Chloé Loneriant et Les Fleurs d’Ici
Artistic direction, bansuri flutes and vocal: Chloe Loneiriant
Recorders: Rose Chevrier et Emma Crumpton
The bansuri flute, a transverse flute made of bamboo from northern India, only became a classical instrument in the last century and was popularised worldwide by the legendary Hariprasad Chaurasia in the 1960s. It is from his legacy that Chloé Loneiriant creates her own style, drawing on her background as a classical Western flutist and also combining the melodic approach of Dhrupad singing, a classical tradition that claims to be the oldest in North India today.
The improvised and composed repertoire of North Indian classical music is defined by raags (or ragas), melodic modes that evoke specific emotional states usually associated with a time of day, night, or season. This same repertoire is built on a drone, usually played by the tanpura, a plucked string instrument. However, the sound of this instrument is often associated with India in an exotic way that ignores the depth of classical music. Inspired by the tradition of Indian oboes (shehnai), which replace tanpuras with other oboes to obtain a drone, Chloé has decided to replace tanpuras with flutes from the ancient and modern European tradition. In doing so, she seeks to remove the classical Indian repertoire from its traditional setting in order to anchor it in the territory she now inhabits, where tanpura luthiers do not exist. Emancipating her art from dependence on a distant place is a way of placing it within an ecological approach, but above all a way of reaffirming the relevance of the Indian melodic tradition, even outside its social context, by revealing physical principles that transcend geographical identifications. This is a cultural reappropriation supported by the intuition that this music is, in essence, universal and timeless.
The Indian master-disciple relationship, made up of formal and informal exchanges, leads students to accompany their teacher on stage or in recordings; a musical role that is unobtrusive but allows them to acquire other skills through participatory observation. The idea for this project also arose through a relationship of transmission that two of the flutists had over several years. However, for the proposed project, Chloé Loneiriant seeks to give the accompanists more space than is customary. She places her accompanists as replacements for the pakhawaj and tablas (Indian percussion instruments that maintain rhythmic cycles) in addition to the tanpuras, and has them play with allusions to sitars, in order to explore everything that three flutes can do independently with their different musical backgrounds. Using the extended techniques of contemporary Western classical music (beatbox, multiphonics, singing into the flute, etc.), the flutists revisit the timbre of each instrument, its harmonics, its possibilities, and its roles. The flutes used are extremely rare on the current scene (Renaissance bass flutes, modern Petzold bass flute), and the bansuri flute has never been used in this context before. The proposal is completely innovative, original and unique, while leading to a poetic result that respects the classical Indian musical language.
The title ‘Les fleurs d’ici’ (Flowers from here) refers to a revisited raga, Basant, evoking spring, as well as to the ornamentation of ancient music that finds its equivalent in Indian music. Finally, it recalls the original intention, which was to anchor and adapt a language to a nearby geographical area.
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