Ghosts and Piano
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Voices and Piano
by Peter Ablinger
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2025
MICHEL LORAND – ALAIN FRANCO (Piano)
Film HD color film, 16:9, stereo sound/5.1, 36’
The film Ghosts and piano is based on Peter Ablinger’s musical composition, Voices and Piano, a series of pieces recorded for a single voice and piano. An ensemble of 80 voices, for the most part those of celebrities, form a cycle that was still unfinished when the film was shot. For the composer, performing this work should always be a matter of selection. The whole must remain whole, and we must hear only a part. “I like to think of Voices and Piano as my song-cycle,” Ablinger has said, “though nobody is singing in it: the voices are all spoken statements from speeches, interviews or readings. And the piano is not really accompanying the voices: the relation of the two is more a competition or comparison. Speech and music is compared. We can also say: reality and perception. Reality/speech is continuous, perception/music is a grid which tries to approach the first. Actually the piano part is the temporal and spectral scan of the respective voice, something like a coarse gridded photograph. Actually the piano part is the analysis of the voice. Music analyses reality.”1
The film Ghosts and piano is constructed around a selection of nine of these voices, one following another. The voices are those of Arnold Schönberg, Nina Simone, Morton Feldman, Setsuko Hara, Cecil Taylor, Billie Holiday, Orson Welles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Anna Magnani. For the film, the voices will be embodied via artificial intelligence. We are thus witness to a casting where each character comes to speak at the microphone facing the camera. This parade is for the most part heterogeneous, with certain among the cast having rubbed shoulders during their lifetime, while others come from very different backgrounds, creative fields, and eras. All of these celebrities were gone by the time the film was made, but they are reborn before our very eyes as ghosts from a memory, sometimes forgotten, unexpectedly revived by the magic of a kind of Méliès cinema. This silent film is screened in black and white, accompanied by an upright piano. The film’s first screening was filmed in the space dedicated to silent cinema at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium in Brussels. The final film is in color with sound, but the fixed frame and real-time shooting are reminiscent of the workers leaving the Lumière factory, a film first shown in 1895. And so Georges Méliès, like Auguste and Louis Lumière, searched for talking pictures.
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