Horvath Introduces Listeners to Melaine Dalibert

The next album in my ongoing effort to account for releases in the Nicolas Horvath Discoveries series is what promises to be the first in a series of albums devoted to the French composer Melaine Dalibert. The title of the album is En Abyme (in an abyss). This is also the title of the shortest of the six pieces on that album, which was released at the beginning of this past August. The brevity of “en abyme” (a little more than six and a quarter minutes in duration) is complemented by the opening track, “Cortège,” which is slightly longer than half an hour. The remaining four tracks have durations between ten and twenty minutes. In contrast to “en abyme,” all of the other tracks have titles that reflect on traditional musical structures.

Bertrand Ferrier, author of the program book, begins his essay with the sentence: “Melaine Dalibert is the oscillation composer.” He offers three elaborations of this assertion:

1. Oscillation of grammar, depending on whether he explores the charms of “contemporary music”, ambient or minimalism
2. Oscillation of the piano idiom, between isolated note, sets, resonances, harmonics and silences
3. Oscillation of emotion, rarely highlighted, often ambivalent, almost always coiled in the undecidability of the nagging

He then asserts that the listener is required “to oscillate with the composer” to find his/her/their “own balance throughout the works.” This is followed by another set of three elaborations addressing the nature of those oscillations:

1. complex yet bare
2. variable in duration … although close in apparent linearity
3. expressed in idioms that are close and yet not reducible to each other

The second of those oscillations was accounted for as a “first impression” in the opening paragraph of this article. I suspect that the other two are more evident when one examines the score pages, rather than through the experience of listening. For example, Dalibert’s approach to “oscillation of the piano idiom” is such that even the most attentive listener is unlikely to perceive the imitations that justify calling the fourth track on the album “Canon.” Where the preceding track, “Variations,” is concerned, one will probably be just as hard-pressed to segment the listening experience into theme and specific variations. (Just to be fair, however, Anton Webern’s approach to variations was similarly enigmatic, again appealing to the eye of the score-reader, rather than the ear.)

Ferrier, on the other hand, tries to approach two of the other tracks as follows:

Do you think you hear in “Cortège” or “Gruppetto” a dotted parade? We can just as well hear a sound continuity whose notes are only the emerged icebergs, the resonance constituting the essential of the narrative. The smoothness of the curb and the bristling of the salient interpolate. The certain crumbles. The binary dissolves. The silence prolongs the music, and the music prepares the silence - it is therefore part of the silence, and vice versa.

Having listened to these tracks several times, I have come to the conclusion that too much attention to semantics may undermine the listening experience. My own impression is that Dalibert is primarily interested in the interplay of keyboard sonorities. Simply grasping what those sonorities are may only begin to emerge after the first few listening experiences. That emergence will then inform the listener about such matters as oscillation or the composer’s rethinking of the lexicon of conventional forms. As the I Ching tells us, “Perseverance furthers.” As one becomes more familiar with the content, one is also likely to find more satisfaction in the listening experience.