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Boulez and the Spectralists between Descartes and Rameau: Who Said What about Whom?

2010; Perspectives of New Music; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pnm.2010.0006

2325-7180

Jonathan Goldman,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

Boulez and the Spectralists between Descartes and rameau: Who Said What about Whom? Jonathan Goldman In 1976, IRCAM (Institut de recherche et de coordination acoustique/ musique) opened its doors. The famous Parisian institute founded by Pierre Boulez was to be devoted to building bridges between the sci ence of acoustics and musical art, facilitated through the burgeoning field of computer music. It was natural for its directors to call upon the young members of the Ensemble Itinéraire, who would later become associated with the so-called 'spectral' school, to collaborate on its projects. Indeed, members of this collective of composers and perform ers (formed in Paris in 1973) went through IRCAM over the following decade. Many of the composers among them participated in workshops on computer-assisted composition, and most composed at least one Boulez and the Specialists between Descartes and Rameau work at the famed Parisian institution, of which Tristan Murail's Dés intégrations (1982-1983) and Gerard Grisey's Les Chants de l'Amour (1982-1984) are but two examples. Nevertheless, the musicians of l'Itinéraire became subsequently somewhat alienated from the institute as well as from its founder. Although Boulez continued to conduct certain spectral works by Grisey or Murail, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the spectral composers became less frequently involved in IRCAM's projects; in a telling irony, the very musicians who founded their musical language on a coordination between acous tics and music were little involved in an institution which had this very goal as its mission. This article proposes a modest contribution to the historiography of this period by trying to come to grips with the ideo logical sources of this aesthetic schism which would have major consequences for the subsequent development of contemporary music in France.1 After a brief historical introduction, I will first examine those writings by Boulez from the early period (pre-1965) which make reference—however oblique—to spectra or the decomposition of sound, and then the lesser-known and mostly untranslated texts from the later period (post-1975), which refer specifically to spectralist com posers or techniques. Then, after briefly examining the rhetoric of spectral composers, the final portion of this paper will discuss a num ber of examples which illustrate ways in which spectral composers apply techniques which could be construed as being in the spirit of Boulez's thought, and conversely, how seemingly spectral techniques can be discerned in Boulez's own compositional production from the late 1970s onwards. Although Boulez's more or less explicit views on spectral music turn out to be by and large dismissive, it is not certain that the objectives and theoretical frameworks of Boulez on the one hand and the spectralists on the other, are as aesthetically divergent as is sometimes thought. The Ensemble Itinéraire, made up mostly of graduates of the Paris Conservatoire, and specifically of pupils in Messiaen's famous analysis class, was founded by composers Tristan Murail, Michael Lévinas, and Roger Tessier—all around thirty years old at the time—followed shortly thereafter by Gérard Grisey and Hugues Dufourt.2 The group also included renowned performers such as the flautist Pierre-Yves Artaud. The composers, who began writing specifically for this ensemble, often required the musicians to perform micro-intervals which correspond to fair approximations of the frequencies of the harmonic series, and came to be grouped together as "spectral" composers—a term coined by Dufourt,3 the theoretician of the group, who in addition to being a composer, also later held a senior research 210 Perspectives of New Music position in philosophy sponsored by the CNRS ( Centre national de la recherche scientifique), the French research umbrella organization. Despite the diversity of the productions associated with this current, spectral composers shared a number of basic operating principles. These composers were interested in microscopic fluctuations of sound, observable through its graphic three-dimensional representation in the form of a spectrogram (a graph which represents frequency on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal, with the relative intensity of the overtones represented with lines of different shades or colors). The spectralists used these representations as the inspiration...