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Abstract
This paper aims to explore Marco Stroppa's compositional workshop through the emblematic work Traiettoria to demonstrate how an underlying trend of spectral thought was present in the composer's mind during the gestation of the work but did not determine his aesthetic orientation. From the study of common filiations and difference between Marco Stroppa and the spectral composers, we intend to show how his years of intensive training in various disciplines crystallise into Traiettoria, giving rise to personal and long-lasting key concepts.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France [grant ANR-08-CREA-066]. Special thanks to Nicolas Donin, François-Xavier Féron and Romain Bricout for their astute reading of this article. Thanks to Angelo Orcalli for very enriching scientific discussions during the development of this article. Thanks to Gilles Rico for the translation. We warmly thank above all Marco Stroppa for his ever continuous availability. Reproduction of genetic documents kindly authorized by Marco Stroppa.
Notes
[1] A tape was used for the premiere of the piece. In concerts nowadays, the magnetic tapes are replaced by digital sounds stored on an electronic device.
The complete version of Traiettoria consists of the following three movements:•Traiettoria … Deviata: composed in Verona (Italy) from the end of 1982; premiered 2 August 1983 in Verona (Ente Lirico Arena di Verona, Auditorium S. Franceso Al Corso);•Dialoghi: composed in Paris (France) between 1983 and 1984; premiered 16 April 1984 in Paris (IRCAM);•Contrasti: composed in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) in 1985; first version premiered 21 September 1985 in Venice (Biennale di Venezia); complete version premiered 12 February 1989 in Amsterdam (De Ljsbreker Centre).
[2] The genesis file is composed of different elements: manuscripts such as notebooks (with many sketches and a few drafts), the correspondence between composer and technician (among others); documents such as computer listings; recordings including among others the rough sound files before the mix.
[3] Tre studi per un progetto, four-page typescript in Italian, written in the first person, undated, from the composer's personal archives.
[4] No specific date is mentioned but Stroppa indicates that the project he is working on will be completed during the first months of 1983. The approximate date for the text is confirmed by the fact that Stroppa mentions using Music 360 for the project, which was his original plan before he quickly discarded that version of the software (at the very end of 1982) in favour of the Music V version.
[5] The original text reads: ‘Messiaen aveva percepito questo fenomeno con tale intensita da creare un accordo importante per la sue teoria armonica proprio dalla sovrapposizione delle note diverse tra le prime sedici componenti elementary del suono’. Ibid., p.2.
[6] An expression Jean-Claude Risset used regularly, well before he wrote the article in which he gives an overview of his career as a composer (Risset, 1990).
[7] Produced with the Bell Laboratories software series Music.
[8] See the speech Jean-Claude Risset gave when he accepted the CNRS 1999 Gold Medal, retrieved 2 August 2011, from http://www.cnrs.fr/cw/fr/pres/compress/risset2.htm. Risset's piano teacher Robert Trimaille was himself a student of Alfred Cortot who was known for his great interest in the ‘toucher du piano’.
[9] Tre studi per un progetto, op. cit., p. 2.
[10] Ibid.
[11] ‘Spectral Music’: first published in March 1979 by Radio-France and then in Conséquences, 718, Autumn 1985–Spring 1986, pp. 111–115; reprinted in Dufourt (1991).
[12] As in our interviews with Stroppa between September 2009 and November 2010.
[13] The 4X is a numerical sound processor created in 1976 (notably by Giuseppe Di Giugno) and inaugurated in 1981 with Pierre Boulez's Répons.
[14] Annual report, IRCAM 1982, IRCAM Archives.
[15] Until 1980 with Laura Palmieri, piano teacher at the Verona Conservatory.
[16] With Guido Begal in Verona (music theory), Renato Ionisi in Milan (music theory including Bach's counterpoint, Renaissance double choir, late romantic style).
[17] With Azio Corghi in Milan for the last course in composition, which he completed in one year.
[18] Insofar as the spectral aesthetics is univocal, which was by and large the case in the 1970s.
[19] Interview of Marco Stroppa by Noémie Sprenger-Ohana and Vincent Tiffon, IRCAM, 28 September 2009.
[20] Composed in 1982 at the end of his training, this 10-minute long piece was premiered 10 May 1983 in Florence by the Orchestra Regionale della Toscana (conducted by Maurizio Diniciacci), as part of the programme of the 46th Maggio Musicale. Less than three months later, 2 August 1983, Deviata was premiered in Venice (A. Ambrosini, piano).
