For Thierry De Mey, movement is everything. In 2002, his music fell silent — quite literally — with his “Musiques de gestes” (“Music of Gestures”), a series of pieces that are almost entirely soundless. In Silence Must Be!, a conductor appears alone onstage, beating increasingly elaborate polyrhythms the public cannot hear, like a well-oiled machine whirling out of control in a vacuum. After this piece, the musical side of De Mey’s artistry seemed to have reached a dead end. “At the end of that project,” De Mey recalls,

I had the feeling of having put my finger on a question that was critical for me, of having reached the vanishing point at which musical gesture — whose purpose is to produce sound with minimal expenditure of energy — ceases to be functional and becomes choreographic, and therefore can set in motion a “music of music,” a musical movement in the minds of the audience. I … didn’t know how to move on to something else. When you reach the blank page or the blank canvas — this fascination with the black hole that all the arts, in their different ways, carry inside of them, like a temptation — how do you get past it?

Silence Must Be! was in many ways a point of no return, leaving De Mey in doubt. Once musicality had been brought back to gesture itself — eliminating any resultant sound — and once gesture was recognized for its own musical quality, what came next? De Mey considered giving up composition altogether to pursue his work as a filmmaker.

Roads less traveled

De Mey spent his childhood immersed in music. Thanks to his father, a representative for a record company, he listened to music of all kinds, from John Coltrane’s jazz to the new pioneers of Baroque music. His adolescence was spent playing rock on the electric guitar. But when it came time for higher education, De Mey did not have the level as a performer to study at a conservatory. Instead, he went to film school, and the transdisciplinarity of film would become fundamental to his artistic development. There he discovered the music of Steve Reich, which impressed him with its urban energy and rigorous procedures. In sound studios, he started to experiment with tape, trying out sound loops and other musical structures. He hitchhiked to hear both Olivier Messiaen at La Trinité and the premiere of Répons by Pierre Boulez in Avignon. He discovered György Ligeti’s Second Quartet, Wind Quintet, and Kammerkonzert, which made a strong impression on him, as well as Heinz Holliger’s Studie über Mehrklänge (Study in Multiphonics, 1971), which was acoustic but nevertheless explored sound just as adventurously as acousmatic music.

All the while, dance was taking up much of his time and imagination. His sister, Michèle Anne De Mey, was enrolled at the École Mudra, opened in Brussels by Maurice Béjart, where her classmates included Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Michèle Noiret, Alain Louafi, and Pierre Droulers, future leaders of the next generation of choreographers. This is how the aspiring composer’s first collaborations began and how he developed an interest in movement: gesture became both an inspiration and an organizational force for his work. Movement is an essential interface that sets dance in motion, which then reflects back into the composition — even when the formal conception remains essentially musical. Rather than approach melody, harmony, and rhythm as distinct entities, De Mey sees musical composition as a synthetic gesture; a movement takes place in both space and time, mind and body.

From that point, transdisciplinarity became De Mey’s driving force, with an emphasis on “trans.” For him, this way of working springs from a collaborative flow, a melding of minds, and is quite distinct from interdisciplinarity. On this distinction, he says,

The classic example of interdisciplinarity is a team of aid workers going off to a country in the throes of an epidemic: it consists of different persons practicing different skills necessary to the fulfilment of the mission. They all do what they know how to do, and that’s that. Once the mission is accomplished, they all go back to their own specialties. By contrast, the birth of cinema is a classic example of transdisciplinarity: artists turn to a scientific invention, even a fairground gadget, to bring into being a new discipline.

Rosas danst Rosas as manifesto

This was the context for Rosas danst Rosas, a work that, from its 1983 premiere in Brussels, launched its creators as major players in the performing arts. Rosas danst Rosas is a manifesto in its themes and techniques. It brought about a process of creating interactive work that preserves the specificities of each component discipline. It was co-creation in imagination, space, temporality, and music. Its makers created the piece’s formal strategies through a system of idea exchange and spatio-temporal circulation, in which a motion can generate a rhythm or a musical development structure a unit of choreography. As De Mey recalls,

Anne Teresa [De Keersmaeker] provided the material for the movement, from which I deduced rhythms, which I notated. I then developed these in a … larger structure (using palindromes, loops, etc.), taking inspiration especially from the masters of the Franco-Flemish era. I’ve always been fascinated by the music of that period, which saw the invention of the major forms and the first experiments with music as process.

