“Enfoncer une porte ouverte”. Madame Bovary sounds as music

Abstract

My contribution consists of an original musical work on Madame Bovary and the following text that is a description of the ideas behind the composition. The link between text and music dates back to the History of humankind and it always represented a problem for composers. According to different situations, new solutions were adopted. In the second half of the xx Century some composers developed new musical techniques for voice composition clearly under the influence of Saussure, Trubeckoj, Jakobson as well as experimental Literature. To compose Enfoncer une porte ouverte I was facing a XIX Century narrative text, leaving me not enough space to fit these modern techniques into it. We know that for Flaubert text and sound were not two separate entities, as he was reading aloud his drafts, so I asked to the voice in my composition, not to read the published version of Madame Bovary, but the final manuscript. One of the founding principles of Musique Concréte is the “reduced listening” (écoute réduit). With this definition Pierre Schaeffer frees the sound from its cause, letting emerge the pure qualities of sound without any cultural interferences from the source. Working within this framework I animate the text with sound-objects whose source is not necessarily heard, as I replace the vocal spectrum - i.e. the timbre – with that of the sounds mentioned in the book, while the voice amplitude envelope will still determine the rhythm. The idea is to give rise to what I call an Imaginary Soundscape, where the sounds assume the role of characters, as in a stage work.

Keywords

• electroacoustic music
• xix Century literature
• imaginary soundscape
• text musicality
• narrative voice