François Houle: Insider Listening That Makes You Clever (Part Two)

By Kerilie McDowall

As seen first published by All About Jazz, 2023. Part Two of Two - In the Zen Blog. Part Two (Continued)…

ITZ: Aerials, was special, too. You were doing a little bit of... electronics. You were using the piano sustain pedal, you were amplifying it somehow.

FH: I used the piano as a resonating chamber to amplify the harmonics and sustain the notes. When you play a few notes together, the piano resonates if you press the sustain pedal down. And you can then hear there's a harmony, like normal overtones, you know, harmonic overtones that happen depending on what type of sound I make, or a combination of two notes, or a run. And so I wanted to use the piano as a reverb, rather than using digital reverb.

But then you hear the piano resonance, and you go, Oh, that's an augmented chord. Right? So I started playing with that, that duality of how I play the clarinet, my vertical thoughts as opposed to melodic thoughts. And so basically, it was the sort of the midway point of me really thinking of my instrument through as a sound generator, more than as a clarinet. I don't play the clarinet like a clarinetist. I play it the way a composer would think of it.

ITZ: Kind of like a textural player, a lot of textures. You and Benoît both are into a lot of really textural exploration.

FH: Well, you know, there's a part of Benoît's playing that's very, very highly virtuosic. He always warms up playing J.S. Bach. So, I know he's very concerned about technique and proper piano, language and stuff like that. But, his compositions, apply all of that. But his concern is not about pianistic approaches. His concern is about sound. And that's why he does the preparations and everything.

That's the beautiful thing about the parallels between what he's doing and what I'm doing with my instrument. Our concerns, ultimately are about transcending the limitations of our instruments.

When I hear Benoit Delbecq it's evident that that's what he's doing taking the piano to a whole other level that very few pianists have taken as their mission or modus operandi.

I would like to think that I'm trying to do some things on the clarinet that, you know, nobody else has tried or has conceived of.

FH: Yeah, there's a design behind it? Or...

ITZ: Yeah. Remember that Miles Davis said that the most important part was where one didn't play?

FH: And the idea is that the sentence that I'm quoting, it's not my thought, but I embraced it, is that space creates rhythm. Without space, you don't have rhythm, you would have just a continuous tone, right? But you split that tone up with silence, then you get a rhythm. It's that basic. It's so silly, in some ways, but then the more you think about it, pop culture has totally ignored space.

That you always have a back beat. You always have a pad, you always have a melody, you always have harmonies, and a song starts and it ends and the rhythm hasn't changed, you might have a little bridge that contrasts but for the most part, the [pop] formula is that there's never any space. It's like, there are sounds happening from the beginning to the end.

ITZ: Yeah, there's no breaks even usually.

FH: There might be the occasional artist...

ITZ: Once in a while a break. Yeah.

FH: There's a really great example it's Metallica. They do a song called 'All Nightmare Long.' And, then in the middle of the song, boom, there's a break of about two or three seconds. And it's so freakin' powerful. Yeah, you know, and then they launch into the rest of the tune. But I remember hearing that thinking, that's a creative use of space.

That's the ultimate rhythm right there. Yeah.

You know, and it's so charged, its electric, right? There's so much gravity in that silence.

And I think, it's very simple to imagine how people like John Cage, James Tenney, Benoît Delbecq, Anthony Braxton, all have that concern, with how to occupy that space with sound. And when I did Aerials, that was like my beginning of my meditation about creating space for things to happen, but also for nothing to happen.

ITZ: But were you consciously thinking about minimalism? Were you?

FH: In Memoriam. There's one tune. It's called, "Ekphrasis.'"

ITZ: It's very minimalistic.

FH: Yes, one little pattern, but if you listen closely, there's so many things happening within it. You know, that it's just a basically it's a system. Yeah.

ITZ: Palindrome? James Tenney was so into palindrome. Absolutely.

FH: So this piece, yes it's a palindrome. And it works its way backwards from the midway point all the way to the end. It starts and ends with the piano. Is it minimalistic in concept. But there's so many layers and little things that happen and a lot of space in between events, that maybe it's not minimalistic, or at least it's not my intention to make it minimalistic. My intention was just to create a shape that was almost like a palate cleanser. And between all the heavy stuff. Yeah, I'll say you get this little piece that really doesn't do a whole lot.

ITZ: Okay. It is the time to interrupt you a bit, because it's always great to hear you speak. But so we talked about the project, we talked about what the project was, but how did you create it? When you were writing it? Where were you creating it? How were you doing it? Was it you said that you were in Sibelius on your computer? Was this in your office? Where was this happening?

FH: My studio in Vancouver. It was about four years, five years ago, four years ago, I was in Switzerland when he passed away. So it would have been 2019.

ITZ: Right, and that was when just the beginning of the pandemic too like, yeah, just like kicking in with all that would have made things difficult to make it happen.

FH: The pandemic was raging, yeah, drove across the country. Before I left, when Ken passed away soon after my, my older brother died of brain cancer.

And I went to see him in Montreal, and he was very sick, was doing all the treatments and stuff, but the tumor just kept coming back.

And I told him, it's like, well, I'm gonna drive across the country and play a little concert in people's backyards, because I can't do concert halls or anything like that.

And all the money I'm going to make; I'm going to do a fundraiser for the BC Cancer Society for brain cancer research in my brother's name. So that's what I did.

So when, when my car died, I had this dream, I thought it was about my car. But what it really was about was my brother's and Ken's passing away.

But it's a convergence of energies. So you know, it's about it's about the circumstances, the car represented an amazing feeling of freedom, of mobility of being able to travel at a time when people were told not to travel. And I did that I'm a bit rebellious.

When you lose, when you see your own... can go through this horrible disease. Emotionally, it's... You start thinking about life, you think about the fragility of it, and everything. And Ken's death, was all mixed in all these feelings and emotions that I was living through. And I think the music is maybe not necessarily just about Ken, but about all these different things.

It's about ultimately, it's about the fragility of life. And the important message that comes out of it is that there's so much beauty in life that goes by unnoticed because we don't take the time to really look at it and to see the details. And I think when I was composing the music, that's what struck me was that I was so into the detail of the music and listening to the music, not just from a technical standpoint, as a composer, as a musician, but also what is it saying?

What am I trying to say? How does that do that?

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