programme notes
‘I am not a hero. I don’t have the strength for it. I’m not fit for the battle. I prefer to stay in the background, in a quiet place.’ - Richard Strauss
O Superman
O Superman, O Judge, O Mom and Dad
Since 2021, Brussels Philharmonic has been collaborating on and off the stage with contemporary music ensemble Ictus. For Ein Heldenleben, Jean-Luc Plouvier from Ictus provides the dramaturgical context. Especially for this concert, which focuses on Richard Strauss and the theme of (anti)heroes, he created a unique cover of Laurie Anderson's worldwide hit, O Superman.
experience O Superman (for Massenet) by Kelly Poukens (voice), María Gil Muñoz (voice) & Jean-Luc Plouvier (piano) at 19:00, 19:15, 19:30, 19:45 at Studio 2 (Flagey)
CONCERT: EIN HELDENLEBEN
[read also: What defines a hero?]
[read also: Soundscapes]
[read also: programme notes]
[read also: Photographic Hero]
[all programme notes]
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30.09.2023 FLAGEY
note
O Superman fait partie du grand cycle multimedia United States. Ce spectacle long de huit heures, composé et interprété par Laurie Anderson, a été créé à Brooklyn il y a déjà quarante ans, en 1983. Il a marqué son temps, et la mémoire en est encore vive. À la fois monumental et ostensiblement « bricolé », il est composé de vidéos et d’images fixes, de musique d’avant-garde et de pop, de textes parlés, de performance gestuelle et d’électronique ludique. Le film du spectacle est aujourd’hui projeté en boucle dans le cadre de la collection permanente du MoMA à New York. La chanson O Superman constitue un très bel exemple d’une rencontre inopinée entre une œuvre d’art audacieuse et l’imaginaire collectif, là où on s’y attendait le moins. Car ce pur produit des pratiques et des préoccupations de l’art expérimental s’est miraculeusement retrouvé au sommet des charts américains et européens lors de sa sortie en 1981. La situation prit de court le label de disques qui en avait sorti le 45 tours, obligé de represser en toute hâte des dizaines de milliers d’exemplaires de l’improbable hit !
Son charme envoûtant tient en une série d’ambiguïtés qui ont fait l’objet d’une longue étude de la musicologue Susan McClary, dans son essai Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality — l’un des manifestes les plus lus et les plus controversés des Cultural Studies américaines. L’ambiguïté entre la douce voix maternelle et la voix robotique du Vocoder ; le délicat et monotone balancement entre deux accords presque semblables (une situation harmonique à peine binaire, pourrait-on dire, qui semble se moquer de tous les codes de l’harmonie classique), tout cela est pour McCLary l’occasion de démontrer brillamment que la musique, si « universelle » soit-elle, peut à l’occasion véhiculer par sa propre grammaire de l’idéologie, et notamment de l’idéologie sur le genre. Nous nous en sommes rappelés lorsqu’il s’est agi de proposer un contrepoint aux héroïques et très virils poèmes symphoniques de Richard Strauss...
Les paroles d’O Superman constituent par ailleurs un subtil et vénéneux poème alternant les fausses pistes et les retournements. Il s’ouvre avec un humour délicieux : il semble que la mère de Superman veuille prendre des nouvelles et laisser un message sur le répondeur automatique de son héros de fils. Superman a affaire a une mère-poule : c’est un ressort comique ! Mais la voix de « Mom » change rapidement de nature. Elle devient bientôt La Voix tout court, une inquiétante figure de l’Autre, à la fois douce, insinuante et anonyme : « Well, you don't know me, but I know you ». Sur le répondeur de Superman, La Voix insiste ensuite pour laisser un message bien précis : « Prépare-toi, les avions arrivent (Here come the planes), les avions américains ». L’auditeur comprend alors que la voix de Mom n’est peut-être rien d’autre que la voix de l’Amérique elle-même, le vague patriotisme qui demeure « lorsque la justice s’en est allée » :
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms, in your automatic arms, your electronic arms, your petrochemical arms, your military arms.
Le sous-titre de l’oeuvre (« For Massenet ») vient pointer que les premiers mots de la chanson
O Superman
O Judge
O Mom and Dad
font référence à l’un des airs de Rodrigue dans l’opéra Le Cid de Jules Massenet, d’après Corneille, un morceau de bravoure pour ténor qui connut à la fin du 19e siècle une extraordinaire popularité. Rodrigue s’adresse à Dieu à la veille d’un combat — qu’il croit qu’il va perdre, mais qu’il gagnera finalement —, en des termes où s’entrecroisent héroïsme, piété filiale et culpabilité (la fameuse mélancolie virile qu’a étudié Judith Butler) :
O souverain, ô juge, ô père,
toujours voilé, présent toujours,
je t'adorais au temps prospère,
et te bénis aux sombres jours.
