CONVERSATION… - CECILE LE TALEC & ROZENN CANEVET

 

RC - Since 2000, your work has been particularly focused on whistled languages, classed as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2006. This led to a series of exhibitions in Mexico City, Beijing, La Gomera, Paris, Blois, Orleans, Reims, Brussels, Liège and Hangzhou (among others) as well as a number of collaborations with scientists, phoneticians, linguists and musicians. You have also embarked upon a number of expeditions around the world to meet with the populations that practise these languages. What attracted you to this form of communication and how does it inspire your work?

 

CLT - I think of my work as an exploration, a melodious expedition on a global scale.

Sound and space have always been fundamental elements of my artistic exploration. Before my ‘discovery’ of language as a subject, my sound art, sculptures and installations initially sought to give voice and to reveal the space, architecture and environment in which they were set. Later, it occurred to me that the voice is an infinite well of inspiration with a real plastic and poetic potential.

In the early 2000s, I started writing texts in the form of dialogues and monologues and I created pieces in which voice, text and speech all played a role. For the first time, these recorded and resituated voices embodied a presence within the sculpture and the space they inhabited. (Conference for Silence, 2000 – sound sculptures for a park). When I discovered the existence of whistled language, it was like discovering treasure: human beings communicating like birds, in a tongue that lies somewhere between music and phrases. These whistled languages are mysterious, defined by scientists as ‘mirror’ languages, they originate from a spoken language: Basque in the Pyrenees, Spanish in the Canaries, Buyi in China, Chinantec in Mexico. Whistled languages are a melodic transposition of words pronounced in their source languages. The words are like amplified phonemes. Having met with linguists and ethno-musicologists, I began my ‘expeditions’ and ‘exploration of languages’ around the world in search of these mysterious languages.

My collaborations and encounters with these whistling populations enabled me to create and produce artistic projects inspired by whistled language and its extraordinary particularities. I created a number of works including several films that I later used as ‘partitions’ during concerts/ performances and I also exhibited them along with my installations.

 

RC - When was the first time you heard whistled language?

 

CLT - I discovered whistled language for the first time in France when I heard some recordings made in the 1950s by the Professor Busnel and then during my first expedition to La Gomera in the Canary Islands. This language is exceptionally musical and nothing like any code. Whistled language is used mostly by shepherds in mountainous regions, enabling them to communicate from valley to valley, across great distances. It is also a language of love and declarations of love. It is worth noting that all of these whistling communities refer to themselves as sky dwellers.

 

RC - So it’s a celestial language, but also a rural language, which incorporates elements of its environment. It is intrinsically linked to its people, is it not?

 

CLT - Yes, this celestial language is the language of birds and ‘sky dwellers’. It is the only language in the world that uses the local topography as a sounding board. The emitter and the receptor of whistled messages must listen attentively to the world around them because the distance separating them means that absolute concentration on the peripheral acoustic details and ‘events’ is essential.

We noticed that the forty or so communities practising whistled language lived in mountainous regions, and particularly in seismic regions where the Earth itself ‘whistles’, although we cannot necessarily hear it. Whistled language is the proto-language. Proto-language is music. It is a form on non-verbal communication. Whether you go to the deepest depths of China or Mexico, music enables us to communicate without words. This is what I find so extraordinary.

 

RC - Besides the difference between music and language, what differentiates whistled language from all other languages? And what is the nature of its link to birdsong?

 

CLT - The music of any language is composed by articulating phonemes. When you listen to whistled words, what you hear is pure music. When it comes to other languages, I think we’re dealing with melody and prosody. When you don’t understand whistled language, it is very difficult to know if you’re listening to birdsong or whistled words. I wondered if Olivier Messiaen knew about whistled languages. I haven’t found anything to suggest that he did. His compositions tend to reflect the detail of birdsong, rather than any connection it may have with language. On the other hand, as an artist what really interests me is just that: the possibility of a union between music and language through this medium. The attention to detail is terrific. Whistled language is an amalgamation of spoken language and birdsong.

 

RC - This relationship between orality and sonority brought you to collaborate with musicians and composers. What were the projects on which you collaborated?

 

CLT - I started working with contemporary music composers in 2000, first with Christian Sebille, then with Nicolas Frize in 2008 and finally from 2007 to 2011 with Leilei Tian. Following a research and creation residency in China in 2006, and having completed a collection of works: instruments (sculptures) and a film ‘Inverse’, I was invited to exhibit at the Musée de l’Objet – contemporary art collection in Blois. It was there, during an electro-acoustic concert at IRCAM (Institute for the Research and Coordination of Acoustics/Music) that I met Chinese composer Leilei Tian. I suggested that she use ‘Inverse’, my black and white film as sheet music on which to transcribe a composition, the instruments (glass sculptures) ‘Les Impurs’ for the musical interpretation of the piece and the recordings of Buyis whistlers as sound material. These instruments -a flute for three musicians, a drum kit and percussion organ- were all created by a glassblower. So Leilei was able to compose music for these instruments (sculptures), which made the task even more difficult. The fragility of the ‘Impurs’ meant that the musicians had to be very careful not to break them or shatter them – this would have been a fiasco! I also had some birdcall devices made; they were great instruments of communication and music. A concert was performed during the opening of the exhibition.

