Geoffroy Colson is a French ethnomusicologist, pianist, composer, and music teacher. He is currently completing a PhD in Ethnomusicology and Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the University of Sydney.
Through his current research, which focuses on the aesthetic and cultural issues surrounding musical change and ‘hybridity’ in French Polynesia, he has been pursuing vital new ways to contribute to Islander approaches to sustaining their rich but extremely vulnerable traditions.
His career as a jazz pianist and music teacher led him to develop an interest in musical syntheses, thereby to discover the fascinating Polynesian culture in 2002. From then on, he has been investigating Polynesian music and culture, and collaborating with indigenous artists.
His work articulates with a range of disciplines including ethnomusicology, anthropology, and creative performance studies research, exploring in particular the intersection between ethnomusicological research and composition.
"Tales from Tahiti" comprises five original pieces for jazz quartet and quintet bridging Tahitian musical heritage with jazz and improvisation. They constitute the result of a four-year investigation into Tahitian traditional heritage, including a period of fieldwork of the composer in Tahiti.
This creative exploration of musical syntheses represent an effective alternative or at least additional approach to be considered to processes of cultural revival through engagement with an indigenous community. It relies on a concept of sustainability extended to the global cultural environment that might be termed meta-sustainability. In allowing aspects or elements of Tahitian music to be transmitted by way of a repository of global intangible culture, it enacts a proactive and cosmopolitanist response to perceptions of out-of-control globalization processes.
The creative processes involved in the creation of this body of work have been informed by a number of factors: an in-depth understanding of the musical system, sociocultural practices, and symbolic and metaphysical elements, along with their interrelationships. The compositions incorporate traditional Tahitian musical instruments such as the tōʻere (slit drum), the pahu (membrane drum) and the Tahitian ukulele into a conventional jazz quartet. But beyond the simple blend of instruments, specific compositional processes have been applied, including textural conceptualisations, arrangement techniques, and structural models derived from traditional music. Ultimately, the compositions lean on the knowledge gained from research into local ontologies, epistemologies, cosmogonies and metaphysics.
An in-depth multi-mode inquiry
This album of original intercultural composition constitutes one of the artistic outputs of a larger research project undertook since 2012 about traditional Tahitian musical heritage, combining ethnography, ethnomusicology, and creative work. This research constitutes a work of practice-based research as applied to ethnomusicology, and is framed as a new kind of musical ethnography within the paradigm of a sustainability of a second order that draws on a fluid conception of tradition.
The creative work complements the ethnographic writing and analysis, and together these ethnographic and compositional components form and represent the fruits of the research, and constitute evidence of application of the research methodology, gathering and processing of data, as well as the presentation of results. Following the idea, developed by James Clifford in Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986), that all ethnography involves ‘fictions’, that is, imaginative and novel constructions relating to the collection, presentation and interpretation of data, the approach presented in this research demonstrates how composition, informed by ethnographical fieldwork, can represent a new form of fiction that serves the overall scope of meta-sustainability. It has to be noted that the portfolio of compositions that forms the creative core of the research is not Tahitian music but rather contemporary jazz informed by fieldwork observation, interviews, performance participation, and musical analyses.
Description of the pieces
1. The opening composition of the folio, "Aito" , attempts to illustrate the power of ancient Tahitian warriors, as well as the energy that pervades contemporary Tahitian music. The piece unfolds as a simple melody floating over a strong rhythmic background. It is built on a series of contrasting modal sections alternating a descending chromatic movement using major, Phrygian, and suspended chords.
2. "Swell" features, in its first part, long balancing sections over two minor chords concluding on the D major chord. Whereas the contrasting piano bridge builds in its gesture, on the well-known Prelude in C major from the Well Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, leading to the piano solo on the same chord changes. Eventually, the saxophone repeats the initial theme whereas the piano continues soloing until it fades, while supported by the ukulele.
3. "Tēteta" follows a simpler structure. The introduction announces the harmonic landscape of the first theme, built on a modal progression moving through bright and dark colors, as an evocation of the dance of the sunrays in transparent and deep waters surrounding the island of Tahiti. Whereas the initial theme moves in a medium register, the secondary theme declared by the tenor saxophone is built on two successive pedal points and glides towards overtones, as a reminiscence of a dolphin’s song. Saxophone improvises on a dark modal plateau which then opens up into a much brighter piano solo on the chord changes that underpinned the first theme. The saxophone then smoothly re-enters over the piano solo, hinting at the first theme, and the piece ends with the re-exposition of the secondary theme.
4. "Tāmau" in Tahitian means permanent, fixed. It is a basic dance movement as well as a function in the percussion orchestra. It is also a basic pattern played on the pahu. This piece develops melodic characteristics from the hīmene genre (the traditional polyphonic Tahitian singing), combined with various rhythmic features. The piece begins as a tribute to the jazz pianist Bill Evans , through a light piano solo in the upper register. The main melody builds on a very slow harmonic movement using long tenuto triadic chords. A contrastive interlude follows, developing repeated block chords in the manner of the Prelude Op. 28, No. 4 in E minor by Frédéric Chopin, before providing another contrast through the bass line inspired by the tāmau pattern. The subsequent piano solo develops an increasingly hysterical atmosphere over a powerful double bass line.
