Music for theatre

CINERE [a part of Alias] - 2020

Conception and stage direction - Jacopo Baboni Schilingi
Text and actress Elsa Revcolevschi
Music - Jacopo Baboni Schilingi
Video Jacopo Baboni Schilingi & Eric Cordier
Lights Eric Cordier
Violinist Guillaume Antonini
27-02-2020 - 20h30 La Scène Numérique - 11 Cours Louis Leprince-Ringuet, 25200 Montbéliard
Producers Saison Numérique#4, EMI-Ensemble de Musique Interactive, Conservatoire de musique, de danse et d'art dramatique du Pays de Montbéliard

Cinere, performed by Elsa Revscolevschi alone on a stage, is embodied by two evanescent situations: Elsa’s life and her body. Through an intimate inner monologue by the two women, Cinere reveals the humanity of its actresses.

Conception: Anne-Laure Walger-Mossière (2015)

Music - Jacopo Baboni Schilingi

Anne-Laure Walger-Mossière creates a free and burlesque adaptation, in grumelot, of Homer's Odyssey. Ulysses is a great and brave seaman but he has to face many obstacles (storms, the cyclops, Poseidon, Circe,Lotophages ...) on his return to Ithaca he gives his last fight to find back his wife, Penelope, who was waiting for him since long time before.

Conception: Anne-Laure Walger Mossiere (2009)

Music - Jacopo Baboni Schilingi

In an indefinite future, Claire is arrested for having torn up advertising posters. She denounces consumer society and she is part of an extremist militant organization. She is interviewed by a woman who appears to be the building caretaker, whose character remains ambiguous. Is this strange woman cruel or gentle? Is she linked to the administration or secretly revolted? And what about the young convict? Is she really passionate and involved in political morals or is she manipulated by a society exceeding her? The real reasons for the arrest will turn out step by step. The spiral of a mafia justice is set up and against the injustice, Claire has only one alternative: choose between a heroic life or a hopeful future much like a modern Antigone. An affectionate relationship made of violence and tenderness began to grow between the two women in an often-surprising sharp and poetic dialogue. This piece echoes of all the great movements of racial protest of the twentieth century, sometimes on a sarcastic tone but at the end brings light to certain truths of the world in which we currently live in. The writing is resolutely tinged by anticipation which brings the spectator to be torn between fiction and reality, prospects and present. As if playing with the future could tell us more about our present time...

"Interdit au moins de 16 ans" (2006) (forbidden for under sixteen years old) is a show built around the painter Jean-Blaise Evéquoz, his erotic paintings and erotic poetry generator (Jean-Pierre Balpe), generative music (Jacopo Babobi-Schilingi).

Given in Sion (Switzerland) in June 2006.

Conceived by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi (music) and Jean-Pierre Balpe (texte)

Commissioned by Biennale de Poètes en Val de Marne

Performances: November 21st 2003 — Théâtre Molière, Paris, France.
November 22nd 2003 — Médiathèque d’Ivry-sur-Seine, Ivry-sur-Seine, France.

Two customers are at the « bar of poets ». A woman and a man read texts for themself.

Thus, music is a new approach to understand poetry. The meaningful texts allow those two characters to discuss with a satiric tone. Images from the out world are nearly intrusive in this muted bar. They are an introduction for other levels in this verbal exchange: between two different conceptions of image, between what is reading and image’s meaning, and between reality and poetry.

Music spectacle conceived by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi

Commissioned by CICV Festival - 2000

A soloist (Nicholas Isherwood, bass voice) creates interferences starting from Jean Pierre Balpe's texts between the text that appears on a series of screen and the one that he pronounces. The singer becomes a character who changes personality in every moment following the texts he has to read. The orchestra (18 musicians) is spread out in the audience.

Conception: Jacopo Baboni Schilingi and Jean-Pierre Balpe
Commissioned by: IRCAM and the Biennale internationale des poètes en Val-de-Marne
Presented: November 14, 1997 - Espace de projection, IRCAM, Paris [France]

Trois mythologies et un poète aveugle [Three Mythologies and a Blind Poet] is a poetic and musical performance in which automatically generated texts, musical composition and human interpretation become part of a shared creative process. Conceived by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi and Jean-Pierre Balpe, the work brought together the poets Jean-Pierre Balpe, Henri Deluy and Joseph Guglielmi, soprano Donatienne Michel-Dansac, pianist Jean-Marie Cottet and percussionist Ève Payeur. The scenographic proposal was by Michel Jaffrennou.

Poetry and music in dialogue

Since 1996, Baboni Schilingi had been developing computer systems that integrated algorithmic procedures and artificial intelligence into his compositional practice. His interest extended beyond the automatic production of musical material to the possibility of making composition a dynamic, interactive process.

For this project, Balpe developed text generators based on grammatical, lexical and stylistic rules. During the performance, texts reflecting the characteristics of the three poets’ respective styles appeared on screens. Each poet could read the proposed text, modify it or intervene in its formulation. The encounter brought the author face to face with a computational representation of his own writing, introducing an unpredictable stimulus into the creative process.

Baboni Schilingi’s musical generator interacted with the textual system. The two exchanged information, allowing semantic characteristics of the generated texts to influence the production of music. Poetry and music were therefore connected through their generative processes. The performers also contributed to transforming the musical outcome as the performance unfolded.

Composing a field of possibilities

The work raises a question that remains central to Baboni Schilingi’s research: what does it mean to compose when every event is not determined in advance? In a generative system, the composer can define the conditions through which events emerge. The identity of the work resides in its rules, relationships and possibilities for transformation, as well as in the sounds and words heard during a particular performance.

In Trois mythologies, poetic and musical writing formed systems capable of producing multiple configurations. Each performance realised one possibility within a larger field. This approach embodies what Baboni Schilingi describes as controlled indeterminacy: uncertainty deliberately introduced into a formalised structure. The composer establishes relationships and limits, while the final form emerges through their interaction with events taking place during the performance.

The blind poet

The title’s “blind poet” can evoke figures from literary and mythological traditions, as well as the computer itself. A machine can manipulate rules and produce formally coherent language without this necessarily implying consciousness, sensitivity or artistic intention. Blindness becomes a metaphor for the distance between producing a form and experiencing the world to which it refers.

The performance stages this tension between computational generation and human experience. The systems produce poetic and musical material; the people on stage interpret it, transform it and give it meaning. The artistic encounter concerns both the creation of forms and the ways in which meaning is constructed.

A continuing artistic inquiry

This experience contributed to the research that later led Baboni Schilingi to formulate his consubstantial aesthetics. In this conception, human intelligence, with its rational, irrational and emotional dimensions, and artificial intelligence participate in a single creative act. Their participation does not imply identical capacities or consciousness: consubstantiality concerns the artistic process and the relationships through which a work takes shape.

Seen from the perspective of his later reflections on the ethics of effort, the project also raises the question of artistic responsibility. Delegating operations to a computer requires the artist to consider why a particular system is used, what it makes possible and how it transforms the work. The significance of Trois mythologies et un poète aveugle lies in this sustained inquiry into the relationship between automatic generation, human interpretation and the artistic thought that gives them purpose.

Hervé Nisic’s film Personne, devoted to Jean-Pierre Balpe’s work and the making of the performance, documents this experience. A recording of the 1997 performance is also preserved in the IRCAM media library.