own French culture.
And I can say to you: I work a lot to hide work! That’s French tradition too (Rameau is an example).

What motivates your choices with regard to your next composition? Do you wake up in the morning and think to yourself, "I think I'll write a string quartet today." Or an opera? Are you more concerned with the possibility of a work being performed, or do your musical ideas dictate the nature of the resultant work?

I’m living in a perpetual motion dedicated to creating new music. In the morning, I have very often some intuitions, some orchestral images that I note as quick as possible, then I work on the piece of the moment. I am following freely my instinct. I can work on different projects in the same session. I have a sort of notebook, like a journey diary, which is always on the piano (yellow music paper), and I write all my ideas down without any judgment, I know that I can read this notes for every new project. But, for sure, I’m always trying to transform a personal decision into a commission, and I’m very often my own producer, because the realization is for me as important as the idea.

So much time and effort is spent on trying to interest children in classical music. These efforts are overwhelmingly unsuccessful. It's as though no one involved in these efforts has any understanding of how to reach the children of today. Much of your music strikes me as capable of speaking to the young. My own children came home from school with a group of friends one day when I was listening to your Nerone Blues. The unanimous review was "That's really cool!” Are you interested in creating music or musical projects for school aged children?

I try always to be immediately accessible while encouraging in-depth listening, so your quote does not surprise me. In this case, the modern mixture of an electric guitar and a classical form is very appealing for young listeners.
Sure, I do write for school aged children. I have written a musical fairytale for an orchestra and an actor from a very strong text of Jacques Prévert, l’Opéra de la lune (not very known in the USA , I presume?). I have written another fairytale for seven musicians and an actor, from the text of the Grimm brothers, The Musicians of Bremen, and I will produce with it a nice 45 minutes show for kids next year. I have written some pieces for the young pianists too, Little Preludes for little hands. I also hope to be able to create some day an opera for and with children, like Britten did. I have the joy to be, since this year, a very happy grand-father of a marvelous grand-daughter, it will influence me for sure to write for kids more often.

If I were asked what is most impressive to me about your music I would unhesitatingly reply: your orchestration. I would put you on a par with the likes of Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. What has motivated you in developing such skill in this aspect of composition?

I agree with you for Rimsky (I am these days reading again Antar, what a great orchestration!), and undoubtedly Ravel, but not for Stravinsky (I do not really like his systematization, his postures). I would add Richard Strauss, especially for the symphonic poems.
I love color. I like to invent new mixtures of timbre. For me the color is not something you add after your idea of form is drafted: the color is a part of the form. Plus, the color originates the form, in a modern sense.
When I was a beginner, in the early 1970’s, I tried to learn how to play all the principal instruments: I played vibraphone to understand percussions, I played cello to understand strings, and clarinet to understand winds, and trombone too! For me music is a practice, not just a formal construction. I have the highest esteem for all instruments and what they could bring to the global color scheme. This close knowledge of and respect for all instrument’s intrinsic value have definitively an impact on my orchestration.

Your music, has a very strong lyrical and dramatic component. This is apparent in everything you do. I, for one, long for you to create a song cycle alla Berlioz or Mahler, for voice and orchestra. Is this something that might be on the horizon?

Music is for me dramatic in essence, so yes, I am looking forward to writing a song cycle with orchestra, as Strauss did too. But I have a dilemma: in the French music I am not really found of the lyrical part. I do not like the Debussy or the Ravel sung pieces. It’s too sophisticated, it sounds now very old-fashioned. I prefer a direct expression, like you have in Mozart, Verdi, or Gershwin’s music’s. I therefore have to carefully choose the right language,
Italian or English. It is not very easy for me to write songs in French, even though I did it in my second opera, O.P.A. Mia in 1990, mixing songs and dialogues.

With the exception of your string quartets and piano concerto, you seem to have avoided traditional large scale instrumental forms. Have you ever been tempted to compose a symphony? Might you write a second piano concerto? I understand that many composers shy away from these larger orchestral forms because of the difficulty in having such works performed. But since your successes with the ballet, opera, concerto and the Paysage de Contes, I would imagine another major orchestral work by Denis Levaillant would be greeted with open arms.

