COMPOSER
(text published in 2013 on the Ircam-Centre Pompidou Resources website).
All of his biographies, as incomplete as they are short, are unanimous: Marc Monnet detests biographies. Let us provisionally refrain from seeing in his efforts to blur the lines—in the past, he amused himself by circulating a few somewhat whimsical dates and facts—the manifestation of a pronounced taste for theatricality that would include the composer’s own staging of himself, or even from reading into it the result of a rhetoric of refusal and negation. It is certainly tempting to define certain aspects of the character negatively, based on what he refutes, but let us first try, as he invites us to do, to understand him through his music.
Musicologist Frank Langlois believes that “Marc Monnet does not have his own musical language but rather writing strategies; he does not conceive forms but rather devices.” Confirming this point of view, the chronology of his works, which indeed shows hardly any language constants, even encourages us to abandon following stylistic veins in the composer’s production to focus instead on attitudes toward the genres addressed.
The Piano
Considered reliable biographical data, the pianistic studies that led the thirteen-year-old teenager to the Paris Conservatoire in 1960 were not without impact on his musical sensitivity. Even if he proved resistant to the learning methods in force and found the repertoire practiced at the time rather narrow, he clearly developed a certain fascination for virtuosity, which would mark his own compositions for the instrument. Despite a certain harshness on their surface, the first pieces for or with piano remaining in the catalog bear witness to an attachment to an ample instrumental gesture and a wide coverage of the keyboard, attributable, as much as to a certain theatricalization of the playing, to the Romantic piano, as evidenced by Boites en boite à musique à système (1977) for two pianos and, the same year, Musique(s) en boite(s) à retour à…, where the two pianos sit alongside a countertenor and two percussions.
Two years later, the eight short pieces of La joie du gaz devant les croisées sweep the performer (Jean-Claude Pennetier at the premiere) into a deluge of arpeggios that is as monomaniacal as it is demonic. After more than fifteen years without a single score composed for his instrument—an absence that the composer attributes, as Frank Langlois reports, to the inhibiting effect of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke on his generation—Monnet returned with Imaginary travel (1996) to an equally spectacular piano, but this time transported to an acoustic elsewhere thanks to the diffraction of its resonances by an electronic ring modulation device. Moving alongside a flute, a clarinet, a violin, and a cello in Chant fêlé, still enveloped by widely reverberant electronics, the reassured keyboard becomes by turns a resonator, a harmonic halo, a rhythmic drone bass, a luminous projection, and a haunting knell.
While the Trio No. 1 with piano (1999) reconnects with arpeggios and sprays of notes, nevertheless showing a fairly perceptible repetitive trend, the second (2008) asserts a frontal, almost jarring expressiveness with greater force, one of whose main mechanisms gains ground: the ostinato, envisioned not as a vehicle for trance or as the substrate for variation processes, like the mad mechanics of György Ligeti, but much more as a compulsive, obsessional, irregular movement destined for entropy.
But it is probably with the first book of En pièces (2007, premiered in 2012) that Marc Monnet’s pianistic writing reaches its peak. Highlighted by the title of the collection, the fragmentary aspect of these twelve pieces of very heterogeneous durations is accompanied by a diffuse climate of mystery, which is also maintained by the stage directions and titles of each piece. Based on a remarkable economy of means, the poetic charge of this opus feeds as much on a playful irony as on discreet evocations. These pages, which alternatively partake of the étude, the miniature, or the character piece, could be placed under the sponsorship of Ravelian hedonism (1. “Éclat”), Debussyan stasis (5. “De la résonance” and 9. “L’autre voyage”), the nervous energy of the Prokofiev-style toccata (8. “Rythme-éclats”), or the introversion of Schumann-Eusebius (11. “Pour la mort d’amour”). Virtuotic vehemence (6. “Extrême”) alternates there on a roughly equal basis with the restraint of a rarefied discourse.
