COMPOSING MUSIC / WRITING TEXTS

 

Like many musicians of my generation, I experienced recording on analog tape, then on digital media, in stereo or multitrack. For the solo musician or band recording live, this meant a particular involvement in the session, and often the need to redo a track or the whole recording in the event of error or dissatisfaction.

Perhaps there was a sense of urgency among us, a desire to give our best and to surpass ourselves, in the very moment of recording and playing the instrument, individually or collectively.

Recording direct to disk, on a computer, with a multi-track DAW, has profoundly altered the process... Cubase, Logic Audio, Live and others have made it possible, especially for purely electronic music, to work in the home studio. The correction and editing of a recorded track, note by note, copy/paste operations, even remixes and metamorphoses of a track, from one project to another, have profoundly reconfigured the work of musical composition and its temporality.

The gains are obvious. But perhaps we've also lost the magic of a certain spontaneity and those “moments of grace” that every musician has experienced, whether solo or in a group, when something inexplicable happens and the first take is the right one. That's what makes the magic of live performance, whether it's a concert or a studio session.

In my experience with Lightwave, and my accomplices Christoph Harbonnier, Jacques Derégnaucourt, Renaud Pion and Paul Haslinger, we've known those magical moments, recorded on Revox tape or DAT cassette, where collective improvisation was accompanied by a live mix, where everyone controlled their levels and playing to better blend into the common sound flow.

Today, working with the infinite possibilities of computers and direct-to-disk recording, I feel like an assembler, retouching and adding one thing after another to arrive at a composition built step by step.

I see a parallel with the evolution of writing instruments. For a long time, I used a typewriter, first mechanical, then electric. You had to write a draft, sometimes several drafts, before typing the text. Corrections were complicated, requiring cut-outs, collages and ribbons of “tipex corrector”. The only way to type was to have a very precise idea of what you wanted to write, and usually a draft to reproduce, with changes in the margins.

Word processing on the computer has changed all that. Immediate correction and editing capabilities have made drafts obsolete. The computer has made the writing process more fluid and instinctive, perhaps at the cost of a step backwards in the process of thinking about and fine-tuning texts.