9 Cultural and generational querelles in the musical domain: music from the Second World War
Business as usual or rupture?
On 12 February 1945, less than six months after the liberation of Paris, the pianist Yvette Grimaud premiered twelve miniatures by a nineteen-year-old composer named Pierre Boulez. It is tempting to view the violent gestures of these twelve-tone Notations as teetering on the threshold of a specifically French post-war musical adventure, even if a typical Parisian concert–goer would certainly not have had the occasion to hear them (and they were not published until 1975). To make such a symbolic claim is to view this era through the retrospective lens of the dominant avant-garde currents of later years – the story self-consciously constructed by Boulez and his contemporaries. Other narratives are conceivable, since the fabric of musical life in the years 1945–54 was woven from many simultaneous musical threads. Several generations of composers were productive in the same years, and there was no shortage of signs of business as usual among prominent French musicians after the war. At the liberation, on 19 August 1944, the composers of Les Six were only middle-aged, and were for the most part highly productive as composers, educators and administrators. Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) and Arthur Honegger (1892–1955) were fifty-two and fifty-three respectively, Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) forty-five. Milhaud, whose Jewish origins had made it difficult for his works to be performed under the occupation,1 returned to France in triumph: his Bolivar (1943, premiered in 1950) and David (1954, French premiere 1955) were produced with much aplomb, and he would later go on to teach composition at the Paris Conservatoire (giving lessons from his home).2 Poulenc’s music also held a prominent place on the French lyric stage.
Until 1968, the Prix de Rome, something of its aura still intact, continued to be handed out to composers of conventional concert music, their names today unfamiliar to many concert-goers both outside and within France. Prix de Rome winners from every generation, such as Tony Aubin (1907–81, Prix de Rome 1930) and Jacques Castérède (b. 1926, Prix de Rome 1953). State subsidies were mostly handed out to the national opera houses (the Opéra Garnier and Opéra-Comique) and to orchestras held over from the nineteenth century, including those of Colonne, Lamoureux and Pasdeloup and the Concerts du Conservatoire.3
Some composers trod a fine line between tradition and innovation. Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) and Maurice Ohana (1913–92), for example, earned a prominent place in concert life in France. Dutilleux, whose works could be symphonic in scope, as for example his monumental Métaboles (1964) and Second Symphony (‘Le double’, 1959), effectively synthesised many of the prevailing musical idioms of the day, including atonality, modality and strong polarities. Other musical traditions continued to thrive well into the late twentieth century and beyond, such as the quintessentially French tradition of Catholic organ composers, represented by composers like Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), Maurice Duruflé (1902–86) and Jean Langlais (1907–91) and continuing through to a younger generation of composers like Thierry Escaich (b. 1965). Messiaen’s peers in the group La Jeune France (inaugurated in 1936), André Jolivet (1905–74), Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur (1908–2002) and Yves Baudrier (1906–88), also continued to compose, largely in a spiritual vein.
New opera seemed to be floundering in the post-war period. The composers of Les Six were not immediately replaced by a post-war generation interested in lyric theatre, and opera houses were not going out of their way to encourage a new generation of opera composers. At the Opéra, housed until 1987 in the Palais Garnier, the most prestigious house in France, not a single world premiere was presented between 1955 (Henry Barraud’s Numance) and 1983 (Charles Chaynes’s Erzsebet and Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise).4 At the same time, notable innovations in the realm of lyric music were being implemented in certain quarters. Dutilleux held various administrative functions with Radio France between 1943 and 1963, eventually becoming director of the Service des Illustrations Musicales, a kind of creative workshop for the exploration of new forms of expression for radio.5 With this mandate, Dutilleux commissioned some of the most pioneering musical dramas of the period, including Maurice Jarre’s Ruiselle (1951), Serge Nigg’s L’étrange aventure de Gulliver à Lilliput (1958) and Ohana’s Histoire véridique de Jacotin (1961).6 They marked the 1950s as an era of innovative programming for French radio (although perhaps not to the same extent as their counterparts in Germany, such as the West German Radio WDR), which became an important conduit for new compositional paths.
