tristan murail
page three

After recently having performed pieces by Harrison Birtwistle and Elliott Carter, the presence in your music of functional harmony is almost startling to our ensemble. In Birtwistle there’s really no functional harmony. In Carter there is, although it’s extremely subtle; it’s always chromatic, and the harmonic form is shaped by spacing, weighting, or emphasizing intervals within this very chromatic texture. And your music seems to have nothing to do with this at all.

No, nothing to do with that. Harmony has become something more decorative in serial music, even in Messiaen’s hands—when I say this, I mean that harmony no longer functions, in the discourse, precisely. And in my music harmony does have a function, exactly as in tonal music. Of course the harmonies might be quite different, richer and more varied, but the functions might be the same: the harmonies imply something, they mean something. They’re not there just for their beauty. Often these days harmony is something added during the last stages of composition. In my music there is a hierarchy within the harmonic phenomenon: one can travel along axes of density, tension.  

And returning to the origins of spectralism, was it the desire for functional harmony that lead you to computer-assisted analyses of sound, or spectra, as the basis for a composition?

Yes.  

Not the reverse.  

No. Of course, I had been interested in the phenomenon of sound itself for a long time. Even as a child, I never wanted to perform tonal music, because I simply found it dull, harmonically.  

And modernism?  

Of course, the period of modernism was a very complex period. Lots of things were explored. You are thinking of Schoenberg, Berg, and so on, but there is much more than that in this period. You have Stravinsky, prolonged in a way by Varèse, who was already thinking, if not of spectral analysis per se, along lines not very far from that. He said, for example, that he needed electronics to fulfill his vision, and as the technology was not sufficiently developed, he was unhappy. You also had, of course, neoclassicism, and also some figures that tried to investigate micro-tonality, like Julian Carrillo, in Mexico, then Alois Hába and Ivan Vïshnegradsky, and so on. The history of this century is not as simple as you might think from the history books.  

The histories are skewed.

Exactly. On the other hand, I was very influenced by the music of Ligeti; and impressed with Xenakis: although his way of thinking has little to do with spectralism, it is the concern with global masses, rather than motivic development, that is very important to me. Similarly with Ligeti. Messiaen, of course, was our teacher, although we didn’t necessarily follow in his steps; it wasn’t until later on that I realized some of the things we were ‘discovering’ were things he had instinctively come upon, namely constructing complex aggregates of sounds, and Messiaen himself comes from a tradition of French music: Dukas, his teacher, and Debussy. But he was also very impressed with Wagner. Things are not so simple! Grisey was very much influenced by Stockhausen, who was a precursor of many of these themes, although in such a systematic way that they weren’t developed very far. But he wrote about this: the use of harmonic series in relation to tempi, etc. There were pieces like Stimmung, which I’m sure is one of the sources of Grisey’s early pieces. Is Stimmung tonal? No. Atonal? No. It’s a musical object, a long musical object. The usual historical position is that there has been a revolution, the Schoenbergian revolution, and one is either with it or against it. No! You can be elsewhere. This is where I am: I am elsewhere. My music is not tonal, nor is it atonal. This assumption should be surpassed. When you say atonal, you imply leaps of minor ninths, major sevenths, jagged lines; you don’t have too much of that in my music, although you have it as well.

Ah, but that’s just a utopia.

Don’t think we were that ambitious. [Laughs.] We were just trying to reestablish sound bases for musical composition, different from serialism, which I didn’t like; different from aleatoric music, and from the purely intuitive music that we heard so much of at the time, during the seventies—a lot of expressionistic things, with percussion ensembles and women crying and screaming.

No, Schoenberg just worked with pitches; he failed to follow the other dimensions of the musical language; his rhythms are very conventional, as are his forms; his textures are very conventional, just lines and harmonies, like tonal music. For me, Schoenberg is not revolutionary at all. On the contrary, it’s the extension of tonal music without tonality. All the forms of tonality are there.

Well, I’m not trying to attack him! [Laughs.]

…I am attacking all theorists.