Commissioned by the Printemps des Arts festival, Monte Carlo. Premiere on 2 April 2026 in Monaco.
What is it that allows an instrument to stand the test of time, capturing the desires of composers, the imagination of instrument makers, and the ear of the audience?
John Cage placed bolts between the piano’s strings. Others before and after him have expanded, reimagined and challenged this musical instrument, transforming it once again into a realm of exploration.
‘An Ear Alone Is Not a Being’ tells this story with humour, with curiosity, and with the sound of a piano that never ceases to surprise us.
https://claudinesimon.com/wp-content/uploads/extrait-titre-j-cage.jpg9871296Claudine Simonhttps://claudinesimon.com/wp-content/uploads/Claudine-Simon-log.pngClaudine Simon2025-08-23 08:58:352026-04-24 09:39:27An ear alone is not a being
A play for young audiences aged 7 and up ; sound and visual creation – 50 minutes
Premiere at the OPERA DE ROUEN
Claudine Simon : concept, sound design Claudine Simon, Max Bruckert, Alix Reynier : performer Anne-Sophie Bérard : set design; Maeva Prigent : plastic designer ; Max Bruckert : sound and computer development ; Antoine Travert : lighting, train development; Vincent Dupuy : outside view ; Alix Reynier : stage and general management ; Solid : set construction
Summary : A small train runs across the stage, illuminating the piano pieces laid out there. The shadows cast are like phantasmagorical figures. An imaginary space is offered to the audience.
Like the child in Proust’s bedroom with his magic lantern, the performers give themselves over to the poetic and dreamlike spirit of the piece. This shift gives rise to a joyful interplay with the sound spaces.
This is a concert featuring a unique scenography: a miniature electric train on a circuit on the floor, surrounding the piano.
Objects belonging to the piano (keys, hammers, small mechanisms, springs) or to preparations (clothes pegs, balls, brushes, etc.) are placed on either side.
The train then sets off.
An LED light fixed to the front sweeps across the space, creating a shadow effect on the walls of the room, while a micro-canon fixed to the top amplifies the sounds of the journey.
Objects scattered on the floor take on a completely different form and appearance. The closer they are to the spotlight, the more imposing their shadows become. Little by little, these figures take on the shape of an urban landscape, the projected black touches becoming gigantic buildings that stand out against the walls.
Our position as spectators changes. This miniature train and the phantasmagoria associated with its movement transform us into travellers on an unexpected journey. We’re transported into an astonishing, improbable universe, creating an immediate sense of interaction with the performance.
The music starts from the world of the piano, but is particularly interested in sound territories: the boundaries between note and sound, music and noise, instrumental gesture and movement, what is normalised and what is not, concrete sound and electronics, in a kind of sonic and spatial writing that is akin to cinema for the ear. Games are set up where sound plays tricks on us. It sometimes contradicts what’s happening on stage, leading to situations that can be downright burlesque !
A title, an approach…
Un pays supplémentaire (an additional country) is a reference to a phrase coined by film critic Serge Daney.
This expression sounds like a message to arrouse children’s curiosity.
Practising music adds a whole new world to ones life, a realm of emotions and perceptions. It’s also a way of living, seeing, listening and feeling that you can make your own. It’s a very special world that we can make our own.
It’s a bit like when you’re faced with translating a foreign language. When you go looking for formulas and expressions, you very often find an astonishing way of saying things that is specific to that language. These formulas, these unexpected combinations of words for our own mode of expression, our own language, stimulate the imagination. Foreign languages have fascinating ways of making us see and feel differently what we actually say in our own language.They can bring up up cultural, visual and oral references, uncovering new ways of thinking and seeing, a whole baggage of curious equivalents and surprising false friends – in short, another world…
This project aims to lead the children to discover something special, an unusual and more experimental kind of music. This discovery, this encounter, will be brought about by the stratagem of a model train that you can follow with your eyes. It acts on sound and produces cast shadows.
Along the way, the amusing and amazing events, put the children in the right receptive mood. Their field of attention and desire grows, their perception opens up, and they are offered a new way of listening, as an invitation rather than a prescription.
Anatomia is a piano recital and an exhibition. Franz Liszt’s Funérailles, a virtuoso romantic piece composed in memory of three friends who died during the Hungarian revolution of 1848, is performed. Then the world-instrument opens up, as if to give us a better view of the music through it. In the darkness of a concert hall that has become an anatomical theatre, we witness a surreal scene. The piano is dissected, deconstructed, dismembered. Still resonating, its organs suspended in space seem endowed with life. In the manner of science fiction, we have shrunk to penetrate the labyrinths of the instrument, while our listening has widened and melted into the details of the sound painting.
Dates in 2025: April 2-3 at Maison de la Musique, Nanterre; May 7 at ZEF Scène Nationale, Marseille, with GMEM’s Propagations festival.