The Theatre
In many aspects, Monnet’s music stems from a theatrical approach. However, one would be inclined to follow the composer when he warns the observer against a simplistic and biased point of view that would consist in deducing a direct lineage from his companionship with Mauricio Kagel in Cologne in the 1970s. Monnet early on proclaimed—he was obviously not the only one to do so—the death of opera derived from the Romantic model. But he also showed skepticism toward musical theatre—did he include Kagel’s?—which, according to him, lacked the means to be anything more than a default option, a “poor man’s opera.”
The black humor, which differentiates Monnet from Kagel, extensively colors his stage production, where, if not the theme of death, at least the figure of the deceased dominates, as announced from the outset, like a coat of arms, by the name of the company founded in 1985: Caput Mortuum. The specifications guiding the work of a team that included non-musician actors stipulated that it was then a matter of “creating a music made from the very beginning by conceiving the work (the opera) through oral work with the performers, combining an unrestricted vocal research linked to movement, without starting from any narrative, other than that of the subject.” The final sentence of this argument allows one to appreciate the influence that Artaud’s precepts clearly had on this conception of the stage: “Thus ‘meaning’, ‘narrative’, and ‘signified’ exclude themselves to move toward a sonic and profoundly wild representation, according to rigorous technical training.”
In the years preceding the composer’s specifically scenic production, a piece like Patatras! (1984) for eight musicians suggests, through its writing in alternation and relays rather than as an ensemble, the language dynamics of characters in conversation, while Mélodie pour voix et clarinette contrebasse already seems to lead Françoise Kübler and Armand Angster, the work’s dedicatees, onto the ground of a certain musical openness and a theatrical bodily attitude. The voice is noted there not on full staves but on one, two, or three lines prescribing an “indeterminate but relative pitch,” while the multiphonic sounds of the clarinet are left “to choice.” The vocal material is entirely phonetic, but the notation of the dynamics, on the other hand, is precise.
In 1986, the company offered the premiere of the short piece Inventions for 3 actors/vocalizers, a dancer, and magnetic tape, augmented the following year by Commentaires d’inventions. With its programmatic title, À corps et à cris (1988) develops work on bodily attitudes (spasmodic stamping, neurotic repetition of gesture, warrior posture) and more generally on the sonic imprint of corporality. Conceived “for three vocalizer-actor performers and MIDI system,” Probe witnessed the following year a reflection on the scenic space: confined to a cruciform stage platform submerged in the middle of the audience, the action takes shape, or takes body, in a restricted space, delimited for it and not, according to the composer-director’s point of view, a utilitarian or endured space imposed by the venue of the performance.
Then came Fragments (1990-93), where Monnet further reduced the non-bodily and non-vocal sonic part, and once again dispensed with intelligible words and narrative plot in favor of a shredded action dominated by cries and gestures. It is difficult to gauge the role that his four-year residency, starting in 1991, at La Filature in Mulhouse may have played in the composer’s gradual distancing from his company, but it was ultimately just after the latter’s dissolution that his scenic production reached its peak with Pan! (2000-2004, premiered in Strasbourg in 2005). Based on fragments of the eponymous text where Christophe Tarkos (P.O.L., 2000) drains an unpunctuated verbal flow rhythmed by quasi-litanic repetitions, and also by virtue of the collaboration of Pascal Rambert, the staging became less minimalist and even showed a tendency toward truculence with the use of puns (two white peacocks roam the stage, while a revolver shot rings out at the crucial moment); as for the music, it gained in orchestral density.
A cycle like the Chansons imprévues (1992), though clearly arising from a theatrical approach despite its status as concert music, seems to warrant examination as a complementary facet, upon which the composer, having become the author of the text (except for “décapeur”, written by Valère Novarina), ceases to set meaning and non-meaning back-to-back in order to better dismiss them, choosing instead to abound in a sur-meaning or a surrealist meaning.
