Preface: Creative Process and Objective Properties of Sound

A significant portion of new music from the end of the 20th century could be described in light of two major and intertwined historical processes in compositional practice. First, in the spirit of Wagnerism and even more decisively from the 1940s onward, the development of what is often called precompositional planning, that is, an initial formalization of the material, and, more generally, the establishment of a logic of the compositional ‘project’, which precedes the composition itself: collecting and refining intuitions; defining explicit rules of generation; selecting criteria of the material and preparing these in view of the score writing stage. The second historical process concerns the way certain composers place sound itself, in all of its acoustic and perceptive richness, at the heart of this precompositional phase. One of the consequences of this choice, which presupposes both theoretical and practical scientific knowledge, is that an analytical dimension significantly appears in an activity ordinarily oriented towards generation, invention and synthesis. It is thus not only a case of moving from composition with notes to composition with sounds, but also of a new equilibrium between the ‘analytical’ and the ‘generative’ stages of a composer's activity. In this sense, Scelsi, the archetypal ‘de-composer’ (Murail, 2005), represents only one of many possibly ways to (de)compose sounds with notes. The present issue is devoted to the diversity and the complexity of these types of creative processes.

If there is one aesthetic paradigm that claims to adopt a form of composition strictly consistent with the internal logic of sounds, it is certainly Spectralism, which has enjoyed increasing attention from both scholars and composers, not only in continental Europe but recently in the UK, North America, Asia and South America.1 The principle writings of the composers of the French spectral school have been published, and, in part, translated into English.2 The intellectual coherence and the aesthetic force of composers such as Grisey, Murail or Dufourt have attracted the attention of the musical community towards a number of concepts, which have proven enduringly seductive more than 30 years after their initial elaboration: the dialectic of harmonicity and inharmonicity, instrumental synthesis, the notion of process, the organic quality of spectra in opposition to the arbitrary character of serial permutations, etc. Despite (or because of?) this appeal, little is known about how, concretely, the great works of Spectralism were made, or, more specifically, which features of their creative processes are uncovered by the theoretical discourse on them, and which are not. Today, these works and these concepts belong to the historical past, as does the surrounding theoretical discourse. If we wish to go beyond the stage of seduction and give them a (compositional as well as musicological) future, it is time to examine them more closely: where precisely do their sources and precursors lie? How did the distinctive traits of this aesthetic current appear? What alternatives were explored at the same time by other composers or by the Spectralists themselves? What was the relationship between their theoretical constructions and their practical composition? This cluster of questions invites us to take an interest not only in the canon of spectral works, but more generally in spectral approaches or tendencies in music from the 1960s through the 1990s—and even outside the bounds of this period, as the presence of an essay on Varèse at the beginning of this issue suggests.

What unites the four articles collected here is a shared concern for the way objective properties of sound, identified through theory and experimentation, are deliberately integrated into compositional practice. In order to arrive at this understanding, a data-rich approach was adopted in which a vast network of documents and information on the creative process of a work (or a series of works) were collected in order to reconstruct in detail the composer's activity through each of its different stages, its heuristic procedure, its setbacks and bifurcations, its initial personal choices reaffirmed or rejected … These essays belong therefore to the current renewal of scholarly interest in the study of creative process at the intersection of music analysis, historical musicology and ‘genetic criticism’ (Kinderman & Jones, 2009). Over and above its capacity to enrich our knowledge about the compositions examined, this approach has the advantage of highlighting the constant negotiation between planning and realization, between analysis and production, and between practical and theoretical logic. It also has the potential to underscore similarities in creative methods in composers of aesthetically distant music, and conversely, it can bring out profound divergences of conception among composers ordinarily thought to be close. Consequently, besides the goal of reassessing Spectralism, the essays collected here offer epistemological and methodological proposals for the study of new music from the last quarter of the 20th century, a corpus that until recently has received little attention within the academy when compared with the decades of exegesis devoted to music from the 1950s.

