Messe de Notre Dame
By and according to Guillaume de Machaut.
Thrusting a work of art into the relativity of time.
This is not an instrumentalist’s interpretation, but rather a composer’s, which is where the term “lecture archéologique” comes from.
To show, by an open and contemporary sensibility, how a work inherited from scholarly polyphonic writings from the beginning of our millennium and nourished by popular and historical elements from the following centuries can still surprisingly flourish at the end of the 20th century.
The transgression committed by Machaut, a composer disrespectful towards tradition, in the words of his contemporaries, can still be respected.
The disrespect of tradition becomes the respect of transgression.
A work of this scope possesses a certain modernity such that it calls for an open mind, intersecting with rock music, geographical and historical world music, even the integration of various disparate elements in writing.
The term “lecture archéologique” brings to mind ancient pottery, locally reconstituted using modern materials.
Above all, this work has provoked in me a great desire to play with it in this way.
The writing profoundly shook me and this vision has exceeded the normal use of this term.
For me, it has such potential that one could go from the 14th to the 20th century through a big black hole, absorbing everything on the way, memory and creation intimately welded, leaving behind the Judeo-Christian notion that it implied and taking up in its stead a liberation of religious history and of a situation changed at the end of our millennium.
Machaut’s thinking, beyond notes and rhythms, implies a true alchemical and timeless transcendence accepting the transformation of material to be taken elsewhere.
Would we be reticent to take this journey?
2746 After Rome
Odyssey of a fractal rock or how seven musicians would be grouped under the sign of a Mediterranean culture turned towards historical and geographical internationality, developing the composition in real time by means of intuitive quantum operations, revealing musical forms that are conceptual and primitive, technologically advanced and archaic, all at the same time, reactivating rock thought in intersecting the idea of an imaginary folklore and the practice of artistic, scientific, and human interdisciplinarity.