Singing Dusapin: dialogues with Françoise Kubler et Georg Nigl
Composers and their performers collaborate to the creation of works. These collaborations are multifarious and unique unto themselves. This article questions the traces left on Pascal Dusapin’s vocal scores by his contact with singers Françoise Kubler and Georg Nigl. This analysis is tainted by the author’s own personal experience of Dusapin’s music. The composer’s approach to vocal music originates in an experimental approach, first met through chamber music, and gradually opened up to opera, eventually reaching its uppermost form, that of a total artwork. This process is crystalized in Dusapin’s relation to Kubler and Nigl. Dusapin responds to issues of expressivity and diction through the means of an immediate theatrical dimension, through the timbers of the voice and physical expression. The gesture imagined by the composer communicates affect. It is not only vocal, but it also embraces the unfolding of a singing body into space.