I like to write orchestral music, I love the great orchestra, but forms change. I’m thinking about music as a dramatic art. The language of passions, the expression of the inner landscapes. So for me, music is cinematic in essence. Music is dreamlike. Recording in multi-tracks and digital cinema have totally changed the way you can create music today. Creation is in a new dimension: acoustic/digital. A new virtuous circle! Listen to my Drama Symphony, composed with samples of another orchestral piece, Les Couleurs de la parole. We are in the kingdom of transformation.
Nowadays, it seems to me impossible to write a symphony in the traditional sense. However I am writing (how did you know?) a new cinematic symphony named Le Livre des transformations, The Book of transformations, which will be my Turangalila: around 28 minutes, large orchestra. I would like to have it performed within a film creation. I am seeking the right commission. And yes, I project to write my second piano concerto (I began this month actually). I hope the audience will share your enthusiasm!

Interview by Leni Bogat

Contemporary music often gives rise to boredom, for no real audience can identify either with its discourse or with its wagers or structures. It is time that new music looked towards the future, addressing itself to the great majority. It is time that the composer stopped considering his audience like the mimetic projection of himself. It is time that the movement set in motion by a Jean Vilar in theatre finally reached musical shores.

The era of military metaphors ("the avant-garde") being a thing of the past, it is time to set sail for the open sea. Let new music escape from its laboratories, studios and ghettos! Let it mix with the hum of the city, with the other performing arts and with the real supports of the real world! Let it compare the results of its research with the narration of its time! Let it drink from popular currents! Let it invade the airwaves and images if it believes in its power! The period is no longer one of the prophet-artist but the entrepreneur-artist, serenely occupying a new place in the city.

So-called contemporary music views so-called modern music with disdain; the latter sends back its fear and envy. Yet they are working with the same tools. The era seems to be getting used to this total separation of genres: "commercial" (for the people) and the "cultural" (for the elite).

Creators do not have to confirm this break in today's musical art, on pain of turning into functionaries of art. Is not the worst defect of this system to designate a work as "classical" before it has found its community usefulness? It is time that these worlds merged.

Music is not a supplement of culture for a tired élite. It is the profound movement, the surge of the soul, pure dramatic imagination. It binds body and spirit, linking Man to his condition. It is time that it rediscovered its true usefulness: language of the soul and passions, formative of taste and revealing expression.

In this movement, musicians (called "interpreters") again find the primordial place as practical researchers that they had magnificently occupied during the Baroque era. It is time that that economy and that circuit, so suitable to musical art, freed itself from the hypertrophy of the composer's role. It is time that other authors appeared for music, mutants, practical and theoretical, players and scribes, poets and acrobats/performers.

For a new music, it is time to inaugurate new practices.

15/06/1992

If I am asked about the "relationship" of music to the image, my first impulse is only to throw back what I don't like to do: the typical illustration, the filling of a hazardous montage, the hint of feeling in short, everything that "film music" has unfortunately accustomed us to hearing at the cinema and on television. In the vernacular production, it indeed seems that sound has driven out music, and that, in the soundtrack itself, dialogue has supplanted the other elements of narration. In that set-up, music has a coloring function: it no longer enters into either the narrative construction or the camera's movement.

Yet, basing myself on a few - rare - films where music took its place naturally, the scenes where it became indissociable from the image (those are almost always moments of wonder, suspense or tragedy), I can also imagine a score of great lyricism fitting into a modern epic (which would take the place of this old, totally worn-out verismo opera); a succession of metamorphoses using studio techniques (few instruments and a wide variety of colours and treatments), integrating itself into a powerful drama (relayed by the new digital image techniques). In short, I refuse to feel defeated by the conformity of current production.

I have no theory to put forward on the subject, just some experiences to think about. Eight years of collaboration in the theatre with Alain Françon (as well as Christian Colin and Michel Dydim) and at least 15 film shorts have confirmed a certain number of my intuitions. It is a mistake to wish to separate so-called "pure" or abstract music from so-called "descriptive" or programme music. Music is always pure, since it is totally abstract. But its flesh makes it living abstraction: it is the most abstract art and the most sensual, and these two qualities are indissociable. It combines with the image, as on the stage, by metaphor: taking possession of the content of situations, the composer must make himself a playwright. Basically nurturing itself on the intervening period between words and gestures, music lights up what is dark and darkens brightness; it condenses and magnifies. With abstraction, it speaks to the imagination, the affective and interiority. In this sense, it can spread out only if, in the show (or the film), the spoken text is not the sole narrative support, if the director also constructs with what is left unsaid, the relationship of bodies, light, space, movement. It then plays an instinctual, almost energising role of metaphor.

