Performance Archive

François Houle, clarinets and electronics

Registry Theatre, April 25, 2007
Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, Kitchener, Ontario

With deep roots across classical music, jazz, new music, improvised music, and world music, François Houle exemplifies the kind of poly-stylistic virtuosity that marks the 21st century creative musician. As this excerpt from Houle’s solo set at the 2007 Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound shows, his musical practice brings an intensive curiosity about all facets of clarinet music together with live electronics. The evening at the Registry Theatre began with a free improvisational set by a raucous trio of young musicians called I Have Eaten the City (see video of their performance and band interview). As the band left the stage, Houle entered playing clarinet as their remaining amplified feedback trailed away. The evening concluded with an encounter between I Have Eaten the City and Houle – a meeting of two generations of Canadian experimental musicians that the band laughingly called “I Have Eaten François Houle”!

One of the most rewarding things about Houle’s approach to experimentation is that he seeks to find commonalities among the various traditions in which he works, rather than reinforcing barriers between them. In 2009, Houle released his first clarinet concerto on a recording with Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble. His comments about the work underline his border-crossing attitude:

My 1st concerto as a composer for the clarinet is a major work in three interconnected sections, hence more of a concertino, but with the breadth and range of a classical concerto structure. Most of my experience as a composer is in the stylistic arena of experimental jazz, working primarily with musicians who are highly versed in that idiom, and in the practice of instrumental improvisation. I thought that it would be very challenging to ‘translate’ some concepts from this sound world to a thoroughly written composition for classical and new-music practitioners.^[1]

François Houle was one of the first people we interviewed for Sounds Provocative, in 2003. His career has burgeoned since that time – across the classical, new music, world music and improvisation spheres.^[2] He has also become an important collaborator in developing the Vancouver Creative Music Institute – a summer improvisation intensive workshop that is coproduced by Vancouver Community College and Coastal Jazz and Blues Society.

The 2003 interview excerpted here serves to illuminate Houle’s various musical roots, and raises some of the issues that arise in institutionalized music education contexts around style.

Interview with Francois Houle, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, June 2003.

Ellen Waterman: I'm really interested to have you talk about performing as a new music musician, being a composer, and also being someone who improvises. Everyone keeps talking about you as this multi-disciplinary person. You said something at the Open Ears symposium [2003] about having started in some very traditional, academic study and it sounded as though you had been almost scientific about the way that you developed your technique in each of these areas. For example, you talked about establishing a traditional technique and then having to unlearn that technique and develop new techniques for other ways of playing.

FH: It was very methodical for sure. By design. I had a goal in mind and was listening to things that I thought, in the late 80's, were challenging and fresh and unusual. I was looking for things that would surprise me, that would shock me, in music – or that would seduce me, you know. The main drive behind my path, I'm looking for the right term, my démarche was to really try to analyse what it is to play the clarinet. And it becomes bigger than the instrument itself, it becomes about the music, of styles, and different ways of bending the sounds. All of the techniques that I was developing worked for technique’s sake or for the goal of playing complicated new music, or to show off some kind of virtuosity. It was really about developing a set of tools to be able to play a great diversity of styles. From traditional jazz, bebop, Dixieland, to klezmer, to Sephardic music, etc. … My starting point was really contemporary extended techniques because that's what I learned in school, but I figured out that there was nothing new about those techniques, that they all had some kind of root in world music...in various millennium old traditions.

That's where I realized that there was a bottomless well in terms of thinking of the instrument as a means of tapping into these traditions. The way that I define that main drive is that anything that pertains to playing the clarinet, even remotely, is going to be of interest to me, as a clarinetist, as a musician be it contemporary music, improvised music, or sub-Saharan pygmy music. If there is something in there that I think that I can somehow use as a medium for my own personal expression, then it becomes useful, or it becomes an inspirational thing too. It's not just all about technical and theoretical [concerns], but also about how it moves your body. To come back to the first part of your question, the relationship between contemporary music and improvised music for me is vital, in the sense that I'm trying to put the body back into the headiness of new music and vice versa: this certain rigour and precision of new music into improvisation. So, I'm still trying to figure out where the fine line is. It's very blurred; it's a big grey zone there. We're talking stylistically here, but also technically speaking…Playing the right notes, or playing with the right attitude, is only the beginning in terms of finding what it is that the clarinet can do in those different contexts.

