1 — The human being as a source of inspiration, energy and exchange
1.1 — The human being as a linguistic entity [A]
1.2 — The human being as a body-centred entity [B]
1.3 — The human being as a complex psychic entity [C]
1.4 — The human being as an entity belonging to complex social systems [D]
2 — The use of amplification
2.1 — Extending the dynamic range and the idiospheres [B]
2.1.1 — The possibility of counterpoint between bodily spaces: private space, social space and public space [D]
2.1.1.1 — The intimacy of the sound source, opening up greater expressive possibilities [B]
2.1.2 — Playing with “intimacy”, whispers and liminal gestures [B]
2.2 — Reference to body-centred models no. 5 [destructiveness] and no. 6 [excitability] [B]
3 — The use of the voice without vibrato
3.1 — “Natural” singing [B]
3.1.1 — An openness to the vocal heritage of jazz, Baroque music and certain forms of mainstream music [C] [D]
3.1.2 — An aversion to a specific repertoire within the history of notated music [D]
4 — The use of prosody as a formal model
4.1 — The natural behaviour of language [A] [C]
4.1.1 — Reference to body-centred model no. 3 [corruptibility] [B]
5 — The use of explicit formal functions
5.1 — The search for new formal functions and their interpretation [A] [C]
5.1.1 — The possibility of changing perceived time [D]
5.2 — Reference to body-centred models no. 4 [constructiveness] and no. 5 [destructiveness] [C]
5.3 — The use of the notion of the internal energy of information [D]
6 — Calligraphy and writing on the body: identigraphy
6.1 — Resisting the reduction of idiospheres [A] [B] [D]
6.1.1 — Increasing the level of concentration [B]
6.1.1.1 — Reference to body-centred model no. 7 [trance] [B]
6.2 — The uniqueness of the trace through the uniqueness of its support [B] [D]
6.3 — Seeking the possibility of fertile accidents [D]
6.4 — Transforming the act of writing into a performance [D]
7 — The use of the computer as a hyper-system
7.1 — The use of interactivity and generativity [D]
7.1.1 — Reintroducing lived systems [C]
7.2 — Controlling complex structures [C]
7.3 — The possibility of concentrating on the result rather than the process [A]
8 — The use of sensors to increase expressiveness
8.1 — Expanding idiospheres [B] [D]
8.2 — Giving the audience access to interactivity [D]
9 — The use of metalepsis in writing the Opus
9.1 — Writing cycles of cycles [A]
9.1.1 — Reference to body-centred models no. 1 [attractiveness] and no. 2 [cyclicality] [B]
9.2 — Defining the Opus and the causality of works [D]
10 — The multiple modes of presenting music
10.1 — Music for the stage [D]
10.1.1 — Music for concerts [D]
10.1.2 — Music for dance [D]
10.1.3 — Music for theatre [D]
10.2 — Music for installations [D]
10.3 — Music for images [D]
10.3.1 — Music for films [D]
10.4 — Music for exhibitions [D]
10.5 — Music for the Internet [D]
A manifesto for non-specialists
The programmatic manifesto set out above is a synthesis, intended for specialists, of my vision and my aesthetics. For non-specialists, I now add the notion of “consubstantial” to Hyper-systemic Music. The movement that encompasses it is “Consubstantialism”. The system on which I rely is the hyper-system: computing in general. In this text, I therefore rename my aesthetics “Consubstantial Music”.
Consubstantialism is a vision that envisages coexistence between the human body and another form of matter: in this case, technology. There is no fusion, no con-fusion, no trans-fusion of technology into the body or of the body into technology. For me, there is a co-presence, a coexistence in which the body remains a body—material and corruptible—and technology remains technology, without physiology and without the capacity to experience emotions understood as the body's biochemical exchanges.
