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comme ses paroles

Concert work for voices, cello and electronics

‘comme ses paroles’ is a work which deploys eight singers and a cellist to represent ideas about language, utterance, writing and transcription. The work as a whole can be understood as a ‘reading’ of Guillaume de Machaut’s

‘Le Livre Du Voir Dit’ (c.1361-65) and as a commentary on the dominant verse and musical forms in which Machaut worked. The relationship between Machaut and the lover he addresses in ‘Le Voir Dit’ is embodied in a series of pairings throughout the work. A range of new notational strategies is adopted, particularly in ‘Les doigts’ and ‘Chanson balladee’, to enable unusual playing techniques and types of ensemble coordination.

In the initial section, ‘Les Doigts’, the cellist hammers the fingers of both hands onto the fingerboard, as if transcribing passages from Machaut’s work. Since these are in Rondeau-form the cellist is eventually joined by the singers who reduce the concept of the rondeau to its essence, a circling form. ‘Les Doigts’ resumes only to be interrupted by eight hockets for pairs of singers.

Since ‘Le Voir Dit’ is one of the first instances in western European culture of a literary work self-consciously conceived as a book, the extended central section of ‘comme ses paroles’, ‘Le Livre’, uses technology to represent the idea of the book as an accumulation of material: the eight live singers are joined by progressively more pre-recorded versions of themselves. At the point of maximum density – 40 voices – ‘Le Livre’ breaks off and is followed by a series of simultaneous monodies. Gradually the number of singers reduces, leaving just one soprano and the cello – the beloved, and the author writing her into history – at the end.

‘comme ses paroles’ was commissioned by Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and the BBC and was premiered by EXAUDI in Huddersfield on 22 November 2008.