For the Giacinto Scelsi Festival 2023, I created "Vision 67", a piece that refers to a central figure for the festival. Besides the eponymous composer Giacinto Scelsi, the writer Henri Michaux, who cultivated an artistic friendship with Scelsi, is also very present.

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Similar to Scelsi in the field of composition, Michaux was a strong and idiosyncratic figure in the literary world of his time. While his contemporaries were carried away by the fashionable literary trends, he preferred to work in seclusion. His goal was not primarily success, but the search for an independent mode of expression, a language of his own. Among other things, it is described that he succeeded in this by knowing how to combine different, partly antagonistic styles. For example, he wrote poems in the rigid structure of a logbook.

 

For my piece, I start exactly there and combine musical elements that do not seem to fit together: Violin, both natural and modified, electroacoustic sounds as we know them from sound research, electronic rhythms as we know them from DJs and producers. Text excerpts both as historical recordings, spoken live or rendered as Morse code. The structure of the piece is also hybrid: it is through-composed but not notated, so it has elements of a classical composition as well as elements of a jazz composition.

 

Henri Michaux plays a role in this piece not only stylistically, but also in terms of content: I have used excerpts from his book "Miserable Miracle" and his film "Images d'un monde visionnaire" as sound material. Both works deal with Michaux's experiences with mescaline. The film "Images d'un monde visionnaire" was a Sandoz production and it is said that Michaux almost convulsively tried to control every detail of the film before concluding that film was not the right medium to express his experiences. With Sandoz and this reference to Basel, the circle closes.

Georges-Emmanuel Schneider, 2023