The Violinist
Music is not simply made by following one tone with another, but by a succession of tones which the ear grasps as a unit, like a melodic phrase or a melody. These units are HUMAN IMAGES for they evoke States of life. Larger forms are created involving complex melodic chains, alternation and variation of melodies, simultaneous interplay of two or more melodic lines or polyphony, formations of chords or groups of different notes that, struck simultaneously, merge to sound like a single note with an enriched “feeling tone.” Such complex forms evoke psychological States that are “human portraits.” Through such “human images” and “portraits” music can be said to embody ideas. These are not the ideas that may be found in a scientific tract but commentaries on a society showing what it means to live in it. They embrace developments in sensitivity, in the human’s awareness of his own powers, and in the situation of internal freedom, as conditions change in the external world. In this way music joins the other arts in creating social consciousness, or the individual’s awareness of the internal life he shares with society, and in revealing the internal history of society.
A female figure roughly seventy centimetres tall, standing on a brown-black industrial lacquered disc whose rim turns deep red. The body is carved from a single piece of pale varnished wood with a warm, pronounced grain, elongated, caught mid-stride, both arms lifted high into a V. Above the head, the hands hold a thin straight rod that reads as the bow, and against it a copper object with a waisted, bilobed shape, like a stylised violin body raised at arm's length. The figure straddles a long pale wooden branch laid horizontally across the base, its bark still rough underneath; that branch runs close to ninety-four centimetres and gives the whole piece its width. At the front left, two red flowers rise on slender metal stems with metal leaves, while the corollas themselves are translucent red glass, heavy and luminous, like two cups that let the light in.
Robert Bibeau carves the violinist's body from one block, with no internal break, the way a figure is released from solid matter. Taken as a whole, the sculpture belongs to assembly instead: the figure rests on the bark-covered horizontal branch, itself braced on vertical lengths of wood, the entire stack mounted on the dark disc, with the metal-and-glass bouquet set alongside as a separate part. The polish of the pale wood answers the hard sheen of the brandished copper and the saturated transparency of the glass. All of it converges toward the lacquered plate as toward a miniature theatre.
The effect seems jubilant and taut at once. The pose summons the victorious end of a performance, the instant when the musician, having held the bow to the very last, raises it as a sign of completion. Through their saturated red and their place at the figure's feet, the glass flowers shift the reading toward the second that follows, the bouquet thrown from the hall, the ovation starting. In a corpus dominated by memento mori, this piece opens a brighter note: it celebrates the performance achieved.
One can read the piece in the lineage of Modigliani, whose elongated-neck figures made the musician's body, from cellist to cabaret singer, a lyrical vertical, and in that of Brâncuși, whose *Mademoiselle Pogany* (1912) pared the figure down to a graphic signature. Robert Bibeau keeps from the first the vertical leap and from the second the simplification of polish, but adds the precise moment: the bow raised marking the end of the work performed, the gesture that knows what it accomplishes is a musical performance's most difficult instant, that of leaving the note.