Francesca Verunelli

Songs and Voices–Francesca Verunelli in conversation with Alexey Munipov

 

»Songs & Voices« is inspired by Kafka’s short text–that alternative take on the Odysseus myth. What was the initial impulse behind it–the seed the whole cycle grew from?

 

The reference to Kafka is often taken very literally–as if it were a piece »about« this text. For me it’s a poetic resonance. The poetic core is basically that absence is stronger than presence. The absence of the singing would be stronger than the presence of it.

 

That was the point, because the first part of this cycle is about what voice is when nobody is singing. This is how it all started. I was reflecting on voice and singing in general. I hadn’t been writing for voice for a long time before this piece–which I am doing quite a lot now, but up to a certain point I wasn’t at all.

 

I was thinking: in an instrumental piece, what is the essence of singing when there is not a singer singing? So each of these movements is where one instrument–or one sound–takes the role of this ghost singing.

 

And then the first instrumental part called for: what happens if voices are there? It was kind of a natural consequence. The idea was to involve six singers. The whole piece is a travel around what voice is. It’s not just a voice singing significant text.

 

The voice seems separated from instrumental sound because there is a significant text, a meaning, a singer singing to the public. But in fact, the voice is also the mother of all sounds. It’s probably the first sound you heard in your own life.

 

When you study an instrument, you’re always taught to »sing«, metaphorically. Every instrument was born as an attempt to replicate singing: a vibrating thing that we have in our throats–the vocal cords. A tube with air going in is pretty much the same idea. So the voice is the model–and the mother–of all sounds.

 

I was trying to understand how one can go from there to singing a text. In the middle of this there is a trained voice. But voice is much more than that. We sing under the shower, we scream–our way of dealing with voices is very wide. This travel around the voice was the core of Songs & Voices.

 

The sirens myth is one of the crucial myths of Western civilization–it deals with the fear of emotions, as well as the fear of music. The sirens try to capture audiences through singing, through sound–through something ephemeral, seemingly harmless, bodiless. It’s strange and unsettling that sounds moving through space can have such force. Odysseus binds himself to the mast and fills his crew’s ears with wax in order to resist. The myth expresses a centuries-long fear that feeling can overpower intellect, that the body can overtake the mind.

 

There’s even a famous line by Kant: a purely physical response to music might be called pathological. Would you say that in Songs & Voices you were also, in some sense, exploring this strange, frightening power of sound?

 

For me, it was rather the sirens as a frontier. In the classical world they were a limit, but also a frontier: if you transgressed, you went into the underworld–you were not living anymore, you were going somewhere.

 

In that sense, they are linked to rituals of passing–from adolescence to adulthood–and to the passage from life to death. That was closer to what I was looking at, because this piece is linked personally to the loss of a beloved one. Probably that passage was what I was looking at in that moment.

 

So it has this memorial dimension–this sense of approaching the border of death?

 

Yes.

 

And it’s not only an extramusical thing, because sound itself is always about appearing and disappearing–being born and dying in front of us.

 

And in the end, the singing is completely deconstructed.

 

I never had extramusical elements in my music. With Kafka, it was a text I knew, and it resonated with this idea that absence is more powerful than presence. But I’m not trying to put his text into music.

 

You also explore the voice as a kind of song that inhabits the body and precedes speech. There’s a scientific hypothesis that before humans learned to speak, they might have had something like a »music-language«–a music-speech complex system of cries and vocalized sounds used to communicate. When listening to Songs & Voices, I felt as if the piece was bringing back this prehistoric form.

 

I’m very happy to hear this, because that’s absolutely true. As I told you, I was wondering for a very long time: what is voice beyond the threshold of a singer singing a text? That’s not the only thing that voice is.

 

There are so many other things. What you’re talking about is very important. I’ve also seen it happening in kids: there is a form of singing that precedes talking. Before we associate, intellectually, a word with a thing–meaning.

 

By the way, have you ever tried to listen to your music with your kids? How did they respond?

