1. INTRODUCTION
In his 1965 article, the composer Elliott Carter argues that a composition should allow the listener to distinguish between its sounds, identify them, recall their individual profiles and compare the combinations that ensue across a certain period of time. If not, he states, it is unlikely that the composition will succeed in capturing the listener’s attention (Carter Reference Carter1965). According to Carter, comprehensibility and attention are based on the proper temporal dimension of music (Carter Reference Carter1965: 29). Music is intended as a ‘ray of light’, projected onto the ‘screen’ of the listener’s undivided attention (Carter Reference Carter and Gubbs1976) and ‘deepest consciousness’ (Koechlin Reference Koechlin1926: 46).
The charm of this poetics hints at an aspect that I find even more interesting: Carter conceived his music in order to communicate his reflection on time. This communication is grounded on the common substratum between him and the listener. To explain this kind of common ground, Carter evoked the notion of temporality analysed by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (Heidegger [1927] Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh1996).Footnote 1 Temporality is the concrete existential horizon within which we live and act; it is that ‘inside’ which constitutes the everyday experience, our social relationships, dialogs and communications. In this sense, communication consists of the fundamental and reciprocal relationship between the composer and the listener (Heidegger [1927] Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh1996: 152). Music, as the ‘ray of light’ that projects Carter’s temporal experience onto the ‘screen’ of the listener’s one, is composed with the objective of establishing dialogue between the composer and the listener. Applying the notion of ‘projectionism’ evoked by Victor Zuckerkandl (Reference Zuckerkandl1956: 185), Carter solicits the temporal experience of the listener by bringing into question his own temporal experience into the equation. The projection of the ‘ray of light’ on the ‘screen’ of the temporality of the listener defines a dialogical act, based on the mutual reflection of musical composition and listening. At the centre of this dialogue, the composition interpolates both the composer’s and the listener’s temporalities. In order to question this dialogical act, in the following paragraphs I define a theoretical framework inspired by the notion of mimesis proposed by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) and a methodology of investigation that allows an exploratory inquiry to be carried out among five composers.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY
2.1. Theoretical framework
In his major theoretical work, Temps et Récit, Paul Ricœur describes the creative act as a mimetic act (mimesis). This mimetic act consists of a ‘creative imitation of the temporal experience lived by the detour of the plot’ (Ricœur Reference Ricœur1983: 66). This act is defined by the passage from a pre-figured time – the pre-comprehension of action mentally articulated by the composer with respect to his experience – to a re-figured time; the latter is interpreted by the listener, towards the con-figured time of the plot (mise en intrigue) (ibid.: 108). These three phases of the mimetic act define three levels of mimesis. If mimesis I specifies what Ricœur defines as the pre-comprehension of the world of human action (ibid.: 108), that is, the presupposed sharing of the temporal horizon between the composer and the listener, mimesis II corresponds to the symbolic transformation of that action, that is, the construction of a succession of events in time. Mimesis II is the ‘as if’, according to Ricœur (ibid.: 125); it is a ‘configuration process’, manifested in the composition of a plot. This plot has an integrative function, mediating between pre- and post-comprehension of the order of actions and its temporal features (ibid.: 127). Mimesis III indicates the intersection of the world of text and the world of the listener. It is the contact between the world configured by the work of art and the world in which the action takes place, developing its specific temporality (ibid.: 136).
For Ricœur, the composition of a plot consists of the ‘arrangement of facts’ (ibid.: 76). In the case of a musical composition, this ‘arrangement of facts’ is defined by the sound events, which are the ‘facts’ of the musical temporal succession. This theory is intended to interpret the construction of the sound events that characterise the composition as a ‘configuration process’.
2.2. Methodology
The present exploratory inquiry seeks to analyse the ‘temporal configuration’ described by Ricœur’s theory of mimesis. To conduct this research, I turned to five composers of musique mixte and acousmatic music. Aged between 35 and 53 years, they are of three different nationalities – Italian, French and Argentinian.Footnote 2 Their compositional styles are very different from the point of view of the musical material – sound synthesis and spectra, quotations, extended techniques, live electronics; but all share common ground in their utilisation of technology. The interviewed composers all work in a French-speaking context, although their activity encompasses compositional work for ensembles, soloists and events in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Australia and the United States. All five composers use Max as a principal tool for signal processing and assisted composition. Each of them has developed a specific practice over time, developing and deepening their knowledge of different aspects of electronics. A has developed writing techniques linked to models of additive and subtractive synthesis; the frequential aspect is at the centre of his compositional strategy. B, conversely, explores the noise domain and the instrumentalist’s gesture through the use of everyday objects. C is particularly interested in the structuring of long musical processes that are extremely articulated internally. D has developed a narrative approach to composition, using granular synthesis techniques. E bases his practice on extremely structured musical gestures and the use of live electronics.