Some artists find their inspiration in nature, travel, science, religion and so on. I find mine in human beings: in exchanges between people [point 1 of my manifesto], both as linguistic entities, through the different forms of language we have created, and as bodily entities. Bodies. Living bodies. The forms of bodily expression with which I also experiment. I draw my most powerful inspiration from the psychic and psychoanalytic complexity of the people with whom I interact and spend time. In my aesthetics, therefore, there is no ideal or abstract human being, but concrete, tangible, corruptible people whom I know and encounter. People constituted within real, present-day social systems: systems that may be concrete, such as associations, collectives and companies, or “virtual”, such as social networks.
This is my starting point. It is arbitrary, but it is mine: personal to me, it interests me, moves me and stimulates me to create. From this starting point, I define an axiomatics that responds to this first principle: the concrete, real human being, through concrete and real manifestations, but also through virtual ones.
I would like to place myself within the systemic lineage that proceeds from the monodic modal system to the polyphonic modal system and finally to the tonal system, considered in terms of tendencies, as discussed earlier in the study of systems. I write and compose both for acoustic instruments belonging to European ethnic music—orchestral instruments—and for invented instruments of every kind: synthesisers, touch interfaces, sensors, custom-built prototypes and so on. As for European ethnic instruments, I compose for them if and only if they are amplified [point 2 of my manifesto]. I believe in the importance of extending the dynamic range, allowing me to amplify sounds at the threshold of audibility and reach fortissimos that can “blow your hair back”—even if you have none. Through amplification, I can extend musicians' idiospheres by asking them to express themselves through micro-gestures and pre-gestures: intentional muscular contractions that anticipate a gesture and that, without amplification, would be neither audible nor expressive to an audience a few metres away. Through amplification, and thus the corresponding diffusion of sound, I create an expressive counterpoint involving the proxemics between musicians and audience. This is not spatialisation—moving sounds around the audience—but the creation of a co-presence between sounds from the performers' intimate sphere, the social sounds of the concert hall and the public sounds of the spectators. Amplification enables an acoustic depth of field that I could not otherwise achieve. It allows me to incorporate two body-centred models into my work: destructiveness, through the invasive and overflowing use of sound, and excitability, through different forms of sound reverberation that produce a feeling of enchantment.
Point 3 of my manifesto concerns the voice. I do not allow vocal vibrato in my music. I neither wish nor intend to be associated with operatic singing. Amplifying the voice means that I do not need to resort to vocal distortions to make a singer heard among other sounds that might mask their power. I consider the “bel canto” approach an artificial, unnatural way of singing, suited to the age of Wagner or Verdi, when voices needed to stand out against a loud orchestra. I want a vocality without vibrato because it allows a more precise understanding of the sung text and enables me to feel in harmony with the vocality of contemporary musical practices. Operatic singing also evokes the nineteenth century for me, with its halls, costumes and narratives. That does not interest me. This is the social explanation for my refusal to belong to the past. I am in the present. Yet because I come from notated music, and singers who can read scores are trained in conservatoires, I have to write for them when I want to use the voice. I do so while specifying that I do not want vibrato.
The human being who left four limbs behind to stand on two legs, who set out to explore the entire planet and leaves intentional traces of their passage on every horizon, began to speak. Over millennia, cries, grunts and vocalisations probably became song and certainly became speech. Speech, the semantic word of Indo-European languages, acquired greater precision in its accents, the duration of syllables and the articulation of timbres when a sentence is uttered. Prosody allows the same sentence to be spoken in different ways without changing its semantic content, while contextual interpretation modifies its semiotics. Within our cultural lineage, words have meaning [semantics], but the way they are pronounced [prosody] can change that meaning. These are two different regimes of power. The word as a semanteme produces conceptual expressive energy. The word as prosodic utterance produces emotional expressive energy. Prosody [point 4 of my manifesto], understood as the distribution of spectral energy over time, becomes my formal metaphor. In this sense, I establish a lineage with spectral aesthetics. It is a dimension of language that reflects a uniquely human model: redefining meaning without a semantic change in a signal. Moreover, all prosody presupposes an initial phase of stasis, a mechanical inertia before the word is activated, the necessary breath before a sentence, the exhalation required at its end, a breath that “nourishes” the lungs so that sentences can follow one another, and a “phrasing” breath that modifies this “nourishing” breath. Prosody carries the notion of fatigue, one manifestation of the body-centred models of attractiveness and corruptibility. It requires speech to be segmented so that we can exhale completely and breathe in again. I take this necessary segmentation of speech, with its durations and proportions, as a metaphor for the formal models of my compositions.
