My encounter with these non-ordinary songs
The act of singing, what is it, and where can it take us?
Before giving some possible answers to that question, let me first talk about what this act is not, and in which ways the act of singing these non ordinary songs radically inverses our habitual perspectives – perspectives here meaning ways of perceiving the whole world, including ourselves. These habitual perspectives are so very ‚real‘ for us that we do not even know how to put them into question, how to see them for what they are: they are perspectives of perception, not ultimate realities.
Of what kind are these perspectives in which many human beings find themselves locked up for the most part of their lives, if it‘s not for the totality of their lives?
I would like to call them the perspectives of introjectionism, of projectionism and of reductionism – and I‘ll say some more now about what that might mean.[1] It is as if one would live, without even knowing why this is so, in two separated worlds: the ‚outer‘ world of measurable material objects, confining to laws of classical physics, and the ‚inner‘ world of the ‚psyche‘ in which all other phenomena are being situated, phenomena who do not find their place in a world reduced to outer objects – we are projecting those phenomena inside an inner world, a world somehow locked up within ourselves.
In a very precise sense, we could speak of phenomena, of situations, of atmospheres as originally subjective experiences. These subjective experiences, by calling them ‚emotions‘, ‚inner states‘, ‚psychic phenomena‘, we introject them inside us. Consequently, their subjectivity becomes minorised, sentimentalised, and put under suspicion.
According to these perspectives of introjectionism, projectionism and reductionism, one finds oneself in an outer world that is void of all these qualities of subjectivity, in a world of a radically different substance than that of the inner world. As a consequence, the things of the outer world appear to us to be dead, they cannot sense anything.[2] They may be animated by our ‚projections‘, but they do not have any interiority, nor do they have any ‚psyche‘. In itself, beyond that which we are projecting into it, such a world has no subjectivity, no interiority, no depth, no life of its own, no soul.
To see it otherwise is considered‚ magical thinking‘.[3]
All that has been said up to this point is important in order to put this cleaved vision of the world and of ourselves into question, and to begin to see the consequences of such a perspective.
I won‘t be able to analyse here in detail how such a perspective reflects a limited understanding of science, or how one can actually know anything through the methods of science – or how such methods actually reflect a limited comprehension of the question how on can know anything at all. And I won‘t say much about how it is a misunderstanding of the results of scientific experimentations to see them as ‚objective‘ realities.
Much rather, I‘ll speak of the effects of such a cleaved perspective on ourselves and on the world we inhabit.
The scientistic reductionism‘s superstition leaves us isolated, without any true connection with our proper world, without even any possibility of getting in touch, as all that we could touch is never anything but our projections.
And therefore, the world could never really be full of life, full of psyche, full of soul – even if it may sometimes seem us to be otherwise, this again is nothing but my own projection. Never could the world really return my glance, or be a vis-à-vis that would relieve my isolation. Never could I really trust my experience as indicating a truth and a beauty beyond myself, because all phenomena of perception would be nothing but illusory perceptions of the idea that one has of a brain.[4]
When the world is dead, being killed by my view, by my habits, by my conditionings, I find myself locked up in the narrow prison of ego-consciousness, confined to my inner world. In this way, all subjectivity becomes literally mine, and all experience is appropriated by the ego.[5]
What does that actually mean?
What does it mean for my experience of singing these non ordinary songs?
To call God, to let oneself be called by God, to sing God, to let oneself be sung by God, to play God, to let oneself be played by God: all this becomes impossible, according to the ego‘s perspective. The ego does not know how to serve, how to be of any help for, how to give itself to, something more beautiful, more noble, more true, more alive, than the ego itself. Except for its personal experiences, nothing has any reality. Ego thus gravitates around the question: „What does this workshop, this performance, this experience, this song – what do I get out of this?“ In this way, all experience remains confined within ego‘s little bubble and its obsession of personal growth.
Maud sometimes talks about the necessity to sense the song‘s effects on us – recipients of life‘s forces in action. Does the way in which we support and nourish the song (or in which we fail to do so) does us good or does us bad? How do I feel after having sung them? Here, the interest in my own experience is not an egoistic obsession, but the subjective sense becomes a sort of compass, indicating the action‘s quality. But what does quality mean here? We have to experience, otherwise we cannot evaluate the quality of a song, or an action, or of anything at all. Quality is not about external criteria. Having worked in such a way, I feel contentment, and I feel clean.
