Introduction
Appearing amid the late 1960s profusion of musical groups exploring improvisation, electronic instrumentation, and spectacle in the newly fluid territory between jazz, rock, performance art, and the avant-garde, the Groupe d’Expression Directe de Châteauvallon (GEDC) (1969–70) and its successor Opus N (1970–3) practised a live electronic music analogous in some ways to that of their international contemporaries such as Musica Elettronica Viva, AMM, or Gentle Fire, making use of tape machines, synthesizers, electric organs and pianos, amplified acoustic instruments, and hand-built electroacoustic devices. The groups participated in a lively ecology of experimentation in which musicians moved with some ease between free jazz, electronic music, and art music, and in which the distinctions between the institutionalized forms of electroacoustic music research, committed to rigid research programmes and ‘school’ identities, and the experiments with electronic manipulation found in jazz, rock, and sound for dance, theatre, and radio were rendered porous.Footnote 1
The present article traces the history of the GEDC and Opus N, a changing grouping of improvising electronic musicians composed most frequently of Alain Savouret, Christian Clozier, and Pierre Boeswillwald. With the GEDC’s fourth member, Jacques Lejeune, the quartet was assembled during the first year of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) course at the Paris Conservatoire, which ran from November 1968. This course, like the GRM itself, centred on the teaching and writing of the GRM’s founder, Pierre Schaeffer, who had published the Traité des objets musicaux in 1966, written with the collaboration of GRM members including Sophie Brunet, Beatriz Ferreyra, and Guy Reibel.
This relation to the institutional and aesthetic context of the GRM accounts for some of the particularities of the group: though they drew inspiration from the model of Musica Elettronica Viva and, by the early 1970s, would have been familiar with several of the many live electronic groups active in western Europe, they were marked by their emergence from French electroacoustic music. John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen were thus less significant to their practice than they were to that of others, and they were instead guided at first by the aim of enlivening musique concrète, creating what they termed a musique concrète en direct with newly developed electroacoustic instruments.
While European free improvisation and live electronic music is a growing subject of scholarly study, there remains relatively little work on French examples.Footnote 2 This article draws on recent work that provides a framework for understanding the cross-genre experimentation of the period while attending to the sorts of geographical and institutional particularities alluded to earlier. Considering the two groups as consecutive case studies, I first argue that the GEDC’s dual interest in instrument-building and experimental performance situations complicates existing accounts of electronic musical instrument-building in placing under pressure the category of musical performance and, by extension, that of the musical instrument. In the article’s second half, the case of Opus N serves as a way into a contemporary cultural landscape marked by attempts to transcend boundaries of genre, ethnicity, and class, as well as by the persistence of those boundaries. Opus N’s self-designation as ‘free electric music’ reflects this dynamic, in which new portable electronic instruments or setups did not merely enrich the available sonic palette but also patched the group into a form of electronic music that decentred, without totally disavowing, the canonical loci of ‘serious’ electronic music.
By way of conclusion, I suggest that the concept of ‘orality’ offers one way of understanding the spontaneous, post-literate, recombinative musical practices reliant on audio technologies for their production and circulation, capturing the music’s somewhat Romantic commitment to the collective over the individual and to listening and playing over reading and writing.
Groupe d’Expression Directe de Châteauvallon
The inauguration of the GRM course, which must, for Schaeffer, have seemed an affirmation of his professional and intellectual standing, concealed a contentious misalignment between Schaeffer’s aspirations and those of many students and, indeed, other members of the GRM’s inner circle. For Schaeffer, the course’s search for the fundamental structures of human musical activity took experimental music to be an almost incidental source of data regarding musical experience. By contrast, those students drawn to the course by their awareness of musique concrète, and of Schaeffer as the composer of, say, Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950), hoped to make use of the GRM’s studios at the Centre Bourdan to compose their own electroacoustic music, a hope that was, if not totally frustrated, at least greatly attenuated.Footnote 3 From 1968 to the early 1970s, the tension between the ideal of a homogenous, unified institution directed by its managers towards defined goals and the impulse towards divergent styles, forms, and areas of research would only heighten. As François Bayle, the GRM’s director from 1966, commented in a meeting in November 1969, the GRM had ‘arrived at a limit point of integration, beyond which we must choose: either we integrate completely (and thus, more effectively), or return to a “contestatory” mode’.Footnote 4
