What thought or experience sparked the initial inspiration for the work?
The fact that all readable text creates an inner sound in our heads. With text everywhere nowadays, it has become a constant inner voice. Bringing it back out and onto the stage gives me a new perspective on our (Latin) written language and our everyday use of it. The Latin alphabet is phonetic. For me, the connection to music and sound art is immediate.
What have you been interested in exploring and expressing through the work?
How the phonetic sound of each letter is heard from the outside; whether it is possible to musicalise the phonemes of a written spoken language. In other words, where the text speaks through each individual letter at the same time as it is being written, and what perspective this offers on our modern digital way of writing text. Language and the inner voice of writing resonate far more strongly in our modern digital text-based society than they do out in nature. What does this do to the formation of our language, our inner noise and silence, and our relationship to text and writing?
What do you find interesting about the relationship, or the grey area, between music and language?
Perhaps the fact that communication takes place through aesthetics. Semantics can dissolve or be amplified, but above all, a completely different form of utterance often emerges — one that, for me, touches the boundary between art and nature.
How do you work with language as musical material?
Language acquires sound through the staged digital typing, where each phonetic/Latin letter has its own sound. But full stops, commas and other symbols also have a sound, much like in Victor Borge’s comic Phonetic Punctuation. The staging of letters and symbols emerges through Latin quotations translated into English, with each language written by a different writer; keyboard performers.
How would you describe the musical universe of the work?
The universe is first and foremost theatrical, with video, electronics and a desk-keyboard duet, taken out of a tired office environment. The musical universe takes shape through a robotic voice speaking a fragmented written language, accompanied by the clatter of typing and the sharp digital sound effects of the symbols. SPACE and BACKSPACE also have their own sounds, thus musicalising the division of text and words, as well as their deletion.
The staging may also draw a parallel to the 1930s speech synthesiser, The Voder, operated by a single performer who could control pitch, noise and resonance, thereby simulating and synthesising vowels and consonants with tonal variation.
What significance does the visual dimension of the work have?
The video component, with its live text projection, visualises the two performers’ respective dialogue and translations of one another. But the video component primarily coexists one-to-one with the sound and can therefore hardly be experienced independently of it.
Time and place
Ad Pedem Litterae is performed by Loïc Destremau and Małgorzata Walentynowicz at Warsaw Autumn at the Creative Industries Institute on Sunday 20 September, 19:15.
Find more information about the performance here.