Texts by Georges Aperghis

Come and explore the wonderful “music” of Georges Aperghis’ phonems!

There will be 5 meetings. In the first one: presentation (excerpts of Machinations), description of the process of working with Georges Aperghis, each participant chooses a text; then, individual and group meetings; presentation of the work at the end of the course.

Music and language, music and text, music and words are almost inseparable in the work of Georges Aperghis. Sometimes it doesn’t seem very clear what came first: the music or the texts? With the French composer, language very often reaches the limits of the semantic context. The phonemes – products of the segmentation of language – become musical material themselves in the process of transforming their tonal qualities, but the origin of the French language is always recognizable, even if the ambivalence between meaning and pure sound leads to this confusing, characteristic whirring and floating in Aperghis’ “Word-Music”.

Geneviève Strosser has been engaged with the music of Georges Aperghis for more than two decades, and not just since she premiered his groundbreaking work Machinations with Donatienne Michel-Dansac, Sylvie Levesque and Sylvie Sacoun in 2000. For this piece, all four musicians put their “instruments” aside and are challenged as performers. Based on this experience, Geneviève Strosser conceived her Darmstadt Atelier about the text treatment in Aperghis’ works. What happens to musicians when, for example, they work instrumentally without their instruments? When you literally perform music as/with text and experience how physically tangible music can become here. After an introduction, the participants of the Atelier have the opportunity to choose certain texts by Aperghis and then work on them for two or three days – whether with or without an instrument. The results of this work on/with the texts will then be discussed and presented.