I wasn't joking when I was saying bending the notes. There's a certain way of placing notes, a certain time aspect, and a certain pitch aspect to it that is very different in any of those stylistic areas and once you've explored that, then, when you approach the music of, say, Scelsi, when you play Kya [for B-flat clarinet solo and 7 instruments, 1959] for example, all those micro-tonal inflections that he suggests become quite natural. You can actually speak to them, you get to the music a little faster, rather than being stuck in just trying to execute. You actually are executing, but at a different level because you can bypass all of the difficulties and go straight for what the music is asking and how to put that out. … My golden rule is that anything that pertains to clarinet is important to me and is worth investigating. How I keep my focus through all that is really by sticking to that rule. And when I'm asked to play a certain style of music, therefore, I can go for the music much more [rather] than being limited to trying to fit in stylistically. I can just go right for what the music asks. That kind of plurality of approach makes it easier for me to change hats and to move back and forth between, say, doing a jazz festival like this, playing with Paul Rutherford and then in August playing the Schubert octet and knowing what is required.

EW: Where did you do your training?

FH: I did a Bachelors Degree at McGill, and a Masters Degree at Yale, and I spent a couple of winters in Banff, and about half a year to a year in Europe travelling around meeting people.

EW: And when you began, did you think you were going to be a straight, for lack of a better word, new music player?

FH: No, not at all.

EW: So this plurality of focus goes far back in your playing?

FH: …Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by many kinds of music. I wasn't exposed to a whole lot being from the suburbs of Montreal. But, when I first started at McGill University, Bruce Mathers was in charge of the New Music Ensemble and everybody was trying to avoid that ensemble like the pest. My first semester fortunately I got into the ensemble, and you're supposed to do just one semester of this, and I ended up doing the new music class throughout my degree for four years. Because we really did all of the war horses and it was a great formative experience for me to develop all of that, the techniques and doing my infancy steps in this repertoire, and also having the opportunity to do chamber music at that level in school. I remember the second year I was there we did Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. We did it without conductor and for me it was a huge undertaking but also a huge, very rewarding experience because it opened the door, basically. It set the tone for everything that came after.

But I was always, also, a very frustrated jazz musician. Because I play the clarinet I could never really fit in the combo. Especially in the early 70's, the big trend was a kind of a jazz fusion with rock and people were playing really loud so clarinet had no chance whatsoever. I was a bit frustrated by that! My attitude when I went to university was that basically the jazz thing was totally ruled out because of that. Later on, I started investigating more improvised musics. After I graduated from school, I discovered a whole tradition of chamber jazz, Jimmy Giuffre and John Carter and all that, and so I realized that there really where big possibilities for clarinet in that area…And that focus grew and became my primary source of expression. As I was developing in the 90's as an improviser, the new music thing was creeping up on me again, more and more. I was doing a kind of a dual thing. …Since '96-'97…I've been becoming more and more active in the classical music scene. From meeting “legit” musicians who were in a new music ensemble, they got interested in what I was doing and they started asking me to play different kinds of music, Mozart, Brahms, and things like that, that I hadn't done in like, 15, 20 years [Vetta Chamber Music Society (Victor Costanzi, dir.), and Vancouver Chamber Music Festival (Leila Getz, AD)]. When I was in school, I really loved playing the repertoire, and I never thought I'd have a chance ever again to do it. I jumped on the opportunity and it went really well. The word got out that I could do this, and that I could do it at a good level, which brought me to the Scotia Festival [2003] and basically, I'm coming out of the closet with these things, so, it's the third area that's been creeping up on me. Even without really wanting it. It's just kind of opening up, and I attribute that to the fact that, I've really done a lot of work on the clarinet and that I have great flexibility in adapting to the different styles. And then there's the world music aspect of it with Safa that's been taking off like wild fire, so, it's basically four main areas that I can travel in and out of, that I'm comfortable with.^[3]

EW: Where does composition fit into that?

