Paul Giger
Chartres

A long time ago, I had the opportunity to travel through part of France by car, visiting castles (including Amboise, Leonardo's home), wonderful nature, hospitable people, and some of the most beautiful Gothic churches in Christendom. Besides enjoying excellent meals and lazy, charming car rides—sometimes the journey is worth at least as much as the destination—I remember spending hours upon hours in the absorbed and majestic wonder of the grand cathedral of Bourges, oblivious to the outside world, immersed in an ocean of silence and shadow, and unresponsive even to the whispers of my wife, who had overcome her amazement before I did and seemed immune to that very Stendhal syndrome which prevented me from stepping out into the light of the world and held me captive in a meditative world.

This is the effect that certain immense cathedrals can have on predisposed individuals, true architectural machines designed to implode into the soul of those who traverse them (but I recall a not dissimilar effect in the great mosque of Seville).

Traveling in France, a visit to the most famous cathedral of Chartres, a hundred kilometers from Paris, cannot be omitted. It is smaller than Bourges but rich with the famous circular labyrinth inscribed in its floor, with which Christian tradition—but also and above all pagan and esoteric ones—have always imagined an initiatory journey towards enlightenment that, not by chance, ends in the direction of the famous Gothic stained glass windows. I visited Chartres and was not captivated to that extent, perhaps due to the excessive presence of tourists and the consequent impossibility of enjoying the architectural locus in a private and dedicated way (I am immune to religious suggestions, especially collective ones, but certainly not to artistic and transcendental ones, like everyone else).

Now imagine a wonderful Gothic cathedral, shrouded in shadow and occasionally pierced by rays of light streaming through skillfully stained and mysteriously colored windows. Imagine the great church being completely empty and illusorily silent, while in reality resonating in every stone and every smallest arch with mysterious sonic responses, designed as it is to explode high frequencies and implode low ones, with the infrasound of the pipe organ practically perceivable in the spinal column.

Imagine a violinist, endowed with immense technique and expression, slowly moving through the deserted cathedral, absorbedly playing a precious instrument and producing entirely improvised music, wrapping around itself and feeding on prodigious resonances and unimaginable harmonics elsewhere, from the darkness of the nave and the crypt, from the magical spiral of the labyrinth on the ground, and from the solitude and silence that alone can release such intense emotions and expressions.

Listening to the improvisations and watching part of the musician's journey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnqYTyUhLoc) reveals an absolutely astounding and unparalleled expressive technique. Paul Giger's improvised music is sometimes cyclical and minimalist, sometimes oriental and ancestral, rich in overtones and percussion on the body of the instrument, with trills and resonances intended to awaken hidden echoes within the stone—a beautiful and absorbed music, absolutely 'private,' if not for the fact that these sounds are marvelously captured in their purity and transferred onto the sound medium so we can listen to them in our homes, as if we were sitting in the nave and choir, hearing him play.

It is clearly a record that requires concentration and dedication, a sound entanglement that is the opposite of the ambient music we've recently discussed, yet it is as much a child of the environment (in the literal sense) as it is of the violinist's improvisation, and our inner visualization of that environment is needed for it to be fully perceived. The exact opposite of 'Discreet Music,' truly, where music merely aimed to 'serve' the contingent situation (waiting, walking, relaxing) whereas here, it is the physical, metaphysical, and sound space of the cathedral that provides nourishment to the musician's sensitivity and his instantaneous musical production.

Perhaps not an easy listening, certainly not commonplace, yet marvelous and undoubtedly pure in its instantaneous compositional and expressive journey: ‘from producer to consumer,’ so to speak, without intermediaries and arrangements, and without sound mediations or modifications not already present in the setup phase of the performance. A concert without public, absolutely private for each of us, but also without that self-celebratory component that is part of many performances: a music created not to prove something (Paul Giger had already shown the world his incredible technique and sensitivity) but to live and express at the moment, and then narrate, a particular place and suggestion.

As usual, the highest sound standards of ECM productions are an essential part of the best enjoyment of the exciting artistic expression, and the sound rendering of all the harmonics and reverberations, skillfully generated in a single take and without rehearsals or second thoughts, is impressive. Done on the day of the summer solstice of 1988 in the cathedral of Chartres by Paul Giger, I have elected this album among my favorites of all time, for the reasons I have confusedly tried to express thus far, and hope others can discover this masterpiece and enjoy it.