Watershed year
In 1954, signs of a sea change were notably felt at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the site forty-one years earlier of the riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. The season finished with an ill-received first performance of Déserts, for orchestra and taped electronic sounds, by the French-born American expatriate Varèse, which was broadcast live on radio between works by Mozart and Tchaikovsky. While Hermann Scherchen attempted to conduct this work, the first of its kind to combine live orchestral and pre-recorded electronic sounds, another raucous ‘riot’ ensued: the audience reacted noisily to Varèse’s work, expressing their distaste with shouts that were simultaneously transmitted over Radio France’s airwaves. Varèse’s blocks of ‘organised sound’, combined with cries of protest, were beamed into the public imagination.7
Earlier that year, the Domaine Musical, the concert society founded by Boulez with help from the theatrical directors Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud as well as the benefactress Suzanne Tézenas, produced its first concert of avant-garde music at the Théâtre du Petit-Marigny. The Domaine Musical included major works from the pre-war atonal repertoire (by Berg, Schoenberg and Webern and others) in addition to new compositions by a younger generation of composers, including works by Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen in the first concert. These works made use of tone rows or ‘series’, a principle that replaced tonality with pitch permutations, polarity with equal weighting of the twelve tones of the tempered scale, and a familiar temporal flow of musical material with unpredictable rhythms and forms. Serialist music was, according to the surrealist poet René Char, himself a regular at the Domaine concerts, ‘the mobile, cruel, true mirror – at once interior and exterior – of a point of novel fusion of the enigma of men’.8 As for the audience of the Domaine concerts, it mixed intellectuals and artists, as well as prominent members of the upper classes. Even such unlikely figures as Nadia Boulanger, champion of Stravinskian neoclassicism, and Jean Cocteau, spiritual leader of Les Six, purportedly attended the first concert.9
As diverse as audience demographics may have been, the same could not be said of the aesthetic convictions of most of the composers whose works were performed at the Domaine concerts. Avant-garde composers not subscribing to serial doctrines were either omitted from programmes or performed reluctantly, most notably Iannis Xenakis, whose highly original attempts to exploit analogies (‘alloys’ as he called them10) between music and mathematical principles had led him to decry a ‘crisis of serial music’ as early as 1955,11 and to apply principles of statistical distribution of densities to produce scores regulated by ‘stochastic’ (i.e. random) rather than serial processes. In the same year, his Metastaseis (1954), for sixty-one players, projected geometrical forms onto a musical score in which sloped lines corresponded to string glissandos of variable speeds – a musical translation of the polytope that Xenakis, a trained engineer working as the assistant of Le Corbusier, used to design the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58 (the Brussels World’s Fair). Xenakis’s public dismissal of serialism was enough to exclude him from Domaine programmes, until the organisation’s benefactress Tézenas persuaded Boulez to place Xenakis’s piano piece Herma at a 1963 concert.12 Other composers managed to straddle the conflicting exigencies of both the Domaine and the traditional concert societies. The Franco-American Betsy Jolas (b. 1926), for example, was the only composer to have had her works performed by both Boulez’s Domaine and the august Societé Nationale de Musique.13
The significance of the Domaine Musical is largely symbolic: attended as it was by intellectuals, ‘chic’ Parisians and government officials, it represented, as François Porcile has noted, a transitional step between the pre-war system of aristocratic benefaction and the post-war system of state intervention in cultural affairs.14 As such it heralded the projects that would come to fruition under the presidency of Georges Pompidou (1969–74) and especially in the large-scale state-subsidised cultural projects of François Mitterrand (1981–95). Nevertheless, the mystique surrounding the institution of the Domaine, the concept of the series and the dominant figure of Boulez himself in the ten years that followed the Domaine’s first concert is indisputable; some would go so far as to declare a near-apocalyptic deliverance from musical mediocrity.15
Three pillars
The change in musical mores was ushered in by three formative personalities, all born around the year 1910: Messiaen, René Leibowitz (1913–72) and Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95).
Messiaen
The meteoric rise of Messiaen as the most prominent composer to emerge from the années noires was a striking feature of post-war musical France. His internment in the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIIIA at Görlitz, Silesia, in which he famously composed and premiered what is arguably the most significant work to come out of the war years in France, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941), and the fact that he had not received any commissions from the Vichy regime,16 were a prelude to a glorious post-war career. A ‘Messiaen spring’ comprising three successive premieres in 1945 confirmed his prominent standing: Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (26 March), Les corps glorieux (15 April) and Trois petites liturgies (21 April).17 In 1949 Messiaen’s monumental ten-movement Turangalîla-symphonie for piano solo and orchestra (with a prominent ondes Martenot part) was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra; its French premiere was yet another highlight of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées’s dynamic 1954 season, alongside Varèse’s Déserts.18 With its Berliozian dimensions, rich orchestration, ‘chord themes’ and mysterious modal harmonies, this peculiarly French ode to love has since been widely performed.
As well as being considered the most original composer of his generation in France, by the end of the war Messiaen had also developed a reputation as a formidable musical pedagogue. In 1942, the thirty-three-year-old Messiaen set about writing Technique de mon langage musical, which would become the basis for his courses at the Paris Conservatoire.19 He had been employed there as professor of harmony since 1941. Messiaen’s class, essentially devoted to analysis, would become the obligatory rite of passage for two generations of avant-garde composers, including Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, Karel Goeyvaerts, Jean-Louis Martinet, Nigg and Maurice Le Roux; in the 1960s and 1970s, Tristan Murail (b. 1947), Gérard Grisey (1946–98), Michèle Reverdy (b. 1943) and Michaël Levinas (b. 1949) also benefited from his instruction. As Messiaen’s renown grew in the late 1970s and 1980s, many foreign musicians came to Paris to attend his classes, including George Benjamin from England and Qigang Chen from China.20
The content of these classes was famously eclectic. Students were exposed to Greek and Indian rhythms (including those of the famous ‘non-retrogradable’ – i.e. palindromic – variety), modes of limited transposition and analyses of works from all periods, whether by Claude Lejeune, Mozart, Stravinsky or Berg. While many of Messiaen’s students assimilated a penchant for the use of exotic modes and predominantly harmonic writing, several of his students in the post-war years were inspired to explore serial techniques. They would go on to comprise the bread-and-butter of the Domaine concerts, as well as those of the famous Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, the Mecca of the post-war avant-garde, which had a prominent French contingent almost from its beginnings in the early post-war years (including Messiaen and Boulez). In 1952 Boulez wrote, ‘Serial rhythmic principles could not have been conceived without the rhythmic nervousness and the technique which Messiaen transmitted to us.’21 In a further extension of serialist techniques, Messiaen’s piano study ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’ (1949) from his Quatre études de rythme (1950), itself inspired by the serialist adventures of his students, gave rise to what was to become known as ‘total’, ‘integral’ or ‘multi-parametric’ serialism, a procedure best exemplified by the first piece of Boulez’s Structures Ia for two pianos (1952), in which proportions abstracted from pitch relationships in a series are used to govern the successions of durations, dynamics, timbres and tempos.