Point 5 of my manifesto follows from the preceding one. Formal models related to prosody, like all body-centred models, are based on “natural” human empathy and therefore on a clear identity. I similarly extend this formal metaphor to formal functions, which thus become explicit: introductions, expositions, developments, recapitulations, bridges, interpolations, endings, false endings, codas and so on. I also emphasise that I work to redefine formal functions in order to discover new ones.
As I have written, I use the computer to generate musical material, drawing on the full potential of computing. Nevertheless, in the act of creation I have chosen not only to write by hand, but also to practise calligraphy on the body: identigraphy [point 6 of my manifesto]. This practice is also known as “bodyscore”: musical scores written on the human body. It embodies my commitment to resisting idiotisation—the reduction of idiospheres—and to intensifying the notion of “tension with the audience”: pre-tensio, which will be discussed later.
Point 7 of my manifesto is the most evident: using the computer for its hyper-systemic properties. Calculating complex structures while concentrating solely on the result, without losing complexity, and transforming each created entity into a generated entity, thereby “living” the musical system.
I study and use different kinds of sensors that establish bridges of “gestural” communication, from society and the audience understood as collective movement through to the notion of the inter-actor. This is point 8 of my manifesto. Interactive sensors are interfaces connected to software that detect and interpret the audience's movements and gestures, using them as vectors of interactivity. They may be infrared cameras that detect people's movements; sonar devices that determine a person's distance from a given point; pressure sensors that detect weight, the pressure of a fingertip or the caress of a hand; muscular sensors that register a muscle's tension before an arm or leg has even begun to move; or physiological sensors that detect heartbeat, breathing, body temperature and so on. In point 8, I declare that I use this technology to increase the expressiveness of my music, expand the dimensions of idiospheres and enable dialogue between the audience and my music through interactivity.
A word of caution: this point of my manifesto could be read as an endorsement of Transhumanism. Sensors designed to detect gestures, movements or physiological values transmit data from the human body to computers. Full stop. That is all. They are not the human body. The body is augmented in its ways of being, acting and sensing, but it is not transformed. Computers respond to the presence of the human being, but they are not the human being. Sensors allow the body and the machine to coexist without confusing them. From one perspective, the keyboard on which I write this text communicates with my fingers through touch. The mouse allows me to use the gestures of my arm, forearm and fingers to activate different computer functions. The screen allows me to see what I write on the computer. Would it not be ridiculous to say that a poet who types a poem on a computer is a transhuman poet? The same reasoning, extended to interactive sensors, applies to interactivity with my music. My aesthetics opposes Transhumanism ethically and politically.
In this respect, a category error within Transhumanism must be noted. It is a cultural and philosophical movement concerned with the possibility of using advanced technology to improve human capacities such as memory, learning speed, physical endurance and longevity. Transhumanists believe that human beings should transcend the biological limits imposed by nature through technologies such as biotechnology, computing, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Transhumanism's ultimate goal is to improve individuals' quality of life, eliminate suffering and enable them to attain a higher level of existence. So far, all of this might seem like a pleasant world of “fairies, princes and princesses”. But the body is a contingency that lives and, in living, undergoes decay. The notion of suffering is questionable in this philosophy, and the notion of sensory saturation is absent from it. Suffering is psychic, whereas sensory saturation is somatic. How can one envisage eliminating the suffering caused by the loss of someone dear—a father, mother, child or friend? How can one suppose that suffering inflicted by one person on another can be abolished? And how is it possible to conceive of pleasure without including sensory saturation? How, then, is it possible to study the body without the notion of orgaste? Or orgasm? Perhaps one day, when wars, abuse, violence and injustice have ended, Transhumanist thought may become relevant. For now, it seems to me the worst form of oppressive capitalism: hypocritical, since it exploits the world's misery to bring itself into being, and crushing cultural differences across the world, thus neo-colonialist. I fight against Transhumanism.
