Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 24, No. 2/3, April/June 2005, pp. 269 – 272

After-thoughts
Tristan Murail

Asking people to listen to a piece of music takes some of their time, some of their life:
the composer is stealing a little bit from the life of each listener. Is this the reason why
contemporary music is so much less popular than the contemporary visual arts,
which are certainly no easier to comprehend? While watching an exhibition, the
public maintains control of their time. If they do not like it, they can leave at any
point—while with music, the composer’s time is necessarily imposed upon the
listener. This creates an enormous responsibility on the part of the composer.
This responsibility means that music can neither be purely experimental nor
eliminate all elements of research. It should always provide interesting, and even new
(daring though the word seems to us today) propositions, while remaining
perceptible so that it can be received by the listener. This must be true even when
the composer is looking for extreme novelty or complexity: somewhere there must
exist a common ground where the composer and his audience can share an angle of
approach.
This leads to a certain number of consequences. Composers should not be satisfied
with music that is simply there to please. They should not allow the style of their
music to be dictated by fashions, the easy acceptance of institutions, of orchestras, or
of the regular concert-going audience. These are not sufficient reasons for writing
music, for stealing from the life of another. Unfortunately, a number of trends are
more and more prevalent in composition today which either ignore the problem of
communication or—resting on the ambiguous notion of postmodernism and on
pseudo-musicological or pseudo-philosophical discourses—are in fact not much
more than disguised academicism.
We are often told that the avant-garde is behind us, that we have achieved so much
distance and perspective that only a ‘postmodern’ attitude remains possible.
However, in my daily work as a composer this idea is disproved. I continue to
search for new ideas and materials. Some of this research is on a technical level—
clearly the case when speaking of developing new computer programs or new ways to
facilitate the comprehension of sonic analyses—but another type of research that I
perform daily is purely musical and aesthetic, looking for ways of effectively using the
material that I discover to create new sonic/musical objects. By ‘new’, I mean
something that I want to say but have not already said, and which no one else has said