[21] LIMB Bollettini, 1 (1981) to 5 (1985), La Biennale di Venezia. The CSC organised many activities when Stroppa was a student there. The CSC notably organised the ICMC Symposium in Venice, held from 27 September to 1 October 1982 as part of the Festival Numero e suono (27 September–8 October 1982) at the Venice Biennale (see the editorial of the LIMB 2 published in 1982).
[22] Stroppa paid tribute to the man he called ‘master’ in Stroppa (2009).
[23] Lecture notes from the CSC no. 3, year 1980–81, Stroppa's private archives.
[24] The first version of Contrasti premiered at the Venice Biennale on 21 September 1985, with Adriano Ambrosini on piano and Marco Stroppa on sound projection. 22 September 1985, the date often cited in documents about this piece, is incorrect.
[25] This version, which Pierre-Laurent Aimard premiered 12 February 1989 in Amsterdam (at the De Ljsbreker Center), includes the electronic solo from the beginning of Contrasti (originally intended for the version premiered in 1985 but left unfinished).
[26] Hidinefte, ou l'autre face de Traiettoria (for computer-generated tape, was premiered in November 1989 at the Maderna Festival in Milan) contains the synthetic sounds from Traiettoria, mixed and put in a different order (with the exception of a single passage, the first electronic part of Dialoghi, deemed uninteresting when separated from the interaction with the piano).
[27] Inizi 82/83, a spiral notebook mainly filled with written annotations and dated from 14 October 1982 to now, and henceforth called ‘Deviata logbook’.
[28] The expression ‘real electronics’ is mentioned in the ‘Deviata logbook’ with the date 1 November 1982.
[29] The Computer Jotters are notebooks filled with technical data: three for the first movement and nine for the last. Out of these 12 Computer Jotters, only the first Deviata notebook contains a section with written notes (more than 60 pages). Aside from that exception, all the notebooks are filled with pencil annotations following the same procedure and they constitute a sort of computer score. In these notebooks the sounds are recorded one by one (one to two pages per sound) and type after type. For example if the sound types are called A, B, C etc., the pages follow one another: A1, A2, A3 … An, B1, B2, B3 … Bn, C1, etc (cf. Marcato, 2001).
[30] Computer Jotter no. 1, p. 3.
[31] The last date recorded in the Computer Jotter no. 1 notebook related to Deviata is 21 December 1982. Then, after the first 60 pages, the second part of the notebook, which contains no dates, is purely technical.
[32] Risset advocates the following view: ‘The possibility of real-time performance in computer music systems is not necessarily a progress for electronic music composition’ (Risset, 1999, p. 31).
[33] Interview with Stroppa conducted by Cohen-Levinas (1992, p. 7).
[34] Computer Jotter no. 1, p. 17, 21 November 1982; then Deviata logbook, p. 6, 29 November 1982.
[35] This type of calculation was then formalised and made accessible on computer using Francis Courtot's CAC Carla software (a system of Composition Assistée par Representation Logique et Apprentissage), written in Prolog2 language (Courtot, 1992). Stroppa used it, notably for Elet … fogytiglan, to implement clusters using a VPS form (Vertical Pitch Structure, a concept he had first developed in 1987–88 during the compositional process for Spiral). This prompted the formation of the harmonic base following constraint programming. Other composers, such as Marc-André Dalbavie, Philippe Hurel and Magnus Lindberg, who were linked with the spectral aesthetic, used Carla for other applications. We are therefore tempted to think that this procedure for generating chords, which was also used by some of the spectral composers, provides further proof of affinity between spectral ideas and Marco Stroppa's ways of thinking, specifically in Traiettoria.
[36] Stroppa describes his writing techniques in his article (Stroppa, 1989) and calls them (among others) structural ‘magnets’, ‘enzymes’, ‘distributive functions’, ‘moulds’ …
[37] Founder of Music 360 (1973) and Music 11 (1978) from the software series Music, Barry Vercoe established the Media Laboratory at the MIT and created the Csound language the same year, in 1985.
[38] A term denoting instructions that are directly intelligible by a computer.
[39] Interview no. 1 with Marco Stroppa by Noémie Sprenger-Ohana and Vincent Tiffon, 28 September 2009, the IRCAM.
[40] Interview no. 2 with Marco Stroppa by Noémie Sprenger-Ohana and Vincent Tiffon, 8 January 2010, the IRCAM.
[41] Called ‘abstractions’ in software such as Max/MSP.
[42] Introduction to the Physiology of Hearing (Pickles, 1982) is also mentioned in his notebooks.
[43] Interview no. 2 between Marco Stroppa, Noémie Sprenger-Ohana and Vincent Tiffon, 8 January 2010 at the IRCAM.
[44] Video documentary; Mille & Bourgeois (1991).
[45] Email from Stroppa, dated 2 November 2009.
