Consensus Partium

With this oratorio for three female voices, three brass instruments, two radio voices and electronics, Alessandro Bosetti and David Christoffel reinvent a prosody where texts, sounds, song and music will resonate together.

Alessandro Bosetti and David Christoffel share practices that balance musical composition, radio drama, and poetry. But Consensus Partium, an oratorio structured around the scansion of its various pieces for three female voices, three brass instruments, two radio voices, and electronics, invites less a dialogue than a friction between words and music.

The vocals will be provided by Trio Déclic, led by Valérie Philippin, one of the few to venture into the realm of sound poetry. The pieces will take the form of solos, duets, polyphonies, or electroacoustic homilies, playing with the effects of extreme proximity and great distance inherent to radio broadcasting and the Brigittines' performance space.

Guided by the search for perfect proportions, Consensus Partium borrows its title from the rule formulated by Leon Battista Alberti, a Renaissance architect, according to which beauty arises from the perfect balance between the whole and its parts. While this model has already inspired architects, musicians, and painters, it does not apply here to the composition of the pieces that David Christoffel and Alessandro Bosetti each wrote independently, playing on the fluidity of their sequence.

Interview with Alessandro Bosetti and David Christoffel

Consensus Partium by Alessandro Bosetti and David Christoffel will open the festival. A spoken opera, a novel approach that travels between music and words, their balance and friction, Consensus Partium is written for three singers and a radio and narration setup. Quoting the search for perfect proportions, and their rules as formulated by the Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti, Consensus Partium explores the voice, listening and language play, the word and its sonic material.

Could you present to us the magical and architectural proportion ( Consensus Partium ), formulated by Leon Battista Alberti, a Renaissance architect, and, above all, its possible translation into music?

Much like John Cage used the games of chance from the I Ching, we took the numbers of the golden ratio (1.618033988) as the "minute" durations of the different sequences in Consensus Partium . This was a way for us to free ourselves from the weight of the overall form and to have complete confidence in its "solidity" in order to better focus on the playing space that each duration offered us. The search for a "Consensus Partium," or the balance of these different components, is also the "modus operandi" of our collaboration, which blends and brings into play many different sources: speech as opposed to music, the hyper-closeness of radio and the reverberating distance of the venues, the aesthetics of David and those of Alessandro… Even in the Renaissance, it wasn't just a question of symmetry; this balance was simultaneously complex, fragile, and "attached" to surprising mathematical sequences.

The instrumentation of Consensus Partium is unique: three vocal voices, three brass instruments, a radio and spoken-word setup. How did you conceive it?

- Originally, there was the paradox of a multifaceted space, with spatialized sound sources, wanderings, and juxtaposed blocks coming from different directions, which led us to this arrangement. The first to do this were the Italian composers Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli in the 16th century, in St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, using cori battenti (concerted choirs) and brass instruments. Hence the idea of creating two trios—one of voices and one of brass—and moving them around. But beyond or within the acoustics of the Church of Saint-Eustache, where Consensus Partium was created in 2020, there is already and always this spatial paradox of radio broadcasting, simultaneously near and far, which superimposes disparate soundscapes. This led us to the idea of embedding dry and intimate radio spaces in an acoustics which, like that of the Church of Saint-Eustache, was in complete contrast with its reverberation and large volumes.

Your Oratorio, a radio opera, a spoken opera, as interpreted by the Déclic trio– which traverses both sound poetry and the sung voice – foregrounds the voice, the word, and wordplay as a form, at times, of verbal seriality. How is the balance, but also the tension, played out between the word, with its infinitely open poetic possibilities, and the sound, the sonic material and its internal texture?

- Each sequence of Consensus Partium plays on this relationship, between the word and its sounds, and its interplay of possibilities. This is why so much happens: infinity encounters obstacles, texture tends to externalize itself, language doesn't just want to play... Consensus Partium is an aggregate of fragments, constructing an ephemeral palace of memory where opposites and incommensurable numbers constantly confront and mingle.

More generally, regarding the Next Opera Days festival, which explores new operatic forms, how do you envision the future and the form of opera in today's music? And, as a corollary, does the relationship between radio broadcasting and music, which is one of the guiding principles of your creation, seem to you to be a promising avenue for a new kind of opera?

The development of radio broadcasting a century ago coincided with a rupture in the history of opera (the fragmentation of narrative and, with it, the erosion of the self-evident nature of lyricism). Thus, everything has long needed to be rebuilt. By returning to the contemporary acoustic references of opera's origins in Renaissance Italy, Consensus Partium offers a way of starting the question afresh. If it is to contain a program for the refounding of the operatic genre, it is primarily because it presents itself as an exercise in memory, because it delves into rhetoric and music prior to their separation into the liberal arts.