5. "Tārava ʻĀpī" refers to tārava, meaning extended, laid, and also one of the hīmene styles, and ‘āpī, new. This piece employs a ‘Second line’ drumming style, originating from the New Orleans jazz drumming tradition, in order to underline the joyful, festive, messy, and energetic dimension of the piece. The melodic line displays affinities with some Keith Jarrett’s or Eddie Harris’ tunes in its structure of fourths. Improvised sections build on triadic progressions reminiscent of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen colors.
Aesthetic placement and stylistic predecessors
Repertoire that fuses jazz with non-Western musical systems abound. There have been very few previous attempts however, to intentionally blend Tahitian music with exogenous genres. Besides isolated one-off encounters between Tahitian musicians and touring international artists, the only planned projects have been the recording of the French jazz pianist, Jacques Diéval in 1970 with percussion instruments, and that of the French Polynesian pianist, Carine Bonnefoy, in 2010. The former performed a four-part impressionistic suite where his improvisations intertwine with polyrhythms played by a traditional percussion ensemble. The latter inserted short rhythmic pieces for percussion ensemble between her jazz compositions arranged for piano and symphony orchestra, as a ‘celebration of her intimate quest of her Polynesian origins’. Norfolk Island jazz composer Rick Robertson’s work, Mutiny Music (2006), which draws on elements of Polynesian drumming, hymnody and spoken language, is a further example.
The composer
Geoffroy Colson is a French pianist, composer, and ethnomusicologist. In 2016 he completed a PhD in Composition and Ethnomusicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the University of Sydney, in Australia. As a composer he has previously released two compact discs of his original works. Besides the present album of jazz compositions, in the context of his research he also composed the first operatic work in Tahitian language, of which he his currently preparing the world premiere.
His areas of expertise include Polynesian music and francophone Pacific Islands cultures, as well as globalization and musical change studies. His recent publications include an article and a book chapter about processes of transculturation in Tahitian contemporary music and in Pacific Islands festivals context. His research bridges ethnomusicological methods and creative practice, and articulates with a range of disciplines including ethnomusicology, anthropology, and creative performance studies. It advocates the creative exploration of musical syntheses as an emergent alternative approach to the sustainability of expressive culture within a changing environment.
His initial contact with Tahitian culture dates back to 2002, when he came in Tahiti to visit a friend. During this three-week stay, he remained deeply impressed by the power and the complexity of the indigenous music, and he was immediately attracted by what he perceived, perhaps unconsciously in the first instance, of the ancestral pact that connects Tahitian people to their environment. Subsequently to this discovery voyage, he decided to spend more time on the island, and in 2003-2004 he dedicated one year in Tahiti as a musician and music teacher. During this second stay, he could develop cultural projects, and get to know more about the Tahitian culture and musical heritage.
In observing the contemporary Tahitian musical landscape, he had the primary intuition that Tahitian music could reach further audiences, and that as a jazz musician, he could contribute to propagate this unique musical heritage using his own musical background. When he came back to France he undertook a deeper personal approach to Polynesian music, and he initiated successful creative intercultural collaborations with the diasporic Tahitian community, which led to intermusical performances in 2007 and 2008 in the South of France. In 2010, he released Matamua, a CD of his own compositions partly inspired by the Tahitian traditional and contemporary music, in collaboration with the singer Mimifé. The CD launch took place in Tahiti, where he undertook a musical tour and collaborated with local musicians. His ongoing creative work resulted in the award of a cultural prize in 2011 by the French Government, "2011 Année des Outre-Mers".
Selected Discography and Published Music
- Taʻaroa. IRMA, The University of Sydney, 2013. seven-minute piece for jazz nonet. World Premiere: 2 May 2013, Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Fairweather Family Prize, Centenary Commissioning Project.
- Tresses, pour piano. Soldano Editions, Neuilly sur Marne, France, 2011
- Mimifé & Pacific Vibrations, Matamua, Compact Disc, Pacific Vibrations & Claudia Sound, PV201001, 2010
- Te Ouʻa, pour piano. Soldano Editions, Neuilly sur Marne, France, 2008
- Voyages, Compact Disc, Association Galapagos, LZD001, 2000
01. Àito (feat. Jeremy Cook, Nishchal Manjunath & Joshua Spolc)
02. Swell (feat. Jeremy Cook, Nishchal Manjunath, Joshua Spolc & Vanessa Caspersz)
03. Tèteta (feat. Jeremy Cook, Nishchal Manjunath & Joshua Spolc)
04. Tàmau (feat. Jeremy Cook, Nishchal Manjunath & Joshua Spolc)
05. Tàrava Âpì (feat. Jeremy Cook, Nishchal Manjunath & Joshua Spolc)
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