Leibowitz
In his apartment on Paris’s Left Bank, Leibowitz, the Polish-born composer who had been living in France since the age of twelve, would convene students (including Vinko Globokar, Hans Werner Henze and Boulez among many others) for lessons in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method.22 Leibowitz, like Messiaen, had also been working on a seminal book during the war years. In 1947 he published what the music critic Antoine Goléa belligerently described as ‘the bomb that he dropped … first on Parisian musical life, then on Germany, Western Europe and North America’.23 This was Schoenberg et son école, the first thorough introduction to twelve-tone music in French.24 In the decade and a half that followed the war, serialism (and for a time the person of Leibowitz himself) carried enormous cultural prestige. Jean-Paul Sartre himself wrote the preface to Leibowitz’s book L’artiste et sa conscience: esquisse d’une dialectique de la conscience artistique.25
The decline of Leibowitz’s influence is often attributed to his continued attachment to the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg when the young avant-gardists (Boulez first and foremost) were in the process of forging the language of total serialism. Recent research suggests, however, that Leibowitz was interested in transposing serial organisation to rhythm, timbre and other musical parameters.26 His receding influence may have had more to do with a personal rift with Boulez than with aesthetic-philosophical differences. Nevertheless, it was he who helped to light the serial fires in post-war France.
Schaeffer
Schaeffer, the other imposing godfather of post-war French music, noted in his diary on 5 May 1948 that he had composed a score made from recorded sounds of a train, isolated into leitmotifs and superimposed in counterpoint.27 Three weeks later he completed the first work of musique concrète, the Étude No. 2 imposée, better known as Étude aux chemins de fer (‘Locomotive study’).28 Thus was born another essential branch of avant-garde experimentation, one that distinguishes itself from traditional concert music in that it dispenses with performers altogether, albeit not with concerts per se: on 18 March 1950 the first public concert of musique concrète took place at the École Normale de Musique in Paris.29 The programme note defined musique concrète as ‘the use of sound in its native state, supplied by nature, fixed by machines and transformed through their manipulations’.30 The programme announced a single work, the forty-six-minute-long Symphoniepour un homme seul (‘Symphony for one man alone’) by Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (b. 1927), a former student of Messiaen.31
Schaeffer himself was an employee of Radiodiffusion Française (later known as Radio France32) who from the 1930s dreamed of composing a ‘symphony of noise’ under the influence of German radio Hörspiele.33 He began experimenting with the notion of composing sounds ‘fixed’ onto a capturing medium. In 1942, the Studio d’Essai was created, a kind of research group that explored the sonic possibilities of the medium of radio.34 This eventually gained institutional weight, becoming first the Club d’Essai and finally in 1958 the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), which Schaeffer co-founded with Luc Ferrari (1929–2005) and François-Bernard Mâche (b. 1935). The two Pierres (Schaeffer and Henry) symbolically embodied the double vocation of the GRM as both an institute of sound research (Schaeffer) and one devoted to the creation of concert music (Henry). Musique concrète was later subsumed under the umbrella term ‘electro-acoustic music’, which includes both recordings of naturally and electronically generated sounds. The productions of this institute (and soon thereafter of countless electronic music studios in France and around the world) would continue to embody this double character, which is caught by the expression ‘recherche musicale’ (musical research): it is both an acoustic laboratory and a studio for musical composition.35 Like Messiaen and Leibowitz, Schaeffer developed his ideas in systematic, book-length form in an attempt to found a new discipline that went well beyond the ‘art of noises’ with which the Italian Futurists had experimented half a century earlier. Schaeffer’s seminal book, with the suitably weighty title Traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines, was the culmination of fifteen years of research at the GRM that marked a crucial turning point in the institutional acceptance of electro-acoustic music as a legitimate art form.36 In 1968 the first electro-acoustic classes were offered at the conservatoires of Paris and Marseilles.37
While Schaeffer’s Étude aux chemins de fer and Études aux allures have something of the character of laboratory experiments, the collaborations with Henry, such as the Symphonie pour un homme seul and Henry’s Variations pour une porte et un soupir have an undeniable musical interest. In the latter work, the fanciful transformations of the sound of a creaking door constitute an unmistakably ‘discursive’ use of noises. The electro-acoustic genre would gain considerable currency over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. Ultimately, many adventurous French and European composers came through the studios of the GRM, including Messiaen, Boulez, Jean Barraqué (1928–73), Stockhausen, Xenakis and Luciano Berio, as well as Bernard Parmegiani (1927–2013), Michel Chion (b. 1947), Eliane Radigue (b. 1932) and Ivo Malec. Their productions ran the gamut from the incongruous curiosity of Messiaen’s withdrawn Timbres-durées (1952) and Boulez’s two Études (1952) to highly polished sound-worlds in Parmegiani’s De natura sonorum (1975) and Ferrari’s ‘anecdotal’ Hétérozygote (1964) – which contains sound issuing from recognisable sources and thus has a documentary as well as a purely aesthetic interest – as well as many works by Malec and François Bayle (b. 1932). Towards the end of the 1960s it seemed as if electro-acoustic music would enter the mainstream by dovetailing with pop-music currents popular at the time: the tape manipulations of the Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ from their eponymous 1968 double long-playing record (the so-called ‘White Album’) seemed to announce an imminent rock–electro-acoustic marriage; in France the most durable example of such a fusion was Henry’s Messe pour le temps présent (1967), originally produced as an accompaniment to a ballet by Maurice Béjart’s dance company, which makes use of ‘groovy’ pop-rock arrangements by Michel Colombier (1939–2004).
