Claude Vivier

[…] In our civilization, people always expect answers. An aesthetic answer, to say, ah ha! this is the truth. And political systems are the same thing. They try to find answers and they try to apply those answers to masses of human beings. Which is sometimes very dangerous to individual lives. What’s happening now is that there’s a total shift in the political fuse and…

Time, love, intimate ones usually. But it’s hard to say I ask questions in my music, because music is such a … Once you’ve got the piece there, it’s done, you know. My music is a paradox. Usually in music you have some development, some direction or some aim, the big bang or crescendo or whatever which in my music, happens less and less. I just have statements, musical statements, which somehow, lead nowhere. Also on the other hand, they lead somewhere, but it’s on a much more subtle basis. Not on the basis of mastering the crescendo or mastering the actual expectations of the listeners, I mean expectations in the dramatic sense. Very often my music doesn’t have these expectations. It’s often only statements, very clear statements, sometimes with dramatic curves, but not as in romantic music.

I could compare myself with some Japanese musics or Balinese musics. Among the western composers I could compare myself with Mozart and Chopin.

Yeah.

Well, there’s always curves…but there is in both those composers a purity in terms of line, melody, harmony and style of development, where you have a cell, getting bigger and bigger and developing itself.

Yes, it is going somewhere, but it’s not going where…

Or Beethoven or even Bach. Oh! It’s hard to define this. Because I’m not anti-gestural per se – anti-gestural would be some pieces of those artists in New York, where you have nothing. But here, if you have a melody then it has to go somewhere.

It’s anti-Romantic, but people would say it’s romantic sometimes. Which shows a very bad understanding of romantic music itself. Actually maybe the best examples of my music are those last pieces … Copernicus, Lonely Child, Marco Polo, Samarkand, Orion … Boukhara. There I dropped completely what was terribly important in western music, counterpoint, and I was only working with melody. That’s the most important link with non-western music. The melody is almost automatic. There’s a lot of automism in my music in fact, even if it doesn’t sound like it. The melody gives the colors, and sometimes even a counterpoint, but only as a matter of phase-shifting, and even the phase-shifting, I use it less and less.

It’s pure melody, with colors on top of it, and the colors are contrapuntal. Whereas Boukhara, which is the purest one I’ve done – 13 minutes of melody – there’s only the colors. And the very last one, Et Je Rêverai Cette Ville Etrange, there’s only melody. In the opera I used harmony, in Orion I used mirror chords, things like that, to get the colors, and in Lonely Child I use the colors. I’ve gotten maybe to the purest form of one melody, in Et Je Rêverai Cette Ville Etrange. In Marco Polo, I did a whole development with one sound; interval, harmony, harmony plus colors, interval plus colors, and that made up the whole piece. And in that piece, there is a fluidity of melodic treatment and development to color. And there are sometimes lines, and even directions…and transformations of the colors. For instance, sheer color to rhythmical patterns to noise…

Yeah. But it’s also process development … Though not in the last one. There’s a process, somehow the color goes somewhere. But at the same time, because of the melody, there is a stasis, it doesn’t really go anywhere!