tristan murail
page four

I don’t believe Schoenberg would agree with the statement that tonality is equal to these other parameters. For Schoenberg, Western music is defined through its use of harmony, hierarchically more important than rhythm or form.

Yes, probably; for me this is so apparent in his music. When I think of the Variations for Orchestra, for example, it strikes me as very didactic, very classical. Whether it’s a tonal or atonal work doesn’t concern me; regardless, it rests a piece of conservative rhetorics.  

For you, musical history seems much more continuous and fluid.

No, there are revolutions. A crucial moment was when electricity came into music and tape recorders were invented; I think it changed one’s perception of time, and thus of music. One could henceforth contemplate a sound for hours. I think that this new possibility, which arose in the fifties, constituted a revolution; it had important consequences on composers like Stockhausen, Ligeti and Messiaen. And the way we have looked at Western music has also changed a bit since then.  

Do you think that these changes in orientation have affected music on a formal level?  

Yes. I was thinking on the perception of time, and at the beginning of Spectralism, for instance, the durations of the pieces were greatly protracted, so that the listener had to time to ‘penetrate’ into the sounds, to be aware of the richness of the intervals and the surrounding phenomena. Scelsi’s music also demonstrated this, and he was a totally independent individual.  

We would like to ask you about the other piece we are going to perform, Bois flotté.  

Bois flotté continues the work I have recently been doing in spectral exploration, a phase that began with Le Partage des eaux, an orchestral piece. Both works are about water. Le Partage des eaux marked the first time I analyzed sounds from nature; previously I had confined myself to instrumental sounds as the basis for the electronic sounds, and L’Esprit des dunes uses non-Western instruments and sounds. So I was curious to see what I could extract from this information, these natural sounds, usually considered noises, things that we cannot define musically. They are very rich in sound, in fact, and I transcribed them for the orchestra of Le Partage des eaux, but I hadn’t time to go further.

Bois flotté took this process a step further, a deeper exploration of these water sounds, and many of the work’s elements are based on analyses of these sounds. They often produced very strange harmonies-sometimes not functional ones. I was very interested in this; they were less directed than my usual harmonies, and I found it a bit refreshing. My harmony is so strong, sometimes I have a hard time controlling it. [Laughs.]  

So how is it organized harmonically?

Oh, it’s very intuitive, in fact. Actually, there is so much information in those sounds, you have to be very selective. So I just used my ears and corrected certain things. I came up with very complex electronic sounds-electronic harmonies, as I would say-which I also used also in writing the instrumental parts. There is another sound used in the piece, in the middle: that of bowing a cello with extreme pressure, as in Lachenmann’s music. It sounds like a noise, but it’s not at all just a noise. I transcribed it and then I analyzed it, and it produced incredible sounds, gongs and voices. The sound is structurally related to a gong, if it is played with a percussive attack.

Well, he’s right, of course. There are no beautiful sounds, no ugly sounds; a sound is beautiful because of its context. It is quite fascinating to explore these noisy types of sounds.

Bois flotté also marked the first time I was able to entirely create the work at home. I didn’t have to go to the IRCAM. Perhaps for this reason the sounds are not as sophisticated as they are in L’Esprit des dunes.

It’s homemade.

Yes, it’s homemade.

What kinds of water sounds did you use?

Waves, breaking on the rocks.

Drops?

No.

That would be a cliché.

Yes, perhaps! There are two or three sounds of water that I selected, one of which is water breaking and ebbing against the rocks.