Pierre Boeswillwald was the oldest of the four members of the GEDC, born in 1934, and by the time he became a GRM student or stagiaire in 1968 he had been working with electronic sound since the mid-1950s. While an engineering student at the Sorbonne, he was involved in the ritualistic and austere productions of ancient Greek drama put on by the university’s Groupe de théâtre antique and later worked in the studio at the Maison des Lettres, run by the avant-garde literary and radio figures Jean Tardieu and André Almuró. This led to his spending much of the late 1950s and 1960s creating electronic sound for the theatre.Footnote 5 In 1967, Boeswillwald was invited by the director and psychoanalyst Jean Gillibert, director of the Groupe de théâtre antique while Boeswillwald was a student, to work with him at the newly founded cultural centre of Châteauvallon, outside the Mediterranean city of Toulon. Gillibert’s productions in specially constructed amphitheatres, drawing inspiration from Antonin Artaud, Japanese Noh, and an imaginative reconstruction of Dionysian festivals, were characteristic of the approach to theatrical programming that, until the early 1970s, dominated the Châteauvallon season.Footnote 6 It was in this context, far from his private studio in Paris, that Boeswillwald developed his initial practice of ‘live’ electronic sound, manipulating tape machines with members of the company and improvising on an instrument he termed the Cabassophone. This consisted of a loudspeaker (manufactured by the French firm Cabasse) enclosed in a box with various appendages attached, amplified by contact microphones. Among his early improvisations was a passage in Gillibert’s 1967 production of Aeschylus’s The Persians, in which Boeswillwald provided an accompaniment to wordless sequences performed in the style of Noh.Footnote 7
The three other members of the GEDC, born between 1940 and 1945, were all students or recent graduates of the Paris Conservatoire or Paris’s other conservatoire, the Schola Cantorum. Jacques Lejeune and Pierre Boeswillwald were known to each other prior to joining the GRM course, and Lejeune had, like Boeswillwald, created tape music for the theatre in his private studio, including for a production by the Orbe Théâtre at the 1968 Avignon festival (at which Musica Elettronica Viva had also performed).Footnote 8 Alain Savouret studied at the conservatoire and began a stage of the GRM from 1965, becoming a research assistant in 1967.Footnote 9 Christian Clozier studied concurrently at the Schola Cantorum, the Paris Conservatoire, where he was classmates with Savouret, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, beginning an informal relationship with the GRM in September 1967.Footnote 10
Rediscovering performance
The GEDC coalesced at a time when attempts to reconcile the dead medium of tape music with the allure and expressivity of live performance were particularly intense. Haunting the public presentation of musique concrète since its beginnings in the early 1950s, this perceived lack had given rise by the end of the 1960s to a practice of integrating pre-recorded tape and live performance, termed musique mixte, prevalent in the music of older GRM composers such as Bernard Parmegiani and Ivo Malec. At the end of the 1960s, such experiments in musique mixte increasingly drew on the improvisatory aesthetics at the nexus of New Music, free jazz, and performance art.Footnote 11
This tendency reflected a general cultural concern for spontaneity, freedom, and the corporeal or gestural. A Romantic and quasi-primitivist nostalgia for a lost human whole prior to the distortions of writing and technology informed a practical critique of the all-too textual post-war avant-garde. A return to orality, to spontaneous interpersonal interactions, drawing inspiration in part from ‘pre-modern’ or ‘tribal’ (to invoke Marshall McLuhan) cultures, would avert the danger of a ‘dehumanized’ machine music.Footnote 12 In a period in which the aesthetics of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen loomed large, and which took on a particular political valence after 1968, orality would additionally stand for a collective, social musical creativity over and against that of the singular composer–author.
One form this took at the GRM was a concern for the instrument and instrumentality in theory and practice. In the wake of Schaeffer’s Traité, both Guy Reibel and François Bayle, who had worked closely with Schaeffer on his solfège of sound objects, sought to modify and extend Schaeffer’s account of musical experience into a theory of compositional practice: the ideal and atemporal unity of the sound object was, for them, difficult to reconcile with the concrete liveliness of musical creation.Footnote 13 To this end, Reibel gradually elaborated the concepts of ‘play’ and ‘gesture’ as an articulation of embodied instrumental practice to electroacoustic music.Footnote 14
It was in this context that, of the ten groups of four into which the stagiaires were divided in early 1969, one comprising Pierre Boeswillwald, Christian Clozier, Jacques Lejeune, and Fernand Vandenbogaerde, and placed under the supervision of Alain Savouret, began to improvise. Under Savouret, the group’s research elaborated the existing practices of preliminary sound recording for electroacoustic composition – generating material to be worked over from the exploratory sounding of objects, modifying microphone positions, and so on – into a practice of musique concrète en direct.Footnote 15 What was once a pre-compositional gathering of material in the studio was transformed into an instrumental performance practice: to borrow from James Mooney’s writing on Hugh Davies, this move constituted an ‘instrumentalising’ of studio practices.Footnote 16
As Clozier’s description in April 1969 of his recent experiments in electroacoustic improvisation and instrumental play with extended references to Schaeffer’s Traité suggests, the group’s practice was, at this point, aligned with the broader concerns of the GRM under Bayle and Reibel.Footnote 17 The GRM’s senior members were themselves looking with interest to developments in live electronic music: Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) had performed in a series of concerts and colloquia at the American Center in Paris in December 1967, during which the GRM had also presented a concert, and they later performed during the Avignon festival in August 1968.Footnote 18 It seems likely, then, that there was an MEV-shaped hole at the GRM into which the GEDC might fit.Footnote 19 In an April 1969 memorandum concerning the concert in October at which the GEDC would first appear as a group, Reibel suggests a concert, including improvisations, modelled on performances mounted at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, while Bayle suggests inviting Musica Elettronica Viva to perform.Footnote 20
