Greece and France: Concerning the Question of Georges Aperghis’ National Identity

Abstract

This article examines the music of Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis through the prism of national identity. This kind of approach was used for engaging in conversations with the composer about various biographical facts from his life, the characteristic features of his aesthetic views, his musical and theatrical language. The historical context and the stylistic and structural features of various French composers compared with Aperghis’ musical output make it possible to characterize the specific features of the latter’s musical thinking.

Greece characterizes the early phase of his work, the beginning of his art studies. After having left Athens, the composer has spent most of his life in France, engaged in close contact with the country’s culture. The concert, theatrical and cinematic life in Paris in the 1960s was seething with artistic discoveries and large-scale events, and he found himself in their epicenter. Many of the composer’s personal artistic patterns have been shaped not only by his impressions of the cultural abundance in France, but also by the French language itself. He perceives the latter as musical material, making use of phonetic and prosodic possibilities. The parameter of corporeality and gesture is also important for Aperghis, wherein the connection with the French tradition in the field of plasticity and sound are revealed. Aperghis’ artistic relationship with the works of theater director Antonin Artaud, as well as the concept of “body without organs” is examined in more detail; and the nature of the interconnection between sounds, gestures and phonemes, as well as the possibility of their combinations with each other are revealed. Fragmented, kaleidoscopic qualities, as well as a “framework” type of perception of reality in Aperghis’ music matches with the cinematographic approaches of the contemporary New Wave film directors, as well as the philosophy of post-structuralism, in particular, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the concept of the rhizome.

The perspective proposed in the article makes it possible for us to examine in greater detail the peculiar features of Aperghis’ life and work of. Based on information from various European scholarly works, as well as an interview with the composer, for the first time in Russian a set of facts from his life is presented, and parallels are drawn with various other composers, philosophers, theater and cinema directors in terms of their compositional methods.

Keywords: Georges Aperghis, France, body without organs, contemporary music, physicality, phoneme, rhizome

For citation: Yakovleva T. O. Greece and France: Concerning the Question of Georges Aperghis' National Identity [Electronic source]. In: Sovremennye problemy muzykoznaniya / Contemporary Musicology, 2023, no. 1, pp. 87–102. (In Russ.) DOI: 10.56620/2587-9731-2023-1-087-102