Nour Symon’s artistic practice is based on the interaction between three major axes in their creations, namely concert music, visual arts and poetry. This transdisciplinary approach is particularly reflected in their sound paintings—instrumental or performative graphic scores, interpreted here and there by musicians and artists with as sinuous a journey as possible.

Their first collection of poetry, son corps parlait pour ne pas mourir, as well as their first book of sound paintings, voir dans le vent qui hurle les étoiles rire, et rire, were published in 2016 at Éditions de la Tournure. The poetry and sound paintings collection L’amour des oiseaux moches (2020) represented an important culmination in their journey, having been the subject of a publication by Omri editions and a major production of the Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM+).

Their visual art work has been exhibited at Gham & Dafe, at Livart, at the Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, at the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur and at the Palazzo Ducale di Lucca. Symon is currently working on an opera based on Le désert mauve, a novel by Nicole Brossard, who supports them in this process.

voir dans le vent qui hurle les étoiles rire, et rire, a 40-minute work co-composed with Yannick Plamondon for the Orchestre symphonique de Québec and the marimbist Anne-Julie Caron, was presented to celebrate the inauguration of the Lassonde Pavilion of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec (2016).

Nour is also an independent researcher: their writings have been published on many platforms, including the Revue Circuit, the Cahiers de la SQRM, the cetvilleetrange.org website and the Ecosystem magazine of the Chambre Blanche. They are a frequent guest speaker, as a composer and researcher, including at McGill University, Simon Fraser University, Western University, Université de Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal and at the various Conservatoires de musique in Québec.

I was connected to Nour via our mutual friend Sarah Albu. Sarah’s work is phenomenal in its own right. I met Sarah many years ago when they came to Ottawa to perform a show with the production company I co-founded called Sesquisharp. Sarah is an incredible vocalist and performer in several genres. Not only in the field of new music and performance but also in renaissance singing and early music. We had intended to meet up with Sarah and Nour in Montréal over Christmas while I was visiting family, but scheduling was tight. Although, we didn’t have a chance to meet in person, Nour’s work was so compelling and beautiful that I needed to connect and talk. I’m thrilled that Nour and I had the chance to talk on Skype and that they were generous enough to allow me to post photos and links of their work so you can all enjoy it as much as I do.

{Jacob} - I’m thrilled that Sarah connected us and that we have the chance to talk. It is too bad the timing didn’t line up while I was in Montréal over the holidays, but I’m happy we can connect now.

{Nour} - I am too! Apologies though, I haven’t spoken English in quite a while: I hope my answers won’t be too bumpy.

{Jacob} - Oh, that’s okay. Your English is going to be infinitely better than my French. My partner is from Montréal and is wonderfully bilingual, and he just refuses to listen to my French because it’s such a struggle for him to understand. But I do try. My masters is from a bilingual university, but that has not helped one bit! What pronouns do you use?

{Nour} - I use they/them.

{Jacob} - Wonderful. French makes pronouns a more difficult thing to deal with often. I know there is a trend starting to emerge that uses alternates to the masculine and feminine. Do you use them?

{Nour} - There is, yes: common gender neutral pronouns in French are “ille” or “iel.” I do see, hear and use them more and more, with people “from the community,” but also in more “everyday” contexts. I try to reconcile those ways of talking–especially since they are also ways of thinking and of “being” to the world–but I’m quite preoccupied by the fact that the usage of gender-neutral pronouns, and the consequential grammar, in French, is much harder while talking or writing than in English for instance. I prefer, of course, when people address me correctly, but I find it important to acknowledge that it can be difficult to expect all the people I interact with to be able to use that rather new—and still in a very early stage of development—mode of expression. In any case, I suppose (and hope!) that some practical and inclusive new linguistic solutions will emerge and become the new “normal.”

{Jacob} - I figured we would start with a short conversation about graphic scores. I have done graphic scores in the past as a musician, but I realize that many people may have not heard of them. So, although I am passingly comfortable with graphic scores, I’m wondering if you can describe in your view how graphic scores work and how you go about writing them.