The example of Boulez
The imprecise ‘serialist’ moniker encompasses works constructed through considerably varied means, by composers of sometimes strikingly different aesthetic leanings. Consequently it might be more helpful to refer to what Makis Solomos calls the ‘parametric’ tradition or what Jésus Aguila calls ‘postwebernien’ music,38 which unites many composers born around 1925, including Claude Ballif, Nigg, Marius Constant, Barraqué, Jolas, Xenakis, Michel Philippot and Michel Fano, as well as countless others. Works from this era testify to a sustained preoccupation with the structuralist currents that dominated French intellectual life in the 1960s. This generation of composers gleaned much from the aesthetic pronouncements of one of their most prominent contemporaries: Boulez. It is therefore instructive to follow the vicissitudes of Boulez’s aesthetic choices.39
Boulez’s influence owes as much to his formidable talents as a writer and polemicist as to his gifts as a composer. His public pronouncements had a decisive impact on various musical controversies, from his provocative eulogy on the death of the godfather of twelve-tone music, ‘Schoenberg is dead’ (1951),40 to his foolhardy indictment as ‘useless’ of any composer who had not felt the necessity of the twelve-tone language (originally published in 1952).41 In early works like the Flute Sonatina (1946) and the densely contrapuntal Piano Sonata No. 2 (1948), Boulez demonstrated his ability to fuse Messiaen’s rhythm and Webern’s pitch organisation. Far from defending a kind of musical rationalism, Boulez’s aesthetic positions placed him squarely within the surrealist tradition. In a 1948 essay he proclaimed that music ‘should be collective hysteria and magic, violently modern – along the lines of Antonin Artaud’.42 In his major work from the 1950s and still his most famous, Le marteau sans maître (1955), he created a convincing musical analogue of surrealist poetry (Char’s). In Le marteau, the instrumentation, consciously chosen to evoke the traditional musics of Japan, Bali and central Africa, and all occupying the middle of the register of the guitar, marimba, viola, alto flute, vibraphone and percussion, has some of the characteristics of what would become the typically Boulezian sound-world, most notably resonating instruments for which the musician relinquishes control over the sound once the note is attacked (this applies to all of the Marteau instruments except the flute and the viola, not to mention the voice).
During the brief but crucial period in which he explored ‘integral’ or ‘total’ serialism, alluded to above with reference to the frequently analysed Structures Ia, Boulez explored the serialisation of parameters other than pitch, a technique already anticipated across the Atlantic by Milton Babbitt in his Three Compositions for Piano of 1947. Boulez originally gave Structures Ia the telling title At the Limit of Fertile Ground, after a painting by the Bauhaus artist Paul Klee, aware that, like many liminal phenomena, it was not lacking in absurdity. Other colleagues embraced the integral series at around the same time, as such pointillist works as Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1951), Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel (1951), Barraqué’s Piano Sonata (1952) and Fano’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1952) attest.43
Open forms
Like many of his contemporaries, Boulez also went on to explore various degrees of openness or mobility in his works of the late 1950s and 1960s. This phenomenon has a variety of sources: in 1957 Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI was given its first performance. It is an open-ended work in which the performer chooses a trajectory through the piece: there are ‘nineteen components, and their order can be changed at random’.44 In the same year, Boulez performed his Piano Sonata No. 3 at the Domaine Musical, a work of ‘directed improvisation’ composed of five mobile ‘formants’. Both of these works in turn testified to the encounter with the anti-deterministic Zen-inspired philosophies of John Cage, and to the mobile works of other composers in Cage’s circle, in particular Earle Brown and Morton Feldman. As for Cage, his ideas were communicated directly to Boulez, notably through a lively transatlantic correspondence that the two composers maintained between 1949 and 1954.45 Boulez propagated his ideas on openness (or ‘aleatoric’ works as he called them) in essays of the time such as ‘Alea’ (1957) and ‘“Sonate, que me veux-tu?”’ (1960).46 Also decisive was Boulez’s encounter with Mallarmé’s unfinished (and indeed unfinishable) Livre, a book of free-form verse of infinitely mobile presentation, of which ‘Un coup de dés’ (‘A throw of the dice’), which invites variable readings from multiple directions, was to be the prototype.47 The aesthetics of the open work were disseminated by André Boucourechliev, the French composer and writer of Bulgarian heritage who, as musical correspondent of the important literary journal the Nouvelle revue française, had written about Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata as early as 1958.
The theoretical underpinnings of indeterminacy and openness were elaborated in 1962 by Umberto Eco in his Opera aperta (‘Open work’), co-translated into French by Boucourechliev himself in 1965. Other French composers began to write music in which the form is to greater or lesser degrees left to the care of the players and then fixed in the instant of performance. Boucourechliev put these ideas into practice in a series of compositions entitled Archipels, composed for various instrumental ensembles that were the subject of considerable attention at the time of their publication. Musical figures are laid out in dense, island-like thickets on large sheets of paper (hence the archipelagos of the title), which give rise to a multiplicity of performance possibilities. For example, in Archipel 2, for string quartet, Boucourechliev’s score uses black and red ink. When one of the musicians wishes to move to a passage printed in red, ‘His intention is made known to his partners by a softly spoken rouge.’48 Many works from this period are also mobile in another sense: they make unconventional use of space by having musicians change their positions with respect to the audience. Countless French works around the 1960s make use of this spatial parameter, including those of Xenakis, whose Duel (1959) exploits two small orchestras; his Terretektorh (1966) disperses members of the orchestra into the audience, which is arranged in a circle. Examples by Boulez include Figures-Doubles-Prismes (1958, 1963, 1968) and Domaines (1968) for a clarinettist who wanders through six spatially separated instrumental groups. One final instance is Dutilleux’s Second Symphony (‘Le double’, 1959), in which the orchestra is divided, with a chamber ensemble of twelve musicians seated in front of the rest of the orchestra.
