Rhythmic circularity and organic unity in Maud Robart’ Singing

INTERVIEW BY "BIBLIOTECA TEATRALE"
THE ITALIAN ORIGINAL VERSION, WAS PUBLISHED IN « BIBLIOTECA TEATRALE », ROMA, BULZONI EDITORE, N. 77, JANUARY-MARCH 2006. 

PART I

As an artist, percussionist and educator, what do you consider essential in Maud Robart's approach to afro-haitian ritual singing, and what is this work’s most unique contribution to modern culture?

     Through her approach, Maud Robart gives her students the possibility to perceive the relationship between rhythm and melody, restoring this natural unity within the space-time dimension of the experience. To me, the essential contribution of this approach lies in the rare opportunity it offers to experience how separating rhythm from melody is, in fact, artificial.

     In today’s culture, rhythm is understood as a linear periodic succession of beats

The representation of a segment - 4 movements beat - (fig. a) of this hypothetically infinite line, suggests the dimension of a journey, moving from one place of the mind to another, where the start and end points are of great importance. All in all, a very useful approach, as long as it helps musical art escape from harmful, repetitive and self-referential closed circles.

     From my experience as an artist-musician and educator, this approach has the merit of bringing order, on the other hand, by allowing musical annotation on paper, it unfortunately contributes to a culture that ignores the value of recursive circles, peculiar to traditional music (riff — pedals — ostinato, etc.) relegating them to static repetitiveness. In my opinion, the lack of knowledge about the generative power of recursive circles in music is to a large extent attributable to this division between rhythm and melody. This separation transforms rhythm into a frame of reference external to music, superimposable to the score as meridians on a map.    

     Time increasingly becomes a theoretical dimension, not always rooted into the experience of playing music. In the end, the space between the beats (markings) almost completely disappears from the grid (the rhythm); and paradoxically, these markings become the only tangible, empirical element of rhythm, even though they don’t actually belong to the music.

     In Maud Robart's work students can fill the space between markings- that in western culture has become an empty interruption - with their own breath, body movements and sounds. While, when time is understood as a reference grid, it ends up functioning as measure and control interfering with the melody's vitality.   

     When Maud Robart proposes a song, she puts the accent on its inner articulation and uses suspension to consciously find back the organic dynamics of movement. This dynamic generates and explains the precise and mutable balance between melody and rhythm, between space and time (we’ll have to ask Maud if this is what she calls the “Soul of Song”).

    We thus discover a precision that stems from learning to listening to our inner rhythm, and from this rhythm's relationship with all the articulations of singing, remaining rigorously "in the rhythm", without the need of any external marking of the beat. Cadence is transformed into flow, into a space of dynamic balance in which one can experience the creative dance between particles and waves that still occupies the minds of modern scientists and artists.

     This work's importance in the modern cultural context, I think, comes from the opportunity it gives us to discover and actualize the knowledge inherent to the repetitiveness of traditional music. In my opinion, Maud Robart's research debunks the idea that circularity is purely of warm, motherly nature; or at best useful (when it works) to reconnecting with the ancestral values of a “primal instinctuality”. This notion deprives circularity of its dynamic qualities, which are exclusively attributed on the other hand to logical-rational thinking, and relegates it to the ghetto of self-referentiality. 

     The quality leap from simple repetitiveness to conscience of repetition's generative and dynamic power, is made possible by the small, almost unperceptible shift of the accent from the support point (the beat), to a little before or after, where the movement begins. It's a matter of setting oneself in motion as Nature intended for our survival: alternating tension and release. Several recursive circles (not closed circles) take turns, stimulate each other, producing complex waves, differently curved, instances of suspension, of momentary calm, of unsteadiness and reboot. The movement is complex, multidirectional in space and in time, and so it’s no more an inexorable movement from a before to an after, from a beginning to an end, from a past to a future.

     Trying to reproduce the picture of our initial segment, we could transform it this way:   from fig. a1 to fig. b.

To the objection that in the first picture (a) the movement goes somewhere, while in the second one (b) it stays in the same place, I respond:

The first movement suggests a journey, but it doesn’t say anything about who's on the journey and what their energy is. The second one, on the contrary, tells us how we can set ourselves in motion and how we can find the energy to do it. Therefore, the second one tells us about the real possibility of a journey.  We will probably be really able to understand the first pattern only when we have understood how the second one works; or even better, the second pattern will help us understand what happens in each of the infinite points of the first one. 

PART II

You observed Maud Robart's work several times; what would be your spontaneous personal remarks? 

First of all, I would talk about the relationship with the space. On the first time Maud invited me to attend her work, I was welcomed by a luminous and attentive silence. In a space that I knew very well, everything was different but at the same time nothing had changed, I detected no violations or alterations. The first sensation was a sense of restitution, as if the work led by Maud in the previous days had made the structure of the place perceptible, the relationship between the walls, the floor, the roof, the objects inside and the air filling space. One could sense something that is very rare and precious to me: it was possible to hear the sound of silence. The bodies, the movements, the voices and the songs had started to leave traces of images and sounds, emerging from the silence and flowing into the silence, making its sound even more perceptible, as it happens when a tree or a ship standing out against a horizon, by contrast, make its depth apparent.   

"Listening to silence"?

As I said, the important element is that this silence existed as concretely perceptible. 