{Nour} - At the beginning of my studies, I have been very much inspired by the graphic scores that came from the good old 50s, 60s and 70s “new music” scene: those by Sylvano Bussotti, Cathy Berberian, André Boucourechliev, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati or Cornelius Cardew, for instance. Scores that were very much tied to the European classical music traditions and that were trying to disrupt or subvert those traditions, using visual elements to open their music to more improvised (and thus personal to the interpreter) sound structures–and that were also very political, especially those of co-founder of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain Cardew!. But I was not necessarily working with visual representation of sound in the same way. In my work, it started off more as a pragmatic thing, rather indebted in aesthetics and sound like Ceci Taylor or Anthony Braxton’s graphic scores. I used to be a classical pianist, did my bachelor degree and all, and had really huge issues with my memory. I used to improvise a lot and I would try to work on my improvisations so they would get better, but I would always forget anything that I did. So, I doodled words and graphical elements to remember a bit what was going on. For instance, here there would be a chaotically drawn cloud of sounds that would be in the lower register of the keyboard and there small dots to represent more pointillist elements going from middle to high register back and forth. And sometimes indications of a chord or bits of melodies intertwined in the doodlings. So at the beginning, it was more just a way to jog my memory and to remember what it was I was doing.

When I started studying composition, later one, my teachers would say, “Oh, your drawings are really nice but just keep them for yourself and show me ‘the real music’”; namely the transcriptions of those drawings in what they would call “new music notation.” I chose to comply with their transcription requirements at that time, especially because I had a huge impostor syndrome (how pretentious to think that I—child of a mixed-race couple coming from a very non-artistic milieu—could write classical music following Beethoven’s steps!). But, at the same time, I felt that using the link between visuals and sound was incredibly useful for me to disrupt my own relationship with the habits that were taught to composers trained in the European tradition, or, in my case, as pianist-composer … which seemed even worse, at the time, in terms of habits inscribed in the body and in the ear! That kind of “secret” or taboo visual work that I was using thus made me explore sound phenomenons that were not necessarily accepted in the canons of European classical musics, and neither in the “new music” codes, to be honest.

I finally met a very influential teacher, Piet Meyer, when I was finishing my studies in Germany. He thought that my scores—being transcriptions of my graphics into occidental classical music notation—were incredibly difficult to perform due to the precision of my transcriptions that were necessary to convey a bit of the sound textures of my drawings, but were thus incoherent with their artistic goals because they were leaving absolutely no room for a discussion involving performer, score and composer. He encouraged me to use my original drawings (and to perfect my art of sound representation at the same time) to express line, direction, pitch, and phrasing, but also more finite things like precise rhythm or timber/pitch sequences. He saw the benefit for me to use graphic notation to directly convey a melody, an emotion as well as a complete and coherent artistic project and helped me in that direction.

{Jacob} - That’s phenomenal that somebody recognized those elements of your work. That’s an astounding thing for a teacher to say. “I like this. You want to write like this. How about you just do this?”

{Nour} - I was extremely lucky to find him and work with him, indeed!

{Jacob} - I have only seen your scores online. I haven’t seen them in person. But, from what I see, they are very large. When did you start playing with scale? I think even for people who have played graphic scores in the past, there is still a feeling of being bound by a sheet of paper. We’re still bound by score. So where did the size and scale and scope come from?

{Nour} - It was there almost from the beginning. One of the first things I realized when I was starting to use graphic scores was that when I used to write on the computer or on regular “letter” paper, I had this habit of always writing musical elements that would fit on the screen, or on double pages. All the musical gestures would be encompassed in what I could see, or be multiples of the said format. So from quite early on I started thinking that for this musical idea I needed a really tiny piece of paper and for that other one I would need the whole wall. So I started to paint and draw using the actual whole surface of my apartment. It gave me a strong physical relationship to the score, which I loved. And the musical gestures are now linked to the size of my arms, to how high I can jump, or to how gently I can drip painting with a syringe, etc. Consequently, I now always try to find places where I can work that are as huge as possible. I put the paper, cardboard sheets or rice paper rolls of different sizes all around on the floor and on the walls. And then I just go around the room and think “okay, at the beginning near the sink, there’s something missing” or “I need to add something this size, shape, and colour on that piece of paper near the door,” etc. Composing has become more and more choreographic for me, and I love it!

{Jacob} - So, from a creation standpoint, when you’re in that space, are you thinking more in terms of colour, sound, size, motion? Or maybe a combination of all of those things at the same time? I guess I’m asking what comes first.

