Henri Pousseur, Michel Butor

condition (record/cover): NM / NM Insert included. La Rose Des Voix on Igloo pairs Henri Pousseur with Michel Butor, novelist whose experiments with literary form paralleled Pousseur's musical investigations. The "rose of voices" suggests both flower and compass rose, multiple directions radiating from a center that may or may not hold.

Butor had already collaborated with composers; his work with Pierre Boulez on Troisième Sonate explored similar territory. But where Boulez sought structural rigor, Pousseur and Butor pursue something more playful, voices interweaving in patterns that suggest conversation, argument, seduction, all the registers of human exchange. The Igloo label, Belgian like Pousseur himself, provides appropriate home for a work that refuses nationality as thoroughly as it refuses genre.

The collaboration between writer and composer raises questions that neither art form can answer alone. How does text become music? How does music speak? Pousseur and Butor don't resolve these questions but inhabit them, producing work that exists in the gap between page and score. The LP preserves a dialogue that neither participant could have conducted alone, proof that some thoughts require two minds thinking together.