Even the idea of really doing us good or bad through a song – from the ego‘s perspective, this is inconceivable. It is equally inconceivable that we could really call someone or something that would be more real than the ego by the means of a song.
Luigi Pirandello talks about this very perturbation of our sense of what is ‚real‘ that may happen through art when he lets his six characters search for an author who could write the play in which they appear. In order to convince him of the necessity to give a written artistic form to his reality as a character, the character of the father asks the director to „step out of this game of art“ that he is accustomed to playing on this stage with his actors, and to „seriously reconsider the question: who are you?“ The character of the father thus addresses, in the question who are you, the director‘s conscience. And the director, astonished as well as irritated, turns away from the father and from the claims of this other reality expressing itself through the latter, and in order to reassure himself of his own worldly, social and habitual reality, the director tells his actors: „Well if this doesn‘t take some nerve! Someone who is trying to pass himself off as a character comes and asks me who I am!“[6]
From the ego‘s perspective, claims of another level of reality, such as expressed here by the character, seem to be an unacceptable pretence. And thus the ego runs off into denial, ridiculising this other reality, to be able to exist itself.
However, the character of the father does not let himself be ridiculed in this way, but insists, with all his dignity: „A character, sir, can always ask a man who he is, because a character truly has a life of his own, marked by his own characteristics, because of which he is always ‚someone‘. On the other hand, a man – I‘m not saying you at this moment – a man in general, can be ‚nobody‘.“ Unable to even just hear the character‘s reasoning, the director takes the argument back to the ego‘s level and to its habitual reference points. „OK. But you are asking me, the director, the head man! Do you understand?“ But in so doing, the director could never refute the truth expressed by the character of the father.
The character of the father is not too impressed by that discourse of the director, but insists on the fact that the play which those characters have come to accomplish is more real and more true than the director‘s situation of being isolated in his own inconstant ego. „But there is no doubt about it, sir. […] I thought you had understood this from the very beginning.“ The director still cannot imagine this reversal of perspective. „More real than me?“ he asks once again.
This dialogue between a so-called ‚imaginary‘ character without any power nor importance in the so-called ‚real‘ world, and a human being, so-called ‚real‘ and therefore powerful and important, reflects perfectly the distortion of the egoistic vision: The ego is incapable of seeing the Other – the character, the angel, the daïmon,[7] the infinite, Life, God – as reality in itself.
The character of the father talks about the „miracle of reality that is born, evoked, attracted and formed by the stage itself“, which emerges and „has more right to live here“ than us, the actors, because this reality is so much truer than us being cluttered by an ego. Between this view informed by miracle, and the pseudo-reality of ego, the „verosimiglianza“[8] as Pirandello calls it, there exists a total gap. And it‘s exactly there where the act of singing can take us: to the edge of this gap, as well as beyond.
Note that the question here is not so much to know whether what one is calling through the songs is actually, literally, real or not. It‘s not a question of belief, of wanting to believe, of dogmatism, of goodwill. Rather, it is a question that hinges solely on our lived experience:
Once I am entering into a vaster sense of reality, opening up to a new perspective, then what happens to my habitual little me?
The archetypal psychologist James Hillman, student of Carl Gustav Jung, points out: „The world and the Gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls. A world view that perceives a dead world or declares the Gods to be symbolic projections derives from a perceiving subject [...] who has lost his imagine del cuor.“[9]
As soon as this reality manifests – as a presence, a necessity other than a personal interest – often we take flight. The ego feels that it is in danger and seeks to escape – which may take various forms: all sorts of inertness, of agitation, but also of goodwill... Instead of feeling concerned by the living necessities of the songs themselves, and of doing whatever one can to respond to them, a person‘s effort (which can be immense) remains paralysed within the ego‘s perspective, by the obsession of ‚personal growth‘, of ‚how am I doing‘.
Here, the question actually is not whether ‚I feel like it‘ or ‚I don‘t feel like it‘, whether ‚I‘m doing great‘ or ‚I‘m doing terrible‘. It is not about wanting to please Maud or being someone in the eyes of others. The question is not one of cultivating a spirit of scholarly competition, or of grandstand performance, or of ‚psychotherapy‘ – except if we return to the original sense of the term, which is to „to serve soul, not to treat it“.[10]
Once we inverse the perspective that habitually we take to be real, what happens then? And how does this reversal even come about?
