AUTOMATIC WRITING AND GRAMMELOT IN CLAUDE VIVIER'SLANGUE INVENTÉE

Abstract

Abstract French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948–1983) is one of the few composers, perhaps the only one, to use an invented language throughout his entire compositional career. Vivier's use of what he called hislangue inventée(‘invented language’) spanned the first vocal work in his catalogue –Ojikawa(1968) – to his final work,Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele(1983), completed only shortly before his murder in March 1983. Despite the pervasiveness of this technique – in fact, it is the only technique that remains a constant across all of Vivier's stylistic periods – relatively little attention has been given to thelangue inventéein scholarship. This article presents a description of Vivier'slangue inventéein three parts, beginning with a general introduction. The second part presents thelangue inventéeas a product of automatic writing and engages directly with Vivier's sketches to propose a method that Vivier likely used to write much of hislangue inventéetext. The final section of the article presents Vivier'slangue inventéeas a form of grammelot – a term revived by playwright, actor and director Dario Fo (1926–), which is associated with the dialect theatre of theCommedia dell'artetradition. This article aims to demonstrate that Vivier'slangue inventéeis not a just a string of unintelligible nonsense syllables, but rather a very purposeful grammelot, freely composed in a two-stage approach to automatic writing, that reaches beyond linguistic semantics.

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