In his article, François-Xavier Féron offers the first synthesis to date of the development of Gérard Grisey's spectral compositional techniques. Working from an examination of the many manuscripts Grisey preserved from the 1970s, as well as other direct and indirect traces of his creative activity, Féron shows how the different constituent elements of the composer's workshop fell into place as a result of his musical discoveries, his reading of scientific literature and his creative experiments, during a period that spans his student days until the composition of the Espaces acoustiques cycle. The (too) famous macrophonic transliteration of sonagrams, whose importance to Grisey has already been questioned by Baillet (2000), appears here as a late product of this evolution. The key to this evolution, far from being limited to the empirical study of recorded sounds, involves an important theoretical dimension (both in the acoustic and the compositional senses). Recourse to combinatorial logic turns out to be just as decisive as the acoustic inspiration as far as the generation and manipulation of material is concerned.

Noémie Sprenger-Ohana and Vincent Tiffon look at an emblematic work of the following decade, Traiettoria by Marco Stroppa. Even more so than in the case of Grisey, this is a seminal work—a sort of opus 1—in which the young composer deploys techniques (such as sound synthesis using Music V software), concepts (such as the notion of ‘Musical Information Organisms’) and aesthetic stances (such as his critique of live electronics), which he would go on to preserve and deepen in many of his later works. His technological and scientific reference points are similar to those of the Spectralists, save for a notable orientation towards artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology (to which he is closer both temporally3 and, thanks to his stay at MIT, geographically). It is unsurprising, even if he was not greatly familiar with the Spectral movement at the time, that he shared certain intuitions and inclinations with them. For example, the authors of this article point out the similarity between Stroppa's notion of ‘interferences’ and the ‘liminal’ preoccupations of Grisey. Even if it has shared roots, (de)composition can thus go on to take quite different forms, both in terms of its artistic result and the consequences that the (de)composer will draw from it at a later stage of his trajectory.

We might not expect to meet Luigi Nono in an issue that is so preoccupied with spectral questions (whereas we would probably expect to find Mâche, Radulescu or Harvey). Laura Zattra, Ian Burleigh and Friedemann Sallis nevertheless demonstrate the crucial importance of successive stages of the collective scrutiny of sound by instrumentalists, computer music engineers and the composer in Nono's creative process in the early 1980s. If the time and the place of this continual experimentation are similar to Stroppa's, Nono's methods are reminiscent of the instrumental research workshops of the l'Itinéraire ensemble (and later of IRCAM), which gave rise to works that exploit in adventurous ways the subtlest physical properties of string or wind instruments. Deciphering Nono's approach to (de)composition presupposes taking into account, through the choice of the musicological methodology itself, the ontological mutations that he effects simultaneously on compositional process, on performance (depending on the specific characteristics of the concert space or the performers), and even on the very concept of musical work. Moreover, Zattra, Burleigh and Sallis approach their object both through its genesis (by studying the traces and the testimonies available about the creative activity) and by performative means (engaging the researchers in a musical realisation of the work, in a place and time different than the original, with new technological and experimental possibilities).

The aforementioned studies are put into perspective by a re-evaluation of the role of acoustics and psychoacoustics in the music of Varèse. Here, we are dealing with a composer who left precious little archival material, creating a situation that forces the musicologist to attempt to reconstruct the compositional approach from scant indirect indications of it. For example, we know that Varèse acknowledged the influence of Helmholtz and Wronski, but we do not possess his personal copies of these books that might contain his own annotations, nor any traces of a compositional process that would explicitly document these influences. Philippe Lalitte makes up for these lacunae by confronting a corpus of theoretical works (on acoustics and philosophy published in France in the second half of the 19th century, including the French translation of Helmholtz's Treatise) with certain key passages in Varèse's scores (interpreted, whenever possible, from a genetic point of view). Varèsian (de)composition, not wholly dissimilar to Grisey's approach in this respect, relies on a highly individual approach to borrowings from acoustic science, to harmonic and combinatorial explorations, and to philosophical and esoteric speculations.

Through the juxtaposition of these articles, certain common traits can be discerned, sometimes appearing in unexpected ways. To list a few: the analogous ways Varèse, Grisey and Stroppa progress from autodidactic study of scientific treatises to its application to musical composition; the desire of both Nono and Grisey (not put into practice to the same degree in each) to treat instrumental radiation as a compositional parameter in its own right; the way both Traiettoria and Les Espaces acoustiques refine, over the course of a cycle of works, compositional categories that emerged from an inaugural piece; or even, as was already suggested, the importance of combinatorial procedures in the composition of works that we habitually consider to be essentially guided by the logic of perception.