In March, a two-day programme of concerts was mounted by the GRM as part of a season of events in Arras in northern France. On the eighteenth, Bayle curated a programme titled Musique à consommer, musique à écouter, musique à vivre, followed the next day by a series of concerts that included pieces for tape by stagiaires as well as a group improvisation led by Alain Savouret with Pierre Boeswillwald, Jacques Lejeune, Pedro Echarte, Christian Clozier, and Fernand Vandenbogaerde. The GRM’s programme closed with a performance interspersing sections of Guy Reibel’s Variations en étoile (1966–9) with improvisations by the same group.Footnote 21 Whatever the precise causal relations (and Clozier suggests that the Reibel Variations were the initial prompt for the group), there was an appetite for an improvising ensemble that shared the ethos of GRM composers.Footnote 22
In summer 1969, Boeswillwald invited Lejeune, with whom he had collaborated in preparation for the stagiaires’ collective project titled Musiques éclatées, staged at the Avignon festival that August, to work with him at Châteauvallon.Footnote 23 There, Boeswillwald and Lejeune gave the first performance using the name Groupe d’Expression Directe de Châteauvallon, on 5 August 1969. The concert, programmed by Boeswillwald, consisted of a first half of tape pieces by Schaeffer, Reibel, and Lejeune and a second half of performances by Boeswillwald and Lejeune, credited as the GEDC, performing pieces by Boeswillwald titled Deux dialogues, Le fer et le feu, and Le temps et le fluide.Footnote 24
By September, the two projects – Savouret’s atelier and Boeswillwald’s duo with Lejeune – had coalesced: in a GRM meeting that month, Savouret expressed a desire to relinquish some of his duties as director of research in favour of his group devoted to ‘“elaborated improvisations” whose musical products would be put into theatrical form by a director’.Footnote 25 Savouret, responsible for the programming of the GRM’s contribution to Maurice Fleuret’s Journées de musique contemporaine, arranged for this group to perform twice as part of the thirty-hour programme on 23 and 24 October: first, giving the premiere of his Kiosque (1969), a piece for tape and improvisors devised for the group, and subsequently improvising as the GEDC.Footnote 26
As the title suggests, Kiosque (‘kiosk’ but also ‘bandstand’) was concerned with the interference and intermixing of musical performance and everyday life, calling to mind the performance practices of Happenings, street theatre groups, or free jazz ensembles such as Cohelmec. The piece intersperses ethnographic recordings of central African polyphony, rock music, marching bands, bagpipes, and field recordings with improvisations by the GEDC, as well as extracts from pieces by Bayle and Parmegiani, hewing closely to the collage aesthetics of pieces such as Bayle’s Journal and Solitioude (both Reference Bayle1969), Parmegiani’s Pop’eclectic and Du pop à l’âne (also both Reference Bayle1969), and Luc Ferrari’s Hétérozygote (1964).Footnote 27 As well as finding points of inflection between different materials, as in the passage from Baroque polyphonic piano to Banda wind polyphony to bebop saxophone, or from Morse code to West African drumming to church bells and alarm clocks, the piece, as Évelyne Gayou notes, also uses disjunctions between material – a fragment of police sirens or a coastal soundscape – to trouble the distinction between interior and exterior.Footnote 28
From October 1969 to 1970, the GEDC would give several appearances across France, both under the auspices of the GRM and independently. The line-up changed from Savouret’s initial atelier – losing Pedro Echarte and a nonplussed Fernand Vandenbogaerde, and on occasion consisting of just Savouret and Clozier – and a consistent project emerged: as Savouret put it in a 1970 interview, they sought to ‘rediscover … performance [l’interprétation], that is …, the fabrication of a music which comes to resemble tape music but played live’.Footnote 29 They constituted ‘a sort of atelier where the operations of recording in the studio, manipulation in the booth, [and] diffusion in the hall are realized simultaneously’.Footnote 30 As Clozier describes it, it was ‘a music improvised on concrète assonances’, or, in Savouret’s more succinct turn of phrase, ‘improv of the concrète type’.Footnote 31
Performing new instruments
One way of interpreting the GEDC’s activities is under the rubric of technical innovation: they sought a solution to the technical problem of recreating an already stabilized language of electroacoustic composition in a live setting. It is on these terms that Parmegiani took an interest in Savouret and Clozier’s technical advances in live tape manipulation.Footnote 32 Indeed, Clozier and Savouret’s performance in May 1970 at the Biennale de l’équipment électrique, in which their instrumentarium of violin, wind instruments, and hand-built devices was augmented by the EMS VCS3, Peter Zinovieff’s flagship modular synthesizer, which had been released commercially in November the previous year, suggests a similar project. Taking place as part of a trade fair, their performance will have functioned in part as a technical demonstration of the synthesizer’s possibilities. These possibilities, as its name – Voltage Controlled Studio – suggests, were close to those sought by Parmegiani and others, and resonated with a contemporary understanding of the modular synthesizer as a portable studio.Footnote 33