FH: It happens a lot in jazz that the performer is asked to write charts, and of course I wrote my own tunes and developed my own compositional ideas. My primary inspirations were John Carter and Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy. From there, just from performing around town, different groups started asking me to write for them and that grew into what I do now which is always trying to find a way to write music for improvisers, but also, writing music for legit musicians, for new music players. I’m trying to blur the lines between the improvisation aspect of writing and the writing aspects in improvisation. …

All of my music is inspired by [Anthony] Braxton's idea of a musical discourse that's everlasting, that's always continuous. In other words, that all of the pieces that you write can be integrated into one another somehow, which creates a sort of conciseness of intention and of language that I find interesting. When you listen to Braxton’s music…if you've been exposed to it, it's fairly easy to identify. Same thing with George Lewis or Muhal Richard Abrams or Xenakis. They all have this distinctive stamp on the material that they give out. And the fact is that from piece to piece, they somehow evolve certain strategies that have been tested and proven on previous pieces. To some extent, I think Stockhausen does the same thing, even though, from one piece to the next, like R. Murray Schafer, you never know what's going to come out. But I think the philosophies behind the music remain the same.

EW: And in both those composers there's a lot of contact with performers. For example, Schafer has written all of his concerti for particular people.

FH: I'm not so interested in writing generically… I'm much more interested in writing for people that I know will understand, and also, it shapes the way that you write certain things. You won't write certain things for a given person, so the end result is much more in touch with what music should be about.

EW: It actually sounds to me as though you compose towards performance because of the context, and being asked to write a piece for particular person. That's quite a different model than somebody who is composing in isolation and hoping that somebody will perform the piece someday. I understand the relationship between you and performers. Can you talk a little bit about the difference for you between performing improvised music or your own music and performing other peoples’ music?

My own sense as a classically trained performer, from a time before I could even think this through, was that it didn't matter whether I was playing Bach, or whether I was improvising… That it was the same thing. In order to play anybody's music you had to make it your own in some way, not that you pretended that you'd composed it, but to recognize its imminence. To perform means that you have to create music in the moment. It has bugged me hugely from a very early age the emphasis in Western music on the artifact of composition, as opposed to its process and the moment of performance. So, I'm very curious about what constitutes that moment of performance and whether it's different for you when you think of yourself as an interpreter (when you're playing somebody else’s music) and a creator (when you're playing your own).

FH: The simple answer is that for any given piece of music you have to live through it in order to be able to squeeze what it is that's in it that will affect the listener…Meaning really assimilating a piece, technically, and structurally, and musically: but it even goes beyond that. You don't get the sense that you know a piece until you've played it many times. Because you know what works and what doesn't work. How to pace it and everything. It becomes a 3-D model that until you've seen it from all possible angles, you really don't know what the object is about. I did some experiments many years ago with the Debussy Rhapsody in which I rehearsed it and analysed it. I went to the point of trying to memorize the whole accompaniment part and the whole orchestration of it so that when I performed it I knew exactly what was happening and everything. The first performances were awful in the sense that I was listening to everything except myself as a soloist! But, the whole process of doing that after two or three times, it was the first time, the first experience in my life, where I felt that I was really playing music. It was not about Debussy, it was not about the Rhapsody, it was just about me playing something really beautiful and making an object and putting it out there. And really knowing all of the possible permutations and pacings in the music in order to create certain effects. So, I could play the piece, maybe in ten performances, play the piece ten times, and each single time it would be completely different from one to the next, but it would all be good performances of the piece.

When you hear a great violinist or pianist playing a piece by Schubert or Mendelssohn, or whatever, they play it great because they've worked the thing inside out and really squeezed all the juice out of it in order to go out there and play it, first of all flawlessly, but then to imbue the music with their personality. It really works on that level. That's what I'm after, but the thing is that I don't have to go through all that rigmarole in order to get to the music. That’s where the improvisation kicks into the equation. You find ways to look at a score…and get to the music somehow quicker. You see what the intentions of the composer were, and how it makes sense musically rather than…theoretically. I think that the fact that we managed to eliminate improvisation from our musical training in academia was a big mistake. Because we are denying a very strong aspect of a very strong formative experience for students. It's a little bit like a weird form of media coverage, or misrepresentation, or misinterpreting the facts. It's like there's been this big campaign over two hundred years to disseminate the idea that improvisation is an anti-musical kind of activity. I think we're finally turning the page and moving on with that...More and more of today’s important composers, at least in my mind, the ones that I really truly appreciate and value, are good instrumentalists, and they are good improvisers.