For me, limiting myself to my life in the present and in today's world, the consubstantial interpretation is the one that meets my needs. Model no. 3 [corruptibility] allows me to integrate death, abandonment and loss as facts in themselves: not things to fight against, but realities through which to appreciate the present itself. Model no. 5 [destructiveness] allows me to integrate sensory saturation, and thus pain, while opening the world to the notion of “vibrating” with it, because sometimes we vibrate beyond what we can bear. What would Beethoven have been without sensory saturation? Or Liszt? Or Van Gogh? Or the “poètes maudits”? To mention only the best-known cases. All the body-centred models allow me to integrate both solitude in the world and the world's worldliness, embracing every specificity and therefore every difference. This awareness carries within it the notion of an ending, of detachment and of mutual dependence. It is the foundation of society. Of humanity.
The original title of this manifesto includes the adjective “metaleptic”. Metaleptic is a technical term from narratology, referring to a device through which one or more elements of a narrative cross the threshold separating it from another narrative contained within, or containing, the main story. It involves a boundary between different narratives that contain other narratives in a complex relationship. Metalepsis transgresses “normal” narrative practice. Through it, a narrative embedded within another emerges across the boundary between diegesis—the narration of things—and metadiegesis—a narrative within a narrative—into the encompassing narrative. Put more simply, it is an interpenetration of different levels within different narratives and temporalities. In the first point of my manifesto, I set out four expressions of the human: the human being as a linguistic entity [A], a body-centred entity [B], a complex psychic entity [C], and an entity belonging to complex social systems [D]. These four expressions reverberate throughout all the other points. These four modes of being “human” propagate through them both as materials and as structural references or conditions. This process is metalepsis. Point 9 makes explicit that metalepsis, which underlies the manifesto itself, is also one of the techniques through which I develop “interlacings”. Indeed, the compositions I have written since 1997 interweave with one another, building a meta-composition of compositions. For example, a theme that ends one composition may appear in a more developed form in another, but may also serve as the incipit of a third or an ostinato in yet another. All the thematic materials I create recur across different compositions, so that no composition in my Opus is “detached” from the others. Sometimes these are “sounds” that appear in different compositions. Sometimes they are identical formal structures: certain formal behaviours in one composition are identical to those in another, as though the structure of a whole composition had become the structure of a subsection of another. Finally, all the compositions I have written define and belong to cycles: structures in which each composition has its own autonomous “meaning”, yet acquires a broader meaning when performed with others from the same cycle. Since they are all connected to one another, my Opus is a cycle of cycles. Metalepsis is the method of connecting, joining and moving from one cycle to another. In this way, I give formal value to the two body-centred models of attractiveness and cyclicality. Attractiveness is expressed in the interdependence of one composition and another. A composition “attracts” other compositions towards itself. Attractiveness arises because metalepsis creates a causal link between a work and the others, as though they attracted one another in a relationship of reciprocity and interdependence. The model of cyclicality is revealed through the writing of compositions within closed cycles: each composition follows its own logic while also following the logic of a group.
I express myself artistically through concerts, performances, installations and exhibitions: in concert halls, theatres, galleries, museums, cinemas and shopping centres; indoors and outdoors; in nature at its wildest, such as a forest or a riverbank barely altered by human hands, and at its most “cultivated”, such as a garden or park; in private homes, shops, hospitals and elsewhere. I also express myself through the Internet. To remain in contact with today's society, I practise the multiple presentation of my music [point 10 of my manifesto], incorporating into my creations the greatest possible variety of places and ways of listening to and experiencing my works.