In terms of the composing profession, working with the image is first a school of precision, particularly of orchestration. The choice of timbres and their place in narrative space have a great influence on the success of the music's integration in the drama - in this sense, I think of the poetic and symbolic weight of each musical instrument, and that faculty is further increased by union with the image. A school of the imagination, too, since the composer will be obliged to write "on the table" and not "in the hall" (or "on the image") for accomplishing his own metamorphoses. And finally, a school of concision of form, of condensation. In this sphere, new forms of musical development will doubtless not be able to be used until the day an ambitious filmmaker has the desire, like a choreographer in the 1920s, to take hold of a score, bar by bar. That's to give an idea of how optimistic I am (and patient)!

Tackling Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon, I therefore forced myself to find the right metaphor. I know that music (played live) gives life to these silent characters, through a sort of alchemy of energy between the movement captured on their faces and our instantaneity. I also know that the rhythm of narration is no longer ours and that I must compose more than might be expected (while obstinately refusing not to leave any silence). I feel like a companion and therefore I accompany, in the literal sense ("and always some fear accompanies love", Britannicus, Racine, v. 3). The great constructivist fiction, the myth of the source of gold as much as the romance. The hymn to modernity, and relational archaism. This mixture troubles me and resonates today (isn't it that of modern adventure films?). Yes, this work is an important step in my career as a musician in search of other practices.

15/10/1994

1 - Rythm and metre

Jazz is not allegorical. It literally translates for us a few musical terms weighted down by European use, such as a tempo. If we must come back to this, it is because we have got away from it. Jazz comes back to beat, tempo and scansion.

Jazz, and the experience of improvisation that arose from it, especially gave its true meaning back to the word "rhythm": a quality of discourse. Indeed, according to the dictionary, rhythm is produced above all by a succession of accented and unaccented syllables, i.e., in musical parlance, a succession of fortes and pianos at certain intervals of time. Whether these are regular or not is, when all is said and done, a secondary question. However, common usage in European music would have us speak of a "triple-time rhythm" to evoke the metre of the waltz, and thus we will think more in terms of number (of beats, or syllables in the discourse) than the figures formed. Therefore, jazz teaches us again that rhythm is indeed a certain art of accentuation - Bud.

Let us transcribe some sophisticated chorus and have it played by an instrumentalist not trained in jazz. Regardless of however perfect the rhythmic and melodic placement might be, there's a good chance that the sense of what is called "swing" will be lacking. By analysing pitches, it can be proved that this feeling exists when the sonority itself is affected, i.e., the timbre varies from one note to the next, irregularly. Here, jazz informs us about the inextricable relationships of what are called the "parameters" of sound. Pitch, timbre and dynamics are indissociable in musical listening that is drawn more to figures than to the structures of the discourse.

What is radical in jazz lies in going from one beat to another, this balance that is created as much by economy, gaps in the beat (Monk) as by abundance or submersion (Coltrane). Here we find the oratorical idea of the number associated with the more or less broad rhythm of the phrase. We are fairly far from the European vision of "jazzed-up" music, this hopping Vivaldi, this curious way of scanning jazz in recent schools here, where you learn to pronounce a standard rhythm on no matter what phrasing, in whatever metre, at whatever tempo. In this deformation, I see a contrario proof of the reduction of rhythm to metre in European music.


2 - Gesture and word

In the consecrated places, the temple-clubs, prophetess-blowers go out on stage, prophet-fans surround them, gathering the phrases that slip out, interpreting them, and we have oracles. Thus is born the myth of jazz, an oracular art.

Reason would want to drive the oracle out of the temple and make its own miracles. Write jazz? But write what about jazz? Its colours, its breaks, its impurities, or its gimmicks, its facility, its successes? Wanting to write jazz is wanting to give it a share of the universal of which it would be, by birth, deprived, as if born in a wasteland. But jazz is anything but vague: it is articulate, accented, precise. It is rhythm. It is urban and lives in a cultivated area.

Of course, the question of form is essential, and one often stumbles over that. Some prepare themselves to such a degree that you have the impression of listening to a recited text. Others wait for the full effect of surprise and, from concert to concert, exhaust a small pool of quotations. Very few master the sense of the variation held out towards a unique goal (Parker). For jazz is an art in a class of its own, demanding both the sense of rigorous development and that of sudden appearance, the explosion of the instant.