The Quartets and the Chamber Universe
Like very many composers and despite sometimes radical statements of intent, Marc Monnet seems to make his appointments with the string quartet privileged moments where writing concentrates and refines itself. The iconoclastic temptation fades in favor of the implicit validation of a genre synonymous with interiority and quintessence. The first quartet, Les ténèbres de Marc Monnet (1984), offers a dark but radiant matter, like a black light. The language is agitated, quivering, tossed about by the instability of a sliding intonation and the sharp contrast of very diversified textures, but channeled by often chromatic or diatonic melodic guides. Its particularly discreet, almost elusive ending is the polar opposite of a theatrical twist.
If, despite the fact that they share a certain sobriety of writing with the first quartet, it is difficult to consider the four pieces for solo cello born in the 1980s as sketches or studies, it is tempting to see them as a peaceful antidote. The introspection is rather meditative, and the dominant nostalgic atmosphere is never heavy. After the relative astringency of the four-movement Fantasia semplice, Chant (1984) introduces the use of quarter-tone intonation, as well as a certain lyricism, prolonged in Terzo (1987).
Even more marked by disruptions, lacerated by sudden silences or stinging chords, Close (1993-94), the second quartet, illustrates how the composer distrusts globalizing forms and “prefers to play on the arbitrariness of form: abolishing the unity of development in favor of fragmentation, reinforcing cuts and silences.” The first part of a triptych, it shares a significant portion of its musical DNA with String Quartets Nos. 3 and 4, Close-up and Closeness (1998). Framed by a very tenuous beginning, entirely in harmonic sounds punctuated by the woodblock, and an equally stripped-down ending where a second accessory, the triangle, makes its appearance, Closeness confirms the composer’s predilection for strong contrasts; one can also note an avoidance of voice polyphony, as well as the recurrent and structuring presence of scale fragments.
The String Quartet No. 6 (2007) is to date the longest of the series, but also the most fragmented. These eight “quartet movements,” made of spaces of “dazzling speed,” “fullness,” and “rebound,” alternate furtive movements, half-tone oscillations, glissandi, repeated notes in the manner of Morse code, or lines tapered in the high register. The material, more open than in the previous quartets, includes a few tonal chords, like the two chords of the fifth movement (“space of fullness 2”), presented successively under different lighting, occasionally takes on a lyrical impulse (6), fleeting octaves that appear like Beethovenian ghosts (3), and a syncopated, repetitive groove. The oscillation that closes the last movement refers explicitly to “space of fullness 2,” suggesting a formal elaboration that does not exclude macro-formal marking. As for the Seventh Quartet (2009), it relies on the repetition and mutation of motifs, a process resulting in a juxtaposition of vignettes not devoid here and there of expressionist harmonic resonances.
Clandestine Concertos
One cannot help but be struck by the constancy with which Marc Monnet has applied himself since the beginning of our century to accompanying the creation of each of his concertos with an argument aimed at demonstrating that it is precisely not a concerto. Yet the composer does not write anti-concertos either, but wishes to abolish any reference to the social model that he believes is inevitably correlated with the soloist/orchestra relationship: the individual versus the mass, condemned to a relationship of struggle or domination, even if this relationship could be envisioned in a dialectical light. Why then persist in confronting a soloist with an orchestra, the former figuring prominently on the concert program, unlike the frequent anonymity of the rank-and-file musicians, and most often placed at the front of the stage? But above all, why stop at this dominant/dominated relationship that a composer like György Ligeti, with his Cello Concerto, had musically subverted as early as 1966 by favoring a relationship of inclusion, where the soloist colors and animates the orchestra without giving up the soloist’s virtuosity?
