Servière Antonin (1977) Selected for the Second Year
Antonin Servière is a composer, researcher and a musician. While he completed higher instrumental studies (First Prize of Saxophone in 2004, Master’s-level teaching certification in 2005), he studied orchestration with Alain Louvier from 2001 to 2003 and composition with Philippe Leroux from 2004 to 2006. He pursued his study of composition with Michael Jarrell, Luis Naon and Eric Daubresse (new technologies) from 2007 to 2010 at the Conservatory of Geneva (HEM), Switzerland. Concerned with History and speech about music, Antonin Servière completed a whole curriculum in Musicology (Bachelor, Master, Ph.D). He is the author of a doctoral thesis about Jean Sibelius. His career is now devoted both to composition and artistic research. Recently, he has been more and more interested in semiotics and the rhetorical dimension of music. His music has been played by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (Montreal), Contrechamps (Geneva), Les Cris de Paris ("Voix Nouvelles" composition session, Royaumont abbey, 2011) and the musicians from the Orchestre National de Lorraine (Acanthes Center for contemporary music, 2010 and 2011).
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servière antoninPRESENTAZIONE OPERA
At the core of my concern is the quest of style as an immanence of the composition itself. More generally, I consider this concept of quest (to be distinguished in this case from a mere "research"), be it a spiritual, esthetic or intellectual quest, as a dimension of primary importance to the "contemporary" composer.
My academic degrees in musicology led me to have a particular relation to History (whether music history or "general" history) and to question different possible ways to refer to it. This questioning led me in turn to think about musical narrativity and its consequences on musical forms. Recently, I have been also interested in semiotics and the rhetorical dimension of music. Aiming to understand, in particuliar, how music can be received as a connotated object and refer to an external content. For instance, the evocation/expression of holiness or whatever historically or contextually connotated musical emotion.
I am also concerned in a broad sense with the correspondence between an artistic project and the final artistic work, as well as the level of awareness the artist can have (or must have) of it. He aims as much as possible, indeed, to reduce the potential discrepancy between the compositionnal idea, the artistic object itself and its eventual perception by the listener. This issue is of course related to Jean Molino's (and later Jean-Jacques Nattiez's) semiotic tripartition (tripartition sémiotique) according to which the communication process between an artist and the "receiver" via the work of art is divided into three dimensions represented by the poïetic, the neutral (or immanent) and esthesic level.
I usually present my music with the use of three basic concepts : history, form and narrativity, all of them being closely related to each other.
I. History. The Same & the Different : Re-writing Of Pieces
In a general sense, I think it is extremely important for a contemporary artist to be aware of what has been done before him and the historical-cultural-sociological context of his time. In our context of post-modernism and the end of ideologies of any kind, I would not personally hesitate to gather the knowledge of history and what I call the level of awareness around a common requirement.
My own interest towards history can be situated at two levels :
--> 1. An "internal" history : my own musical materials and their developments,
--> 2. An "external" history : historical images used as potential semiotical objects.
The first can be related to Boulez's famous concept of "work-in-progress" (although in my case it is a rather a simple version of it), whereas the second is merely a source of inspiration. In my case, history conveys a set of principles or laws which I try to transfer into musical principles : working with the possible transformations and/or derivations of materials, processually or not, often despite their commonness or lack of originality. I have three reasons for this : first because I often haven't been able to convey the idea of a piece at first time, secondly because it has been often a good way to try new experimental developments, then because it helps me to practice composition as a craftsman.
II. Form. Exploring A "Processual Developing Variation"
My second interest in music is related to form and what I called "processual developing variations" :
- how to build a development, which is for me one of the most essential dimensions of music,
- how to renew a given material using different kinds of variations (e.g., with no change of pitches)
- how to give to these developed variations a teleological dimension (cf. “dramaturgy” of music).
This aim often led me to write dense polyphonic structures, involving several voices or musical “characters” confronting to each other. It is also for me an essential aspect of a musical “dramaturgy”.
III. Rhetorics, Semiotics. Setting a network of signs ?
III. a) Narrativity
My interest towards narrativity came from a piece called “Car je croyais ouïr de ces bruits prophétiques (…)”, for horn and live electronics, which was based on a poem by Alfred de Vigny. The Horn is indeed one of the symbols of Romanticism in literature and its medieval atmosphere is the pretext for giving the author the opportunity to express his inner feelings. I was interested in this double layer of style and started to question the narrative issue in music :
- how to use poems and poetic inspiration without being merely literal
- how to extract the dramaturgical potential of a poem to build a form
- how to play with external / stylistic references / connotations in music (here, Romanticism).
III. b) Rhetorics & Semiotics
Recently, I have been interested in semiotics and the rhetorical dimension of music and how a traditional material can sound differently, because acting as a sign for the listener. As we know, musical signs can act either as "sign-functions" (cf. Umberto Eco) or as symbols (cf. Todorov). But in any case, musical objects do have a signification, through their connotations. I wish to be able to play with their meaning as well as to control their power of persuasiveness.
Migratio, for ensemble (13 instruments, duration : 10 ')
Migratio stands for a moving. The piece can be divided in 2 or 3 parts, depending on what type of material is considered as structuring the whole. It starts with an opposition between two instrumental groups (more or less represented by the high and low registers), the latter gradually becoming more prominent in the course of smaller sections. In the second part, these low-pitched instruments finally gets the primacy. The last part of the work is a sort of “negative” of the first, although the opposition is shifted towards another direction. All in all, the piece follows a process-like motion : moving of an instrumental group from the background to the foreground, moving the perspective from the listener's point of view. The music is shifting from an essentially harmonic world and a first type of opposition (two instrumental groups) to a melodic one and a second type of opposition (a soloistic line and the ensemble). This process is achieved through a set of gesture-like "episode" sections in which individual characters foreshadow the last part (in that respect, they can be considered as signs). This processed-like motion makes Migratio a journey from polyphony to monophony through heterophony. However, this moving process has also a narrative dimension, in the way every type of material in use has for me a semiotic function, a sign which says : "we are now going there". They represent a musical world, although the latter may not be defined entirely. In this view, the semiotics are closely related to narrativity and a rhetorical way to put it into music. A good example of this is the end of the piece and this endless-lile melody of the violin, a fairly common effect if ever. It has a strong rhetorical effect on the listener, especially when played by the first violin in an ensemble and the historical connotation that comes with it. It says something, and the content of what it "says" is in this case entirely determined by what came before. It also tells something : as a narrator who would tell the "story" and the signification of the preceding elements, objects or any musical material.
One of my next projects is now to deepen these ideas and trying to find more appropriate forms in order to fit the narrative dimension of such pieces.
Antonin Servière, 13.XII.2010