To titillate, not assault or manipulate: Marc Monnet engages in dialogue with a listener whom he has not subjected beforehand. Never naïve, this dialogue does not proceed from a defective mechanism or a limping organism: the process devised in virtuoso fashion by Luc Ferrari in the early 1960s, at the height of the triumph of serialism, presupposes a stable harmonic language, although one that has been disparaged as defunct since Debussy - tonality.
Conceived fifteen years later, in the mid-1970s, Monnet’s version of dialogue arises from a scathing critique of postmodernism, which is lying when, stupidly or cynically, it proclaims the sovereign liberty of the creator on the premise that all musical languages, since they are available simultaneously, are supposedly legitimate nowadays. Marc Monnet does not have a specific musical language, but strategies of writing; he does not conceive form, but mechanisms. Moreover, to organise each of his compositions, he disperses, spreads out and propagates, with amused slowness, the ideas that sparked it off. As a result, a link with politics is revealed: Monnet takes an anarchistic attitude (ruled neither by overriding symbolic authority nor by delegation of powers to a taste police) to the mechanism of each work. Moving in the opposite direction from a form, each mechanism is mobile, unstable, lacking fixed limits, so subject is it to local eruptions and earthquakes.
The energies which drive it result from the gaping tension between two types of tectonic plates (the intimate and the extimate) which eye each other scornfully, conclude armed truces or declare war on one another. The game according to Monnet . . .
… so not a collection of orchestral lollipops then.