We can play on different perspectives. Instead of seeing, as we habitually do, the whole of our experience as dead ‚projections‘ of ego, we could, for instance, play with a reversal of perspective: it is not Life, or God, who is ‚our projection‘, but it is us who are the projections of Life. Rather than seeing the reflections of our ideas in the world, we could play that it‘s us who are the reflections of some ‚objective‘ ideas. This perspective is giving all her weight, all her density, to God, to Life, to the songs, rather than to my little ego – and at the same time its appropriation is being renounced.
The Singing-Calling springs and vanishes, it appears and disappears, it is done and undone – it is completely free, and equally absolutely necessary. God is calling us. We are calling God. We are singing God. God is singing us. God is playing us. We are playing God. Buddhism calls these ways of playing the experience and understanding of the emptiness of all things. It is through playing in these ways that our realities manifest themselves: if we forget to play, we find ourselves enclosed in a flat, solid, tasteless world: enclosed in a unidimensional real-ness, separated from God, without any life. This is why the act of playing is so serious. Playing helps God, helps us, helps the world, helps Life, to exist.[11] Life, we ourselves, and the whole of our phenomenal world, even God – all of it emerges interdependently through playing thus.
God is doing us. We are doing God. We are entering in God‘s doings. We cannot do otherwise. All this becomes genuinely possible for us – it becomes a reality that is calling us, that is speaking to us, that is inviting us in ever more. A reality that comes alive more and more, through our very acts. If I allow myself to be touched by this necessity beyond ego, such as it expresses itself through the songs, I do not even quite understand how it is even possible that another, in that same situation, on his part could not be touched; so evident is the reality of the song‘s calling. From this perspective, it is about following an imperative. What matters is the palpable life of the songs themselves. They come from so far away that we do not even know neither how nor why they are touching us, traversing us. As much as they transform ourselves, they change the entire world of our lived experience.
Complementarily, the songs, on their own, do not have any isolated power, they are no detached idols by any means. The actual question is how to treat them, how to approach them, how to receive them, how to respect them, how to embody them, how to become the spot of their incarnation. In order for this to happen, a process of elaboration is needed – bringing the instrument that are these songs, as well as ourselves who are their vehicles, towards a perfection. It is in the encounter of these two, the songs and ourselves, it is in the act of singing, that the mystery of transformation is being played out. Without such, there is no fecundity, there is no Life.
Eva Kreikenbaum
[1] See the work of the contemporary German philosopher Hermann Schmitz.
[2] Alphonse de Lamartine, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, Livre III, Harmonie II, cf. https://sites.google.com/site/texteschoisis/home/alphonse-de-lamartine
[3] James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, Putnam 2014.
„[68] For centuries we have identified interiority with reflexive experience. Of course, things are dead, said the old psychology, because they do not „experience“ (feelings, memories, intentions). They may be animated by our projections, but to imagine they are projecting upon us and each other their ideas and demons, to regard them as storing memories or presenting their feeling characters in their sensate qualities – this is magical thinking. Because things do not experience, they have no subjectivity, no interiority, no depth. Depth psychology could go only to the intra- and interpersonal in search of the interiority of soul. Not only does this view kill things by viewing them as dead; it imprisons us in that tight little cell of ego.“
[4] James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, Putnam 2014.
