As some aesthetic currents cross the borders, Vincent Paulet remains unquestionably a French composer. He inherited from Franck, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Dutilleux and made this inheritance blossom freely following his own personality. Ravelian in music and in thoughts, perhaps would he make his own this sentence by the composer of Daphnis et Chloé : “I, the most internationalist of all men, am strongly nationalist in art. In art only.” If Vincent Paulet likes French music, it might be merely because he looks at the world from the place where he lives, in all simplicity. However, like his elders, his admirations lead him to the gates of Great Europe and he conceives neither Franck and Debussy without Wagner, nor Poulenc without Stravinski, or Dutilleux without the Vienna School.
Vincent Paulet is a composer with a flawless craftmanship. Come to maturity when the theory of tabula rasa was still ruling the French small musical world, he kept away from it, choosing to successfully attend harmony, counter-point, fugue, scoring and analysis courses except composing courses. At that time, following both paths at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique de Paris was frowned upon. “I have never resorted to a composition teacher, besides I think a composition teacher is totally useless”, he said. “Actually the pieces that fascinate you, mark you to such an extent that, in the first place, your own writing is influenced by them, then it finally expresses itself in a personal language progressively appeared after a natural and unconscious process; that is what makes a true “composition lesson”.
Despite his vast culture and savoir-faire, Vincent Paulet remains an intuitive composer. No cunning device in his work, very few abstract tricks except in some of his youth works, but an exclusively musical thought, expressed from the beginning by means of sounds and developed in the same way. An honest craftman, he does not cheat, does not need the props of ready-made systems. He composes slowly, not worrying about producing a prolific work he would not be satisfied with. Some close friends will know : everyday, when he starts composing, he sits down first and sings to himself the whole score already written, in tempo, in order to see clearly where to fit what he is about to create in the time of the work. L’Office des adieux, a wide and magnificent piece of orchestra, a state commission, took him fourteen months of strenuous work, and the shorter works have not been less demanding in proportion. One could apply to Vincent Paulet these remarks held by Paul Dukas - an other composer of a rare work - in front of his composing class : “It is not necessary to write a lot, twenty-five pages are enough (see L’Après-Midi d’un Faune). But it is precisely those twenty-five pages that our current musical literature is missing.”
Slowly, but with passion and sincerity, Vincent Paulet wrote some of those pages necessary to our time : this orchestra in turns rarefied and dark or so bright in L’Office des adieux, Musique pour douze instruments, a piece so rightly honoured by the jury of the competition Alea III in Boston in 1997; or In memoriam Manuel de Falla, a commission from la Casa de Velazquez when the musician was in residence there. And, amongst the other pieces to quote, we should not forget to include several organ pieces.
There is a religious dimension which may or may not appear in Vincent Paulet’s work, the author being loath to attempt to impose a way of hearing on his audience through long texts acting as ready-made thinking. However, in the choice of subjects, of titles and of certain considerations, this dimension shows clearly, though with discretion. In his music as in his life. He does not need the golden tints and the splendour of the cathedral. The Gregorian themes come naturally under his pen, developed, altered, and slip into his style, although so different from the style of the anonymous musicians who forged the repertory : La Ballade des Pendus, L’Office des adieux borrow from it, as well as the Salve Regina or the Verset sur Ave maris stella, organ pieces whose titles are more transparent. More than a musical reference, it is a true influence. In the Verset sur Ave maris stella, numerous sentences, entirely in his style, are as many lines remotely stemming from Gregorian monodies : insistant come-back of a chosen note, melodic amplification, stability of the mode - although those of the composer may be irreducible to a scalar diatonic theory.
Another typical trait of the composer, is the apparent complexity of his music. And yet, he does not want to make the task of the interpreter difficult. More than once, while discussing the string parts of a piece or even more regularly during the composition of the Psaume 129 for mixed choir a capella, this concern surfaced, showing the care of the composer to write as simply as possible. But this willingness comes up against the demands of his art, the richness of his harmonic universe as well as against the flexibility and the fluidity of his rhythmic, that he can not write other than with the very precise values of his scores, with lines that burst forth, limpid or tragic, with progressive accelerandos or rallentandos. According to him, his writing little varied since he started :
“As always in my music, it is a flexible rhythm, a kind of rubato written as precisely as possible (which makes it appear often complicated, despite all my constant efforts to simplify it.)”
But we must come up to one of the greatest particularities of the composer’s style : Vincent Paulet is a thematic composer, that is to say he invents themes, gives them to hear, even to hear again. He plays with them and varies them. That is why we can say he is a truly daring musician who does what very few composers have dared to do for half a century. How can we claim “to be of our time” and not use methods, processes and even these good old series almost secular ? Vincent Paulet does not pretend anything, he does not wrap his music in heavy and dissembling comments. On this aspect of his work like on all the others, neither manifesto, nor rough definite position; Vincent Paulet makes his way like Henri Dutilleux, one of his favourite composers : with sureness and discretion. He just composes, taking all the risks, relying on no one but himself :
“The methods of a serial type (although applied to thematic elements which are never true series and which have a real thematic profile - and a thematic role -) progressively faded away from my discourse, to the advantage of more direct developing forms, actually simpler, at least when listening to them : however let us not think it is easier to write : actually, it is much more tedious, and more demanding; one will never gauge enough to what extent resorting to systematic methods, even very complex (as, for instance, the harmonic presentations - I prefer this term to “coagulations” - in triple canon that we can see (if we are sharp-eyed!) in La Ballade des Pendus) is a readiness for the composer; write without the help of any system, here is the real difficulty, the supreme requirement : the ear, nothing but the ear, in an utter submission to inspiration.”
The language of the composer is not necessarily obvious to grasp for those who are not familiar with the great creators of our time, such as Bartok, Stravinski or Dutilleux. But he is neither dark, nor of a cryptic coherence which would only appear through a Benedictine study of the score. One only has to listen and the themes come out, lively, with their shimmering and varied harmonics. The musician’s discourse carries one away. With his particularities, he only tries to make himself understood :
“Making my work easily understood by my audience is, anyway, one of my priorities, and it is no doubt what brought me, although in a progressive and unconscious way, to establish a more direct communication with the listener (in L’Office des adieux, for instance, not a single element of the thematic discourse is concealed). There is nothing demagogic in it : I am indeed my own (and my first) audience (...).”
This prominence of the thematic discourse may progressively prove itself in the creator’s work but it is there, way before what this quotation would make us think. Le Grand Stellaire or Laus (1991-1992), for instance, are pieces which thematic path can be easily followed. This legibility is found in all the most recent major pieces : In the Deuxième Quatuor à cordes, en forme d’études (1994), which structure in several parts does not prevent from being a succession of variations. In Musique pour douze instruments, so undivided/unifying and so rich. In the Psaume 129, a choral fresco a cappella nearly twenty minutes long, which carries away the listener from the first to the last words. For, if Vincent Paulet requires some involvement from his listener, it is indeed the following one : listening and remembering from beginning to end. If the listener lets himself be seduced by his muse, then the piece will never leave him.
Philippe Cathé,
Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne, 2006