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AUTOMATIC WRITING AND GRAMMELOT IN CLAUDE VIVIER'S LANGUE INVENTÉE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2014

Bryan Christian
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Abstract

French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948–1983) is one of the few composers, perhaps the only one, to use an invented language throughout his entire compositional career. Vivier's use of what he called his langue inventée (‘invented language’) spanned the first vocal work in his catalogue – Ojikawa (1968) – to his final work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1983), completed only shortly before his murder in March 1983. Despite the pervasiveness of this technique – in fact, it is the only technique that remains a constant across all of Vivier's stylistic periods – relatively little attention has been given to the langue inventée in scholarship. This article presents a description of Vivier's langue inventée in three parts, beginning with a general introduction. The second part presents the langue inventée as a product of automatic writing and engages directly with Vivier's sketches to propose a method that Vivier likely used to write much of his langue inventée text. The final section of the article presents Vivier's langue inventée as a form of grammelot – a term revived by playwright, actor and director Dario Fo (1926–), which is associated with the dialect theatre of the Commedia dell'arte tradition. This article aims to demonstrate that Vivier's langue inventée is not a just a string of unintelligible nonsense syllables, but rather a very purposeful grammelot, freely composed in a two-stage approach to automatic writing, that reaches beyond linguistic semantics.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 68 , Issue 270 , October 2014 , pp. 15 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 See Schnapp, Jeffery T., ‘Virgin Words: Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua ignota and the Development of Imaginary Languages Ancient to Modern’, Exemplaria, 3/2 (January 1991), pp. 267–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Highley, Sarah L., Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation, and Discussion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)Google Scholar.

2 Patrick Levesque's analysis is the most extensive and focuses on text setting and melodic intervals in Lonely Child (1980) and the works with langue inventée that follow. See Patrick Levesque, ‘Les Voix de Vivier: Langage harmonique, langage mélodique et langage imaginaire dans les dernières oeuvres vocales de Claude Vivier’ (MM thesis, McGill University, 2004), pp. 86–98.

3 All French translations in this article are by the author. ‘Claude [Vivier]: ‘Toute cette langue résulte de l'écriture automatique. Je me suis toujours inventé une langue à moi ...’ [Daniel Moisan]: ‘Est-ce que les mots ont été choisis pour leur valeur musicale?’ Claude [Vivier]: Pas nécessairement, même si je fais attention de ce coté-là. C'est vraiment de l'écriture automatique'. Moisan, Daniel, ‘Kopernikus ou l'histoire d'une oeuvre lyrique québécoise’, Aria, 2/1 (Spring 1980), p. 7Google Scholar.

4 Louise Bail, ‘Kopernikus: La Berceuse à Claude Vivier, Contrepoint Imaginare à Trois Voix’ (Doctoral thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2012), pp. 125–6.

5 ‘Elle consistait à écrire le plus rapidement possible, sans contrôle de la raison, sans aucun souci de cohérence, de grammaire ou même de respect de vocabulaire. Cet état, proche de l'état hypnotique, était un état de lâcher prise se situant entre le sommeil et le réveil’. Bail, ‘Kopernikus: La Berceuse à Claude Vivier’, p. 125.

6 Grant, Kim, Surrealism in the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 314Google Scholar.

7 Prologue pour un Marco Polo is occasionally abbreviated to Prologue.

8 ‘Le text entier est en langue inventée, langue d'amour, historie se répétant éternellement’. Vivier, Claude, Bouchara (London: Hendon Music/Boosey & Hawkes, 1981)Google Scholar, programme notes.

9 ‘Dire que cette expérience fut facile serait mentir car je dois avouer que l'apprentissage de l'indonésien et de deux niveaux de balinais est une chose plutôt ardue et terriblement fatigante!’ Robert, Véronique, ed., ‘Les écrits de Claude Vivier’, Circuit: musiques contemporaines 2/1–2 (1991), pp. 39–136Google Scholar, here p. 73.

10 ‘… la langue inventée et cette langue est surtout celle de l'incompréhension générale à laquelle se buta le pauvre Marco’. Robert, ‘Les écrits de Claude Vivier’, p. 111.

11 Robert, ‘Les écrits de Claude Vivier’, p. 111.

12 The numbers one through five on the far left, next to the lines separating the rows, likely represent the textural and textual interruptions by the ensemble and other voices, which ultimately divided the lines of text from the sketch in the final score.

13 The dots in line with the text from the sketch are realised as repeated syllables in the score.

14 Schnapp, ‘Virgin Words’, pp. 290–91.

15 ‘La majorité des textes ont été écrits par moi au fur et à mesure de la composition, dans une langue inventée, basée davantage sur le contenu émotif des sons que sur des systèmes de transformations’. Robert, ‘Les écrits de Claude Vivier’, p. 56.

16 Fo, Dario, The Tricks of the Trade, trans. Farrell, Joe (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 56Google Scholar.

17 The music is by Giuseppe Scarlatti (1718–1777).

18 Ward, Adrienne, ‘“Imaginary Imperialism”: Goldoni Stages China in 18th-Century Italy’, Theatre Journal, 54/2 (May 2002), pp. 203–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 213.

19 Ward, ‘“Imaginary Imperialism”’, p. 213.

20 Original Italian: Ward, ‘Imaginary Imperialism’, p. 220. English translation: Ward, ‘Imaginary Imperialism’, p. 213.

21 ‘… la langue inventée et cette langue est surtout celle de l'incompréhension générale à laquelle se buta le pauvre Marco’. Robert, ‘Les écrits de Claude Vivier’, p. 111.

22 ‘… une terre aperçue mais pas atteinte’. Robert, ‘Les écrits de Claude Vivier’, p. 111.

23 Angela Chia-yi Pao, ‘False Accents: Embodied Dialects and the Characterization of Ethnicity and Nationality’, Theatre Topics, 14/1 (March 2004), pp. 353–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 355.

24 Scuderi, Antonio, ‘Updating Antiquity’, in Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition, eds. Farrell, Joseph and Scuderi, Antonio (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 39–64Google Scholar, here p. 57.

25 Scuderi, ‘Updating Antiquity’, p. 58.

26 ‘… le fait de savoir, dès 6 ans, que je n'avais ni père ni mère m'a procuré un univers de rêve merveilleux; je façonnais mes origines comme je le voulais, feignais de parler des langues étranges’. Robert, ‘Les écrits de Claude Vivier’, p. 92.

27 Fo, The Tricks of the Trade, p. 56.

28 Gilmore, Bob, Claude Vivier: A Composer's Life (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014), p. 169Google Scholar.

29 Personal communication, Montréal, 6 September 2013, and email correspondence, 12 May 2014.

30 Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 30Google Scholar.