„[78] A world without soul offers no intimacy. Things are left out in the cold, each object by definition cast away even before it is manufactured, lifeless litter and junk, taking its value wholly from my consumptive desire to have and to hold, wholly dependent on the subject to breathe it into life with personal desire. When particulars have no essential virtue, then my own virtue as a particular depends wholly and only on my subjectivity or on your desire for me, or fear of me: I must be desirable, attractive, a sex object, or win importance and power. For without these investments in my particular person, coming either from your subjectivity or my own, I too am but a dead thing among dead things, Potentially forever lonely. If particulars – whether images, things, or the events of the day – are to afford significance, the burden has been on the subject to maintain libidinal cathexis, „to relate“, so that depersonalisation and derealisation do not occur. It has been up to us to keep the world aglow. Yet these syndromes, depersonalisation and derealisation, are latent in the theory of the external world as soulless. Of course I am lonely, unrelated, and my existence thrown away […] [79] When the world is dead, ego psychology is inevitable, for the patient must find ways to connect the psyche of dream and feeling to the dead world so as to reanimate it. What stress, what effort it takes to live in a cemetery; what terrible need for will power. So of course I fall prey to ideologies and cults that relieve the burden of this subjectivity. Of course I am in desperate narcissic need, not because I have been neglected or still neglect my inmost subjectivity, but because the world without soul can never offer intimacy, never return my glance, never look at me with appeal, with gratitude, nor relieve the essential isolation of my subjectivity. But at that moment when each thing, each event presents itself again as a psychic reality […] then I am held in an enduring intimate conversation with matter. […] Then Eros descends from being a universal principle, an abstraction of desire, into the actual erotics of sensuous qualities in things: materials, shapes, motions, rhythms.“
[5] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975/92. „[2] Just as modern science and metaphysics have banned the subjectivity of souls from the outer world of material events, psychology has denied the autonomy and diversity of souls to the inner world of psychological events. […] All my subjectivity and all my interiority must literally be mine, in ownership of my conscious ego-personality.“
[6] Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921.
„[55] I would like […] to invite you to step out of this game [looking at the leading lady as if to anticipate her] of art! of art! which you are accustomed to playing here with your actors and seriously reconsider the question: who are you?“
[7]See James Hillman, Healing Fiction, Putnam 1983: „ [55] Just to remind us what a radical, shattering move – theological, epistemological, ontological – Jung‘s personifying was, let me merely pronounce the usual judgement upon daimons that is part of our Western religious psychology. Whether Eastern Church or Roman, whether Old Testament or New, whether Protestant or Catholic – daimons are no good things. They are part of the world of satan, of chaos, of temptation. They have been written against by major Christian theologians down through the centuries, associated with the cult of serpent worship in the midst of Christian Europe, and they are, according to the authority of St Matthew‘s Gospel the source of possession, sickness, and magic. Who indeed are those figures that they should be so menacing? If we look into the world before and parallel with the rise of Christianity – first to Homer, then to Plato and the dramatists, then to Plutarch, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and then to the Renaissance – the daimones were figures of the middle realm, neither quite transcendent Gods nor quite physical humans, and there were many sorts of them, beneficial, terrifying, message-bringer, mediators, voices of guidance and caution (as Socrates‘ Daimon and as Diotima). Even Eros was a daimon. [56] But the dogmatic crystallisation of our religious culture demonised the daimons. As a fundamental component of polytheistic paganism, they had to be negated and denied by Christian theology which projected its repression upon the daimons, calling them the forces of denial and negation. Thus Jung‘s move which turned directly to the images and figures of the middle realm was a heretical, demonic move. His move into imagination, which had been prejudged in our religious language as demonic and in our clinical language as multiple personality or as schizophrenia. Yet, this radical activation of imagination was Jung‘s method of Know Thyself.“
See also James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975/92: „[175] Our distinction between psyche and human has several important consequences. If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and differently by the soul, and we admit that the soul exists independently of human beings, then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation, but the daimon‘s; not my faith that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul.“
[8] « La vita, per tutte le sfacciate assurdità, piccole e grandi, di cui beatamente è piena, ha l’inestimabile privilegio di poter fare a meno di quella stupidissima verosimiglianza, a cui l’arte crede suo dovere obbedire. Le assurdità della vita non hanno bisogno di parer verosimili, perché sono vere. All’opposto di quelle dell’arte che, per parer vere, hanno bisogno d’esser verosimili. E allora, verosimili, non sono più assurdità. Un caso della vita può essere assurdo; un’opera d’arte, se è opera d’arte, no » […]. (Luigi Pirandello, « Avvertenza agli scrupoli della fantasia», postfazione a « Il fu Mattia Pascal », 1921 - Luigi Pirandello, « Avertissement aux scrupules de la fantaisie», postface à « Il fu Mattia Pascal », 1921).
[9]James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975/92, [16].