It is precisely the goal of the articles collected here to reveal a network of similarities and differences. In fact, much of the research presented here—everything that concerns Les Espaces acoustiques and Traiettoria—were undertaken as part of thesame research project, MuTeC (Musicology of Contemporary Compositional Techniques). This project4 consisted of analysing in parallel an ensemble of characteristic compositional processes from several periods of contemporary music, from the middle of the 20th century to our own time (see Donin, 2012, for a detailed presentation of the hypotheses, methods and first results). The comparison of these different creative processes led to the emergence, among other common threads, of the question that lies at the heart of this issue: how is it that certain composers felt the need to study the objective properties of sound, and how did they integrate these properties into the heart of their creative practices?

Our selection of case studies is related then to a historical evolution, which is broader than the various instants sampled here. The type of creative processes that we analyse emerged with the first generation of composers who began to take acoustics (and psychoacoustics) seriously as a practical and theoretical compositional resource, often under the influence of Helmholtz (such as Varèse or the Schoenberg of the Harmonielehre). Then, it was cultivated in the fertile ground formed conjointly by the Darmstadt of the ‘post-zenith’ period5 (if we think notably of the aesthetic positions of Stockhausen and Ligeti in the 1960s) and by the development of computer music technology, in particular sound synthesis. Composers as dissimilar as Grisey, Nono or Stroppa offered convincing implementations of this (de)compositional paradigm at the turn of the 1980s, resulting in major works and in well-buttressed concepts. As regards the present period, it might well turn out to be particularly propitious in this respect, judging from the degree of integration of computer tools into the common practice of this early 21st century—whence the interest in shedding light on the present through the study of older creative practices that constitute the condition of possibility of the current ones. Compositional processes today can then be contrasted with some defining issues in past compositional processes—whether in the form of Varèse's ideal of collaboration between the arts, science and technology, in Nono's critique of the post-Romantic authority of the composer (a concept often accepted unquestioningly by his contemporaries) or in the computer science training of the young Stroppa. Where then have we arrived today? While Grisey's dream of an ‘ecology of sounds’ in the service of the composition6 remains no more than a dream, it is clear that the idea of associating scientists, computer engineers and performers at different phases of compositional activity no longer seems exotic. What does this specifically imply for the composer in cognitive and material terms? What constraints does this place on the definition of the compositional project? To what extent is creative practice itself affected? The inquiry continues by leaving the field of the archive in order to conquer the terrain of immediately contemporary processes (Donin 2010), in an ongoing attempt to come to terms with the ever-changing cartography of ways to (de)compose sound.

Acknowledgements

Since most of articles were originally written in French, the authors wish to thank the translators for their commitment to this project: Jonathan Goldman (Donin), Peter Nelson (Lalitte), Karen Brunel-Lafargue (Féron) and Gilles Rico (Sprenger-Ohana and Tiffon). These translations were financed by the CNRS and by the ANR as part of the MuTeC project (see note 4).

Notes

[1] Two issues of CMR edited by Joshua Fineberg were a major step in this evolution of scholarship (Contemporary Music Review, 2000a and 2000b).

[2] The Contemporary Music Review was also instrumental in providing English-speaking audiences with a complete translation of Murail's writings [24(2/3), 2005].

[3] This generational gap, while relatively small, turns out to be particularly significant in the late 1970s: whereas the Spectralists could still think in terms of a collective musical language, of historical rupture and of manifesto-works, Stroppa already belongs to the generation of composers who, beginning in the 1980s, concentrate on the elaboration of a strictly individual language, without systematic or prescriptive pretensions.

[4] The MuTeC project was funded from 2009 to 2011 by a grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche française (project ANR-08-CREA066, directed by Nicolas Donin). It unites a group of researchers from IRCAM, the University of Lille-Nord de France and the Université de Technologie de Troyes, in collaboration with the Haute Ecole de Musique/Geneva Conservatory.

[5] Cf. Borio & Danuser (1997).

[6] ‘In order to arrive at a better definition of sound, we need to understand more about the energy which traverses it through and through, and about the web of correlations which regulate all of its parameters. We can dream of an ecology of sound that would be a new science made available to musicians’ (Grisey 2008 [1978], 28).