Elisabeth Hubmann (Genève): Organ improvisations in response to Simone Weil’s “Les Lutins du feu” (ca. 1921/22)

T (Tom of the Denkkollektiv): We have received a very precious yet unusual gift from you: an audio file with organ music. What does one hear when listening to it?

E (Elisabeth): One can hear many different things, depending on what they focus on. If listening while reading Weil’s poetry, one might be shocked by the conflicting setting of music in relation to the text. One who concentrates on the music might be trying to distinguish electronic sounds from organ sounds and to understand the layering of the improvisations. One who enjoys simply listening might be overwhelmed by the masses of sound.

T: “Les Lutins du feu” is one of the lesser known texts by Simone Weil. Some Weil scholars assume that it is her earliest text available to us, probably written in 1921, when Weil was about 12 years old. How was your first impression of this text? Did you recognise the young age of the author?

E: The text fascinated me very much, yet I was confused and I couldn’t construe it. I did not know many other texts by Simone Weil before, but I recognised that this one is very special, probably unusual. It was the most colourful text I had read in a long time and yet I felt it is set in darkness, sometimes scattered with little lights – when I read the text now, I feel the colours are much brighter than in my improvisations.

T: What happened after your first encounter with the text? The final product we can now listen to consists of a recording of an improvisation that is a live, spontaneous act you have performed. Additionally, it is more than just the simple documentation of this unique “event”. You amplified the recording in a manifold process of “post-production”. So, we have several layers of reception, (re-)action, reflection, editing, alteration, and I guess, imitation?

E: This was the first time someone asked me to improvise on a text. My spontaneous reaction was to read the text many times, underline words that provoke something in me and try to find sections that could help me to structure my improv. I thought about using musical language contemporary with Simone Weil, a composer that reminds me a bit of her: Jehan Alain. His music is as colourful as Simone Weil’s text and he was, as was she, very passionate, also in his christian faith. I wrote a scheme with key words and sections and chose organ stops to put the words into music, but soon I gave up modelling my work after Alain – his music is unattainable and I didn’t want to rationalise the process even more. I opted for an organ from 1918 in Amsterdam, (where I used to be an organist), so quite close to the origin of the text. Today, it has a typical electro-pneumatic action but its sound gives us us an idea about the typical soundscape in the early 20s. I played the music spontaneously from that point onwards, there was some “good” music and some “bad” that came out. First and foremost, I am a player, not an improviser, so I felt I had to gain a bit more control by doing further creation with this material. Also, I had to let  some time pass. I sat down at another organ, this time in Geneva, to complete the material with what, after listening to the first set of improv pieces, I felt was missing. In the meantime, I experimented the melting together of organ and synthesizer with a composer-friend and I thought of our recordings to be very apt for an ambience for this Weil text. After giving up the idea to put the text “literally” into music, instead I recreated my feelings from when I was reading the text, meaking music at the centre of my endeavour. For a long time I felt especially impressed by the darkness and gloom, interrupted by scenes of light games like shimmer, burning, flashing and noises like crackling, sighing and whining. So I put these 3 experimentation situations together and worked on a dramaturgy without a clear story line, but reflecting the scenes of dance, sobbing, fight and fire, enveloped by tranquillity.

T: After listening to your improv pieces I started to read “Les Lutins du feu” in a non-chronological, non-linear way. That means that I did not read the single figures, events, elements set along the dominant storyline but the initially apparent storyline as being opened, enmeshed, short-circuited by manifold agents of light, fire, and fight.

E: First I thought the storyline would be the same as in my improv. But the wild fury dance, as described in the text, was hard to begin with. I tried several times, but never to my contentment. I also felt it is a bit too simplicist and childish for this text to translate words in notes and sentences in musical phrases. And finally, dance is a form of movement and movement in music needs preparation. Still, I can recognise the story in the music, but as you say, in a less black and white, but a more complex and rich way; in associations, amalgamations, re-interpretations. The fire that strikes down from the sky and the fight of Mégistos are combined in a similar musical idea, as are the questioning and whining. Dance is movement, sometimes in the foreground, but mostly as a swarming in the rear.

T: Against the backdrop of some critics dismissing the text as children’s artistry, it is very interesting that you explicitly felt to do something that counters all impressions of childish poetry. Was there something unsettling, irritating, provoking in the text that supported your impulse to not go too easy with it?

E: Yes, “simply” the impression it made on me! We tend to judge art and many other things very often in an academic way, according to cultural, formally transmitted criteria that blind us from what we actually feel. Meanwhile, popular arts have understood very well that what counts is what it provokes and not if it is done with highest artistry or great complexity.

T: Did you “invite” other influences into your process of making music? Other composers, models, thematic elements or musical inspiration from elsewhere?

E: Yes, it is best audible in the beginning of the piece. A synthesizer leads the way with acidity, blending into more and more levels of organ sounds. Also, the metallic percussive sounds are generated by my friend Nicolas Roulive on the synthesizer. I added some filter effects on some of the pure organ sounds as well, others I left just as they are. Talking about influences, it is often hard to name why we do things one way or another. I am inspired and marked by many different schools, teachers, composers and improvisers, but I’m neither a composer nor an improviser, but for the moment a musician trying to leave the cage of an interpreter. On a note not directly related to music, my encounters with nature, sonorities of the environment, human noises, travels, and (other people’s) characters have a huge impact too.

T: Finally, what do you recommend: Reading the text first and then listening to your improv pieces or the other way around? Or simultaneously, or both in a repetitive, or even meditative manner?

E: What experience do you want to have? An intellectual one? A meditation as you say? It will be a very different impression in what order you read and listen. And especially how you read and how you listen. My recommendation is to be open for confrontation and looking for a positivist effect: to learn or realize something, to allow feelings, to discover pretty atonal, cloudy, noise-music and appreciate a musical approach to Weil that is different from what you might ever have heard before.