An Interview with Tristan Murail

Ronald Bruce Smith Center for New Music and Technology An Interview with University of California, Berkeley 1750 Arch Street Tristan Murail Berkeley, California 94720-1210, USA [email protected] Tristan Murail was born in Le Havre, France in of quasi-aleatoric experimentation. This was the 1947. Following university studies in economics, antidote to the structuralist trend in music. I was Arabic, and political science, he entered the com- not at ease with either of these approaches, nor position class of Olivier Messiaen at the were many of my friends. This was why we had to Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de find something different. Paris in 1967. Upon graduation in 1971, he was Smith: I believe that the term used in America was awarded the Prix de Rôme. On his return to Paris, “anti-establishment.” he founded the ensemble L’Itinéraire with com- Murail: In a way, serialism was the establishment. posers and former Conservatoire classmates It certainly became the establishment when Pierre Gérard Grisey and Michaël Lévinas. L’Itinéraire Boulez came back to Paris in the mid-1970s to es- soon became known as the starting point for an tablish IRCAM and the Ensemble aesthetic movement known as spectral composi- Intercontemporain. He was “establishment,” as he tion, its two main proponents being Tristan was heavily supported by the government. It Murail and Gérard Grisey. In a nutshell, much of seemed that there was little room for anything the material in a spectral composition is derived else. While there were other ensembles in Paris, from the frequencies of spectra and their behavior. such as L’Itinéraire, we had to fight just to survive, Tristan Murail has been involved with IRCAM to keep our meager subsidies. (Well, meager com- since 1980 as a composer, researcher, and profes- pared to what Boulez was receiving.) sor. In 1997 he moved to New York City, where he Smith: At the time of the inception of L’Itinéraire, is a professor of composition at Columbia Univer- what was its mission? sity. The following interview was conducted by Murail: We were trying to propose another ap- telephone on 7 February 1999. proach toward music. We tried to play everything that would not be considered establishment. At Smith: Can you briefly describe the contemporary times we played some music by Boulez, though we music scene in Paris in the early 1970s? were mainly looking for novelty, for things that Murail: At that time, I felt that serial composers would bring a new approach to music. and theorists were strongly predominate. With We programmed many premieres, such as the respect to theory and actual practice, many people French premieres of music by Giacinto Scelsi, who were still influenced by serial ideas and, of course, was virtually unknown at the time. We also gave by the theories of Pierre Boulez. However, 1968 the French premieres of pieces by George Crumb, being the year of the student uprising in Paris pro- because along with a certain freedom in his lan- vided a source for a contrasting viewpoint. In art, it guage, we believed that he was bringing something gave way to many experiments. This new aesthetic new to the field of timbre. We also played the mu- emphasized the art of destruction, although this sic of the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, who model was already quite old, dating back to the was working on extended techniques. His music is Dada movement of the 1920s. John Cage was im- very, very special; it is not at all structuralist mu- portant at that time, as were Earle Brown and sic! These sorts of things we did quite often. Of André Boucourechliev, a French-Romanian com- course, we played the music of our smaller group. poser. Many concerts at that time involved a sort We played many pieces by Gérard Grisey, for example. We were also very interested in live elec- Computer Music Journal, 24:1, pp. 11–19, Spring 2000 tronics, so we built our own equipment. © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Smith 11 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/014892600559146 by guest on 25 September 2021 Smith: What sort of electronics did you use at that formation that we required was not as readily time? available as it is today. Gérard Grisey and I had Murail: Analog electronics: ring modulators, har- read books on acoustics that were designed more monizers, electric organs, electric guitars, reverb for engineers than for musicians. There we found units, and the Ondes Martenot. It was centered rare information on spectra, sonograms, and such around what was available at the time. A bit later that was very difficult to exploit. We also did our we bought synthesizers and even later we bought own experiments. For example, we knew how to computers. I don’t know whether people today real- calculate the output of ring modulators and, a little ize how limited the electronics were in the 1970s. later, frequency modulation. Those things were, Smith: And difficult to program, too, I would imagine. theoretically, quite easy to manipulate. Murail: Oh, yes! We had an old EMS synthesizer, When I began working at IRCAM, things be- which was a very temperamental machine! There came easier, even though it was still not very easy. is a Swiss composer, Thomas Kessler, who has In the early 1980s it was still quite complicated for done a lot with that machine. L’Itinéraire often us to perform a Fourier analysis on a computer. played his music, and it was always a nightmare. Scientists or computer technicians did this. Even- He was so meticulous. He would put tape all over tually, the data became more widely available. the synthesizer to immobilize all of the param- This was how I came across the Fourier analyses eters, which, as you said, were very temperamen- of several instruments that David Wessel created tal. We did quite interesting things with him; it at IRCAM. These were the basis for my first elec- was a tour de force every time! tronic piece, Désintégrations [1982–1983; for 17 We also used things like ring modulators and instruments and 4-channel tape; see Figure 1]. tape loops which were also temperamental. Actu- Smith: I would think that if one were to use mate- ally, just moving from one piece to another during rial derived from frequency modulation or ring a concert was complicated. modulation, it must have been an incredibly time- I did many experiments with the equipment consuming task to make all of the calculations. from that time. Even though I did not really use Murail: Yes. Time consuming, and boring, too. I the equipment in my pieces, I learned much about could show you pages and pages of calculations. electronics. I derived formal models from them Smith: How did you first become involved with and just learned about sound. I think that such IRCAM? electronic experiences were important for many of Murail: That was in 1980. They had organized a us at that time. summer session for people belonging to or related Smith: You have become known as one of the to L’Itinéraire. It was a way of signing an armistice! founding composers and one of the leading com- Smith: So things were that tense? posers of something which has been termed “spec- Murail: There was quite a lot of tension for the tral music.” What does that term mean to you? first few years of IRCAM. However, since we really Murail: I think that it is chiefly an attitude toward needed computers for the sorts of things that we musical and sonic phenomena, although it also were doing, it was quite natural (both aesthetically entails a few techniques, of course. We were trying and technically, if not politically) for us to be at to find a way out of the structuralist contradiction. IRCAM. At the same time, we did not want to be com- Smith: I would think that what you were inter- pletely intuitive like the aleatoric composers or ested in would have coincided very well with the like Giacinto Scelsi, or even György Ligeti (who research that was being done at IRCAM and with was and remains an experimentalist but an intui- the research that continued there through the tive composer). We were interested in those experi- 1980s, particularly toward synthesis and sound ences, but we wanted to build something more analysis. sound (pun intended). This was part of it, as was a Murail: Yes. I think, in fact, that there had been a curiosity about sounds. Also, at that time, the in- historic conjunction between an aesthetic move- 12 Computer Music Journal Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/014892600559146 by guest on 25 September 2021 Figure 1. Excerpt from the score of Désintégrations. ment, the spectral movement, and the techniques, problems because, in terms of calculations, addi- research, and software developed at IRCAM. I think tive synthesis is very costly. we needed them and, in a way, they needed us. Computers at that time were big machines. At Smith: How were the electronics for IRCAM, there was one huge computer that every- Désintégrations realized? Did computer analysis of body shared (though it was probably less powerful sound play a role in the construction of the compo- than a Macintosh G3). When somebody was calcu- sition and in the creation of the electronic sounds? lating a sound, the whole system slowed down. Murail: The idea behind the piece was to integrate You also had to listen to what everybody else was the electronic sounds and the instrumental sounds working on.

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