The Widespread World of Florent Ghys

Reed Pryor, 2-8-2019

Composer’s Forum, Julie Wolfe

The Widespread World of Florent Ghys

Florent Ghys’ dedication to the marriage of video and music in the presentation of his work was something I found to be inspiring. I thought it bright that Ghys looks at video as liberation for a musician, and I think there is a lot to be learned from his tendencies. When you go to school to study something, as Ghys did for upright bass performance and as all of us in Julie’s class do for composition, there can reach a point where a wall starts to come up. In an environment where we are sharpening and perfecting a craft that is more like a personal blanket we have hung close to for a long time, there comes a feeling of losing oneself. 

On a personal note, that realization happened to me when I was a sophomore at NYU, at a time in which someone made an exit from my life, and I felt like going to make music about it to cope was simply not enough anymore. I visited a student co-op on LaGuardia Place and West 3rd, where you could use their computers for free, loaded with visual editing programs like Adobe. Sitting there, grabbing random clips from the internet and throwing them into this mosh pit of footage, I acknowledged that I had finally reconnected the dots in my brain. It was not that I was no longer creative, or had run out of things to say. It was that I hadn’t even begun to fully explore the visual avenues available to me in which I could be musical in ways I never knew how. I found myself obsessing about the visual rhythm in a sequence I had where clips of Angelina Jolie from Gia (HBO Films, 1998) were displayed particularly to represent the character arch that I picked up on in the movie. In a scene where she walks down a long hallway after storming out of a fashion show, I cut back to her moments of glory as she did a spin on the runway in front of an adoring crowd. With the audio cut out as this flash occurs, for me, it was representative of her fall, and the very potent sadness the movie humanely conveyed. 

While watching Florent Ghys on Monday night, I saw that he too was paying tribute to his own inspirations in his videos, and that the music that was accompanying his work meant all the much more because of his own passion that you could see as you heard. I enjoyed the thought the class presented about Ghys being a preserver, if you will-someone who sees deeper value in happenings that are supposed to be trivial. I especially took a liking to his fasciation with language and weather reports that harkened back to his mother listening to the radio every day. He had not forgotten his experiences (old and new) in his personal projects, he was actually expounding upon them. 

Ghys deeply investigated childish, elementary, and primal instincts. In his Ping-Pong video, there was a sense that every time the ball passed on one side, and there was a clear moment of victory versus defeat, and the music stabbed through as if to make you a little physically weary. It was as if you were watching a great sporting event, which at its zenith, is the human body being pushed to its ultimate limit, and for some reason, always connects me back to childhood and dreams of greatness. In his weather report remix Farsi version, Ghys also used playful shots of the cellist from below, in the style of the old MTV music videos that he grew up on. With the green lighting behind him cast on the face of the newswoman, the room felt acidic, and his motions upon the instrument goofy like the sunlight that cracks by after you wake up from a long night out.  

Going forward, I would love to see Ghys attack some of the more undeveloped and seemingly personal narratives in his videos. In his “Etude For Eleven Voices,” Ghys used solfeggi syllables for lyrics, and this piece was in response to the materials that humans were packaging and sending out into space should extraterrestrial beings ever come upon them. Ghys’ history at the conservatory seemed strained, hard on his conscious even. He talked about how he felt trapped, which is why I find it so interesting that he used solfeggi, the classical model of naming pitches, as the fodder for this etude that celebrated expression. I picked up on this theme again in his video playing double bass atop a roof in Dumbo. His body retired into a disappearance but the bow still struck his instrument with lively vigor. Is he to suggest that this identity he formerly devoted himself to, as a student of conservatory, is still within him? Does it lie buried beneath the mounds of voices and shadows that stand in for deep emotions of anguish? Either way, this Ghy is up to something cool and his class was great!