Elisabeth received a classical harp training in her native France before studying harmony and composition at Berkley College, California, and film direction at the IDHEC in Paris. In the United States, she discovered rock and roll - Pink Floyd, the Doors, etc - Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and the jazz scene. She played bass in a rock group for a while, and also worked with jazz musicians like Kent Carter, Jean Jacques Avenel, Daniel Cobbi and Bobby Few.
It was this non-classical musicmaking that lead her to the electric harp, because trying to amplify a classical harp and a drum kit together makes every sound engineer despair. After a frustrating time fighting against the inevitable feedback that results from stick-on mics on any harp, Elisabeth met Joel Garnier, who had just made an electric lever harp for Alan Stivell. Elisabeth began with one of these electric lever harps, and was also instrumental in the development of Camac's concert pedal electric harp with a pickup on every string - now known, of course, as the blue harp. "Later, I also had Joel and Jakez make me a harp with no soundboard at all, and four outputs, which was an even more effective way of getting the harp to sound very loud. Nothing against the older classical harps - I'm still in love with my Erard of 1872, which has a sound that, when I hear it, I can't imagine anything else - but in the scene I found myself, it just wasn't audible. However much I love the Erard, I guess I took another road. Once I also got an electric effects machine, that and the electric harp rocketed me into an amazing new world - no other instrument can do what that combination can. It's like a jungle, or fireworks of different sounds. I love that."
During the eighties and nineties, Elisabeth collaborated on various albums, including Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man, Quantum Dub Force and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. In the early nineties she was asked to write a piece of ambient music ("Credis I and II) for NUNC Music, which received rave reviews and caught the attention of Chris Blackwell - Bob Marley's producer - of Blue Mountain Music in London. He signed Elisabeth and she moved to London, where she released a commissioned album of ambient music, Innocenti (Universal / 1998). "This is one of the best-produced things I've heard in years", said Brian Eno. "I ‘m very impressed by E. Valletti, her voice and harp-playing, and
also by the really musical feel of the whole thing."
It was Eno who invented the term "ambient music", when he released his first four "Ambient" albums at the end of the 1970s. Ambient 1 / Music for Airports, conceived when Eno was stuck in the boring surroundings of Cologne/Bonn airport for several hours, is a looping soundscape "designed to induce calm and space to think." New-age composers have taken Eno's concept to passive extremes, but good ambient music has much more to do with inspiring ideas than musical anesthesia.
It would be wrong to define Elisabeth Valletti as an "ambient" composer: her music has a huge generic range, such as A Harper, a rap opera she wrote in 2000 about King David. One part of The Orfeo Project, NY.Xperienced-SONGS, is a collection of songs about her life in New York between 1998 and 2003, and a unique mixture of classical, electronic, jazz and rock using electric harp/effects, laptops, midi keyboards , strings, winds and electrobass.
Whatever musical styles she uses to express herself, nonetheless Elisabeth Valletti does share one aspect of the best ambient music - the ability to inspire the listener's own mind. Her ideas are very strong, and at once highly personal and widely appealing: when you listen to the music, these ideas find wings within your head and partly become your own.
"Take 'The String Theory', the first piece ('Classical Suite 1') in The Orfeo Project. It was written because Elisabeth, always interested in science, had found out about the late twentieth-century quantum physics idea that creation is made up of a web of strings. It is a logical idea for a harpist to link up to, and the result is "my representation of the sound of the dancing strings of our universe." Similarly, The Orfeo Project's 'Classical Suite 2' is called 'Brain Chemistry Under Storms.' Here, Elisabeth weaves a personal tribute to the Boildieu harp concerto with "seven pieces...about the limits the mind reaches in times of utmost stress, whether it is physical, emotional or spiritual. The shock of love at first sight, the mental state of a pilot in a war plane...the intake of a powerful drug...these pieces are the sound of the brain chemistry during these life experiences." The third Classical Suite is based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the interval between death and re-birth.
Another part of The Orfeo Project is NY.Xperienced - STORY. It is the story that accompanies NY.Xperienced - SONGS. This is a true story that has been fictionalised, Elisabeth writes to introduce it. Her songs, her story, and our stories intertwine like the strings of creation the physicists discovered. Perhaps that is what most of us are looking for, the dancing strings.
NY.Xperienced - SONGS will play in London at the Hope & Anchor, 207 Upper St, Islington N1 on September 24th, 2009.
