Yann Gourdon — solo for hurdy-gurdy with wheel
Hurdy-gurdy in English (vielle à roue in French) is a stringed instrument that produces sound by rubbing the strings on a wooden wheel instead of a bow. The wheel is turned by a crank in the right hand, while the left hand plays the melody on a keyboard. Most hurdy-gurdys have strings that act as equalizers, giving a steady accompaniment to the melody and creating a sort of drone. As a traditional instrument, the hurdy-gurdy is found mainly in the music of Occitania, Aragon, Asturias, Galicia, Hungary and in Slavic folk music. It also appears in medieval, Renaissance or Baroque European music.
Starting from traditional music and folk dances, Frenchman Yann Gourdon is one of the musicians who use the electroacoustic hurdy-gurdy with wheel.
Playing solo or in various ensembles, he showed, together with the twelve musicians of the La Nòvia collective, how tradition can be reinvented, opening new paths for immersive and hypnotic sonic explorations.
His father was a musician, a fiddler, and played mostly traditional Irish music. The wheeled hurdy-gurdy is one of the instruments with which Yann came into early contact. He started at the age of twelve, having previously studied classical piano.
He quickly became interested in opening up the instrument to other musical areas and in the development of the electroacoustic hurdy-gurdy.
Between 1993 and 2003, he played with the band Djal (“From One Day to the Next”), a traditional band with repertoire from many regions of France.
In 1999, he turned to experimental music. He studied at the National School of Music in Villeurbanne until 2003, where he took courses in electroacoustics, composition, free improvisation and analogue composition.
With Jérémie Sauvage on bass and Mathieu Tilly on drums, he founded the band France in 2005.
His music is based on continuous sounds, drones and a very particular management of time that demonstrates his elasticity. It thus creates an immersive feeling, a loss of orientation. He immerses himself in a continuous sound, trying to stay in it. “There are many things you can listen to on a drone, it opens up new worlds, new directions, little corners to explore.” His music seeks out border zones, fuzzy and intangible areas. His work has led him towards musicians like Tony Conrad, La Monte Young or Phill Niblock. He was also influenced by the works of Alvin Lucier, an American composer who was particularly interested in the sonic and acoustic dimension of sound.
His hurdy-gurdy has peculiarities that distinguish it from the traditional versions of the instrument. It is soprano and is made with a motor on the wheel. Yann nevertheless retains the option of using the crank.
He uses minimal effects. After trying them all, he kept only the delay, which allows him to create repeating patterns.
He still plays traditional music today, mainly within the La Nòvia collective, a hotbed of thought and experimentation around traditional and experimental music.
He has about forty albums to his credit, with solo or collaborations, but above all he desires the live condition of the concert and the closeness with the audience.