Non è un errore di stampa. Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), scultore e pittore francese di fama mondiale, ha scritto anche della musica. Più che scritto, però, bisognerebbe usare il termine “realizzato”, trattandosi di musica concreta, in parte di origine strumentale, della quale non esiste alcuna partitura.
Oltretutto, lo stesso Dubuffet dichiara:
I find that true music should not be written, that all written music is a false music, that the musical notation which has been adopted in the west, with its notes on the staves and its twelve notes per octave, is a very poor notation which does not permit to notate the sounds and only allows the making of a totally specious music which has nothing to do with true music. It is impossible to write true music, except with a stylus on the wax, and this is what they do now in recordings.
This is a way of writing and the only one that’s proper to music.
Il suo metodo compositivo, infatti, consisteva nell’improvvisare liberamente con diversi strumenti occidentali e orientali, nonché con oggetti trovati, registrando il tutto, per passare, poi, a una fase di montaggio usando vari registratori e un mixer.
In realtà, Dubuffet aveva studiato musica da giovane, ma poi non l’aveva mai praticata o studiata con continuità. La sua attenzione era stata risvegliata, alla fine del 1960, da una serie di improvvisazioni fatte per divertimento con l’amico Asger Jorn. Ma poi la passione si era risvegliata al punto che
I transformed a room in my house into a music workshop and in the periods between our get-togethers with Asger Jorn I became a one-man band, playing each of my fifty-odd instruments in turn. Thanks to my tape recorder I was able to play each part successively on the same tape and have the machine play everything back simultaneously.
E poi
The subsequent recordings are the result of two diverging approaches which I hesitated between and which are probably both apparent in at least some pieces. The first was an attempt to produce music with, a very human touch, in other words, which expressed people’s moods and their drives as well as the sounds, the general hubbub and the sonorous backdrop of our everyday lives, the noises to which we are so closely connected and, although we don’t realize it, have probably endeared themselves to us and which we would be hard put to do without. There is an osmosis between this permanent music which carries us along and the music we ourselves express; they go together to form the specific music which can be considered as a human beings. Deep down I like to think of this music as music we make, in contrast to another very different music, which greatly stimulates my thoughts and which I call music we listen to. The latter is completely foreign to us and our natural tendencies; it is not human at all and could lead us to hear (or imagine) sounds which would be produced by the elements themselves, independent of human intervention.
Dubuffet dichiara anche:
In my music I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him to express himself freely and for his own good pleasure.
Da queste improvvisazioni sono nati due dischi che potete trovare in formato flac su AGP74 e AGP79.
Intanto alcuni estratti:
Octandre è rappresentativo di un modo di comporre tipico di Edgar Varèse, sviluppando e variando piccoli frammenti sonori. Lo stesso compositore lo descrive mediante una analogia con la crescita di un cristallo.