[10] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975/92. „[74] Let us recall that psychotherapy, in accordance with the root meaning of the word „psyche“ and „therapy“ means to serve soul, not to treat it.“
[11] See Henri Corbin, Alone with the Alone. Creative Mysticism in the Sufism of Ibn‘Arabi, New Jersey 1969/ 97 [titre originel: L‘Imagination creatrice dans le Soufisme d‘Ibn‘Arabi, 1958]. „[95] He who knows himself knows his Lord. Knowing one‘s self, to know one‘s God; knowing one‘s Lord, to know one‘s self. This Lord is not the impersonal self, nor is it the God of dogmatic definitions, self-subsisting without relation to me, without being experienced by me. He is the he who knows himself through myself, that is, in the knowledge that I have of him, because it is the knowledge that he has of me; it is alone with him alone, in this syzygic unity, that it is possible to say Thou. [248] For prayer is not a request of something: it is the expression of a mode of being, a means of existing and of causing to exist, that is, a means of causing the God who reveals Himself to appear, of „seeing“ Him, […] in the form which precisely He reveals by revealing Himself by and to that form. [...] We do not pray to the Divine essence in its hiddenness; each faithful prays to his Lord, the Lord who is in the form of his faith.“
Ma
Robart’s work emphasizes the exploration of dancing and singing as a window into a deeper and larger view of the human being and creativity. Her approach to form, in both dance and chant, widens the experience of the body by going beyond the inherited cultural viewpoints that consider it as a tool of the mind to create patterns. In the context of her research, the body is an entity of relatedness, an interface that connects our consciousness to the external world perceived through the senses, as well as to the inner, subjective world— what we feel within our body and psyche. In Robart’s work, the body is an open door to the present, past, and future, to all beings, to the most mundane and to the most sacred in the human being.
In Robart's research, form, articulated either as dance or chant, is the expression of the dynamics between the subject’s pulses of creative awareness and its responses to those same pulses. Robart calls the pulses of creative awareness élan. For her, élan is more than a physical or kinesthetic impulse. The source of élan is in the heart. Élan is fervor and will to go beyond our limited human condition to be in freedom— it is propulsion toward God. Dance and chant are simultaneously a call and a response to that call. The call represents an innate need to overcome our limitations and realize our transcendental nature. The response is expressed through the evanescent forms our body is capable of constituting through chant and dance.
Realizing that form itself is the expression of the creative power of life may lead the individual into an evolutionary process of his consciousness, identity, and quality of action. Such a change is accomplished in a new perspective on life and art. To consider Robart's research and ideas leads us to explore their relationship with notions of body and perception, peculiar to modern phenomenology.
Testimony
Relatedness' Praxis
This writing is based on a recorded conversation between Robart and I on July 6, 2013, as well as on my own experience in her research.
Robart’s praxis is about the experience provoked by an approach to art in which the dance, the chant, and the artist are not viewed as isolated phenomena but as processes or organisms , which in turn are part of an organic whole, whose parts are interdependent. This notion derives from a worldview in which reality is also like a living organism in which one part is not more important than the rest but all become one through their interactions. Thus, the subject is not a primary entity that relates things to itself, swallowing them into its singleness. Instead, entities and phenomena grow together and enrich each other. Another way to consider the chants and dances is as it they were holograms, which independently of the perspective or angle from where one sees them, one can perceive the tridimensional rendering of the totality to which they belong, which includes, not the person, the chant or the dance, but the matrix containing all of them.
According to Robart, her work places the subject face to the enigma of life. In practical terms, she explained, her work is about relatedness because relatedness exists in all levels of life, and there is no life if there are not interrelations among things. She considers the human body as an entity of relatedness. It connects or relates us with the air, the birds, the sun, other humans: all worlds within and around it. She laughed and mentioned the following poem anonym African poem**,
A canvas and my body speak
I throw myself to the left
I throw myself to the right
I make the fish
The bird flies,
flies, flies, flies
Goes away, comes back, passes
Ascends, glides, and falls
I am the bird
Everything lives, everything sings and dances.
One of the aspects of her work is the development of intimacy with the body in order reach the consciousness that the body is a body of relation, because it is made for that. That is why we have senses. The eyes see; the nose smells; the ears hear; and the hands and the skin sense the world around.