Dates in 2024: Théâtre de Vanves; Opéra de Dijon Ici l’onde-CNCM; Festival Détours de babels, Hexagone Scène Nationale de Meylan; Opéra underground (Lyon); Opéra de Reims – Césaré-CNCM; Espace Malraux Scène Nationale Chambéry Savoie
AURIS ⌊ sound and stage productions ⌉
Prize-winning project of “Mondes Nouveaux” DGCA – Ministry of Culture; of the Beaumarchais-SACD foundation, la Maison de la Musique Contemporaine, the SACEM
Co-production : Espace Malraux Scène Nationale Chambéry ; ici l’onde Dijon, Théâtre de Vanves – DRAC Auvergne Rhône-Alpes ; Support and residency: GMEM-CNCM Marseille, Why Note ici l’onde, Espace Malraux Scène Nationale Chambéry, Scène Nationale d’Orléans, Opéra underground, Pianos Baruth
Claudine Simon (prepared piano) and Christian Sebille (electronics) both have a relationship with musical writing, even if their training and career paths have been dissimilar.
Claudine Simon, diverting the instrument she has always played, questions her intimate relationship with the piano. Christian Sebille, on the other hand, seeks to rediscover the pleasure of immediate instrumental play and develops controlled electronic lutherie.
The exploration of timbres within the piano constitutes the sound material of the transformations operated by the electronics. The improvisation is built through the dialogue between the two musicians thanks to the coming and going of sonorities and musical proposals.
Then, reminiscences and evanescent ghosts appear between the materials and the sound features of three preludes by Claude Debussy. These quotations constitute the axes of perspective of the walk. The landscape changes and metamorphoses between the thickness of the sounds, the memories that form our memory and the new discovery of a never seen panorama. We await the next angle and the surprise of another perspective.
In the first half of the 20th century, the composers Henry Cowell and John Cage considerably extended the field of possibilities of the piano. The first went inside the instrument to manipulate the strings directly. The second inserted various objects between the strings to transform it into a sort of percussion orchestra guided by the hazards of matter and movement.
This duo is part of this filiation, between sound engineering and artistic exploration. In complicity with Vivien Trelcat, Claudine Simon goes in search of the secrets hidden by her instrument by adding appendages, by touching it with electromechanical devices as well as with incongruous objects.
Much more than a high-tech performance, this duo of improvisers allows a dialogue with the instrument, its lutherie, its history, revealing the poetic relationship between the organic and mechanical bodies.
The duo SIMON | TRELCAT is a duo of improvisers who assert a will to question the piano playing, the lutherie, its coupling with technology and the digital. The main axis of this collaboration is constituted around the hybridization of the piano realized by an electromechanical device which comes to transform the traditional lutherie and to disturb its use. The modelling of the instrument’s sound capacities opens up a new playing space.
The electroacoustic augmentation of the instrument, via a work of timbre by digital treatment allows to revisit the know-how, a knowledge to hear, in the instantaneousness of the improvisation. A new musical and gestural grammar takes shape.
This device was created in 2020-21 by the Sonopopée collective thanks to a commission from the GMEM-CNCM of Marseille.
Performative, visual and sound experience Creation on March 10th 2021, Scène Nationale d’Orléans
Claudine Simon : conception, performing pianist – Vivien Trelcat : computer lutherie, machine performer – Pauline Simon : choreographic vision – Franck Lemonde : texts – Jacques-Benoit Dardant : lights, scenography, general management – Collectif Sonopopée (Vivien Trelcat, Max Lance, Nicolas Canot) development and design of the machines – Insa de Lyon students : prototypes of the machines
I have always considered the piano like a body, an organism. I have always wanted to know what was happening inside, what was this machinery, this frightful power rumbling and rolling under its wooden chest. Remembering the words of my professors who taught me how to tame it (we pianists have been, for that matter, educated like machines to look for the most precise movement every time) I do sense a significant artistic stake.
For a long time, I have been wanting to create a show, which would hold at its core this machine, this mass, its intensity and its mechanisms. In the meantime, I would like to investigate this particular hand-to-hand relation it imposes on the human machinery in order to achieve sound purposes.
Pianomachine proceeds from an organological study that I have pursued with engineering students from the INSA in Lyon. This study resulted in the creation of a prototypical Piano in which automated units (percussive tools, resonators, bouncy masses) are added to the piano organism and act on its strings and structure. The instrument is conceived as an extension of the interpreter’s active power. The added machines provoke chain reactions, in or out of sync, by the piano player.
A hand-to-hand relation is by nature one of struggle as much as one of desire, sensuality and pleasure, the lovers’ union. This relation is first and foremost the one that has been bonding man to machine for centuries. It involves the body as much as the brain cells or rather what one could designate as the body/brain. It is in fact a matter of resonance between those two bodies: the human and the instrument, to evoke their inner parts and their outer parts, what is shown to the eye, what is given to hear and what is not. A dialogue is built up between the two “subjects” through a performative mode of sound, verbal and gestural exchanges, a kind of visual narrative.
co-production La muse en circuit CNCM-Alforville, La Fondation Royaumont, Financed by the Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the DRAC Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Supported by: Saintex culture numérique Reims, Insa de Lyon, Césaré CNCM-Reims, Malraux Scène Nationale Chambéry Savoie
This expression sounds like a message to arrouse children’s curiosity.
rudy decelière
CREATION in 2023 at the Musica festival in Strasbourg