Despite this organic modus operandi, the two artists built up the work through an extremely rigid, even constraining structure — the idea being that the stronger the structure, the more the human element would come through, as though to reconcile “music as process” with the immediacy of Pina Bausch or Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The structure of Rosas is mathematical, ineluctable: it is organized around the number eleven, with everything repeated seventy-seven times, so as to bring out the way in which systematic repetition can denature a movement. This implacable regularity goes along with the extreme sensuality of the movements, bordering on eroticism (which, after all, is no stranger to repetition, embodiment, and frenzy) in the spirit of Georges Bataille.

The music is the fruit of the experiments De Mey had done in the studios of his film school. Created with a ReVox and an eight-track recorder, as well as a noise reducer, it was then re-recorded by musicians with the assistance of Peter Vermeersch, prefiguring a method of collaborative compositional notation that would become standard for De Mey. The forms are crude, in an attempt to transpose into music the famous essay Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the aesthetic presuppositions of Bauhaus. In fact, in 1996 De Mey filmed Rosas danst Rosas in an abandoned building in Leuven designed by Henry Van de Velde in the 1930s. Every step in the production of this film, from the storyboard to the filming to the composition to the editing, faithfully reflected the rigor of the original work (a similar approach is visible in De Mey’s documentary Floréal, about a garden city of social housing in Brussels built by its own inhabitants in the 1920s, in which the montage follows the simple proportions of the architecture). There are only a few deviations, which are worth noting since deliberate deviation (from structure, from procedures, etc.) is another hallmark of De Mey’s work. De Mey acknowledges Indian music, undoubtedly some of the most detailed yet synthetic music in the world, as one of his major influences. A productive paradox, once again.

Rosaswas the starting point for another adventure, that of a musicians’ collective called Maximalist! The group, formed to perform the music ofRosas danst Rosasin concert, would exist for five years and be pivotal in the contemporary Belgian scene. (One important offshoot was the group ICTUS, after the showLe Poids de la main[The Weight of the Hand] by the choreographer Wim Vandekeybus with music by De Mey and Vermeersch.)

Digital music

In the course of subsequent collaborations with his choreographer friends, De Mey continued to explore music closely integrated with dance, as well as purely sound-based experiments, notably with the help of music technology.

In De Mey’s relationship to technology there is a sense of “I dreamed it, the computer did it.” The arrival of the first sequencers, which dispensed with the need to cut tape by hand, was a real joy for him. During the first stirrings of spectralism, he got onboard enthusiastically, though in a completely artisanal way: seeking to bring coherence to the pitch structure of his music, he covered the walls of his living room in graph paper, on which he drew giant logarithmic curves of frequencies so he could identify partials and other harmonics. The idea was to reproduce the same distances in frequency between the notes of one tempered chord and another: far from a simple matter, since the relationships between the pitches in an interval are more readily logarithmic than multiplicative. For example, one can take the distances between the frequencies in a C major triad and, by moving them along the logarithmic scale, hit upon another tempered triad with the same frequency differentials, though not the same intervals, since the relationships between the notes of an interval are multiplicative, not subtractive. The procedure was and remains paradoxical — spectralist, but with equal temperament. It was long and tedious: calculating one simple harmonic progression took De Mey half of the time he took to compose his First String Quartet.

When he arrived at IRCAM to work on Kinok (later integrated into the larger work Amor constante, más allá de la muerte [Constant Love, Beyond Death, 1994]) with De Keersmaeker, the computing power in its facilities was a godsend. “It was my first time in the big store,” he recalls with a childlike tone in his voice, “and there I was discovering all these amazing toys.” De Mey takes a playful attitude toward these various technologies, whether digital aids for composition or real-time sound processors. They fill a gap in his toolbox. Since that time, he has made the most of them by assembling a whole Open Music library dedicated to his pitch calculations.