In our culture we have the tendency to reduce everything to I and mine, but relatedness has nothing to do with the isolated individual. Robart’s idea resonates with the Japanese notion of human being conveyed by the expression ningen 人間, which includes the character 人 (nin, hito, bito, pito, jin) for human, and 間 ma (pronounced gen in the compound). The Japanese character 間 ma is translated as: “among”. “Interval”, “gap”, in Japanese aesthetics it is used to describe the negative space between artistic objects. Ma introduces an active quality into ningen and establishes the relational and relative nature of the human being. For Pilgrim, ningen “also carries an experiential connotation: for persons to stand in relationship to other persons is for them to experience each other.”
For Robart, by becoming conscious of the interrelatedness of the beings and things in the world we can understand why one and one’s body are there, as well as one’s mission in it. In order to experience the relatedness, the subject has to arrive to its “zero point”, where the ego is silent and the tendency to judge and individualize experience ceases; only then, the body can resonate and enter in relationship with everything around it. Robart’s pedagogy aims to bring the participants to the intuition of relatedness. She does not want to convince them with theoretic indoctrinations. Her way is not speculative but rigorously practical, she creates the conditions to give the participants the opportunity to discover by themselves and allow their bodies to be bodies of active relatedness.
The essence of her practice is what the person directly experiences through the body. The chant is not separated from the dance, and vice versa, because nothing happening in the body is separated from the rest.
Singing and dancing come alive through the body, which, as a field of relatedness, is their conduit; it connects the world in which they originate with ours. However, the idea that they arise only from the body would be too limited. Indeed, they are closely connected with a deeper notion of life. Robart’s praxis operates in a context of relatedness, in which Wisdom embodies itself: there Wisdom is chant, Wisdom is dance.
Pablo Jimene
*A system with many parts that depend on each other and work together” Merriam-Webster Online
** Ellwood, Robert S., and Richard Pilgrim. Japanese Religion: a Cultural Perspective. Prentice-Hall, 1985.
Rhythmic circularity and organic unity in Maud Robart’ Singing
Interview by "Biblioteca Teatrale"
The Italian original version, was published in « Biblioteca Teatrale », Roma, Bulzoni Editore, n. 77, january-march 2006.
Part I
As an artist, percussionist and educator, what do you consider essential in Maud Robart's approach to afro-haitian ritual singing, and what is this work’s most unique contribution to modern culture?
Through her approach, Maud Robart gives her students the possibility to perceive the relationship between rhythm and melody, restoring this natural unity within the space-time dimension of the experience. To me, the essential contribution of this approach lies in the rare opportunity it offers to experience how separating rhythm from melody is, in fact, artificial.
In today’s culture, rhythm is understood as a linear periodic succession of beats
The representation of a segment - 4 movements beat - (fig. a) of this hypothetically infinite line, suggests the dimension of a journey, moving from one place of the mind to another, where the start and end points are of great importance. All in all, a very useful approach, as long as it helps musical art escape from harmful, repetitive and self-referential closed circles.
From my experience as an artist-musician and educator, this approach has the merit of bringing order, on the other hand, by allowing musical annotation on paper, it unfortunately contributes to a culture that ignores the value of recursive circles, peculiar to traditional music (riff — pedals — ostinato, etc.) relegating them to static repetitiveness. In my opinion, the lack of knowledge about the generative power of recursive circles in music is to a large extent attributable to this division between rhythm and melody. This separation transforms rhythm into a frame of reference external to music, superimposable to the score as meridians on a map.
Time increasingly becomes a theoretical dimension, not always rooted into the experience of playing music. In the end, the space between the beats (markings) almost completely disappears from the grid (the rhythm); and paradoxically, these markings become the only tangible, empirical element of rhythm, even though they don’t actually belong to the music.
In Maud Robart's work students can fill the space between markings- that in western culture has become an empty interruption - with their own breath, body movements and sounds. While, when time is understood as a reference grid, it ends up functioning as measure and control interfering with the melody's vitality.
When Maud Robart proposes a song, she puts the accent on its inner articulation and uses suspension to consciously find back the organic dynamics of movement. This dynamic generates and explains the precise and mutable balance between melody and rhythm, between space and time (we’ll have to ask Maud if this is what she calls the “Soul of Song”).
We thus discover a precision that stems from learning to listening to our inner rhythm, and from this rhythm's relationship with all the articulations of singing, remaining rigorously "in the rhythm", without the need of any external marking of the beat. Cadence is transformed into flow, into a space of dynamic balance in which one can experience the creative dance between particles and waves that still occupies the minds of modern scientists and artists.