Young composers in the 1960s
If the composers who were in their mid-twenties in 1950 were an outspoken lot, elaborately theorising the role of the series, the status of the open work and the possibilities offered by the electronic manipulation of sound, the younger composers of the 1960s were more circumspect, generally accepting (if tacitly) the new rails upon which their elders had dispatched the avant-garde. These composers benefited from and supported the musical institutions established by their older avant-garde mentors. Many of them, especially those born around 1935, such as Gilbert Amy (b. 1936), Jean-Claude Éloy (b. 1938), Bayle, Ton-That Tiêt (b. 1933), Alain Bancquart (b. 1934), François-Bernard Mâche (b. 1935), Michel Decoust (b. 1936), Jean-Claude Risset (b. 1938) and Roger Tessier (b. 1939), went on to assume important institutional roles in French musical life in the 1970s and 1980s: Bancquart, a serialist composer who also worked with microtonality, was inspector-general of music for the French ministry of culture between 1977 and 1984; Decoust occupied the same position as well as playing a crucial role in the establishment of a system of subsidies which allowed the electronic music studios (centres de recherches musicales) to thrive between 1975 and 1985;49Constant co-founded Radio France’s classical music radio station France-Musique; Risset held a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) from 1969 to 1972 and became a director of research in 1985;50Amy went on to take over the direction of the Domaine Musical from Boulez’s departure until its dissolution in 1973 and became director of the Lyons Conservatoire in 1984.51
In retrospect some of the musical creations of this generation – particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s – may seem derivative of earlier models: Équivalences (1965) by Jean-Claude Eloy (b. 1938), for eighteen instruments, dedicated to ‘my master Pierre Boulez, as an expression of gratitude and friendship’, might recall one of the dense creations of his ‘master’, somewhere between ‘Don’ (from Pli selon pli) and Éclat (1965). Amy’s Jeux (1970) for one to four oboists contains loose-leaf material that the performer is required to assemble: ‘The interpreter has at his disposal already realized material, material to be realized, structures involving flexible ordering of sections, etc.’ With its sections entitled ‘Trope’, ‘Variation’, ‘Répons’ and so on, it belongs to a family of open works that by then could be construed as an autonomous genre. The common musical and literary influences on composers of this period (Webern, Debussy, Mallarmé, Char) sometimes result in works even sharing titles, such as Bancquart’s Explosante-fixe (1972) for wind quintet and harp, not to be confused with Boulez’s Stravinsky tribute … explosante-fixe …, whose first version dates from the same year and which borrows its title from the same André Breton poem. Ballif’s Un coup de dés (1979) sets the Mallarmé poem which had partly inspired Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 3, this time for chorus, six musicians and tape.
Inevitably, many of the young composers of the 1960s clearly side with one or other of the dominant musical camps of the period, either as purveyors of what rancorous critics called the ‘Domaine Musical style’,52 presumably referring to certain stylistic tics such as wide registral leaps and a preference for dissonant intervals, or as creators in the GRM manner, devoted to the production of mostly tape music. In other words, their musical output and aesthetic orientations were strongly determined by the ideological assumptions of the institutions with which they were associated. Inevitably in this ideologically charged environment, there were also ‘turncoats’ who crossed the aisle to join one or other of the opposing camps. By the end of the 1960s Eloy, for example, had distanced himself from the serialist manner and begun composing music with oriental influences, often using taped sounds or synthesisers; Pierre Jansen (b. 1930), whose Concerto audiovisuel was premiered at the Domaine in 1960, along with a cybernetic sculpture baptised a ‘musiscope’ by the visual artist Nicolas Schöffer,53 went on to become a non-serial, though occasionally atonal composer of film music, most notably for many of Claude Chabrol’s films.54 Indeed, the birth of pop music and the flourishing of a distinctive French cinema (the earthy, literary, wilfully unpolished cinema of the French New Wave) had a decisive impact on the musical careers of some key figures in French music at the time: Michel Legrand (b. 1932), the impossibly versatile composer, songwriter and jazz pianist, a former pupil of the Paris Conservatoire, composed a score to Jacques Demi’s Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) which, with its sung dialogue, bridges the traditions of the Broadway-style musical and the orchestral film score. Georges Delerue (1925–92), a student of Milhaud, supplied the distinctive sound to a whole generation of French cineastes. His lush ‘tapis’ (or ‘carpet’, as it is called) of strings becomes a cast-member in its own right in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris of 1963, where it is used ironically, creating a kind of Brechtian defamiliarisation. Other musicians skilfully navigated between the worlds of contemporary music and jazz, most notably the clarinettist Michel Portal (b. 1935), who was instrumental in the development of free jazz in France; at the same time he was a prestigious performer of avant-garde music. The composer and jazz musician André Hodeir (1921–2011) also straddled these two worlds. Only with the arrival in the early 1970s of a new generation of composers, who came to be known as Spectralists, as comfortable in serial idioms as electro-acoustic techniques, did a new aesthetic vision emerge that was able to confront and rival the narratives of the 1925 generation.