It wasn’t an absence of sounds but the silence of this place, in this moment, with these people inside. In every place, in nature or inside buildings created by men, if several living beings manage to be really together, without rushing to fill the space with sounds, a generative tension arises, allowing us to hear the sound of silence. If we wait a little longer, we come to realize that this very tension, calm and abounding with awareness at the same time, is in itself silence: in this place, in this moment, with these people. It seems to me that Maud Robart builds with her students this active silence every and each time, allowing the movement and the song to arise from it. To those working with her, she communicates since the beginning, how each creative act is born at the point of merging between the perception of ourselves and of the world, the image we create out of it, and memory.

Is space then very important for a musician?

     Space is both the physical and mental place in which the action of playing happens. The musician, the composer, the improviser or the executant must learn to perceive, imagine, measure it and, if necessary, empty or fill it with impressions, living beings, objects, etc. Being aware of being in a "place" makes the experience of playing real and enables us to perceive time in a far more tangible way, as a relationship between movement and space.

In what terms would you talk about this work to a “classically” trained musician?

     First of all, I would tell them everything I just said; then I would try to explain how Maud Robart's work, by setting a clear and inseparable relationship between movement and sound, offers the opportunity to experience a way to be involved in music, which restores the real nature of the action of playing and which provides the creative process with tangible structures and territories, reconnecting imagination and action.

Do you think this research can actually be useful to the work of artists, musicians and researchers educated in a modern culture?

When Maud Robart moves and sings, she creates a continuous series of circular, repetitive, generative waves. She uses syncopation to generate sound, not to fragment it. The suspension that occurs produces no interruption in the movement, on the contrary, it becomes a key point, a centre catalysing new melodic combinations.  As a musician, I had the opportunity to witness a work that leads to an organic connection with rhythm, since this work, shifting the focus to the rhythmic-melodic phrase, enables us to be "in time" without necessarily needing an external reference.  

     In my opinion, the fundamental value of Maud Robart's work lies in the possibility to experience the generative function of a whole continuous series of recursive circles. 

     Rebuilding body-mind unity becomes a tangible experience, based on an ancient, rigorous tradition, free from the dangers of any romanticism and fashionable exoticism.

What immediate difference do you notice between "the spirit of rhythm" peculiar to this way of approaching ritual afro-haitian singing and the common understanding of rhythm in the West?   

     The moment we perceive and build together the sound of silence, it becomes also possible to hear the tiniest gesture, not because it has its own sound but because it modifies the movement of silence.

     Real rhythm arises as a tangible movement in time, inside a living space. Creating a frame of regular beats (markimgs) may still prove useful if one feels the need to measure, to check, but it doesn't help to generate the singing itself. 

     Every single time, Maud Robart creates a path that seems to exist already within the silence, as oriental artists do when they look for the drawing into the whiteness of the sheet. The secret lies into the movement that continuously carries the energy out of the centre, generating a dance, which only finds its own balance in the movement and for which the focus is almost never on external supports.

    The difference with the common conception of rhythm in the West lies in the fact that Maud Robart's singing lives of its own inner rhythm, born from the articulation of the melodic phrase in relation to the movement, with no need to leave it to an external reference grid.

Watching Maud Robart singing, on what specific elements did you base your observations in order to describe the concrete relationship between sound and movement?

     Talking about this relationship in Maud Robart's work means discussing once again her way to conceive rhythm.     

     I saw Maud Robart start very often with a little movements of the feet and pelvis, flowing to the shoulders through the spine. It’s a single complex movement, almost imperceptible and always counter-lateral, created by shifting the weight alternatively to the right and to the left foot.

     When the right foot is slightly lifted and the weight shifts on the left, it appears to release an impulsion, which sets the left hip in motion and, bouncing on the hip, goes through the upper-body out through the right shoulder, which slightly lifts up. If the left foot goes up, the impulsion sets the right hip in motion, and then flows through the left shoulder.

     In Maud Robart’s singing, the essence and the crux of the science and of the deep awareness of syncopation, seems to spring from that very "cross-flow", which prepares the body to perceive, to act and react. It is a rhythm in which syncopation cannot be an interruption, but rather is the "place" of the unsteadiness, generating movement's dynamic balance, without ever fixing the action to physical and mental external supports (the “beat" for example).

What did "observing", "being witness" mean to you?

     I came into the workspace already filled with all the wonderful stories I had heard from a group of Maud Robart's regular students. On one hand, I was a little worried about not being able to maintain an attentive and discrete listening, and on the other hand I was a little on the defensive regarding the great rigour of the form that we, witnesses, had been requested to observe (we had to be barefoot and dressed in white like the others). It proved to be an extraordinary experience, and both embarrassment and defences disappeared almost immediately.    

     When Maud Robart works with her students, either you feel a participant, or you end up automatically “out”. Little by little, I experienced a strong feeling of empathy towards the others, but what I most clearly remember is the generosity and the effort of a beautiful lady, dressed in white, engaging fully, who tried to call a group of young people, in some ways still inadequate but willing and attentive with their bodies and minds, into a world of mysteries.    

What was your relationship with the participants in the work?

     I experienced the joy of sharing and some melancholy towards a group of men and women who seemed fearless, because they were alone in the universe, and a little lost at the same time.   

How would you talk about the ties between the participants in the work?

     They were like participants in a journey; I felt strong solidarity among them, stemming from a great confidence in a sure guide who is also a source of doubts, questions and answers, so many answers…Angelo Tripodo*

* A musician and educator, Angelo Tripodo is member of the Giovanni Renzo Trio. For the association La Ragnatela, he directs the Laboratory for differently-abled, Suono e Ritmo, with collaborations with Paolo Fresu, Alessandra Giura Longo and other musicians interested in practising creative improvisation. With Giovanna La Maestra, he works on the realization of performances and of theatre and music laboratories. He witnessed several times Maud Robart's work.