{Nour} - It always starts with what I call “creating the poetical universe” of the project. That sounds weird in English [laughs]. “L’univers poétique.” For some reason that makes more sense to me in French.

{Jacob} - I think I understand what you mean though.

{Nour} - OK, good! I don’t think in terms of sound or in terms of visuals or in terms of words. It’s a lot about the context. First, with whom am I going to work? And with those people, what kind of “poetical universe” can we build together, and in what kind of venue or presentation setup? This has become really the centre of what I’m doing. When writing something, for instance, in collaboration with our friend Sarah Albu—who’s working in the fields of voice, electronics, theatre and performance—then I’m thinking of her art and of the person she is before thinking of any sound or visual element. The person that I am at that point in time and how we interact, also. For instance, we’re working at the moment on a project called “L’Outre-rêve,” with the Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM+), and it’s all about the idea of community, of building chosen family and kinship, of taking care and power from what has been considered unsightly by a certain norm. About accepting to just go on living as the beautiful weird birds that we are and creating a world where we can be our own point of reference. Perhaps because of the positive interaction around that project—with Sarah, but also with fellow composers Annesly Black, Myriam Boucher and Snežana Nešić as well as with conductor and artistic director Véronique Lacroix and choreographer Line Nault—I’ve gone all solid gold and flashy colours for that project, whilst most of my earlier scores were black and white. And also very, very dense sound/visual material: for the first time I feel comfortable enough with my own identity to say, “nope, simple is not the only way to be beautiful; being complex is valid too,” and that reflects a lot in the score.

{Jacob} - Had you painted much before? Have you studied visual arts at all?

{Nour} - Not really, no, except for a few visual arts elective classes during my piano bachelor’s degree. I can’t draw or paint a bird. I’m totally incapable of drawing figurative things. You know, if I draw a house, it’s going to be the least realistic house ever. When I write my scores, I never think of them as paintings, always as sound structures. When I started, I didn’t think of my scores as independent visual art, that could be presented in galleries or museums, for instance, or put in people’s kitchen. For me they were doodling or memory aids, which eventually became more consciously drawings, which became “Oh, here I need acrylic. Okay, here I need solid gold paint mixed with oil pastels. Oh wait … you really think this could be shown to people hanged on a wall??!”

{Jacob} - I’m also fascinated with your work because I am also interested in the idea of de-structuring and decolonizing the hierarchy of the arts in general but specifically classical music. Bringing those really long held and very destructive ideas to the fore and really breaking them down wherever possible. Of course, I am biased and I believe that queer identities, on some level—not for everybody—but inherently it is part of queer thinking to want to deconstruct and want to decolonize and want to be heard. What do you feel about that? When you are creating and when you’re talking about these new ways of thinking about how classical music can be made, do you actively bring gender and queer identity into that space or is it a happenstance? Does it just exist or are you trying to bring it in?

{Nour} - For that “Outre-rêve” project, it’s the first time that I actively try to bring it in. It’s been kind of recent that I realized it’s always been at the core of what I was doing, even though it was more or less conscious. This current project is my entrance door into trying to work actively with the concepts, and to deal in a more “frontal” way with the relationship between my egypto-québécois and queer identities. I had to struggle with those quite a lot—being of “Arabic” (or Coptic, to be more accurate) descent, in a post 2001 world, growing up in a community, a neighborhood, that was really closed-minded—and violent—regarding gender and sexual diversity. I hadn’t realized until very recently how challenging it had been. That violence was just the normal everyday life, with, for instance, my cousins inviting me to plays at their Church where they would reenact the burning in hell of the sodomites and all. And the hatred that was communicated to me between Christians and Muslims from the Middle East, in a Montréal context where I actually had no real contact with the Québécois of French descent majority. And so, you know, since I’m white passing, and a few of my other friends are also of “Arabic” descent and also white passing, we hadn’t made a big effort until now to reclaim our identity because of that, and we have at times idealized the Québécois majority, so open-minded in our point of view. Getting older, we kind of escaped from those milieu and tried to disappear in the majority. Thus part our non-reclaiming was rooted in our own racism against our own origins, which was reinforced, of course, by the pop culture where the evil Russians had been replaced by the evil “Arabs.” The same thing applies to my queer identity: being genderqueer and pansexual in that context, to not acknowledge my wholeness was certainly rooted in some unconscious transphobia and homophobia. As far as I can remember, my siblings and I were fighting a lot against the sexism and phobias around us (not sure where our “progressiveness” came from!), but, of course, some of that violence got in the back of our minds somehow, and I personally felt, and still feel, that I needed to deconstruct that in my mind, and in my art.