Eh bien, Richard Strauss, héros de la musique allemande,
tout plein de tes incomparable vertus et de tes discrets péchés,
tu ne seras pas ce soir la seule à parler !
With love,
Jean-Luc Plouvier
lyrics
O Superman
O Judge
O Mom and Dad
Hi, I'm not home right now
But if you wanna leave a message
Just start talking at the sound of the tone
Hello? This is your Mother
Are you there?
Are you coming home?
Hello? Is anybody home?
Well, you don't know me, but I know you
And I've got a message to give to you
Here come the planes
So you better get ready, ready to go
You can come as you are, but pay as you go
Pay as you go
And I said, "Okay, who is this really?"
And the voice said
"This is the hand, the hand that takes"
Here come the planes
They're American planes, made in America
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said
"Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night
Shall stay these couriers from the swift completion
Of their appointed rounds"
'Cause when love is gone
There's always justice
And when justice is gone
There's always force
And when force is gone
There's always Mom, hi Mom
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms
In your automatic arms, your electronic arms
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms
Your petrochemical arms, your military arms
In your electronic arms
(Laurie Anderson)
And so began Laurie Anderson’s own state of the union. The record of this eight-hour, two-night show—1984’s four-and-a-half-hour box set, United States Live—is a gesamtkunstwerk, a bold federation of hobbyist tinkering and scientific wizardry, sound sculpture and rock music, gender and social studies, philosophy and linguistics. [...] Anderson untangled Reagan’s knot of tech and hope and power and wove together an alternative form of patriotism, one that centers disorientation and finds authenticity in imagination. Along the way, she created an American masterpiece.
O Superman, the 1981 hit single from the extended work United States, is a good example of Anderson in deconstructive mode. [...] The musical constant in "O Superman" is a pedal on middle c on a single syllable: "ha ha ha." In performance, one watches as Anderson generates this sound and establishes its technological reiteration through a delay mechanism. It gives the impression of being expressively authentic, as though it exists outside of or prior to language, and it evokes powerful though contradictory affective responses; alternately it may be heard as sardonic laughter or as anxious, childish whimpering. It runs for the duration of the composition, changing only when it is thrown temporarily out of kilter through phasing. Its apparent shifts in meaning are due solely to context, for the sound itself is frozen into place electronically.
Two alternating chords inflect the pedal harmonically: an A'' major triad in first inversion and a root-position C minor triad. It is her dependence on such minimal musical materials that makes some musicians dismiss Anderson as unworthy of serious analytical discussion. But like many other as- pects of Anderson's work, the music often is carefully organized in terms of austere binary oppositions, the kinds of oppositions that structuralists such as Saussure and Levi-Strauss revealed as lying at the foundations of Western thought and that poststructuralists have been concerned with decon- structing. The binary opposition she has chosen is not innocent, and as the piece unfolds we learn a good deal not only about "O Superman," but also about the premises of Western musical discourse and our own postmodern condition.
Anderson's piece is in some ways like a performed-out analytical reduc- tion of the axes upon which many such tonal pieces turn. Nothing extrane- ous is present —she gives us only the binaries that underlie and inform the more complex narratives of the tonal repertory. But the fact that the hierar- chical relationship between her two chords is undecidable means that there is not even the potential security of the tragic ending. We may not like Schu-bert's rejection of the pretty theme and the affirmation of brutal reality at the end of the "Unfinished" Symphony's first movement, but that ending at least confirms the necessity of dissonance resolving to consonance, or the inevitability of second themes yielding to first. The formidable metaphysics of tonality and sonata form win out over romantic illusion, and there is considerable security in knowing that something —even if that something is harsh and tyrannical—guarantees meaning.
Anderson's monologue causes us to map the alternations with certainty at first: Man/Machine, Home/Alienation, and so on. But then things become confused, as Mom becomes Machine, and the cliches of American patriotism become codes of totalitarian control. Finally we are left with the ambiguity of the initial sound and the undecidability of the binarisms.
What is a hero?
What defines a hero? Who are they or how do you become one? Is a hero by definition heroic? Or do they have the same flaws as everyone, do they make the same human mistakes? Can one call themselves a hero?
Together with a multidisciplinary team, the Brussels Philharmonic explores the concept of heroism from various angles in relation to the concert Ein Heldenleben. The heroes depicted in Strauss’ music are surely not anymore the heroes we admire today - or are they?
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben · 30.09.2023 · Flagey
Heroes take many forms – in real life as well as in art. Richard Strauss brought a succession of heroes to the fore in his symphonic poems, two of whom come to life in this programme – thanks to Strauss’ impressive orchestration – as if in a film.
with KAZUSHI ONO conductor