tristan murail
in conversation with kirk noreen and joshua cody

Tristan Murail, born in 1947 in Le Havre, France, received degrees in classical and North African Arabic (at the National School of Oriental Languages) and in economics (at the Paris Institute of Political Science) before turning to composition. A student of Olivier Messiaen, he won the Prix de Rome in 1971 and spent two years at the Villa Médicis. Upon his return to Paris in 1973, he founded the Itinéraire ensemble with a group of young composers and performers; the group became widely renowned for its groundbreaking explorations of the relationship between instrumental performance and many aspects of electronics.

In the eighties, Mr. Murail began using computer technology to further his research into acoustic phenomena. This lead him to years of collaboration with the IRCAM, where he directed the composition program from 1991 to 1997 and helped develop the Patchwork composition software.

Mr. Murail has also taught at numerous schools and festivals worldwide, including the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, the Abbaye de Royaumont, and the Toho University in Tokyo; he currently is a professor of composition at Columbia University.

Mr. Murail’s have won many awards and have been widely performed throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and both Americas. Recent notable works include the orchestral work Le Partage des eaux and the chamber ensemble works Bois flotté, L’Esprit des dunes, and Serendib, which was commissioned by the Ensemble InterContemporain in 1991.

The Ensemble Sospeso is delighted to be performing the American premiere of L’Esprit des dunes next week, and I wanted to talk about that a bit—first of all, the title.

The title is very difficult to translate, in fact. Esprit, in French, has several different meanings. It can mean ghost—which is not the signification here—or soul, which is better. It can also mean a way of being, a spirit, as in l’esprit de la mode, or the spirit of the times.

Zeitgeist.

Maybe. L’Esprit des dunes refers to the essence of the dunes, their aura. Something that the dunes are trying to tell you, something the sand is telling you.

I remember a few years ago in Paris you told me that you were considering ‘reintroducing figure’ into your music, and now we have the beginning of L’Esprit, with a solo oboe playing a melancholy phrase that reminds some of our musicians of Varèse’s Intégrales, and even of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faun. And at times it seems as if the entire piece is constructed out of this phrase.

Yes—well, several phrases. But it’s a bit more complicated than this, because while it is a phrase, it is also a sound. The phrase actually comes from an analysis of a Mongolian diaphonic singer. Mongolian singers have a technique of producing several tones simultaneously; there is melody within a single pitch, the melody created through the pitch’s harmonics. It’s both a sound and a melody.

And the choice of the oboe?

It couldn’t have been a horn! It could have been a flute, but the flute is so overused. It could have been the clarinet, but I thought that the sound of the oboe is compelling; for a call like this, it was more appropriate. And perhaps it’s an unconscious allusion to musics of those Asian countries, where one often hears nasal reed instruments. There is a kind of folklore, in fact, threading its way through the piece.

So L’Esprit heralds the return of the figure into your music.

Well, it’s not the first piece that introduces figure, but it is very clear in this one. The beginning is quite melodic, and in fact, I hesitated before settling on that. I was afraid that it was too simple; but after all, simplicity has its virtues, too.

Is it a motive? Are we dealing with motivic composition now? And is there a separation between the identity of the figure and its sound? Is there a discourse between these two things?

Well, it’s motivic and it’s not. There’s no motivic development. Therefore, I don’t know if you could refer to it as motivic.

There’s variation.

Well, there’s distortion. It is a sound object which is distorted, which manifests itself in different forms. But it’s repeated, distorted; this is not the same thing as variation. I’m very much afraid of falling back into classical clichés of musical rhetoric. When you reintroduce motives or figures, there’s always a danger of falling back into that-at least it’s a danger for me.

So the form is not a traditional discourse.

I hope not! [Laughs.]

So how is the form created?

… [Laughs harder.]

Is it from the analysis of the sound?

No, not at all. Never.

Vertical doesn’t translate into horizontal.

Oh, it’s not that; the melody, after all, is horizontal. But the melody, the motif, lasts for a very short duration, and our perception of a short duration of time is vastly different from that of a long duration. You cannot just enlarge a duration.

It’s not a piece with one motive, one contour—I think, in fact, in terms of contours rather than motives—but several contours, which are distorted, nevertheless preserving the melodic shape. There are other sound objects, like Tibetan drums, prevalent during the rhythmic, louder sections of the work. And within the replications of the Tibetan drums, there are distortions of harmonies very much like the contour of the Mongolian voice, for instance. So at a certain point in the piece, you should realize that in fact everything does come from the same source, or related sources. This point occurs a bit after the halfway point of the work, I believe, where you hear a tearing sound… [He picks up a sheet of paper and tears it.] And incidentally, the sound is exactly that; I recorded and analyzed the sound of tearing a sheet of paper. What’s being torn is a veil that had been hiding part of the material, part of the music, and at this point you realize that the source of all these sounds is the voice. This is, in general, the overall trajectory of the piece.

It’s not a narrative.

No, it’s never a narrative—I’ve been told that my music tells a story, but I don’t know the story. For instance, at the end of the piece, all the work’s material is stacked together; another thread running through the work is the sound of Tibetan monks singing, and this thread, too, is combined with the others; they are tuned together, by means of a kind of timbral micro-surgery, which tunes the partials themselves.