This work's importance in the modern cultural context, I think, comes from the opportunity it gives us to discover and actualize the knowledge inherent to the repetitiveness of traditional music. In my opinion, Maud Robart's research debunks the idea that circularity is purely of warm, motherly nature; or at best useful (when it works) to reconnecting with the ancestral values of a “primal instinctuality”. This notion deprives circularity of its dynamic qualities, which are exclusively attributed on the other hand to logical-rational thinking, and relegates it to the ghetto of self-referentiality.
The quality leap from simple repetitiveness to conscience of repetition's generative and dynamic power, is made possible by the small, almost unperceptible shift of the accent from the support point (the beat), to a little before or after, where the movement begins. It's a matter of setting oneself in motion as Nature intended for our survival: alternating tension and release. Several recursive circles (not closed circles) take turns, stimulate each other, producing complex waves, differently curved, instances of suspension, of momentary calm, of unsteadiness and reboot. The movement is complex, multidirectional in space and in time, and so it’s no more an inexorable movement from a before to an after, from a beginning to an end, from a past to a future.
Trying to reproduce the picture of our initial segment, we could transform it this way: from fig. a1 to fig. b.
To the objection that in the first picture (a) the movement goes somewhere, while in the second one (b) it stays in the same place, I respond:
The first movement suggests a journey, but it doesn’t say anything about who's on the journey and what their energy is. The second one, on the contrary, tells us how we can set ourselves in motion and how we can find the energy to do it. Therefore, the second one tells us about the real possibility of a journey. We will probably be really able to understand the first pattern only when we have understood how the second one works; or even better, the second pattern will help us understand what happens in each of the infinite points of the first one.
Part II
You observed Maud Robart's work several times; what would be your spontaneous personal remarks?
First of all, I would talk about the relationship with the space. On the first time Maud invited me to attend her work, I was welcomed by a luminous and attentive silence. In a space that I knew very well, everything was different but at the same time nothing had changed, I detected no violations or alterations. The first sensation was a sense of restitution, as if the work led by Maud in the previous days had made the structure of the place perceptible, the relationship between the walls, the floor, the roof, the objects inside and the air filling space. One could sense something that is very rare and precious to me: it was possible to hear the sound of silence. The bodies, the movements, the voices and the songs had started to leave traces of images and sounds, emerging from the silence and flowing into the silence, making its sound even more perceptible, as it happens when a tree or a ship standing out against a horizon, by contrast, make its depth apparent.
"Listening to silence"?
As I said, the important element is that this silence existed as concretely perceptible.
It wasn’t an absence of sounds but the silence of this place, in this moment, with these people inside. In every place, in nature or inside buildings created by men, if several living beings manage to be really together, without rushing to fill the space with sounds, a generative tension arises, allowing us to hear the sound of silence. If we wait a little longer, we come to realize that this very tension, calm and abounding with awareness at the same time, is in itself silence: in this place, in this moment, with these people. It seems to me that Maud Robart builds with her students this active silence every and each time, allowing the movement and the song to arise from it. To those working with her, she communicates since the beginning, how each creative act is born at the point of merging between the perception of ourselves and of the world, the image we create out of it, and memory.
Is space then very important for a musician?
Space is both the physical and mental place in which the action of playing happens. The musician, the composer, the improviser or the executant must learn to perceive, imagine, measure it and, if necessary, empty or fill it with impressions, living beings, objects, etc. Being aware of being in a "place" makes the experience of playing real and enables us to perceive time in a far more tangible way, as a relationship between movement and space.
In what terms would you talk about this work to a “classically” trained musician?
First of all, I would tell them everything I just said; then I would try to explain how Maud Robart's work, by setting a clear and inseparable relationship between movement and sound, offers the opportunity to experience a way to be involved in music, which restores the real nature of the action of playing and which provides the creative process with tangible structures and territories, reconnecting imagination and action.
Do you think this research can actually be useful to the work of artists, musicians and researchers educated in a modern culture?
