An Interview with Annette Vande Gorne, Part One

Annette Vande Gorne (see Figure 1), a renowned composer of electroacoustic music, explores different energetic and kinesthetic archetypes in her works. Having accidentally discovered acousmatic music in France in 1970, she became convinced by the revolutionary character of an art which permits her to use nature and physical worlds, among other sources of inspiration, as models for an abstract and expressive musical language. Her contributions include pioneering research on space—a fifth musical parameter, the other four parameters being pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre—and the relationship between words and meaning, as well as between words and vocal material. Of equal importance has been her exploration of gesture in acousmatic music, which is founded on a keen awareness of the fundamental link between the musician and the machine, a concept that carries as much weight in composition as in interpretation. Through her teaching, Vande Gorne (born in 1946 in Charleroi, Belgium) has conveyed these notions, alongside the French electroacoustic aesthetic, to several generations of composers in Europe and beyond. She also offers diverse opportunities for composers, interpreters, and researchers at Musiques & Recherches, the institute for electroacoustic music she founded in Ohain, Belgium, in 1982 (see Figure 2).

This interview was conducted in French on 18 July 2005 at Musiques & Recherches. It was subsequently translated, edited, and updated through additional interviews with the composer at Musiques & Recherches between 2005 and 2011. [Editor’s note: This interview is published in two parts, with the second part appearing in the next issue (Volume 36, Number 2).]

Elizabeth Anderson:

You have had a diverse career in electroacoustic music as a composer, researcher, teacher, and founder of Musiques & Recherches. Yet you were trained as a classical musician and discovered electroacoustic music by chance. Can you share this serendipitous experience and explain what effect it had on you?

Annette Vande Gorne:

I discovered electroacoustic music at the age of 25, having previously completed classical piano studies and parallel coursework in Belgium, as well as written musical studies, including harmony and counterpoint. I was also doing theoretical studies with Jean Absil in Brussels, notably in harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and orchestration.

Figure 1.

Annette Vande Gorne during the spatialization of a monographic concert on “The Electroacoustic Project” acousmonium at the Technische Universität, Vienna, Austria, 28 November 2010. (Photo by Thomas Gorbach.)

In the summer of 1970, I went to Vichy, France, for a training course in choral conducting. While there, I walked down a hallway one day and heard unrecognizable sounds coming from a room. The door was closed. I was timid, but I pushed the door open, walked in, and saw nothing except people seated with their eyes closed in front of two loudspeakers. I sat down, like them, and closed my eyes. And I am certain that if I had not closed my eyes, nothing would have happened, because, then, a whole universe opened up—a whole universe that I did not know as a classical musician. It was a universe of mental and physical sensation, one of images of rhythms and lines, and the physical impression of floating, of completely losing my references, of being in myself and out of myself at the same time—the sensation of a complete loss of stability, movement, dynamism, and energy.

Figure 2.

Multichannel studio “Métamorphoses d’Orphée,” Musiques & Recherches, Ohain, Belgium, 2006. (Photo by Annette Vande Gorne.)

At the end of the experience, I immediately decided that this was what I wished to do. I didn’t know who to speak to, so I went to Vichy the following year and enrolled in the electroacoustic training course, which was given by Joanna Bruzdowicz and François Delalande from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In 1977, after having participated in many such workshops in France, I found myself, at the age of 28, as one of twelve students from a group of fifty candidates who passed the entrance exam at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris. It was difficult and, by the way, it’s the same exam...