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tristan murail
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Have you been to Mongolia? |
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No. Sometimes, it’s better not to go—like Debussy, who never went to Spain, aside from that brief visit to St. Sebastian.
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Or the Douanier Rousseau… |
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…who never saw the jungle!
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So much the better. |
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Yes—but I would like to see Mongolia.
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Sometimes, while listening to your music, I have the impression that the work began as a single block of time, which was progressively shaped and carved and molded. I remember once, as well, that you defined an authentic composition as one that demonstrated discourse. |
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… [Pause.]
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That’s all you said. Rather enigmatic. |
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… [Laughs.]
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| But I’ve thought about that a lot: what you have in serial music, of course, is a dialectical discourse; a statement is made, then negated; then the product of those is negated. Boulez, in his early aesthetic writings, is frankly Marxist in describing this; his writings are sometimes reminiscent of Eisenstein. Now there’s a discourse in your music as well, an argument, but it’s not at all the same thing; the music is not constantly divided, then subdivided; it’s not a discourse based on absence. | ||||
No. I don’t know how to define discourse in music, although I know there must be one. If I could say it with words, I would not have to write music. Perhaps what I meant is simply that there must be a direction that guides the listener, there must be something else than just a system, just textures. I remember a student, once, who showed me the beginnings of a composition; his sketches were systematic permutations of chords, and I told him to be careful, to always seek the musical idea. It has to tell you something. This doesn’t mean a narrative, of course, not a story; but it must communicate something. |
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