L’Itinéraire and Spectralism
In January 1973, l’Itinéraire, a collective of composers and performers, was created in Paris, for the most part from graduates of the Paris Conservatoire, especially from Messiaen’s famous analysis class. It was founded by the composers Murail, Levinas and Tessier, who were soon joined by Grisey, Hugues Dufourt (b. 1943) and others.55 The group also included renowned performers like the flautist Pierre-Yves Artaud. The composers who began writing specifically for this ensemble often required the musicians to perform micro-intervals, which approximate the frequencies of the natural overtone series. Thus they came to be grouped together as ‘spectral’ composers, a term coined by Dufourt,56 the theoretician of the group, who, in addition to being a composer, also later held a senior research position in philosophy sponsored by the CNRS, the French research umbrella organisation. Grisey famously declared: ‘We are musicians and our model is sound and not literature, sound and not mathematics, sound and not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology, or acupuncture.’57 Thus begins a kind of 1968-inflected manifesto by Grisey, whose Partiels (1975) for eighteen players, included in the cycle Les espaces acoustiques, gave an eloquent demonstration of the ways in which the evolution of sound could be used as the basis for a musical composition.58 In it, Grisey imagined the ways the overtones theoretically contained in sound produced by the low Es of the trombone and double bass at the beginning of the work could be projected onto an instrumental canvas. Each instrument then sounds one of the frequencies of these overtones, also imitating the staggered manner in which these overtones ‘kick in’ (a slow-motion simulation, since the ensemble performs in some ten seconds what nature accomplishes in two-tenths of a second). In later works such as Transitoires (1980–1), Grisey would go on to examine spectrograms (charts graphing frequency on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal, which represent the relative intensity of the overtones with lines of different hues), which he would then project onto an instrumental ensemble, the instruments respecting the pitch, degree of stability and relative intensity of the partials appearing in the spectrogram.59 This technique was also used in such pioneering spectral works as Murail’s Gondwana (1980), in which bell and trumpet sounds are modelled.60 It is sometimes known as ‘instrumental synthesis’ and is but one – albeit the most characteristic – of many techniques that Grisey and several of his peers employed, either by transcribing properties of natural sounds made visible through electronic tools or else by imitating, on acoustic instruments, techniques of electronic sound manipulation such as ring modulation and tape-feedback loops, as in Murail’s Mémoire/Érosion (1976). More than Grisey, Murail often mixes electronic and instrumental sounds to impressive effect, as in his seminal Désintégrations (1982), for fifteen instruments and computer-generated tape, or in the overtly spiritual Les septs paroles (2009–10) for choir, orchestra and electronics. For Spectralists like Grisey and Murail, the important point about instrumental synthesis is not the possibility of synthesising the sounds of musical instruments, but rather the fact of creating a liminal experience: one in which harmony and timbre become indistinguishable.
Spectral musical explorations were also part and parcel of the French tradition of recherche musicale, an area of activity which, as we have seen, straddles scientific and technological enquiry on the one hand and the creation of musical works intended for a concert setting on the other, and which has its roots in Schaeffer’s sound explorations at the GRM. Institutes devoted to this kind of research, with acronyms like CERM, GMEB, CIRM, GMEM, ACROE and CEMAMu, thrived throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s, notably during the music critic Maurice Fleuret’s tenure as director of music and dance in the French ministry of culture (1981–6). The lavish subsidies allotted to these institutions began to be the object of considerable criticism in the mid-1980s, following the publication of the sociologist Pierre-Michel Menger’s widely read book Le paradoxe du musicien: le compositeur, le mélomane et 1’État dans la société contemporaine (1983), which applied sociological principles partly inspired by Pierre Bourdieu to the culture of contemporary music subsidies in France and adopted a critical position with respect to these subsidies. Ironically, one of the most prominent – or at least durable – of these research institutes emerged in more or less explicit opposition to Schaeffer’s approach to the electronic medium: IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique), inaugurated by Boulez in 1977, was devoted to collaborations between scientists and musicians in the development of electronic modes of sound production in music.
Following in the footsteps of Varèse’s Déserts, so-called ‘mixed’ works (i.e. works for instruments and electronics) conceived at IRCAM and other musical research institutions formed an increasingly important part of French avant-garde musical production from the 1970s. For example, in François-Bernard Mâche’s Maraé (1974), produced at GRM and scored for amplified percussionists and tape, unadulterated sounds of nature are incorporated into the pre-recorded tape part. It is difficult to say whether French composers have a predilection for mixed works or whether the establishment of these institutions encouraged composers to compose such works through commissions and pedagogical ‘internships’ (such as IRCAM’s year-long ‘cursus’). In these research institutions, composers work alongside ‘computer music producers’ (‘réalisateurs en informatique musicale’, or RIM, is the most current term for this crucial and relatively new métier) in the development of the electronic components of their projects; these producers sometimes play a considerable role in the outcome of the finished product (e.g. Andrew Gerszo for Boulez and Gilbert Nouno for Jonathan Harvey).
In the 1990s, many composers aligned with the Spectral school began to work both in IRCAM and the GRM; the period of ideological schism abated and many young composers began to be as comfortable in a GRM studio of musique concrète as they were writing pieces for instruments and live electronics at IRCAM, or spectral pieces that imitate electro-acoustic techniques through instrumental means. This generation includes Philippe Leroux (b. 1959), acclaimed for his scintillating Voi(rex) for voice, six instruments and electronics (2002) and Apocalypsis for voice, ensemble and electronics (2005–6),61Philippe Hurel (b. 1955), the Finnish-born Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) and Marc-André Dalbavie (b. 1961). Over and above the use of this or that technology of electronic sound transformation, what all of these composers have in common, and what qualifies them as in some sense neo-spectral, is an approach that tends to blur the line between the construction of timbre and the elaboration of harmony.