When Maud Robart moves and sings, she creates a continuous series of circular, repetitive, generative waves. She uses syncopation to generate sound, not to fragment it. The suspension that occurs produces no interruption in the movement, on the contrary, it becomes a key point, a centre catalysing new melodic combinations. As a musician, I had the opportunity to witness a work that leads to an organic connection with rhythm, since this work, shifting the focus to the rhythmic-melodic phrase, enables us to be "in time" without necessarily needing an external reference.
In my opinion, the fundamental value of Maud Robart's work lies in the possibility to experience the generative function of a whole continuous series of recursive circles.
Rebuilding body-mind unity becomes a tangible experience, based on an ancient, rigorous tradition, free from the dangers of any romanticism and fashionable exoticism.
What immediate difference do you notice between "the spirit of rhythm" peculiar to this way of approaching ritual afro-haitian singing and the common understanding of rhythm in the West?
The moment we perceive and build together the sound of silence, it becomes also possible to hear the tiniest gesture, not because it has its own sound but because it modifies the movement of silence.
Real rhythm arises as a tangible movement in time, inside a living space. Creating a frame of regular beats (markimgs) may still prove useful if one feels the need to measure, to check, but it doesn't help to generate the singing itself.
Every single time, Maud Robart creates a path that seems to exist already within the silence, as oriental artists do when they look for the drawing into the whiteness of the sheet. The secret lies into the movement that continuously carries the energy out of the centre, generating a dance, which only finds its own balance in the movement and for which the focus is almost never on external supports.
The difference with the common conception of rhythm in the West lies in the fact that Maud Robart's singing lives of its own inner rhythm, born from the articulation of the melodic phrase in relation to the movement, with no need to leave it to an external reference grid.
Watching Maud Robart singing, on what specific elements did you base your observations in order to describe the concrete relationship between sound and movement?
Talking about this relationship in Maud Robart's work means discussing once again her way to conceive rhythm.
I saw Maud Robart start very often with a little movements of the feet and pelvis, flowing to the shoulders through the spine. It’s a single complex movement, almost imperceptible and always counter-lateral, created by shifting the weight alternatively to the right and to the left foot.
When the right foot is slightly lifted and the weight shifts on the left, it appears to release an impulsion, which sets the left hip in motion and, bouncing on the hip, goes through the upper-body out through the right shoulder, which slightly lifts up. If the left foot goes up, the impulsion sets the right hip in motion, and then flows through the left shoulder.
In Maud Robart’s singing, the essence and the crux of the science and of the deep awareness of syncopation, seems to spring from that very "cross-flow", which prepares the body to perceive, to act and react. It is a rhythm in which syncopation cannot be an interruption, but rather is the "place" of the unsteadiness, generating movement's dynamic balance, without ever fixing the action to physical and mental external supports (the “beat" for example).
What did "observing", "being witness" mean to you?
I came into the workspace already filled with all the wonderful stories I had heard from a group of Maud Robart's regular students. On one hand, I was a little worried about not being able to maintain an attentive and discrete listening, and on the other hand I was a little on the defensive regarding the great rigour of the form that we, witnesses, had been requested to observe (we had to be barefoot and dressed in white like the others). It proved to be an extraordinary experience, and both embarrassment and defences disappeared almost immediately.
When Maud Robart works with her students, either you feel a participant, or you end up automatically “out”. Little by little, I experienced a strong feeling of empathy towards the others, but what I most clearly remember is the generosity and the effort of a beautiful lady, dressed in white, engaging fully, who tried to call a group of young people, in some ways still inadequate but willing and attentive with their bodies and minds, into a world of mysteries.
What was your relationship with the participants in the work?
I experienced the joy of sharing and some melancholy towards a group of men and women who seemed fearless, because they were alone in the universe, and a little lost at the same time.
How would you talk about the ties between the participants in the work?
They were like participants in a journey; I felt strong solidarity among them, stemming from a great confidence in a sure guide who is also a source of doubts, questions and answers, so many answers…Angelo Tripodo*
* A musician and educator, Angelo Tripodo is member of the Giovanni Renzo Trio. For the association La Ragnatela, he directs the Laboratory for differently-abled, Suono e Ritmo, with collaborations with Paolo Fresu, Alessandra Giura Longo and other musicians interested in practising creative improvisation. With Giovanna La Maestra, he works on the realization of performances and of theatre and music laboratories. He witnessed several times Maud Robart's work.