Jérôme Orsoni's 'Au début et autour' Explores Steve Reich's Early Works

Jérôme Orsoni's book 'Au début et autour, Steve Reich, Chemin de ronde' is a work of 'pure fiction,' a term the author uses to describe a liberated space opened by music itself through listening. The subtitle 'Une pure fiction' signals a departure from academic frameworks for writing about music, pushing toward new ways of expressing, thinking, and writing about it. Conceptually, the book rejects the polarity between the ineffable (from certain music philosophy) and the textual truth of music (from certain musicology). Instead, 'fiction' is a construction where music takes body in listening, and listening 'exhausts' music. It deploys an 'organic thought' located in the vibration of organs and reaction to environmental changes under music's effect. Orsoni moves within the space opened by Steve Reich's early compositions—Piano Phase, Come Out, It's Gonna Rain, Clapping Music—not to reveal the essence of the music but to explore its realities and understand how difference and repetition are incorporated. This central question extends Reich's intuition that 'all music turns out to be ethnic music.' The book was published by Chemin de ronde and reviewed by Christophe Kihm in artpress.