By Andrea Guachalla
How does it feel to be home?
How does it sound?
Is home a place, a person or a song?
If you are clueless don’t be troubled, there’s a man who knows.
He lives in a hidden island to the northwest of Brittany, a province in France. That’s his homeland, and it’s one with many names…
You might call it “Ushant” if English is the language you prefer, or you might call it “Ouessant” if you’re lying your feet in France, or most accurately you can call it “Eusa” in the Celtic language that is spoken there. Nevertheless, to be fair, none of those is its real name, none of those define its transcendence well.
Some might remember that Eusa was the last piece of France that Napoleon Bonaparte saw when he, condemned to exile in 1815, was taken away. Some others might remember it as the place where a German radar station was destroyed by the US Army Rangers and the British Commandos in World War II, or the place from which you can see the most potent lighthouse in Europe: Phare du Creach.
But all of that, all the names, all the stories Eusa entails pale to its real essence and name:
“HOME.” Home to a man.
“Which man?” You might ask.
And I would answer: “Yann Tiersen,” the only man who has ever mapped an island with music.
He was born in Eusa in 1970. At the age of four, he started playing the piano, and the violin at six. Ever since then he held on to music as if it was the air he needed to breathe, and to the island as the main source of inspiration.
No matter what instrument or music genre he’s playing, his music always represents Eusa, his home. It portrays the cold days and the rocky soils, the ocean waving unendingly while the rain pours, the wind grasping his skin while he walks, the calmness of the days, the dazzling stars shining at night, the weary clouds, and the gentle storms.
When he writes music
“…[everything] is linked to the island, to [its] nature, to [its] coordinates.”
Yann Tiersen
His music is the island.
His music is home.
Five years ago, in 2015, he came back to the place that witnessed his birth, the island whose native language, Breton, is in danger of disappearing. He came back to the fifteen-square-kilometer island that a hundred years ago had almost three thousand inhabitants, and today has a third part of those.
He came back with a mission:
“10 tracks,
10 pictures,
10 locations,
10 coordinates,
10 field recordings.”
He spent months looking for locations that would inspire his 9th studio album titled “Eusa” after the island. He went to each of the ten places and took note of the coordinates, and recorded the surrounding sounds: The birds singing, the waves crashing against the rocks, the wind blowing calmly. While a friend of his, Emily, took the pictures at each place.
In Yann Tiersen’s words:
“Eusa is more than just a home, it’s part of me. The idea was to make a map of the island and by extension a map of who I am.”
Yann Tiersen
The ten locations and the ten pictures had a distinct sound. It was not the birds of the field recordings, nor it was the ocean. In Yann’s mind it was… Piano melodies. The island sounded like simple successions of arpeggios and chords. At times sweet, at times sad, and most often hopeful. And the pathways in between the locations sounded like loose piano notes, sort of like when you look through the car’s window and you let your mind drift from thought to thought.
And with all ten piano pieces that represented each location combined with the field recordings, and eight improvisations in between that portrayed the pathways to get to them, the album “Eusa” was mapped and complete. Yann was mapped and complete. A book and an album were released.
But there was still one thing to do: To honor the island, Ushant, Ouessant, Eusa with the music it had inspired. So…
One morning a piano was carefully packed in a truck and taken from Yann Tiersen’s home to Porz Goret, a place near the coast. Everyone had to use raincoats for the sky threatened with sending a storm.
The piano was delicately removed from the truck and placed in the middle of a grass field, under a sky full of clouds that made the surroundings look pale. A man sat down in a blue chair with the towering Phare du Creach standing imposingly behind him.
Yann Tiersen and the island, and he playing Porz Goret to her.
Porz Goret
48°26’19″N 5°6’40″W
Two white keys opposing the black ones. A reflection of Yann’s resemblance on the piano’s neat surface. A sweet melancholic melody coming from his fingers that steadily grasped the keys, the sky, his whole being.
The same man that plays before thousands of people, played a simple ballad to the ocean, to the island, to his home. With the cold wind passing through his fingers, and the waves mixing with each note. With memories of his childhood and adulthood filling in the separation of each octave, and his life at times rocky, at times calm entangling with the melodies in between.
A man sat down in a blue chair, and portrayed with a simple melody the beginning of his being and the journey of his life. How the years of success, wealth and recognition never changed him. Because for the ocean travelers Eusa is precisely that: the beginning and the end. Just like for Yann Tiersen his music interconnected with the island is who he was, who he is, who he will be, and even more than that…
It’s the sound of a Celtic language, Breton, that might be soon forgotten. The sound of a hidden island that might be nobody’s home in a century. The sound of the place Yann Tiersen will always call home.
It’s a whisper to your ears that says:
How does it feel to be home?
How does it sound?
Is home a place, a person or a song?
If you listen carefully you’ll discover that
YOU ARE ALWAYS HOME.
It’s really beautiful to read it while listening Porz Goret 🙂
I’m glad you did it! Its a beautiful song. 🙂