[46] Risset explores the timbral space in the IRCAM Report no. 11: ‘Hauteur et timbre des sons’, 1978. This concept was used notably in his piece Songes (1979) and is described in detail in Risset (1978d).
[47] Sound examples from the composer's private archives. His archives collate examples from Wessel, McAdams and Risset, some of which were reproduced in the ‘IRCAM Reports’ published in 1978 and in 1985–86 (McAdams, 1985, 1986; Risset, 1978a–d; Wessel, 1978).
[48] Sound excerpts grouped under the heading ‘Exemple sonore n°5’ (Appendix in McAdams, 1984).
[49] In italics in the original text.
[50] Stroppa first used the term MIE while he was composing Contrasti. He later switched to MIO (logbook for Contrasti).
[51] See in particular the chapters by Tversky & Gati and Rosch in the book edited by Rosch & Lloyd (1978).
[52] Deviata logbook, p. 3.
[53] Undated and on separate sheets (concerning section II of Dialoghi).
[54] Stroppa used a number of examples from Traiettoria for pedagogical purposes in courses he gave at Szombathely (Hungary), Stuttgart, Paris and beyond.
[55] The word ‘commission’ appears in the Deviata logbook (1 November 1982, p. 2) and is found in the CSC archives and confirmed in an interview of the composer (Interview no. 2).
[56] The new title adopted by the composer, written in capital letters on p. 3 of the logbook for Deviata (10 November 1982).
[57] The title written on the front page of the first Deviata Computer Jotter dated November–December 1982 and referred to again later in several writings of the same kind.
[58] Traiettoria … deviata first appeared as a title for the first movement the 29 November 1982 (logbook, p. 5) but the two words are several lines apart with (TRAIETTORIA) on the one hand and (DEVIATA) on the other hand: only the capitals and the parenthesis seems to imply that the two terms will be put together.
[59] Stroppa, M. (2009, last revision), Miniature Estrose, Ricordi no. 136804.
[60] See for instance the Ricordi score of Deviata, pp. 9, 10 and 11.
[61] Ibid. p. XVIII.
[62] Referred to on the first page of the Deviata logbook.
[63] The muted notes are especially highlighted when their harmonics are played.
[64] Deviata logbook, p. 1.
[65] According to the laws of psychoacoustics, the threshold under which our perception fuses two sounds successively played is 20/30 milliseconds.
[66] A note at the bottom of the page of the first logbook tells us that Stroppa decided early on to add a ‘tape (computer)’ to his piece, dated 14 October 1982 (or between this date and 1 November 1982, since the difference in writing indicates that the composer could have added this comment later). In fact, the tape is referred to and quoted several times in the subsequent pages.
[67] This is similar to the vibration added to synthetic sinusoidal sound waves to give the impression of a voice (see Chowning's research, 1973).
[68] The beats are not only perceived but they also actually exist for their number is given by the (positive) difference between the two frequencies.
[69] d=1/freq with freq for the frequency of the targeted note and d for the duration of the delay (in milliseconds).
[70] There is a second reason that motivates the use of this method: it helps produce sounds rapidly, a feature well appreciated by Stroppa with the date of the premiere of the work looming.
[71] Note that the type of synthesis used in Contrasti no longer directly determines the nature of the organism produced (as was the case in Deviata). For instance, additive synthesis and frequency modulation are used to create two sound entities that are then compiled into a single MIO.
[72] Contrasti logbook, p. 14.
[73] Contrasti logbook, pp. 5–6, 2 October 1984, Cambridge, MA.
[74] Here after two definitions of the MIOs according to Stroppa: MIOs are ‘complex events, musical concepts grasped as unique by our perception’ (Stroppa, programme notes for the French premiere of Hiranyaloka, 17 October 1994, Radio-France, Paris); ‘an organism is something active composed of several components and properties of variable complexity which maintain certain relationships between one another and yield a specific form. The cognitive representation of such a form constitutes its identity.’ (Stroppa, 1989, p. 208).
[75] Undated but it is clear that this document dates from the time of the composition of the piece (most likely end of 1984) for it is written that ‘the score is not yet complete and must be updated', and that ‘the whole piece will be published by Ricordi'.
[76] Tre studie per un progetto, separate sheets, three-page manuscript, undated. The context for this document remains unsure.
[77] ‘The contrast model relies on featural representation of objects, and it is used to compute the similarity between the representations of two objects. Similarity is defined as an increasing function of common features, that is features in common to the two objects, and as a decreasing function of distinctive features, that is features that apply to one object but not the other. This definition is formalised in the following equation:
S(a,b)=θf(A∩B)−αf(A−B)−βf(B−A)’. In Heit (1997).