And it’s only in the last few years, with the help of friends and colleagues, that I realized that everything we do, creatively speaking, is linked to that upbringing context. I never felt comfortable in school—with the classical training especially—the way teachers were presenting the canon of “The” “His”-tory of music, in a very non-plural manner. Everybody seemed to always just accept that homogeneity as a common ground, a mandatory simplification in order to build a common culture. It was infuriating because I felt quite isolated when I was saying, “you know, there’s more right? Not ALL music is based on the ‘tension and release’ binarity, or on the idea that all good music is based on the development of a tiny sound structure! Other modalities to exist musically in the world are also valid, and Bach isn’t a universal comparison point!” Every time I was trying to relate to Arabic music or to reconnect it with what I was doing as a young composer, or as an artist, teachers (and often colleagues too) were saying, “use a few quarter tones and minor thirds to colour your chords and you’ll get to be the Egyptian Bartók.” And for a while I believed that I really wanted that, and learned that composer Gamal Abdel-Rahim was already known as the Bartók of Egypt. Pianist William Chapman Nyaho was very influential to me in my early questioning on the topic, making me discover a lot of composers of African descent (ex: Rahim’s Variations on an Egyptian Folksong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZujQocbxrw or Gyimah Labi’s Earthbeats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLh1-zEw32w). I’ve talked to a lot of my friends that didn’t come from the “good” geographical places to be a classical music composer, and lots of us really wanted to be the North-African Bartók or the Bartók from wherever. But I’ve come to realize, especially through reading poetry from contemporary Arabic poets (Nada Sattouf, Nadia Tueni, Anne-Marie Alonzo, etc.) that getting rid of the colonizing shackles was way more interesting, complex and difficult than adding some “exotic spice” on very traditional Austrian schnitzels. Fellow mixed race queer composer Gabriel Dharmoo (https://youtu.be/3Sbp2WP3vFU), being also a vocalist and investing venues and spaces that are working toward decolonization, has been a great influence … and validation! … to me. And also being an amazing drag queen, under the stage name Bijuriya.

{Jacob} - My partner is an Armenian Montrealer. But in a funny coincidence, Armenian via Alexandria through his mother, so I suppose also with an Egyptian connection. I would say he probably has very similar feelings to holding a variety of identities within himself and how he navigates those as an artist. When you are writing for somebody, or an ensemble, that you know well, are you trying to create a specific sound for that person or group? Given that graphic scores are constantly different in every performance—that they are ephemeral—does that have any bearing on how you write?

{Nour}–Contrarily to the appearances, the scores I write are quite precise and thus have the potential to be very similarly performed by one musician or another. If I find myself working with an ensemble that feels more comfortable having access to all the details, I can add back staves or rhythmic indications to somehow make it possible to perform the piece exactly as I hear it, using some markings that clarify, “okay here, this blue sploosh is centred on a G sharp, and this other sploosh happens a triplet later.” But the complete opposite can happen, whereas with some musicians I would take out a maximum of precise indication, and let them dive in in a very personal matter, leaving most of the space for interpretation, discussion, and surprise. My preferred “zone” is when we are directly on the breaking point between precision and openness, but in any case I’ll always favour the notation—and consequently the type of collaboration—that speaks the most to the artistic interests, cultural codes and artistic strengths of my collaborators.

{Jacob} - Have you had these scores played by primarily classical players? By orchestras? Or do you mostly work with new-music people?