Transposing cinematic techniques to music, Kinok opens like a backward tracking shot: starting from a closeup on a multiphonic sound in the oboe, the frame widens as the spectrum travels to the clarinets before being dispersed among the rest of the strings and winds. The sound is immobilized, frozen (the better to be analyzed), then projected over varying durations to create lines that can evolve over time. Since each instrument is also tied to a dancer on stage, this bending of time is reproduced in the choreography.

The same principle applies in Tippeke, a film choreographed by De Keersmaeker for her company Rosas, with music for cello and electronics, involving a Flemish nursery rhyme that De Keersmaeker sings. The gesture is even extended to the cinematography. De Mey turned to recorded sounds (forest sounds, highway noises) that correspond to the images of the film, finely filtered and manipulated through film techniques. The musical structure grows from the harmonics of the cello, analyzed with AudioSculpt and entirely resynthesized, except that the synthesis is subtractive: the recorded sounds are filtered, giving the impression that the forest itself is beginning to sing along the cello’s spectrum. When all this is injected into a Risset rhythm, the whole forest seems to sink down indefinitely into the bass.

Music of movement: from Musiques de tables to Light Music

Though De Mey’s music need not always be seen with the eyes to be appreciated, it is almost always in confrontation with movement. Its extreme is the series “Musiques de gestes,” whose starting point is Musique de tables (Table Music, 1987), for three percussionists. De Mey filmed this carefully staged piece in 1999: the three percussionists sit next to each other in front of tables, which their hands dance on and strike. The piece jubilates in the carnal power of rhythm, ludic aspects, and allusions: De Mey plays as much with canonical forms (counterpoint, etc.) as with instrumental gestures (and not only percussive ones: the ballet of the hands also sometimes draws in those of a pianist).

A score of a movement piece

After Musiques de tables, came Frisking (1990), Unknowness (1995-1996), and a few other works whose trajectory culminated with Silence Must Be!, which, as mentioned, led to a moment of radical doubt. De Mey escaped from this impasse with the help of one of his later producers at IRCAM, Laurent Pottier, then based at the GMEM (the Centre national de création musicale) in Marseille. Pottier saw Silence Must Be! and recommended that De Mey look into using motion sensors. This technology, which began development in the 1980s, was just starting to yield results, largely due to the exponential growth of computing power. For De Mey, motion sensors unblocked the creative process that had come to a halt. These sensors opened new possibilities in the relation between music and movement, transforming the performer into both the generator and manipulator of electronic sound, all while preserving the kinetic aspect of music so essential to De Mey. Thus the project Light Music emerged.

The collective creation of De Mey, the engineer Christophe Le Breton at GRAME in Lyon, and the percussionist Jean Geoffroy — Light Music is both a work and a customized tool. This “instrument” combines video projection, motion sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes attached to the performers’ wrists), and video-based motion recognition. A key feature is a “wall of light” that acts as an on/off switch: when the performer’s hands move in the light, the computer generates or modulates the sound; when they are still, the system remains inert.

“Light music” also alludes to a phrase from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra: “one must still have chaos in oneself, to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” This phrase defines the piece’s micro and macro form, and is signed in sign language by the percussionist at the end of the piece, as a sort of keynote.

In the years since, movement has continued to structure De Mey’s creative process, guiding and motivating both his aesthetic and his philosophy of composition. In the mid-2000s, he launched into a “taxonomy of movement,” a term that for a long time stood as the working title for his piece SIMPLEXITY.

The transdisciplinary unified: SIMPLEXITY

Produced at IRCAM in 2016 with five dancers and five musicians from the Ensemble intercontemporain, SIMPLEXITY represents a crucial step in De Mey’s journey. In this piece, he achieved what he calls a “complete art,” allowing him to act simultaneously as composer, choreographer, and director. He finally embodied the transdisciplinary approach he had long championed, integrating all the aspects of the work himself. SIMPLEXITY also exemplifies his creative process, from the media that inspired him, to the generation of material, collaboration with performers, organization of both small- and large-scale form, and use of digital tools.

Movement undeniably takes center stage, starting with the motions of both the dancers and the musicians. One component piece, Traceless, builds on the concept of Silence Must Be!: the five musicians and five dancers work in pairs, with the dancers having learned the musicians’ movements and then extrapolating from them. The musicians perform hand gestures, unrelated to their instruments, which the sensors capture.