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/07494460500154954
270 T. Murail
either. You cannot express original ideas by recycling old material: new thoughts need
to be formulated with new material. Our vision of the world has become so historical
now that, when we speak of the avant-garde, we automatically think of the avant-
garde of the 1950s. But, if we stick to the etymology of the word, by definition there
always will be an ‘avant-garde’ or our civilization is dead. Let’s stop being ashamed of
this notion!
This position may seem ironic, since at a certain point the ‘spectral movement’ was
seen as a reaction against the ‘avant-garde’. And, clearly, it was a reaction against
certain composers who believed that they were the avant-garde. But, in reality, it was
a reaction against their refusal to make even the slightest concessions to the
phenomena of auditory perception. Abstract combinations on paper are not musical
research. As a result, we fought against this type of musical behaviour. However, we
were not the only ones to criticize that music which was so prevalent during the late
1960s and early 1970s. Advocates of the music I referred to above as disguised
academicism accused the so-called avant-garde of emptying the concert halls and
alienating the listeners through their decadence and excesses; and, in a certain
manner, their criticism was justified. However, one need not respond to these
criticisms as they have.
The first pieces associated with ‘spectral music’ made only cursory attempts to use
spectra since, at the time, we lacked the technological and scientific tools and
information. In early pieces, like Gérard Grisey’s Partiels (1975) for 18 instruments,
the use of spectra is very timid: there is only a pseudo trombone spectrum. Most of
these early pieces made use of simulations of electronic systems such as ring
modulation and echoes, or the harmonic displacement or compression of abstract
harmonic series. In the first piece that captured my personal style—Mémoire-érosion
(1976) for French horn and instrumental ensemble—the main model is a feedback
system. The piece is not really spectral in that there are no spectra in it. However, I
tried to take into account the spectra and timbres of the instruments in constructing
the harmony for certain passages (e.g. making use of the strong 12th and 17th—3rd
and 5th partials—of sul ponticello notes played on string instruments) and to develop
an auditory continuum between timbre and harmony. But what is especially
noticeable in these early pieces is the (already present) notion of process.
Historically, the ideas of process and continuous change came before the real
spectral work. For me, this fascination with transforming objects and creating hybrids
was always there: it is almost congenital. I think retrospectively that this idea, coupled
with the importance that I (and others) place on working with harmony in a way that
completely controls it—giving strength to the formal construction—were the basic
ideas of spectral music. This was really a very new way of writing music and was
perhaps what most shocked a certain part of the musical establishment. Formally, the
music was built on principles completely different from other widely accepted
techniques. Development by proliferation, which is so easily recognized, was
abandoned, as was the systematic use of oppositions and dialectics. This was even
more shocking than the unusual sonorities, and I now think that this was the most
 Contemporary Music Review 271
novel aspect of spectral music. Contrary to often-heard superficial opinions, I have
often seen my pieces make more impact on the public through their form than as a
result of the harmonic or timbral refinement, which (one must face reality) only a few
people really appreciate; though, of course, there is a striking aspect to the timbre,
which is certainly not lost on the public. I do, however, believe those refinements are
indispensable for the reasons mentioned above: we are stealing people’s time and, so,
must give them a very high-quality musical time in return—a time where even the
smallest details are carefully perfected (like in a Japanese garden), even those details
that are not immediately visible.
The initial goal, which motivated our extensive timbral and harmonic research,
was the desire to develop the capacity to control the finest possible degrees of change.
Having achieved this, however, we began to feel that the music had perhaps become
too directional and predictable; we then had to find a way to re-introduce surprise,
contrast and rupture. Contrary to the widely held view, they were never truly absent;
even in the earliest pieces, like Partiels, there are quite a few unexpected turning
points. In Gondwana (1980) for orchestra, which is considered a typical piece from
this period, there is continuity, but there are also ruptures and many other types of
transition: passing of thresholds, reversing of the direction of motion, triggering of
‘catastrophic’ changes, abbreviated processes where only some of the steps in a
process are present, etc. Even in these early works, there is clearly more than pure
monodirectional and continuous evolutions. The increased formal discontinuity that
was to develop in the music should, therefore, be viewed more as a development than
as a renunciation.
As time went on, we also sought to introduce, with much care and hesitation, ideas
that were closer to the traditional dialectic. This also applies to melody. It took me a
very long time to re-introduce truly melodic elements into my music, because I was
afraid of returning to past melodic clichés, falling back into formulas of theme and
variation of all sorts. I wanted to find very personal melodic contours, and this is one
of the hardest things to do, since, today, everything melodic is connotated to a
frightening degree. On a formal level, too, it is not my goal to return to the Romantic
dialectic, nor to develop fragmented forms that would simply be a return to the
formal conceits of the fifties. The solution lies elsewhere. There must be a logic and a
continuity behind the apparent fragmentation. This is what I have tried to achieve in
recent years: a more versatile and mobile form (more dialectic even, if one insists
upon viewing things from that angle) capable of linking together the ideas of
contrast, tension-resolution and many other formal devices, while retaining an
underlying musical logic. Harmony has been an important asset for building more
complex structures that, nonetheless, retain perceptual clarity in their formal
development.
Unlike the evolution of formal elements, where we have moved considerably away
from our point of departure, spectral harmony has steadily grown and flourished,
aided by ever-improving technological and scientific support. When I speak of
harmony, I refer to something very specific: what has been called ‘frequencial
272 T. Murail
harmony’. I think this term is more accurate than ‘spectral’ harmony since it includes
harmonies far beyond just spectra. Through this approach to harmony, it is possible
to create harmonies (or timbres) that are completely invented, through analogies to
the spectra found in nature. Most of my pieces, in fact, are built on structures that are
not direct spectral observations: this is what I call ‘frequencial harmony’. These
harmonies are conceived outside the domain of equal temperment, equal-tempered
quarter- or eighth-tones and form an unlimited harmonic realm, which happens to
be contiguous to timbral space, thus placing us in a domain where harmony and
timbre are more or less the same thing. There are often striking sonorities in ‘spectral’
pieces that many people attribute to some arcane craft of orchestration we have
developed. They do not understand that those sonorities are in fact created through
the harmonies, the notes, the pitches. Or, rather, that pitch structures and
orchestration have become one and same thing.
I realize now that, over the years, I have struggled to develop an awareness and an
expertise in this domain of harmony that few people have taken the trouble to seek. I
am very surprised that this harmonic dimension has so completely disappeared from
composers’ preoccupations when, in fact, it is so rich and powerful. I can recall, in the
eighties, other composers going so far as to mock me for worrying too much about
harmony: this was simply not done. This attitude is reflected in many of my students;
their most common deficiency is the lack of harmonic awareness. They write music
that may have strong gestures, but that ultimately does not function over time
because the harmony fails to support the form. Harmony, through its relation to
form, gave tonal music its strength; nowadays, it has too often been reduced to a
simply decorative function. The mere existence of pitches even seems to be a nuisance
for certain composers. I think it is time to reconsider the role of harmony and timbre
within formal constructions—and this does not only apply to ‘spectral’ styles.
Only now have I begun to feel as if I have obtained the technical means to carry out
my dreams of adolescence: I imagined certain ambitious works, but lacked the
capacity to realize them. With a piece like L’Esprit des dunes (1994), for ensemble and
electronics, I feel that I have succeeded in doing something that I could have easily
dreamed of doing when I was 20 or even younger. In a piece like that, there is
research on the level of pure technology, but there is also musical research into the
combination of sounds; this may not be immediately apparent, but so much the
better. And while the ‘poetic’ side of the piece probably has an even greater impact
than the spectral contents, the ‘poetry’ depends utterly on their careful construction.
Creating this sense of research, newness and ‘avant-garde’ while still maintaining a
coherent and comprehensible musical discourse is my real goal.