Indeed, the instruments that the group constructed and used drew on existing studio experiments at the GRM with feedback and contact microphones, including Bayle’s amplified zither.Footnote 34 Despite their similarity to the setups required by Cage for his Cartridge Music (1960) or by Stockhausen for his Mikrophonie I (1964), like the ideal guiding the development of the VCS3, these instruments in some ways represented a portable, modularized rendition of the studio techniques available to GRM composers.Footnote 35
Nevertheless, such an interpretation elides the contexts in which these instruments were put in play. The GEDC’s practice of collective, live electronic music was inseparable from a host of experiments that questioned the norms of and boundaries between musical, dramatic, and artistic performance. The meanings of performance were up for debate, as the emergent form of performance art made apparent. The group’s immediate context – the precedent of MEV’s radical participatory performance, Bayle’s desire for a musique à vivre, and Boeswillwald and Lejeune’s commitment to avant-garde theatre – ensured that the concert situation was not a stable or unquestioned frame for the GEDC’s activities. The group’s name, coined by Boeswillwald, who had spent much of the preceding decades in the world of avant-garde theatre, expressed a commitment to a post-Artaudian, anti-representational seam in European performance that included Jean-Louis Barrault, Jean Gillibert, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and the Living Theatre, a seam with which MEV were also closely aligned.Footnote 36 The group’s conception of performance was informed by these contemporary currents, and as well as performing in venues associated with the theatrical avant-garde, Boeswillwald, Lejeune, and Savouret were all, independently of the GEDC, active and committed collaborators with the theatre.Footnote 37 Their concerts foregrounded the performance situation, as the rhetoric of a piece in the Châteauvallon newsletter suggests: a photograph shows the four players divided into two opposing pairs by their motley setup of strings, percussible surfaces, and contact microphones. The text describes the performance, with an ironic invocation of archaic formal dance, as an ‘ambulatory quadrille in several stages’.Footnote 38
The group’s interest in an anti-representational dramaturgy of rites and ceremony is discernible in their fixed concert works of the period, such as Lejeune’s D’une multitude en fête (1969), Boeswillwald’s La promenade du dimanche (1969), and Savouret’s Kiosque, and a transgressive vital intensity characterizes the group’s contribution to an experimental radio broadcast by the Atelier de création radiophonique.Footnote 39 This broadcast, an oneiric depiction of a seedy Paris after dark, combines spiky percussion, eery sounds of bowed metal, and garbled vocal improvisations embellishing on found text from German pornographic catalogues.Footnote 40 After the demise of the GEDC in 1970, the group’s intermedia performance practice reappeared in Boeswillwald and Lejeune’s collaboration with Gilles Baye-Pouey, staged at the 1971 Châteauvallon festival. This piece, titled Les symbiotes exorcisent and described as a ‘direct expression concert-spectacle’, combined improvisations, music on tape, light and photographic projection, and dance. From a broad outline, the participants improvised a ritualist spectacle of man’s alienation from the society and his rediscovery of a primal myth and magic.Footnote 41
The group’s approach to constructing their own devices was self-consciously partial, haphazard, and idiosyncratic. Their ‘electroacoustic’ instruments were founded on the cheap technology of the contact microphone, an increasingly prevalent instrument in indeterminate electronic music after Cage and Stockhausen. The ‘never finished’ assemblages of strings, springs, and resonating bodies were activated with bows or a range of beaters. Boeswillwald’s Cabassophone was expanded into an instrument he baptized the ‘polychor électromécanique’ and supplemented with ‘larsenophones’, creating feedback between cannibalized telephone components. Clozier, for his part, used an instrument built with a colleague in the state radio department that housed the GRM. The Hydrophilus, as it was named in reference to an Alfred Jarry tale about the eponymous water beetle, consisted of a frame of double bass strings of different materials, amplified by contact microphones.Footnote 42
As the poetic names given to the instruments suggest, the group did not conceive of these instruments as neutral media for their music, and instead emphasized the performative, sculptural aspect of their practice. As such, their instruments can be aligned with the kinetic, participatory sculptures of the Baschet brothers and Nicolas Schöffer, which sought to socialize artistic practice by inviting audience interactions, as well as with the arte povera-adjacent aesthetics of ‘junktronics’ practised by MEV. Bernard Baschet, whom Boeswillwald mentions in relation to his instruments, had worked at the GRM for much of the 1960s, and served as its director from 1964 to 1966, where the continuities between a certain mode of 1960s participatory art and a liberal technocratic politics founded on the frictionless meeting of art and science were particularly apparent.Footnote 43