EW: It's becoming more common now. Let's just switch gears for a minute if I may, and ask you my final question. In my research comparing 11 festivals of experimental music, I'm finding the same musicians at a lot of these different festivals from the FIMAV to Open Ears, to the Vancouver International Jazz Festival and the Guelph Jazz Festival, to all around Halifax. It's really quite fascinating to come across this small group of people. What is the scene like? Is there a sort of definable Canadian root, trajectory, or scene? Or does this have more to do with how arts councils fund festivals based on a knowledge of a small number of players? How would you characterize that? This strange country's experimental music scene.

FH: That's a tough one! How would I define it? I haven't put much thought into it because so much of it is about the individuals much more than the scene. The individuals are what make the scene and I think the one thing [about] the people that you see out there all the time [is that they] are people who have achieved fairly high musical standards and they're putting out the shit, and they're doing it. But they're also good ...they've figured out the system in the sense of how to do outreach. How to put a press kit together, and a grant presentation and a good recording, so, it becomes a bit of a business. There are a lot of really great people who are good musicians who cannot put it together and they don't get the work. There's that aspect of it. But I don't want to ghettoize it like that either. It's a form of reverse ghettoization...the people who are out there, who receive that elite [funding]. And I have to confess that I owe a lot of what I do now to the fact that I really had to sit down and figure out the grant process. I had to figure out how to put a press kit together and that's where it really started, because the whole musical education and experimentation everything, that's just the beginning of the whole thing. Fortunately you get to a point where putting these things together becomes a bit easier because you do them almost by rote. And you can start building on your reputation. It's one thing to get a grant and go play a festival, but, if you don't get noticed, or if you play a bad performance, obviously next time you put an application by a jury, they're gonna look at it and “well this guy didn't really...” So it still comes down from a grant perspective or from the way the system works – it still comes down to excellence in a sense. And the ones who prevail are the ones who are really doing the stuff, who are really challenging the status quo, which is what I think the Canada Council for the Arts should be about.

EW: It also struck me though, that there seems to be a generation that has grown up. Maybe I just have this sense from watching the Upstream Orchestra [in Halifax, 2003 – where one of Houle’s pieces was performed]. Maybe it's just projecting on my part I'm turning forty this year! I looked out there, and I saw all these people, some of whom I've seen at music festivals over the years, or whatever, that Lori [Freedman], and you and I, and Guy [Few]...that there's a mature generation of performer-composer flexible musicians out there. It's almost as though there is a critical mass of Canadian players. Is that pushing it too far?

FH: No, I don't think it's pushing it too far. I think certainly with the way things have evolved, in new music, in improvised music and in the jazz community, that there is this movement of performer improviser composers that's been growing pretty strongly since the 60's, and has been very encouraged by the establishment in order to grow. Even though there's still a limited public and limited funding, this thing is just kind of like a resilient bug that just won't go away. There's a hipness factor that kicks in as well, that people who can do that, there's, like you meet classical musicians who've been trained to play in an orchestra, they're very envious of what it is that we do. Because they say "Oh, I wish I could improvise but..." they never make the leap conceptually that they could do it anyway. So, in a sense it reinforces the value of that music in the community or in the scene so to speak. It is an integral part of the musical landscape and it won't go away, but it's going to continue to grow in a sense that at its roots, at its most fundamental, it is a rebellious kind of music...new music, and improvised music, and jazz. And that's the vital aspect of it, that's the reason it's gonna keep existing because it mutates, it'll take whatever shape it needs to take in order to survive, in order to move on. It defines styles, it defines genres, but it's not limited by those definitions. It just keeps moving on while the style and the genre stay where it's at. And there's more and more practitioners of those styles and genres but the real forward thinking musicians will move on from there all the time.

EW: It seems there's a real paradigm shift towards inter-disciplinarity...not just the musician that is capable of many styles of work, but somebody who is able to synthesize and integrate them. Do you teach?

FH: I teach improvisation at Vancouver Community College and it's interesting because I'm working with kids who are making their first steps in this schooling system, learning theory and harmony and all of that – and then they're thrown into my advanced improv class and there's no prerequisite (even though it's called advanced improvisation). I show them all the other aspects of music making, and its traditions, and its history, and where it’s going, but the most important thing is that every class we play - we listen to a lot of music and we play. My role in that class is to demystify the process so that they can go out there and discover their own ways of approaching this music.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to François Houle for permission to publish this interview, and for allowing us to document his 2007 Open Ears concert and to post an excerpt on this site.