Circling outwards
Predictably, as we move closer to the present, the fault lines of aesthetic rivalries become less clear, and no consensus prevails about which works deserve our attention. With the passing on of the Spectral school (Grisey died in 1998 and others, like Levinas, no longer define themselves as spectral), the last ‘grand narrative’ to inform the history of contemporary music in France, or in any case the last one to have any chance of rivalling the way the series so enthralled adventurous musicians at its height in the 1950s, was put to rest. Like the immediate post-war period, the last two decades of the twentieth century bore witness to a high degree of stylistic pluralism. Politically, the 1980s were the Mitterrand years, which were characterised by large-scale social projects, represented in the musical world by the construction of the Bastille Opera House and by Jack Lang, Mitterand’s minister of culture, who instituted an annual ‘fête de la musique’, which favours inclusive and accessible public music-making. Other anti-elitist measures had been put in place before this, in the spirit of André Malraux’s determination in the 1960s to decentralise culture in France. As director of music and dance from 1966 to 1975, Marcel Landowski (1915–99) had already set up a system of regional conservatoires, which enable French musicians to receive professional musical training outside the main centres of Paris and Lyons.
One of the corollaries of the popularising ambitions of French cultural policy, beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the twenty-first century, is a surprising resurgence of opera, a genre which is particularly apt at bridging the gap between high and low art. A composer in tune with this period is surely the prolific Pascal Dusapin (b. 1955). A composer whose music is performed regularly in France and abroad, he is also gifted at articulating his thought in intellectual terms.62 His opera Passion (2008) was premiered at the prestigious Festival d’Art Lyrique in Aix-en-Provence and then produced at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. Other notable operas from the end of the twentieth century have been composed by the likes of Philippe Manoury (b. 1952), whose fifth opera, La nuit de Gutenberg, was premiered at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg in 2011, Levinas, whose opera Les nègres was premiered in Lyons in 2003, and Michèle Reverdy, whose Médée (2001) was premiered by the Lyons opera in 2003. One of the most adventurous and prolific composers for the voice, the Greek-born Georges Aperghis (b. 1945), premiered his opera Avis de tempête in Lille in 2004.
Another current of the first decade of the new century whose lasting influence is still to be confirmed is represented by the so-called ‘Saturationnistes’ (distorsionists), graduates of IRCAM’s ‘cursus’ composition programme including Franck Bedrossian (1971), Yann Robin (1974) and Raphaël Cendo (1975), who follow in the footsteps of the Franco-Italian rock-influenced neo-spectral composer Fausto Romitelli (1963–2004) by composing complex and un-genteel music.63
Predictably, even strong musical personalities like the aforementioned ones could never hope to elicit the eloquent querelles that characterised musical life in the first two decades after the war. Beyond this proclivity for fierce aesthetic ‘quarrelling’, other features of the musical landscape of the second half of the twentieth century could strike an outside observer as typically French: the preference for strong institutions and the capacity to establish them; the passion for new sounds, rooted in a taste for the imprévu or ‘unexpected’; an ability to absorb outside influences; and a certain devotion to métier or craft – a professionalism that is not averse to displays of virtuosity. Over and above this or that stylistic tendency, these characteristics link certain features of post-war musical production – even of the avant-garde variety – with many aspects of its past.
Notes
1 , Composer sous Vichy (Lyons: Symétrie, 2009), 32–5.
2 , Les conflits de la musique française, 1940–1965 (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 60.
3 , ‘Transgressions impossibles? L’avant-garde atonale et le champ musical parisien en 1954’, Vingtième siècle: revue d’histoire, 83 (2004), 40.
4 (ed.), Le théâtre lyrique français, 1945–1985 (Paris: Champion, 1987), 13.
5 , Henri Dutilleux, Musiciens de Notre Temps (Paris: Hachette, 1973), 33–4.
6 Reference MariIbid., 48.
7 , Edgard Varèse, trans. (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 183–8; see also , ‘Un mythe fondateur de la musique contemporaine: le “scandale” provoqué en 1954 par la création de Déserts d’Edgar Varèse’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 51 (2004), 129–52.
8 In response to a survey by , ‘La musique sérielle aujourd’hui’, Preuves, 177 (1965), quoted in Porcile, Les conflits de la musique française, 237.
9 Porcile, Les conflits de la musique française, 186–9.
10 See the title of ’s book Arts/Sciences: Alloys: The Thesis Defense of Iannis Xenakis before Olivier Messiaen, Michel Ragon, Olivier Revault d’Allonnes, Michel Serres, and Bernard Teyssèdre, trans. (New York: Pendragon Press, 1985).
11 , ‘La crise de la musique sérielle’, Gravesaner Blätter, 6 (1955) repr. in , Kéleütha: écrits, ed. (Paris: L’Arche, 1994), 39–43.
12 , Le domaine musical: Pierre Boulez et vingt ans de création contemporaine (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 30–1, 273; Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet has recently shown that Xenakis’s position with respect to serialism was in fact more ambiguous and nuanced than the notorious title of his essay ‘The crisis of serial music’ (1955) might suggest. See ‘MÉTASTASSIS-analyse: un texte inédit de Iannis Xenakis sur Metastasis’, Revue de musicologie, 89 (2003), 129–87.
13 Porcile, Les conflits de la musique française, 252.
14 Ibid., 185.
15 See ’s heady announcement of the arrival of a musical ‘saviour’, the unnamed Pierre Boulez: Pierre Souvtchinsky, ‘À propos d’un retard’, Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaude–Jean-Louis Barrault, 2 (1954), 127.
