Voices From Beyond Paper: Risset's and Kowalski's L'autre face

Abstract

Roger Kowalski's poem ‘L'autre face’, published in 1960, was set to music by Jean-Claude Risset some two decades later in a piece with the same title for soprano and computer-generated tape. The poem is a powerfully self-reflexive piece, foregrounding its status as a work on paper, in which the voice of the poet becomes audible only through an imaginative act of interpretation. This relationship between paper, voice, and interpretation is fundamental to the aesthetic tradition which the poem belongs. Risset's soprano part, like classical music generally, is similarly a work on paper, awaiting a voice; but his computer-generated tape is not. Does this mean we cannot interpret it in the same way? This essay argues that Kowalski's work and Risset's, despite the latter's new medium, both belong to a high art tradition in which ghostly voices emerge from beyond the physical substance of the work—whatever that substance may be.