rhapsody

The musicality of inspired minds

Anna Luyten in conversation with Josse De Pauw
 

“Doubt is our most profitable feeling. We have a very ambiguous relationship with it because we want so much to be firm, self-confident and decisive. But I think it is doubt that moves us forward. Everything of any value has come from doubt.”

“And then I listen to and watch again Van de Schoonheid en de Troost, that moving 2000 television series by Wim Kayzer in which he has long conversations with artists and scientists. And I still find them touching. I hear people thinking out loud. I don't have to agree with them or understand them completely. It's just the beauty of thinking out loud, of those bright minds trying to explain what they are doing and what makes them tick. It is an attempt to communicate.”

“The anthropologist Jane Goodall sits on her mountaintop, looks around and formulates the beautiful thought: 'This is the world as it should be.' That's where it starts for me, a rhapsody fits that perfectly:

a musical form that tolerates diversity and whimsicality. I start with Jane Goodall who gave her chimpanzees names instead of numbers and I end with Edward Witten speaking fondly of his string theory. It becomes a rhapsody of thinking people whose thoughts I express.”

“'I find comfort in memorising other people's words,' says George Steiner. I can relate to that. The comfort of being able to recite a poem by Rilke without having to reach for a book. Poetic verses that mature somewhere in your mind and that you can go back to when you are short of words. Steiner says: 'You only love what you remember.'”

“In his doubt, the writer Coetzee leaves long silences and his silence takes on a musical quality. I understand the trap he is in: he forces himself in the interview to think slowly but knows he doesn't have enough time. The interviewer knows that he is rushing the other person and the other person thinks I am wasting the interviewer's time. That is a musical challenge.”

“You can make music on stage that creates an atmosphere. I never felt much for that. But what I have always enjoyed doing with musicians is creating music where you bring the words as close by as possible. I have succeeded in doing so with jazz musicians in An Old Monk and a concert called a landscape. Jazz musicians have a skill, a habit and a willingness to improvise.”

“I worked with the composer Frederik Neyrinck in the performance with Koenraad Tinel, Zolang hij niet zichzelve kent. It struck me how quickly Frederik composed. He was able to bring together music, text and image. He is generous, because he declares nothing sacred. That is why I dared to talk to him about this performance. What might happen when I have a text and I want to say it in a certain way, and that becomes part of the composition. Or what happens when I read text to the composed music.”

“How once, when you were a teenager, you heard a song on the radio that completely matched your feelings at the time. You couldn't get that sentence out of your head. And decades later, that sentence is still there but it has a completely different meaning than it did then. That still happens to me: sentences, plays, poems ...”

“Music has something to do with words, with meaning. Sometimes words get in the way of meaning. But if you bring the words closer to music, the meaning can break out again. They get space to resonate.”

“And now I want to put those fragments of text and words of those thinking and wavering great minds to music, in all senses of the word. Not to give them an atmosphere, but to put them into a musical score. I know that a different clarity will result from that.”

“I care a lot for timbres and tempi and the changes in them. The musicality with which someone speaks is a big part of the communication. It is a part of who someone wants to be, can be or thinks they are. Jane Goodall can perfectly imitate the sound of chimpanzees by pursing her lips in a certain way. Sometimes you can find musicality in the gestures someone makes. Take Vladimir Ashkenazy. He is sitting in the rehearsal room on a practice table eating a sandwich. A can of beer in the hand of the world-famous conductor and concert pianist. Just in the way he sits down, you can feel his displacement. Or the view of the painter Karel Appel who remains alert to what he does not yet know

and says that the painting will finish itself. 'You are there and yet you are not there', he says. 'My work is finished, the painting is not. The spectator has to see it finished.' Then I think: 'I know that. I can do something with that.'”

Actor, author and director Josse De Pauw (°1952) is part of the artistic core of LOD music theatre. He started his career in 1976 with Radeis International, a successful theatre group that performed all over Europe and overseas. Since 2004 he has been developing his theatre work at LOD. Since 1989, he has acted in more than fifty Belgian and foreign films. Besides texts for the theatre, he also writes stories, observations, notes and travel reports.

The Belgian composer and pianist Frederik Neyrinck (°1985) lives and works in Vienna. He then studied piano and composition in Brussels, Stuttgart and Graz with Piet Kuijken (piano), Jan Van Landeghem, Marco Stroppa and Clemens Gadenstätter (composition). In 2018, he was awarded the 'Austrian state stipend for composition'.At LOD music theatre he is currently in residence.

Asko|Schönberg is a leading ensemble for new music. Its highly qualified and passionate musicians play works from the 20th and 21st centuries, from solo work to large-scale repertoire, both in concert and in interdisciplinary performances. With its great versatility, constant movement, response to current events or, on the other hand, its contrary approach, Asko|Schönberg occupies a unique position within the arts.

LOD music theatre is a Ghent production company for opera and musical theatre, a creative base for performing artists. LOD undertakes to map out long-term trajectories; with directors Josse De Pauw, Inne Goris, Steve Salembier, Gorges Ocloo, Lies Pauwels and Laila Soliman as well as composers Kris Defoort, Daan Janssens, Thomas Smetryns, Bushra El-Turk, Jamie Man, Frederik Neyrinck and Nabou Claerhout. In addition, LOD remains open to those who - always surprisingly, but never by chance - cross our artistic path. Our production company is intended to be an overarching platform for these artists, and is meant to offer the resources to develop their ideas.