16 , ‘Les commandes de Vichy: aube d’une ère nouvelle’, in (ed.), La vie musicale sous Vichy (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 2001), 164–5. See the discussion of the genesis and reception of this work in Chapter 8 above.
17 , Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (London: Faber, 1985), 112–13.
18 , Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris: Julliard, 1960), 78.
19 Trans. as The Technique of my Musical Language (Paris: Leduc, 1956).
20 , La classe de Messiaen (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1995).
21 , ‘Éventuellement’, in Points de repère, vol. I: Imaginer, ed. and (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1995), 289.
22 , ‘Leibowitz, René’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (accessed 22 May 2014).
23 , Vingt ans de musique contemporaine: de Messiaen à Boulez (Paris: Seghers, 1962), 112.
24 , Schoenberg and his School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music, trans. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949).
25 Paris: L’Arche, 1950.
26 See M. J. Grant, reviews of Inge Kovács, Wege zum musikalischen Strukturalismus, , Die soziale Isolation der neuen Musik: Zum Kölner Musikleben nach 1945, and (ed.), Reihe und System: Signaturen des 20. Jahrhunderts, all in Music and Letters, 87 (2006), 347.
27 , De la musique concrète à la musique même (Paris: Mémoire du Livre, 2002), 112, quoted in Porcile, Les conflits de la musique française, 105.
28 Porcile, Les conflits de la musique française, 116.
29 , Le GRM: Groupe de Recherches Musicales: cinquante ans d’histoire (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 75.
30 Serge Moreux, quoted in Gayou, Le GRM, 75.
31 Porcile, Les conflits de la musique française, 106.
32 The institution was variously named Radiodiffusion Française (RDF) until 1949, then RTF until 1963, ORTF until 1974 and Radio France from 1975 onwards. See www.radiofrance.fr/l-entreprise/histoire-de-la-radiodiffusion/archives-historiques-de-radio-france (accessed 22 May 2014).
33 , ‘Schaeffer, Pierre’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (accessed 22 May 2014).
34 Mathieu, ‘Transgressions impossibles?’, 42.
35 , ‘Les musiques électroacoustiques et la politique culturelle: repères historiques’, in and , Du sonore au musical: cinquante années de recherches concrètes, 1948–1998 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 341.
36 Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966.
37 Veitl, ‘Les musiques électroacoustiques’, 342 n. 6.
38 , ‘Les évolutions récentes de la musique contemporaine en France’, Musik und Ästhetik, 4 (2000), 80–9; , Le Domaine Musical (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 273.
39 A more detailed account can be found in , The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez: Writings and Compositions (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–15.
40 The Score, 6 (1952), 18–22.
41 , ‘Possibly …’, in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship (Oxford University Press, 1991), 113.
42 Pierre Boulez, ‘Proposals’, in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, 54.
43 See , ‘Messiaen/ Goeyvaerts, Fano/ Stockhausen, Boulez’, Perspectives of New Music, 13 (1974), 141–69.
44 in , Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 70.
45 Pierre Boulez and John Cage Correspondence, ed. , trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
46 Pierre Boulez, ‘Alea’, in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, 26–38; ‘“Sonate, que me veux-tu?”’, in Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. , trans. (London: Faber, 1986), 143–54.
47 The Livre had been reconstructed in , Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé: premières recherches sur des documents inédits, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
48 Instructions in score (Universal Edition 15 639).
49 Veitl, ‘Les musiques électroacoustiques’, 350–3.
50 , ‘Risset, Jean-Claude’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (accessed 22 May 2014).
51 , ‘Amy, Gilbert’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (accessed 22 May 2014).
52 Aguila, Le Domaine Musical, 403.
53 and (eds), La musique et ses problèmes contemporains, 1953–1963 (Paris: Julliard, 1963), 377; Porcile, Les conflits de la musique française, 355.
54 Porcile, Les conflits de la musique française, 296–7.
55 , ‘Prélude’, Revue musicale, 421–4 (1990), 11.
56 , ‘Musique spectrale: pour une pratique des formes de l’énergie’, Bicéphale, 3 (1981), 85–9.
57 , ‘La musique: le devenir des sons’, Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik, 19 (1984), 22.
58 On the political inspiration of Spectralist discourse, see , ‘Spectralism, politics and the post-industrial imagination’, in (ed.), The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 39–60.
59 François-Xavier Féron’s research on Grisey’s compositional sketches housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel has strongly suggested that, contrary to what is claimed in Grisey’s writings, Partiels, unlike later works by the composer, was probably not inspired by the study of spectrograms. See , ‘Sur les traces de la musique spectrale: analyse génétique des modèles compositionnels dans Périodes (1974) de Gérard Grisey’, Revue de musicologie, 96 (2010), 411–43, especially 440–1.
60 , ‘Les modèles perceptuels par simulation instrumentale dans les œuvres de Tristan Murail’, Revue musicale, 421–4 (1990), 114–17.
61 See , ‘Genetic criticism and cognitive anthropology: a reconstruction of Philippe Leroux’s compositional process for Voi(rex)’, in and (eds), Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater (University of Rochester Press, 2009), 192–215.
62 ’s book Une musique en train de se faire (Paris: Seuil, 2009) emerged from lectures he gave at the Collège de France as chaire de création artistique in 2006–7.
63 See (ed.), Franck Bedrossian: de l’excès du son (Champigny sur Marne: Ensemble 2e2m, 2008).