This goes some way to trouble the characterization of the GEDC’s project as a move from studio to stage underwritten by a process of ‘instrumentalization’ suggested earlier. While I borrow the term from Mooney’s research on Hugh Davies’s parallel practice of group electronic music improvisation, the case of the GEDC complicates Mooney’s theoretical apparatus somewhat.Footnote 44 For Mooney, though Davies’s practice results in a proliferation of devices termed ‘instruments’, the concept of the ‘instrument’ remains untroubled. If a lingering nostalgia for a certain musicianly prestige is discernible in earlier discussions of ‘instrumentality’ at the GRM, the instrumental practices of the GEDC are not so easy to align with the learned discipline of the orchestral virtuoso. Instead, ‘instrumentalizing’ appears here as an ongoing process in which the organizing category of the ‘instrument’ is ironized and placed in question, as manifest in the group’s insistence on the contingent, unfinished character of their instruments. This might then be thought of in line with the sorts of indeterminate practices that placed an analogous pressure on the categories of works, composers, and so on.Footnote 45
Brian Kane’s tempering of the form of ‘materialism’ that underwrites accounts such as Mooney’s is useful here. Describing various articulations of the transition between the phonograph disc and magnetic audio tape, Kane argues that ‘materialism on its own cannot provide an adequate account of the “meaning of audiotape” … since such meaning, or range of meanings, is inseparable from the way that prior (and newly generated) cultural practices are related to audiotape’s medium-specific properties’.Footnote 46 ‘Instrumentalizing’, then, cannot be located simply in some material concatenation of components that, once achieved, results in an instrument, but instead speaks to the ‘instrument’ as a social category. As I have argued of the GEDC, existing material devices or practices might be ‘instrumentalized’ by their integration into a musical performance. Rather than producing an ever-expanding corpus of instruments, in such cases cultural practices and material objects are reorganized and rearticulated to one another in ways that trouble easy distinctions between, say, an instrument and a sculpture, a dance performance and a concert.
As Marielle Pelissero has argued, it was at this moment, and at the sort of events and venues at which the GEDC and Opus N performed, that a novel interdisciplinary discourse of performance as distinct from theatre solidified in France: at festivals such as Sigma, where Opus N performed in 1970 and 1972, the group would have brushed shoulders with, for example, the Living Theatre and Richard Schechner.Footnote 47 Rather than aspiring to a version of art music performance, the instantiation of a stable and notation-based tradition in which the materiality of performer and instrument recede into the background, the GEDC performed on chaotic, surrealist instruments without defined idioms. An approach to material history that merely describes their instrumentarium misses an entire ecology of practices and politics that shaped the significance of these instruments.
Opus N: Thinking of Hendrix
Leaving the GRM
In September 1970, Clozier and his fellow GRM stagiaire Françoise Barrière departed the GRM to found an electroacoustic music studio within the Maison de la Culture in Bourges. Barrière had been contacted after the departure of a theatre company from a recently established recording studio at the Maison de la Culture.Footnote 48 Named the Groupe de musique expérimentale de Bourges (GMEB), the studio was one of several such studios to emerge at this time, including the Centre internationale de recherche musicale (founded in 1968), the Groupe de musique expérimentale de Marseille (founded in 1969), and the electroacoustic studio of the Pantin Conservatoire (founded in 1972). The studio’s setting – outside Paris, in one of the cultural centres resulting from André Malraux’s tenure as minister of cultural affairs – is indicative of its differences from the GRM, and Barrière and Clozier, motivated in part by a commitment to leftist politics, were quick to open their doors to interested amateurs, schoolteachers, and children as well as composers from further afield, above all Latin America and Eastern Europe.Footnote 49
In the process of this reconfiguration, the GEDC came to an end and a new group, named Opus N, was formed, with Savouret and Clozier at the helm. As the journalist Jean-Michel Damian explained, the ambiguous name functioned as a placeholder: each performance was designated with an opus number, a naming protocol that archly scrambled the conventional ordering of works, ensembles, and performances.Footnote 50
Opus N was a rather different endeavour to the GEDC; where the latter had been framed by Boeswillwald and Lejeune’s interests in theatre and spectacle, as well as a reasonably faithful attempt to recreate concrète aesthetics in real time, the new group was guided by an ethos closer to the free jazz pluralism of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, or, indeed, of Savouret’s Kiosque, staging spontaneous encounters between different musicians and musical traditions.Footnote 51 As it was for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, genre was a problem, a particularism to be transcended. One sense of the ‘freedom’ of Opus N’s ‘free electric music’ is an autonomy from such confines, from the pigeonholes of ‘contemporary music’ or musique concrète.Footnote 52 As I discuss in due course, this freedom remained an aspiration, with old distinctions re-emerging and new formations partitioning once fluid territory.
In a sense, the newly configured group reflected a commitment to a changed understanding of improvisation, no longer thought in terms of modernist sui generis creation, but instead after the model of oral culture, that is, as a practice of innovative recombination.Footnote 53 As Opus N, the musicians drew on a conception of improvisation as a point of contact between diverse musical practices, providing a frame in which Opus N might include a Swiss hurdy-gurdyist, an Iranian zarb player, or a free jazz drummer.Footnote 54 As such, the Opus N sound had a different emphasis: where the GEDC had the non-pitched materials of their hand-built devices at its core, Opus N turned to more conventional instrumentation, with Savouret’s electric organ providing an anchor, often in the form of tonal drones.
