Musiques Des Ailes / Wingéd Music

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Jean-Louis Vincendeau – Hers the Bell of Wings

“Phoebe Neville is musician, singer, and dancer. Philip Corner composer, musician, and former professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Michel Vogel, a musician and maker of instruments, principally percussion (gongs and bells). He has for this occasion installed a double frame for eight steel bells inspired by a Burmese model. In the context of “Archipel” the three present a performance in four parts.

1. The three of them on the same bell-frame, each with a different score and beater: they are moving a lot, which agreeably creates a progressively rushing effect.

2. A duet between the frame and the gong. Each one stays put so there is more of a group effect.

3. Phoebe Neville puts herself in front of the gong and dances in response: vibrating, she is as if pushed or carried along by the gong’s sound in a muted and harmonious drone.

4. Again a duo (almost a duel!) this time on a single gong with mimetic force.

The wings turn and propels the sound into all possible corners of the room; the gong rubbed vibrates the floor under the feet of the viewers who are moreover invited to rub sheets of paper of different colours and shapes suspended within reach of the hand.

The original model for these bells is a flat piece of bronze or copper placed in the doorway of the Kachins or Mungs of Burma. But, if the model is antique, the arrangement of the whole is wholly contemporary, realized with today’s metals by Michel Vogel for a living music of today. Furthermore, the form has evolved by a “happy accident” towards a silhouette more properly occidental — one which suggests a hat.

The musical referents might be found between Erik Satie and John Cage all the while precisely following the thread of explorative expression into as yet unheard territory, thus asserting what they justly call “visual listening”.”

Jean-Louis Vincendeau
Translation by Philip Corner