Despite the device imagined for Bosse, crâne rasé, nez crochu (1998-2000) in order to “allow a more active listening,” which notably consists in “breaking the old concertante form” by inserting three interludes for two pianos between the five movements, or “adding here and there a character disrupting the listening,” or even “playing on lighting effects”—here, the man of the theatre comes to the rescue of the composer—it is clearly the concerto genre that wins out, by the very fact that the soloist(s) stand(s) out from the ensemble due to a superior virtuosic density, which cannot but singularize them acoustically. Before this particularly alive and dynamic musical object, where the most diverse textures collide, sometimes multiplied by electronics (realized by Ircam, which commissioned the work), one hardly thinks of reproaching the composer for having “accepted to merge into a form of the past,” which is precisely what he seeks absolutely to avoid.
Épaule cousue, bouche ouverte, cœur fendu (2007-2008) is probably the only piece involving soloists and ensemble of which Monnet has actually made a non-concerto. The solo violin intervenes several times, notably during a long introduction of more than five minutes out of the short half-hour that the work lasts, but always strictly uncovered, so that it is never confronted with the rest of the ensemble. As for the countertenor, he is called upon only sparingly and in a quasi-instrumental manner. In a universe with a more pronounced tonal anchoring than usual, one rediscovers the feeling of seeing a succession of changing musical landscapes, including octave sonorities, a motoric drive evoking Adams as much as Reich, vaporous sheets, or even, thanks to a substantial electronic part (Thierry Coduys, Ircam), a memory of a deliquescent post-Romantic adagio, as if mired in a slippery microtonal intonation.
The modalities of intervention of the solo cello (late appearance, extremely reduced cadence, stepwise melodic material, confined to a narrow ambitus and often restricted to a second-interval oscillation, long passage in dialogue with the trumpet), barely more than the formal characteristics (four main movements, interspersed with fleeting “Ersatz” or “Sketches”), do not really obscure the concertante nature of Sans mouvement, sans monde (2010). The addition to the orchestra of somewhat anecdotal accessories, continued in mouvement, imprévus, et… (2012-2013) “for orchestra, violin, and other gadgets,” undoubtedly stems from those strategies intended to intervene on listening. The electric siren reinforces a rather hard material, treated in blocks, while the wind machine seems summoned as much for its referential charge as for its acoustic contribution of white noise. Nothing prevents one from hearing the firearm explosion as a self-reference to Pan!, which had also been premiered at the Strasbourg Musica festival. Setting aside a few glissandi and slightly crushed sounds, the violin part relies on a virtuosity that extends, rather than breaks with, Romantic canons. But unlike Épaule cousue…, whose violin part was already intended for Tedi Papavrami, the alternation of the soloist and the orchestra no longer causes, after the long initial solo, mutual exclusion.
Marc Monnet’s activity as an organizer and programmer is not unrelated to his work. It was as a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome, from 1976 to 1978, that he founded the “Contemporary Music Week,” the first showcase of composers’ activity intended for an outside public, and of which he was to retain the direction four years after the end of his Roman stay. The blank check he obtained in 2002 when he was entrusted with the artistic direction of the Printemps des Arts de Monaco showed, after a dozen editions of this festival, how his programs align, in certain of their characteristics, with his compositions: openness and diversity of musical material, concern for the form and staging of the concert, experienced far beyond the boundaries of the hall and the duration of a single event, concern for the audience’s listening attitude and, possibly, a zest of provocation. Although careful not to confuse his institutional position with his activity as a composer, and notably not to make the former the promoter of the latter, Marc Monnet inevitably projects his creative identity onto that of the festival in his charge, to the benefit of the latter. Resistant to conventions, inclined toward invention, coherent but unpredictable, he keeps his hands free to create surprises.
¹ CD booklet ZZT100403, p. 7 (unpaginated booklet). ² Ibid., p. 2 (unpaginated booklet). ³ Composer’s website: https://www.marcmonnet.com/caput-mortuum.html ⁴ Interview with Jacques-Emmanuel Fousnaquer, booklet of the disc Montaigne 782008, p. 6, 1992. ⁵ All of these citations come from the score published by Cerise Music. ⁶ Score note.