{Nour} – The diversity of collaborative possibilities permitted by graphic scores is what actually fascinates me the most. I work often and with great pleasure with musicians that are new-music specialists, but I’ve been collaborating (and seeking those collaborations, of course!) with musicians from the trad scene (especially long-time collaborator hamonicist Benjamin Tremblay Carpentier), or with ensembles as different as the Vancouver Chinese Music Ensemble or the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, for instance. And the clash is sometimes quite intense, like with the incredible marimba soloist, Anne-Julie Carron, who performed a concerto I wrote for her and the said Orchestre symphonique de Québec [excerpt: https://youtu.be/xcG69wcJJvk]. A few months after the premiere, she told me that when she started rehearsing the piece, it got under her skin so much that she took the score and threw it at the end of her practice room and just hated it so much because it brought up something that was really emotional. Then (fioufl) she told me that at the end she felt that it was the most personal thing she ever performed in her career, and that she’d do it again anytime–which was very touching to me. I think that this initial tension was partly due to the fact that she had never been asked—or granted permission by herself or by other composers—to work like this. To accept the emotional leaps that the score called for, the level of personal implication. Her going through that process and really getting into the score was so insightful for me as a composer, artist, and human being. Listening to her struggles and ultimately how she came to understand it made me think a lot about how I write, and the kind of artist I wanted to be, more and more putting aside this idea that artists actually “create” things from thin air. We are not. We are only a set of eyes and ears in relationship with our kin and context.

{Jacob} - I tend to think any reaction is a good reaction. As long as people are reacting. So I love that she threw the score. She got frustrated and I think that’s great. I love when people have walked out of my concerts. I think there’s something really satisfying about making somebody feel something so strongly that they have those reactions. We did a show once with my ensemble here in Halifax at a private club, like a yacht club that had a long history of being a whites-only elitist place, like so many of them were. And we brought in Indigenous poets and black Nova Scotian poets and queer poets to talk. During the show we had four or five people walk out of the show because of what the poets were speaking about in this space. And I could not have been happier. They couldn’t deal with what the indigenous poets were saying about the space and its history but I love that they felt something. I think they were feeling the wrong things, but I am happy there was a reaction.

So, what else are you working on other than the “Outre-rêve” project?

{Nour} - This project is also becoming my second poetry book, under the title “L’amour des oiseaux moches” (The love of unsightly birds). It’s been published as a kind of graphic novel because it’s intertwining the text and the score together. I’m so happy of what this project has become, from the point when Véronique Lacroix, artistic director of the Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM+), asked me to try and set my own words into music … to the point where that music is going to be performed and where that project got the attention of Charlotte Francœur, at Éditions Omri, who invested lots of energy to make the book project happen in a truly transdisciplinary fashion.

[Excerpt of the score and text, to be premiered as soon as possible after the C-19 situation: https://youtu.be/IuAb-sfIx2U]

I’ve also started writing an opera based on “Le Désert mauve” [Mauve Desert] by acclaimed poet and author Nicole Brossard. It is a hugely influential book for the lesbian community in Québec, and also for the whole queer community. It’s kind of a dream come true that Ms. Brossard accepted to let me work with her words and characters: the idea has been in my mind since 2011! As a genderqueer person, it has been the first book ever in which I actually really related to the characters, their interactions and aspirations. And Ms. Brossard has been the most wonderful person to discuss with in order to make the project come true. Last year, we premiered a 20-minute version [https://youtu.be/Fx6h7-SJBx8], and hopefully by the time the complete work premieres it will be about 2–3 … or maybe 7 or 8 hours long, who knows. I love long forms. To have the chance to really sink into things.

{Jacob} - I couldn’t agree more! That sounds amazing. I cannot wait for that to happen!

{Nour} - The 20-minute version was for four performers, but the full opera will likely be 10 to 15 people, singers and instrumentalists. Ideally, at some point, I would love to write something really “next level” long form. Let people come and go. Take a break. Let them experience different parts of the opera at different times.

{Jacob} - Graphic score, queer ring-cycle where you can go grab a snack and move around a bit. I think that’s a great idea! I’ll be there whenever that can be produced!

Additional Listening of work by Symon:

Prologue au Désert mauve : https://youtu.be/Fx6h7-SJBx8
Mâ’lesh I – leurs étreintes bouleverseraient la mer : https://youtu.be/kStaPT7agy8
L'amour des oiseaux moches (score and text only... music to come sometime after Covid) : https://youtu.be/IuAb-sfIx2U

Nour Symon | Composer

ClassicalQueer.com

Nour Symon | Composer

Theo Espy | Violinist

Alex Temple | Composer

ClassicalQueer.com