“Charlie”: a musical fable after Matin brun by Franck Pavloff, composed for the Aleph Ensemble by Bruno Giner.
Summary of the action
Charlie and his pal are living through a period disrupted by the rise of a totalitarian regime: the Brown State.The Brown State has arbitrarily decreed the eradication of all cats that are not brown.
A short time later, the same happens to dogs, newspapers, publishing houses and libraries. Soon, the militia arrests all owners of dogs and cats who do not comply.
Nonetheless, Charlie and his pal continue to live a very ordinary life, between betting on the horses, playing cards, football matches and other moments of day to day life.
Neither heroes nor bastards. Simply, to avoid problems, they look the other way and accept each new constraint.
I came across Franck Pavloff's Matin Brun in 2003 quite by chance, a brief fiction of a few pages, which describes both the rise of a totalitarian regime and the reaction – or more exactly the lack of reaction – of the protagonists, Charlie and his pal. It's an extremely simple text (almost a children's tale), which can be read in a few minutes and yet it is capable of stimulating long hours of thought…
Composed for the Aleph Ensemble, Matin Brun has been transformed into Charlie, a kind of contemporary musical fable with a single character (Charlie's pal), scattered with recitatives, songs, slogans, melodies, spoken or sung choirs, collages, quotations, etc.
Deliberately based on the brief operatic forms of the 1920s and 1930s, Charlie is an attempted response to several questions which torment my ear as much as my mind: how to express in music a text which has a meaning? How to find a resonance between scholarly and popular music? How to intermix musical languages without falling prey to quaintness or plagiarism? How to manage the atonal-tonal-modal relationship and give it meaning? What role for the instrumentalists in a dramaturgy which is not quite musical theatre and even less music for the theatre? In short, how to make one's own a certain form of post-modernity when one has been “spoon-fed” on the avant-gardism of the post-war period?
Bruno Giner
