The Door is open

These 2 years of research taught me a lot about the saxophone, electronic modulation and about myself as a musician. Taking the time to develop my own language, to carefully consider what I wanted to work and reflect on changed the musician I am by making me more aware of what is important to me.

I know more than ever that I want my technical skills to serve my expressivity, that I enjoy minimalist contexts to leave room to subtle variations and that sensibility and fragility are key to my personal expressivity. The way I improved my ability to modulate my saxophone sound electronically allows me today to express things I couldn’t express 2 years ago, and that is a wonderful feeling.

Thinking in term of research and not just as a composer or a performer also opened new doors. As it is often the case, new responsibilities brought new freedom with them. I refined my understanding of the saxophone and of the electronics, developed my personal approach to their combination, derived from numerous external examples and personal experiments and failures I decided to follow on or to discard (process and instruments chapters). Now I am convinced these new possibilities will allow me to perform differently in various contexts where my hybrid sounds will blossom, such as hybrid concerts where I can modulate other musicians sounds, dance performances and film scoring.

In concert, the control I have developed and the comfort (accessibilty, no feedbacking) allows me to now experiment with various settings. I started trying it out with more musicians on stage and that poses a new question: the question of the space I’m ready to give to the electronics in the busier and interactive with more sources context that is a band. Solo and duets were ideal to insure enough space was left in the music for the electronics to express themselves and still leave room to the listener’s imagination. My experiments with groups so far (I processed my saxophone and the percussions in a quartet configuration and just my saxophone in another quartet) is that I don’t really want the electronics to interfere too much with the ‘communion’ of the band and this will be a new thrilling challenge which will imply new compositional processes and thorough collaboration with all the musicians to function slightly differently. At the moment I feel able to experiment with it in any kind of band context but I am not sure of the added value it could bring me, this will be a new chapter of the development which I believe can push me to further discoveries and take me to yet another stage of my musical development. Apart from this I want to practice the duet setup with various musicians and instruments. I want to foster this new practice of mine by spreading my solo and duo music and reaching out to fellow musicians and to conservatories (including ArtEZ) to accompany students in their exploration of electronics by experimenting with them with this setup. I already tried it out with some of my most advanced students in the music school where I teach, and it worked very well. They enjoyed it and connected it right away to their practice. They promptly saw possibilities to integrate it to their musical world though I know that being ‘amateur musicians’ this probably won’t be followed because of the (time and financial) investment needed to really develop something in this area. It nevertheless encouraged me to pursue this idea and convinced me further that it can be very rewarding for students interested in hybridisation and how to combine it with improvisation and inspire their own sonic equipments and systems. It would also be a fantastic way for me to experiment further and make myself know as a ‘computer artist’ which will be one of my challenges in the coming years. Combining it with various instruments and finding out how the setup should evolve to match the instruments acoustic specificities (like I did with the prepared piano) is an exciting prospect.

Beside the improvisational context, implementing electronics from the start of my compositional process has been a challenge of my research as well, and I will need more time to further develop it. Beside my multidisciplinary productions and the moving sounds EP tracks which I would describe as ‘half composed, half improvised, ‘Le mot n’est pas la chose’ is my first autonomous composition truly based on electronics. I truly enjoy it, but I am also already looking forward to the next one to better integrate the FXs and the different atmospheres they create into one another. I think the transitions are probably the weak point of this version for which I had too little time to rehearse with the saxophonist and/or work it out more specifically on the score and working on these transitions combining acoustic and electronics is a prospect I relish.

Working on film scores using electronics helped me develop what I think is a personal style which I hope to promote and practice with directors in the future. I still feel fresh to it, but I learned a lot about film scoring over these 2 years, and feel ready and equipped to work on bigger projects with my own sonic setup. Once again, spreading my music will be key to get the chance to work in this area more frequently and the music I produced for this portfolio is an important step towards this goal. using electronics to change the listener’s perception (or ‘position’), suggesting dark feelings or inner suffering and travelling form the real to the ‘inside’ world of a character are examples of how I intend to use hybrid sounds in this context. I also wanted the rescore the ‘hands dance’ scene to have a ‘dance performance’ to include to my showreel because I believe working with choreographers will suit this style very well and could offer a nice opportunity for me to work more as a composer and expand my expressive possibilities by confronting it to the particular challenges of dance performances.

It has been a long and winding road and I encountered my share of setbacks and dead-ends, but thanks to that personal journey where I didn’t take any shortcuts, today when I perform on my ‘Saxleton Live’ I really feel like I have my own hybrid instrument in my hands which I know how to play, and I feel ready to share it with the world.