Both sonically and culturally, then, Opus N participated in the experiments in fusion undertaken at the end of the 1960s which find their paradigmatic expression in what Kevin Fellezs describes as the ‘carnivalesque juxtaposition of acid rock, free jazz, and experimental “new music”’.Footnote 55 Billing their act as ‘free electric music’, they expressed a desire ‘to experience the all-terrain aspect that music must have today’, leading to the inclusion of ‘more diverse and more popular musical traditions’.Footnote 56 Outside the citadel of the GRM, they embraced the ‘electric music’ being practised by rock and jazz musicians including Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, and John McLaughlin, who were enthusiastically adopting new electronic instruments, effects units, and studio techniques and practising an aesthetic of ‘electric textures, electronic soundscapes, exotic references, free improvisation, and alluring grooves’.Footnote 57
The title of Opus N’s first performance, ‘Thinking of Hendrix’, given during the Sigma festival in Bordeaux in November 1970, provides a convenient frame for conceiving of Opus N’s ‘free electric music’. This performance, in which Savouret, Clozier, and Boeswillwald appeared as Opus III, was programmed alongside a performance of Reibel’s Variations en étoile with improvisation by Savouret, Bayle (on electric zither), and Gérard Frémy, as well as Parmegiani’s collaboration with the British rock group the Third Ear Band.Footnote 58 Hendrix had died in the previous September, but the dedication points to a deeper engagement than simple memorialization. Opus N were not alone in thinking of Hendrix, and the guitarist came to stand, for a generation of musicians, for an electrified music in which the conventional popular song form dissolved into extended timbral experiments, expanding the potential vocabulary of live and studio reproduction technologies.Footnote 59 Kevin Fellezs describes the encounter of Miles Davis with Hendrix’s records and performances as a sort of matrix not just for the records of Davis’s that followed – and Bitches Brew (1970) in particular – but more broadly for the fusions of jazz, rock, funk, non-Western, and avant-garde musics that would develop through the early 1970s. As he suggests, it was towards rock music that jazz musicians looked when experimenting with electronic instrumentation and recording techniques.Footnote 60
An excerpt of the 19 November performance was broadcast on France Musique in the following months, and its sonic resources of electric organ, wah-wah pedal, and extensive use of tape delay help to situate the group in relation to a free jazz-psychedelic rock furrow being ploughed by many musicians in France at the time.Footnote 61 (The British band Soft Machine, probably the most important influence on French psychedelic rock, are significant here both for their proximity to Hendrix, whom they supported on the latter’s North America tour in 1968, and for their own particular fusion of jazz and rock, quite distinct from their US equivalents. Like Mitch Mitchell, Hendrix’s (English) drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt made his start as a jazz drummer.)
Though it is hard to trace precisely the circulation of live setups, Savouret’s decision to route his electric organ and electric piano through effects units including a wah-wah pedal puts him in shared company with Davis’s sidemen Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, as well as numerous keys players in Soft Machine-adjacent groups such as Caravan’s David Sinclair or Van der Graaf Generator’s Hugh Banton, while Clozier’s amplified violin invites comparison with jazz players such as Jean-Luc Ponty. As an audition of their broadcast performances makes apparent, Opus N operated with a vocabulary that cannot be neatly distinguished from rock freakouts by Pink Floyd or Soft Machine. These groups combined repeating modal material on electric organs with extended electric guitar techniques and tape effects, performing alongside psychedelic light shows.Footnote 62
The group performed frequently over the following two years with a core line-up of Clozier and Savouret and a cast of collaborators that included jazz players such as Philippe Maté and Pierre-Alain Dahan, the hurdy-gurdy player René Zosso, Jorge Arriagada’s synthesizer ensemble Musiques Variables, and the lightshow group Atelier d’art cinétique de Dijon. In February 1971, Clozier, Savouret, and Boeswillwald were joined for the first time by Maté, a young saxophonist who had recorded for the important free jazz label BYG and was experimenting with different amplification and tape manipulation techniques.Footnote 63 On Jean Guérin’s Tacet, released in January 1971, Maté’s looping saxophone forms a striking component of Guérin’s psychedelic electric free jazz, suggesting the path that Maté would take on his 1972 collaboration with the sound engineer Daniel Vallencien, in which Maté’s amplified saxophone is extended with further live tape techniques.Footnote 64 In a concert that also included the premiere of Parmegiani’s piece for tape and free jazz trio Le Diable à quatre, the group performed (or performed as) Opus 5, with Maté placing microphones inside his saxophone, amplifying the keys to transform it into a percussive instrument.Footnote 65
Among the later performances recorded for broadcast, a performance given by Clozier, Savouret, and the Atelier d’art cinétique de Dijon during a GMEB concert in April at the Maison de la Culture in Bourges provides a sense of the polyvalent aesthetic the group practised.Footnote 66 Titled ‘Opus 7’, the performance begins with varying percussive repetitive gestures, fed through tape delay, over extended drones, resembling the musical language of GRM composers such as Bayle. Savouret plays electric organ routed through a wah-wah pedal, deploying clusters and frantic runs in a vocabulary that recalls both the pianistic techniques of Cecil Taylor and Savouret’s description of his methods for playing a tempered keyboard instrument as a source of concrète material.Footnote 67 In the second half, a looping electric organ figure emerges over a serene drone. Afterwards, this strikingly tonal passage disintegrates into wild organ runs that recall psychedelic rock as much as Olivier Messiaen. Indeed, the use by Savouret, an alumnus of Messiaen’s renowned harmony class at the conservatoire, of the electric organ serves to yoke together the living improvisatory tradition of French organists that included Marcel Dupré and Messiaen, and the gospel-inspired adoption of the organ in 1960s rock. In the following passage, dominated by Savouret’s organ routed through tape delay, the tonal language settles into a minor pentatonic groove, calling to mind a further and perhaps even more significant resonance of the electric organ at this time: the tape-delayed organ language of Terry Riley.
