“Removing or adding music allows certain moments in the text to come into sharper focus”

Parisian cellist Bruno Ducret came to Andorra for the first time with The Siege of Mosul. This work is by Félix Jousserand, poet, slam poet, singer, and one of the most distinctive voices on the contemporary French poetry scene. In this piece, he blends war reportage, an epic poem in alexandrine verse, and musical performance. Presented in the gardens of the French Embassy in Andorra, the performance retraces one of the most significant urban battles of the 21st century: the siege of Mosul, which pitted the Iraqi and coalition forces against ISIS between 2016 and 2017. The musician speaks of a “carpet of noise,” but the word should not be misleading. This noise is not chaos. It is a carefully crafted texture. A sonic backdrop that envelops the listener without overwhelming. A cushion that is sometimes harsh, sometimes unsettling, and sometimes almost comforting. The idea is astonishing: to create a kind of lullaby out of aggressive sounds. Much like falling asleep in a noisy place, only to be awakened by the sudden silence. The ear adjusts, the body accepts, and attention shifts. The music then becomes an atmosphere. It establishes a world in which the voice can unfold. It intensifies certain moments simply by receding and returning. It illuminates the text without ever illustrating it too literally. It allows the listener to feel before they fully understand. The narrative itself carries immense weight. But what is striking here is not only the subject matter. It is the way it is given voice. The text could be read alone. It would already have considerable power. But with the music, it acquires another dimension: the dimension of a shared breath. We no longer simply listen to the words. We listen to their weight. We listen to their rhythm. We listen to the space they open up. “I’ve been working with Félix Jousserand for two and a half years. We created this piece after spending the first six months developing our collaboration. We began working together at the end of 2023, with the goal of premiering the production at the Avignon Festival in the summer of 2024. This is my first time in Andorra with this production. Félix had already performed here with a different piece based on the songs of Albi, but for me, it’s a first. I think this production holds a unique place among the projects I’ve worked on, particularly in terms of the role music plays. It’s a demanding role, but also an immensely rewarding one. Very often, when music is brought into a performance, it ends up competing with the spoken word. There’s a risk that the musician is reduced to punctuation or transitions between scenes – a sonic comma, an atmospheric effect. The music never truly becomes part of the performance. On the other hand, music that’s too prominent, too active, or too closely tied to the text can also end up competing with it. For me, text and music engage different kinds of imagination. Music belongs to the realm of the abstract, while text is language – something concrete that everyone understands. Music, by contrast, speaks primarily to our emotions. With this show, I’ve found a role that feels right for me: that of an illustrator. In many productions, illustrating the text would be unnecessary, because the words already carry themselves. Here, I’ve chosen to illustrate war. That means creating harsh, abrasive sounds – electricity, clashing metal. It’s not meant to be harmonious or especially melodic. I mainly tried to structure the narrative around recurring musical motifs. The music is omnipresent; it forms a kind of sonic backdrop that runs beneath the text throughout. Rather than simply illustrating what is being said, it creates a sonic cushion that never overshadows the words. The music and the text exist on two separate planes that intersect only when we want them to. It’s neither completely scripted nor completely improvised. The performance is built around a single musical theme, the only melody in the entire piece, which returns at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, each time becoming more difficult to play as the narrative unravels. The performance is divided into four acts. Félix and I agreed on the sonic textures, moods, and sound palette of each act. Then I decide which pedals to use, how to combine the sounds, and the musical path I’ll take. I know which sounds define each act, but I decide in the moment how they will evolve into the next. I’m carrying an essential part of the performance. If there’s a gap in the music, everything falls apart. If I lose focus, the whole piece loses its coherence. A silence at the wrong moment can be just as disruptive as an intrusive sound. The two elements have to function in complete symbiosis. I was inspired by that feeling you get when you fall asleep in a noisy environment: after a while, the noise becomes almost comforting; it lulls you to sleep. But the moment it stops, you wake up abruptly. I wanted the music in this performance, despite its abrasive quality, to create that same sensation. Removing or adding music allows certain moments in the text to come into sharper focus. My aim was to create a soundscape that gradually becomes familiar, so that the audience slowly grows accustomed to sounds that are, in themselves, aggressive. That, in turn, allows me to evoke drone sounds or bursts of machine-gun fire without the effect feeling contrived or theatrical. Because there are two of us on stage and the work is built collaboratively, these sounds remain in service of the narrative rather than drawing attention to themselves. I see this work as a kind of choreography in sound. Faced with a text like this, it would have felt deeply inappropriate to write lyrical melodies. Why step away from the narrative simply to make music? That never felt right to me. This is also why we speak of a performance rather than a show. The word “show” becomes problematic when you’re telling a story that belongs to all of us rather than to its performers”.The post “Removing or adding music allows certain moments in the text to come into sharper focus” first appeared on All PYRENEES.