At this level of playing, improvising is writing. Jazz is a pragmatic art, in which the way form is handled is organised at the time. This technique can be worked on like any other writing technique. I have often been struck by the similarity of the terms used in certain improvisation treatises (of which there are hundreds in the United States) to those used by Arnold Schoenberg in his California period. The method used is parallel, particularly for everything relating to the notion of motif (motivic form, outline, melodic pattern), given by jazz teachers and basic composition teachers as the constitutive foundation of all development. A good motif will thus be one that best concentrates in itself an ensemble of characters that are at once rhythmic, melodic and dynamic, allowing the form to spread.

Improvising in this mobility assuredly constitutes an excellent composition exercise. Simply, jazz reminds us that the first gesture is often diabolically appropriate and that this rapid appropriateness of speech contrasts irremediably with the slowness of writing. But does one expect a conversation to be as structured as a speech? (Ornette)


3 - Hybrid modernity

Jazz is questioning. Its masters leave a question- Duke, Bird -whereas European art, in large part, answers the questions it asks (Bach).

In Europe, jazz asks the essential question of the invention of writing, the deadly cult of the past. It offers to reread its History live, here and now: who knows whether, someday, a musical system won't feed on the minuscule differences detectable between two interpretations of a chorus by Parker, as today with Chopin Mazurkas? And who can say if Chopin were alive today he wouldn't be playing in a club?

Conversely, in America jazz poses the ongoing question of modernity, the preference for the copy over the original, and the adaptation of aesthetic forms to the market (Miles).

For jazz is, by its make up, ambivalent. It profoundly influenced all the "serious" music of the 20th century—beyond borrowings and quotations, one might detect this influence in instrumental writing (those traits of energy), in the timbre of the orchestra (those brass and percussion), in the refreshed sense given to accentuation and colour (those brainwaves) - not to mention its direct influence on a whole generation of interpreters and composers. Moreover, and in the same constitutive movement, jazz disappears into the commonplace, the facile, the déjà-entendu (the drawing room). If you wish to caricature the "jazz style", you know full well that it suffices to sketch a walking-bass line, bedoum-doum-doum. This is indeed a signature that is too direct (literal) for many minds more inclined to the formal.
Jazz does not have this same post-mortem relationship with itself that European music still nurtures. It assimilates its past as it grows older and invokes yesterday to stimulate today. A hybrid, ambivalent, post-modern Janus before its time, jazz feeds on time and all times.

For these three motifs and a few other secrets, at present I would no longer be able to put this sophisticated dance of the century out of my mind.

30/03/1999

(Preface to the second edition of the book L'improvisation musicale)

This book came into being in the 1970s, from this "post-68" ferment when a generation gave itself the means for practising, thinking and living otherwise (music and all the rest). Obviously, the tone, colour and touch were ours and now sound delightfully dated. But the subject remains amazingly present, and musical improvisation, freed 15 years later of its sociological and biographical origin, is to be read as if it had been born yesterday: touching invariants, it speaks of musicality.

Of course, everything has changed! Since the first edition, improvisation has won over the teaching profession. The destructive madness of "contemporary" music has been rejected. Composers have returned to the instrument, to the ancient practice, modest sons of Bach. Performers have lifted their head; musicians of the world are no longer considered subhuman by professors of analysis, and everyone moves shamelessly - the body exults.

Of course, nothing has changed! Improvisation is established, in an extremely marginal way, in higher musical education. It is tolerated only when indispensable, for example, in teaching through bass on the harpsichord - and this, thanks to the commercial success of Baroque music. The creators of "improvised music" remain in low esteem. Rhythmic culture remains atrophied. Exchanges with the supporters of hyper-writing remain worthless.

The debate is far from being over. We are doubtless just in the process of leaving the Iron Age of formalism, that new ars nova which destroyed the desire of the majority to approach creation. We became used to category, I suspect - this book, even though some may have laid hold of it in a militant manner, never pretended to define an aesthetic born of improvisation. That improvisers are now anxious to introduce themselves as composers is another sign of the times. I myself have suffered enough on account of my dual career - pianist and composer - to cast the stone at them, but I never thought that that writing, that of instrumental playing, could suffice in constructing a vision of form. We can see it: categories still have trouble becoming clear, and this book was sometimes read too quickly.