In October, the group performed as part of the seventh Paris Biennale, in a concert series programmed by the Atelier de création radiophonique with a line-up of Clozier, Savouret, Boeswillwald, and Maté.Footnote 68 In the first half, Maté and Savouret dialogue with one another on amplified saxophone and electric organ, respectively, before an extended section underwritten by an ostinato on sanza or mbira. While Clozier, Savouret, and Boeswillwald’s time at the GRM would have made them familiar with ethnographic recordings of African music, this material was Maté’s contribution. A component of Opus N’s vocabulary since Maté’s first performance with the group in February 1971, almost identical material appears on a track, titled ‘Sanza’, he contributed to a 1971 LP by Jean-Claude Petit (recorded in September and October 1970) as well as on a track titled ‘Sanza sallée’ on his 1972 LP with Daniel Vallencien, in which it is looped and delayed in the manner of Riley or Steve Reich.Footnote 69 Later on, Savouret and Maté duet, playing intense runs that evoke late John Coltrane, before returning to a language of drones and gestures. Maté’s looping use of the sanza can be heard as an analogue to the engagements with non-Western traditions found in the music of Riley or Steve Reich, and there is something of a shared concern to decentre European music with the emergent grouping of American minimalists, not yet known as such in France.Footnote 70
Over the course of 1972, Clozier and Savouret would give around ten further performances as Opus N in settings that included a tour of Austria organized by Dieter Kaufmann, who had studied with the duo at the GRM, performances in a temporary tent named the ‘modulobul’ in a series that also included Alan Silva and the Frank Wright Quartet, and several performances as part of spectacles for children mounted by Clozier.Footnote 71 Other commitments increasingly took precedence: Clozier devoted his time to the internationalizing work of the GMEB and to large-scale electroacoustic spectacles, while Savouret developed a conducting career in Paris alongside his open-ended compositions for amateurs and children. By the end of 1973, as Barrière explained in response to a performance enquiry, Clozier and Savouret had decided against giving any more concerts as Opus N until further notice.Footnote 72
Among the final performances as Opus N was the inaugural concert in an ‘experimental variety’ hosted by the GMEB, titled ‘Musiques d’ailleurs et d’aujourd’hui’ (‘Music of elsewhere and today’).Footnote 73 The concert of 13 December 1972 paired Clozier and Savouret with the Iranian percussionist Djamchid Chemirani, who had been resident in France since 1961 and collaborated with musicians including the tape composer Nicole Lachartre, the composer and percussionist Jean-Pierre Drouet, and the early music specialist René Clemencic.Footnote 74 Like the contemporaneous group L’Inter Communal, led by the free jazz player François Tusques, this programming evinced a commitment to intercultural exchange in which the clear exposition of cultural essences is replaced with a noisy and provisional mixture; not just through his adventurous collaborations, but in his adoption of the zarb, typically an accompanying instrument, as a solo instrument, Chemirani’s practice rejected the idea of a static Iranian cultural inheritance in need of preservation.
