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“I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.”
Edgard Varese
There has always been a lot of skepticism when it comes to out of body experiences, and perhaps there should be. Yet to those who have experienced them the question of whether they are real or not is irrelevant. What matters is the experience, the emotion. Science may never be able to prove or disprove it, although some recent research suggests that OBE like sensations can be artificially triggered in a laboratory setting. But science is a skeptic by nature, it has to be, and yet this prevents her from being totally impartial. Perhaps the best way to describe Musiques Pour Cultes is as a 40mn long transcription of an OBE, from start to finish. In order to do so, together with Severine, we had to develop a vocabulary, a grammar of sounds and structures. That took over 9 years.
I believe the sounds and voices heard throughout musiques are sounds we have all heard before, whether we remember them or not, they have all been part of who we are, a collective subconscious. Perhaps the true universality of music lies not in the many culturally biased conceptions of harmony, melody and form, but on a deeper foundation, the universality of the human experience, beyond culture. I believe that OBE’s are part of this common heritage, transcending time and space.
Nowhere in Musiques pour cultes’ score will you find a ‘note’ in the traditional, western sense of the word. There is no do, no re, but instead Hertz, actual frequencies expressed in cycle per seconds, and yet it remains somewhat tonal.
The sounds and voices that make up the work have all played in my head before, they have always been with me, since my early childhood and probably before, but I had forgotten them. That is until someone showed me the way out of my body. I still hear them, they still accompany me everyday.
Musiques pour cultes is a profoundly introspective experience, an invitation to look into places inside you, places you may have forgotten about. We hope you will enjoy it.
On a technical note, Musques pour cultes was written to strongly interact with the space it is played in, and you the listener. In most situations, sound will eventually appear to envelope the audience and emanate from directions and places without speakers. It is also almost entirely written using Csound, a computer language used for sound and music creation. Csound was ideal because it offers the composer a blank canvas within which to create, and almost limitless possibilities for sound synthesis and composition.
Jean-Luc Cohen
New York City, February 24, 2007.
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