Here, information technology—particularly musical information technology—acts primarily as an interface: between composer and sound, performer and sound, movement and music (as in Light Music), and between the audience and the work. It furnishes the space for interdisciplinary interaction, allowing the various layers to unify without erasing or competing with each other. This interpenetration of disciplines, rather than mere juxtaposition, results in what De Mey calls a “complete art” rather than a total art.

Movement emerges even at the source of the materials’ generation. This process relies heavily on collaboration with the performers, particularly drawing on the taxonomy of movement that De Mey had been developing for more than a decade. For the dancers, this might involve using a deck of cards: they draw a few, arrange them as they like, and from these gestures, craft a movement sequence. Or, for either musicians or dancers, inspiration might come from a poem by e. e. cummings, an image from a nature documentary (of gibbons, flying snakes, manta rays), or a physical model with unstable balance (multiple pendulums, bats in flight, starling murmuration, slithering, zero gravity) from which they improvise.

Playing cards: Brownian motion

If I were working with a different dancer or a different musician, the piece wouldn’t be the same. So I haven’t provided passages of choreography for the show as such. I’ve provided material, suggestions, and stimuli of various kinds from which to choose. Same for the musicians. Especially in the passages where I leave them a lot of freedom.

The unique format of SIMPLEXITY allows for other experiments, many inspired by the time De Mey spent with William Forsythe (notably his self-organizing systems and organic approach to time) and Bob Wilson (particularly his dramatic use of light) during filming in the 2000s. One such experiment is “Face-to-Face,” where musicians and dancers work in pairs on a given theme. Once they finish, De Mey selects the items he finds compelling or reorients the work, all while ensure the process remains organic.

These material results form what De Mey calls “Instant Compositions,” which may or may not be formally written and might evolve into “Instant Variations” — either improvisations on the material of an Instant Composition or “Fixed Variations,” where performers recreate a previous version. To preserve spontaneity, certain passages of SIMPLEXITY are “Instant Compositions” produced live during the performance. The work then becomes a structured improvisation around a pre-developed model.

“The only danger in this domain,” De Mey warns,

is the exhaustivity that can wear out the procedure. An infraction of the system is sometimes more interesting than absolutely respecting it. When I prepare a film, everything is built around the script — the production schedule, the shooting plan, etc. But I always ask a trusted cameraman to take additional shots, either on their own initiative or following my suggestions. Even in rehearsal, they’ll hide behind a column to do a closeup when we are doing a wide shot. During editing, I start by creating the storyboard: everything is perfect, academic, and then from time to time I pull from their shots to enrich the scenes. Filming dance is at once filming a script and filming the performers who embody that script and give it flesh and blood.

To accompany him in the writing and choreographic notation, De Mey relies on his two assistants. Likewise, for everything to do with instrumentation he counts on François Deppe (a cellist in ICTUS, a conductor, and a former member of Maximalist!), with whom over time he developed a precise vocabulary for effectively fixing on paper what the players do.

Finally, movement drives the organization of the work. Thus, in determining use of the stage space, De Mey uses proportional scales such as the Fibonacci series or the plastic ratio. After marking these geometrical patterns on the floor, he invites a dancer to move through them at a steady pace. The mathematical proportions translate into rhythms: space becomes time. If the dancer takes the same amount of time to traverse each segment, they must accelerate, creating a spatial proportion in time. In the same way, a musical form can translate into a series of movements, and vice versa — projecting time onto space or space onto time.

De Mey occasionally repurposes conventional musical tools — such as the mathematical functions used by spectralist composers, who, from a series of chords, extract a common fundamental, this virtual fundamental being the greatest common factor of the given frequencies. De Mey might apply this function to rhythms instead of frequencies, seeking the smallest common pulse among a series of rhythmic patterns, which can then be deployed in space. In this way, a spectral function becomes rhythmic and then spatial.

Thus, spatial gesture unifies the gesture of creation, with a movement at once generating, organizing, and validating, while breathing life into the work on stage.

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Translated from the French by Tadhg Sauvey