We are at the very beginning of a profound movement of change, and so many things were erased from our habits! But how enjoyable it is, the march that leads us from the body to the spirit, from improvisation to composition, from the instrument to writing! How full it is of the unexpected, of brainwaves and clarity! To think freely, the musician improvises, just as the philosopher strolls. Improvisation is practised in solitude, where it takes root and becomes fortified. It is practised in the group, which it feeds - but don't be mistaken: even well surrounded, Miles smiles alone. The musician improvises and thereby encounters the past of his culture and all the music in the world. Who would dare say we don't need these passages?

I would also like this book to be read as a study of recent composition resources (born of improvisation), like a proposition of a new reading of the history of music (crossed by improvisation) or, as a last resort, as a reflection on musicality (summoned by improvisation). It could be subtitled "For a new Baroque age". Don't you feel this renaissance that is coming to overturn the old formalist, combinatory, structuralist practices (made to feel guilty, ugly and boring)? This new equilibrium between pleasure and rigour, the body and the mind, sensation and narrative, the scholarly and the popular? Through the filter of improvisation, it is to this renaissance movement that this book commits itself: let us make other uses..

December 1995

The most powerful moment of my collaboration with Enki Bilal for O.P.A. Mia will certainly continue to be the day when, the set finally completely assembled (at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers) and the sound system roughly arranged, we heard the first effect, the first mixing of sung voices in the spatial volume.

Then we saw we had not been mistaken—that there was a profound connection between his universe and mine. The music had found its image, this transformed, anticipatory reality that I was seeking.

When I broadcast Speakers* at Radio-France, one of my colleagues told me that it made him think of comic books. "Careful, now, that's not a criticism! let's be quite clear on that: good comic books!" The way intellectuals approach comic books today is a bit the way 17th-century letters greeted the nascent novel - a slightly disdainful respect for "something" not yet a listed art form. It's true that comics range from insipid fanzines to admirable graphic work by artists like Bilal. But doesn't today's music also range from the thin home-made soup concocted on the all-purpose synthesiser to the introspective craftsman's art still necessary for composing? And, with those same intellectuals, don't we find the same suspicion of authenticity vis-à-vis musical genres currently considered "minor"? Here, I'm primarily thinking of music associated with the image, a new art of today corrupted by merchants under the term "film music".

Not so long ago, what Enki creates was still being designated as "illustration". The example of our work on O.P.A Mia strongly refutes that category. My characters existed; the roles were written, the music copied out - Yet there lacked a dramatic characterisation. I can say that Sunny Cash, god of money, and Sphinx, goddess of truth, did not come into being until the day Enki agreed to make the "image" of my opera - his vision of gods lost in the urban underground from La Femme Piège precipitated mine. In this case, who is illustrating what? Enki is not a stage designer either. You don't work with him endlessly discussing dramaturgy, you don't constantly keep going back and touching things up. He gets closer, through sensibility. He's a Cat who doesn't make a lot of drafts. Through O.P.A. Mia, he continued his work. Like a painter.

For fifteen years now, I've been putting on shows with my music and I've carried out a number of works in collaboration. The most efficient practicality has always been the fruit of encounters where everyone remained master of his or her universe. However, habit would have it that art, putting itself at the service of a common purpose, goes astray.

I am betting that the distance I spoke of above, and which touches on the idea of the function of art, will fall one day, all by itself.

I will go so far as to bet that, in the 21st century, the idea of an art that serves no other purpose than itself will give our grandchildren a good laugh - design, image-music, narrative graphics (rather than comic book?) will dominate the market. In the meantime, I am firmly determined to continue exploring my polyvalence (music as performance art), which allows me to meet all-rounders like Enki (who has more of a tendency to carry out his work on numerous supports). I thank him for having travelled a bit with me- here these images, which provide the framework for an encounter, come back: Enki's feeling drawn by my orchestral scores ("I'm jealous of this format"), his constant attention to the entire production crew of the show, his preciseness on the hues during the lighting adjustment, his solid presence facing the media in Avignon - and having accepted to put his graphics into three-dimensional form for the first time, on a theatre stage, for singing my music there.

l20/09/1991

*A radio poem from which O.P.A. Mia was born