In the cultural ghetto
The trappings of genre were, however, not so easy to shed. Though they performed during festivals that brought together diverse disciplines and styles, Opus N were generally programmed within contemporary music strands. This fact was remarked upon in a contemporary review of the musical components of the 1971 Paris Biennale for the magazine Rock & Folk, which gives a sense of Opus N’s persistent failure to shake off the generic frame of contemporary music. The author Paul Alessandrini notes the setting of the group’s performance in a separate hall from the rock and jazz groups, despite their seeming similarity with the collaboration between the fusion group Come to the Edge (two of whose members had performed in the British live electronic group Intermodulation) and the Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta, which called on tape loops, electric organ treated with effects, and miscellaneous percussion. The group’s confinement to what Alessandrini perceives as the ‘cultural ghetto’ of ‘contemporary music’ might, he hopes, be allayed by the publication of a recording, or by the addition of a drummer providing a rhythmic backbone to the performance (perhaps along the lines of the Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza 1970 record as The Feed-Back, or their contributions to Ennio Morricone’s giallo soundtracks).Footnote 75
The group’s cultural positioning was certainly ambivalent, and though various characteristics of their setup, including their use of individual speaker systems for each performer, align them with the form of the rock band, their sound differed notably from that of, say, Come to the Edge, Soft Machine, or Davis’s ‘Lost Quintet’ in the general avoidance of a clear groove. Not unrelatedly, unlike musicians such as Andrew Powell, who went from performing Stockhausen with Intermodulation to the improvised fusion of Come to the Edge and the progressive rock of the Alan Parsons Project, Savouret, Clozier, and Boeswillwald remained largely within the specialized field of electroacoustic composition after the demise of Opus N.
Equally, by the time Opus N ceased performing, the field of Live Electronic Music had been consolidated as a performance mode situated safely, for the most part, within the world of European art music. A pan-European scene had emerged with less concern for the cross-cultural experiments that were central to Opus N’s practice: this included the Feedback Studio and the Oeldorf group in West Germany, the British groups Intermodulation and Gentle Fire, and the French groups GERM and Groupe 332.Footnote 76 Though this flourishing was welcome to many participants, the increased density resulted in new distinctions within the field and an isolating turn inwards. Relatedly, the increasing imaginative distance from the social transformation promised by 1968, to adapt a phrase of Perry Anderson’s, resulted in a retreat from emphatically politicized conceptions of artistic experimentation.Footnote 77 Through the 1970s, this strand of Live Electronic Music developed in settings such as the music department of the University of Vincennes, and, eventually, at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM, where the radical social critique of a group such as MEV was superseded by a triumphant state-funded modernism.
Outside such institutions, that radical spirit could be found in projects such as Luc Ferrari’s Atelier de Libération de la Musique, and in the more-rock adjacent music of two of that group’s members, Philippe Besombes and Jean-Louis Rizet. A similar aesthetic, midway between free jazz, American minimalism, rock, and electroacoustic music could be found in the music of Un Drame Musical Instantané or in much of the music created for the choreographer Carolyn Carlson and the Groupe de recherches théâtrales at the Paris Opera, who collaborated with musicians including Besombes, the Swedish tape composer Ragnar Grippe, and the British jazz musician John Surman.
This grouping solicits a conception of electronic music, or, thinking of Hendrix, as well as of Opus N’s ‘free electric music’, ‘electric music’, as a spontaneous music rejecting conventional popular song forms and notated art music alike in favour of drones, soundscapes, and timbral fantasies. Such ‘feral’ (to cite both Fellezs and Piekut) experiments in amplification were articulated to – and in terms of – an anti-hierarchical musical practice, self-conscious in its crossing of ethnic and class distinctions.Footnote 78
Conclusion: electric orality
The concept of orality as it circulated in the late 1960s and 1970s offers a way of theorizing the consistency of this grouping.Footnote 79 Indeterminate practices that placed in question the authority of the composer and the notated score aligned with a wider denigration of writing. In a binary opposition with literacy, orality and oral tradition name a (problematic) distinction between societies with and without writing. In the latter, culture is thought to constitute a commons rather than private property; the art that literate society takes for a separate sphere of existence is in oral cultures inextricable from social life. In addition, in an account that builds on philological debates on various traditions of epic poetry, oral culture is understood to value the spontaneous combination of conventional materials over the sui generis inventions of an individual genius.Footnote 80
This valorization of orality entailed a disidentification with and critique of Western ethnocentrism, and an identification with various ‘traditional’, ‘primitive’, or non-Western others.Footnote 81 As the philosopher Daniel Charles argues, in music this resulted in a conceptual convergence of indeterminate and folk music, a convergence that had among its practical corollaries the oral musics of Pierre Mariétan or Jean-Yves Bosseur, as well as laying the ground for collaborations such as those between Opus N and René Zosso.Footnote 82
An important dimension of this thinking was a sense of an epochal deprivileging of the written word resulting from the spread of new communications technologies, which lent to oral communication characteristics previously associated with writing. This was theorized by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong as a post-literate ‘secondary orality’, a formulation that aptly describes the transformed modes of listening to, learning, and distributing music associated with what I have termed ‘electric music’. Bypassing the need for specialist knowledge of musical notation, electric music was associated with a perceptual innocence or deconditioning, emphasizing timbre as the medium for recombinative sonic practices.Footnote 83 If, around 1970, such a timbral monism afforded striking transgressions of social and aesthetic boundaries, proposing new forms of collectivity, it could just as easily justify a politically quietist liberalism and a formalist musical aesthetic that wishes away persistent material inequalities. Nevertheless, it is tensions such as these that are registered by the concept of electric music, in which the making of generality or commonality is thematized rather than presumed.
Open access