 

Oh, they are interested. Maybe because they are used to listening to music a lot–I don’t know how it would be with kids who are not exposed to it that often. But they are very interested. Often they dance. They move with their bodies. They sing. They ask me about sounds: »What is this?« They are definitely involved.

 

I’ve worked a lot with children, introducing them to contemporary music. And I’ve noticed how quickly they respond to it. It’s often assumed that it isn’t for children–that it’s a different world, difficult even for adults. But children don’t know that yet. In my experience, they can listen with real openness and respond immediately–and they don’t need to be »prepared«.

 

I think this is the only way to listen to music in general. If you already know what you »should« listen to, then you’re not listening at all.

 

I don’t think we need a specialized public. Either you go freely and let the music come to you–do something in you, whatever that might be–or you don’t, be it classical music or any other. It’s letting it be, being open to it.

 

How did you work with electronics in this piece? As I understand, your approach is very delicate. You don’t rely on electronics in the conventional sense.

 

Mostly it’s one use: subverting the acoustic balance of sounds.

 

You have microscopic sounds–very small collateral sounds–that in a normal concert situation you don’t get, because a few meters away they are too small to come to you. Other parts of sound win in the balance.

 

The idea was to take back these microscopic details and be able to listen to them. So mostly it’s microphones: many microphones in different places on the instruments, capturing different qualities. Then it recreates a way of listening that is very different from a purely acoustic context. So you can create your own instruments, in which sound relationships are different.

 

In your project wo.man sitting at the piano, you asked: what is electronics without an electronic sound? And in this cycle–what is singing without a voice? Why is absence so important to you?

 

Maybe because we see something when we lose it–when it’s not in front of us. When you are far from something, you really get what it meant to you, what it is for you.

 

Before Songs & Voices you’d mostly avoided writing for voices–perhaps because text and music felt like separate worlds. Were there other reasons you were cautious about writing for voice?

 

Mainly that. I didn’t feel like putting a text into music. The relationship should be different.

 

Also, I wanted to investigate the relationship between voice and instrumental sound–which is very intimate. In a sense, the voice is part of every instrument: every instrument is singing, metaphorically. And also the opposite is true: the voice is connected to an instrumental voice, or a word. I had to find a way to work on that connection.

 

There is a moment in the piece where a very beautiful song starts. To my ears it almost resembles a Monteverdi madrigal, something Renaissance-like. It felt like a key moment. What is that moment for you?

 

There are only two poems in the whole piece, so that’s clearly meaningful text. There is also a personal reference: the song is singing about someone. And I feel it’s again an absence–an impossible song.

 

There is a special tuning to the guitar, similar to a lute. Some lower strings are higher than the next higher string. It’s all microtonal. It’s like a lost song–a song that can’t be, in a place you can’t reach anymore.

 

It’s more like: if you were singing, trying to find a tune, to find the right song for someone–but you can’t. So it’s an impossible song.

 

I know you’re very focused on musical temporality. You’ve said that for you, sound is a tool to write time. How does that manifest in Songs & Voices?

 

It manifests everywhere. I work a lot on harmonic issues–temperaments, tunings. I’ve worked on this a lot and still am.

 

In general, what you do in harmony can make sense only if it’s related to time. You can’t define a chord if you extract it from its timing–from how it makes sense in musical time. This is true also at the level of sound: whatever sound or chord you figure out is always related to the timing of it. You can’t think outside time.

 

You see tuning as an ecosystem. At this year’s ECLAT festival, several composers use similar vocabulary–some speak explicitly about creating a sonic ecosystem.

 

For me it’s simple: harmonic structures, tuning, temperaments may feel abstract, but thinking of them in a biologically integrated way with the sounds you use is the only viable way.

 

Take a saxophone multiphonic. These sounds are chords, and they are not tempered. They need the temperament to live in–that’s how they can live and relate.

 

I think it was Lachenmann who said something like: »If you go into the forest, find a beautiful flower, cut it, and bring it home–that’s the problem.«

We have all these sounds from the last century of contemporary music–cool, beautiful sounds–but the problem is: how can they live in time? Listening and tuning are the answer for me.

