music of the words

Frédérique Bruyas likes to present herself as a public reader. She conceives reading aloud as an art of written words whose object is literature in its variety and vitality. She sees each text as a score of words and each reading as a staging of literary works. In duet with Pierrejean (among other musicians), they arouse a singular pleasure that places the listener at the frontiers of sound and meaning, widening the field of possible interpretations of the text and the musical work. Their various programmes cover worlds as diverse as the noir novel (texts by Jonquet, Malte, Vargas, Manchette, Pouy…), or contemporary poetry (Kerouac, Luca, Rebotier, Tarkos…). Lurking in the shadow of words, the guitarist improvises around themes from his musical universe.

His work around fables, as well as his numerous readings-concerts with Frédérique Bruyas, convinced the guitarist that there is music specific to words. Also, like any instrument, each of us has a unique vocal identity, a kind of sound signature that reflects our fingerprints. It is defined by timbre, intonation, articulation, flow… Also, the language used and the accent offer specific “musical” colours. To continue his work on this musical material, Pierrejean sometimes likes to hijack documents gleaned here and there on the Internet. In fact, political oratory games are an ideal playground for him.

With Frédérique Bruyas, or on the diverted videos (political and phonetic), the guitarist is dependent on a text with an imposed diction. The opposite is true here. The text exists, but it is he who follows the music. In fact, like an opera singer, the “vocalist” interprets a vocal score (sometimes close to the Sprechgesang) which must be based on the instruments. The Les Fables project has known these two approaches: the disc was conceived around the voice (free recitatives a capella), but its scenic version (Fabulatorz) has known the opposite constraint since the reciter had to recite the texts in the same way in order to fit in with the group.