 

RC - And then there was the collaboration with Nicolas Frize, Opus 2 at the Scène Nationale d’Orléans / Contemporary Art Centre in 2008, you put together a sound installation and video and Frize composed a piece for six Chinese whistlers. Birds also featured, did they not?

 

CLT - Nicolas Frize and I sojourned, worked with and recorded Chinese Buyis together in the Guizhou province. In the framework of this collaboration/concert/exhibition in Orleans, I created a sound and musical installation for six singers from the Canary Islands, Opus 2, and Nicolas composed a musical piece ‘Shi Tchué’ for six Chinese singers/whistlers, which was performed in 2008 during a concert. For the exhibition I collaborated with the IRCAM for the sound installation ‘Opus 2’, which was to echo Nicolas’ composition. Various sound samples were activated by the intensity of the vibrations generated by the birds as they landed on the musical stave (cables) that were stretched across the exhibition space. Their song was combined with whistled words to constitute a random piece of music that was both visual and audible. With the projection of the black and white film ‘The Whispers’, as the birds’ landed on the cables, their shadows appeared as musical notes. I always make my black and white films seem like writing paper. I think I am attracted to the triangular relationship between music, language and writing and I call upon all three, to varying degrees.

 

RC - You are also interested in overtone singing, which is intricately linked to the pulsations of the body. What are the origins of this form of singing?

 

CLT - I don’t consider myself to be a musician at all and I think that is precisely what interests composers and musicians. My approach is free from complexes; it is experimental, including my invention of fragile instruments. Of course, when I work with musicians I use the proper system of score writing, but I use drawings instead of notes. I have put in a place a system that clarifies what I’m looking for, which wouldn’t otherwise be clear in regular sheet music. I don’t use staves but I give the musicians drawings and films and that way I retain the role of conductor.

 

RC - You talk a lot about music, language and writing, but you also produce a lot of installations and sculptures. What comes first, the music or the installations? What role do the objects play?

 

CLT - Without the objects, there is no sound. The objects I create reflect their own finite qualities: be they disks or instruments, eventually everything disappears, just like sound.

 

RC - When we discuss transcription, you seem to be transported to another place. You displace the elements, migrate from one realm to another. This creates a profoundly subjective and complex cartography of unique and widely varied languages. It can never be untangled because it is never fully revealed in this oscillation between music and language. Therein lies the poetry, does it not, in this unfathomable dimension? It is a mysterious and mystical experience.

 

CLT - Indeed, it is also the reason why whistled language and harmonic resonance are so fascinating: these are not written languages. They are passed on orally. That is why the whistled language ‘silbo gomero’ is classed as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. All of my works reflect the impossibility of their use. When I was making my double guitar, for example, ‘Alone Together’, I wanted to evoke the incompatible: the impossibility of two people playing the same guitar simultaneously. Other examples include my negatives that evoke the mirror languages.

In the Aubusson tapestry ‘Panoramique polyphonique’, the mystery of birdsong is represented in the spectrographic form of a landscape. In the work ‘Tapis symphonique’, the unstable writing of sound frequencies emanating from the environment is transcribed in the form of mathematical figures.

 

RC - This migration between these territories (music, language and writing) generates a certain form of vagrancy, which is marked by the constraints of each discipline, yet is able to occur on a geographic scale. This displacement and these journeys have been documented. They inspire unique music, do they not?

 

CLT - All of these journeys and exhibitions were prepared beforehand during research. I think that what I was looking for in these journeys, more than anything else, was to lose myself. I like to get lost, to feel vulnerable in these far-flung places; it helps me to see and to hear. That kind of ‘danger’ is essential for me. It enables me to generate new thoughts, new ideas and new projects. Uncertainty makes me feel alive. Unique compositions are written during all kinds of journeys.

 

RC - Isn’t it also a series of encounters with populations? You go to meet them and to immerse yourself in their world, to test yourself. Your thirst for discovery is driven by curiosity.

 

Absolutely. I think I have deep love of discovering new cultures, getting lost and overwhelmed by the strange and the unknown. When you don’t have the keys or codes to decipher a culture, it enables you to read, see and hear the world differently.

 

RC - To end, I would like to come back to the start: the title that you have chosen for this collection, ‘Echolalie’, what does it mean ?

 

CLT - I live in the land of my language. When I come back from my travels, I immediately forget the numerous language barriers. The contemporary meaning of ‘echolalia’ is the repetition or mimicking of words pronounced by another. However, in a study of echolalia (Daniel Heller- Roazen, Écholalies, essai sur l’oubli des langues, Seuil, 2007) the author explains that it is also the blind spot of language.

In other words, each language is an echo of another. It is about exploring vocal sounds before accessing the language. When we start to project ourselves in one language, we must forget all others. In music, we have a rapport with language, with all languages. That is why music, for me, is synonymous with echolalia.