 

If you treat an interesting sound as an effect, it’s like the cut flower: you put it there, and that’s it. If you want it relating to other things, then you need a harmonic space–an environment.

 

Why do you think so many composers today think in terms borrowed from ecology, biology, forestry? What happened aesthetically or culturally to make this language feel relevant now?

 

There is a hyper-intellectual way of seeing things–disconnecting them from anything human and natural–but it’s probably in the past now.

 

We live in a troubled time, and we need music to be connected to other humans. And that also means thinking of it as part of an ecology–a global ecosystem containing humans, where humans can be human.

 

I’d also like to ask about finding your own musical language. Paris and spectral music made a strong impression on you. At the same time, in France there was the saturation trend–density, noise. But you didn’t really align with any camp.

 

Saturation was big. It was not easy as a young composer to resist it.

 

I was interested in spectral music because of harmonic questions–questions outside temperament. Then I became very interested in extended just intonation–a deep theoretical way of thinking.

 

Harmonic thinking is crucial nowadays because it allows complex sounds to live. Those two things are related.

 

And obviously there are things that come from life, personal experiences–things you can’t rationalize. For example, the voice entered my music world, and now I’m writing more and more for voice. I couldn’t expect it. But the red thread–harmony and its relation to complex sound–was always there.

 

Where did you sense your own territory? What did you want to explore?

 

I feel I’m becoming more radical with time–not because I want to be radical, but because I try not to do anything that is not really necessary.

 

I might see something and think: okay, I could do that, it would sound cool. But if it’s not completely true, completely necessary, I don’t do it. Maybe that wasn’t the case when I was younger.

 

Now I feel there must be a sense of the piece–a vision–and I try to be as true as possible. »Truth« is a more important word for me than »beauty«.

 

If I’m completely true to what I see, then something might happen. But I never try to control what it might do. I’m not trying to manipulate other people’s emotions or listening. I just try to be as true as possible to what I see.

 

When you say »vision«, do you visualize your piece before you compose?

 

I’m kind of a blind person. If you ask me in 30 seconds how you were dressed, I will forget. But I won’t forget your voice.

 

Everything for me comes through my ears. My vision is connected to my listening. It’s very clear and very obscure at the same time.

 

I don’t do graphic sketches or have photographs as a source. I enjoy other things–novels, exhibitions–but they’re not directly a source for the music.

 

What is the most important thing in listening for you?

 

Listening itself is very important for me. I do it almost always. And everything I listen to–in the street, wherever I am–is important. It has been crucial since my earliest memories. It’s difficult for me to think otherwise.

 

Listening isn’t only about music or sounds–it’s our way of perceiving the world. But we tend to avoid thinking about it because it’s omnipresent.

 

For sure. But I’m a very conscious listener. It’s difficult for me to do the opposite–to disconnect. Say, not to listen to the background at the dentist’s office. I always know I’m listening, and I know what I’m listening to. For me it is central.

 

Do you usually start with a concept, or with sound?

 

I start with a strong feeling about something. As I said, it’s clear and obscure at the same time, and I have to take time to understand.

 

At first it’s negative knowledge: I know what it is not–what it won’t be, what it shouldn’t be. Then, little by little, I get closer to what it should be. I see it more clearly. I have a clear sense of what the piece will be, but it takes time to realize it and understand technically how to do it.

 

How do you define the line between what’s necessary and what’s not?

 

It would be easy to have nice-sounding things. Things that work. But…

 

Nice-sounding things and things that work aren’t necessarily the same.

 

By »things that work« I mean effective things. Hence, nice sounding. Not properly nice… Yeah, it’s complicated to talk about.

 

Maybe for some time I felt music was mainly about music. Now I feel there must be something in music that carries something about our being humans among other humans. In art there is always something that carries something about our humanity. Maybe I changed over time as a human being, and now I ask something different from music.

 

Finally: how do the ideas in Songs & Voices connect to what you’re working on next? Did this piece open a new direction?

 

It opened the research on voices. From then on, I’m often working with voice.

 

And the absence/presence question is present in what I’m doing, as well as the question about tunings, working outside the system.