This diversity of approaches is reflected in the tools that the composers use. In addition to Max, which allows for studio composition and subsequent interpretation in concert settings, the composers have all designed their specific work environments (see Table 1). I think it is important to know this operational aspect in order to concretely realise, through the working environments of the composers interviewed, the full context of their aesthetic orientation. However, in this exploratory inquiry I have chosen not to relate style with temporality. Instead, I asked the composers to describe how they negotiate the complex relationship between composition and reception over time, from their own experience.
Table 1. Types of music practised by the interviewed composers, describing the tools that characterise their work environments
Interviews were conducted in a semi-directed face-to-face format, following the same set of questions. Because I am a composer myself, the interviews were underpinned by a common experiential basis between interviewer and interviewees. I introduced the interviews by explaining that when I write, my compositional choices are informed (in part) by how I expect the music to enter the temporality of the listener.Footnote 3 To define this fact, I specified the concept of temporality that I use in the following terms:
The notion of temporality is understood as the intimate experience of time defined by the existential constraints of the limits, sensations and projects oriented to the present and the future of the individual. It is a horizon of actions and meanings shared by the composer and the listener, within which the musical work is created and received.
Starting from this definition, I asked the composers to reflect on the temporality of their compositional act. Ricœur’s theory allowed me to define a questionnaire that tries to highlight the three aspects of mimesis mentioned above. Interviews were conducted in French and in Italian; questions were the following:
Q1. When you compose, do you think about the temporality of the listener who will listen to your piece?
Q2. If yes, how do you conceive this relationship?
Q3. How are your compositions conceived in order to create such a relationship with the listener?
Q4. How do you conceive mixing and simulations in your musical practice?
The interview answers are presented in the following two sections. In section 3, in which I encourage the composers to reflect on their own compositional temporality, I present the answers to the first two questions (Q1 and Q2). Section 4 presents the answers to questions three and four (Q3 and Q4).
3. THINKING ABOUT THE TEMPORALITY OF THE LISTENER
In the first part of the interview (Q1 and Q2), I asked the composers if, and how, they engaged with the temporality of the listener. During the interview, we sometimes referred to the listener as the ‘other’, in order to fully express the unknown – but also the openness – that the encounter between the composer and the audience entails. Their answers are presented here, related to the relevant interviewee. So, for example, Q1A is the answer to the first question by composer A.
Q1A. For A ‘the thought of the other is diffused … a hope of encounter’.
Q2A. A wanted to ‘resonate the space and make the listener discover it’; to ‘form a space for the listener who is sitting or moving, … to create the conditions for the possibility of multiple listening’. Music, A remarked, is ‘a way to discover listening’.
Q1B. ‘I wonder how to hold the audience in the piece’, B said. B continued:
I’m checking to see if I’m getting into the time of the piece. I’m trying to listen to the piece to find out if the piece is working. … You have to think of others. If you think that what you are doing is a dialogue, it changes completely. You can’t not think about the other.
Q2B. Indeed, B thinks of music as a confrontation between the sound and the listener. B concentrates on the time of the musician’s action. Imagining the tension of listening provoked by the action of the musicians on stage characterises the fulcrum of the dialogue B imagines with the listener:
You have to imagine a piece of action rather than a note. The note variable is less important. But the time variable is more important. The gesture has a temporality. … I was looking for the same action in everyday objects.
Q1C. C did not think of the listener’s experience directly. C described focusing, primarily, on his own listening. This listening served to ‘weigh’ the music and to be impartial: ‘I don’t think of a listener. I think of time in an abstract way. I try to embody a relationship with time myself’, C noted; ‘I don’t think of myself as a subject, I think of listening. Listening gives me the impression of how time passes. It’s simple. I don’t think about measuring the listener. It’s listening that evaluates’, C said.
Q2C. C described counting internally, trying to understand the real temporal weight of his compositional choices:
I am the one who is positioning myself as the listener. For me, the components of music are objects. At some point I take their size. … there are moments where I sit down with the score and try to imagine the passage of time. I’m counting internally. I couldn’t do it any other way.
C said: ‘Obviously, there is a waiting. There is a dimension of the gift …. It is the most important act.’ The time count is used to understand the consistency of the composition, and to know when it ‘risks falling’. The fear of ‘falling’ described here is the anguish of judgement. The artist observes himself, and scrutinises the sincerity of his intention. The fear is that the gift is not accepted. Here, the ‘other’ comes into play in a mediated manner as the one who will receive a sincere gift.
Q1D. D observed that acknowledging the time of ‘others’ meant the need ‘to enter into the idea of the concert’. For him, ‘I’m the listener. I listen to what I want to hear. … I listen to what I would like to hear as an audience in a concert situation. I’m always a bit of an “I”.’ Subjective listening is put into perspective by listening from the outside, deferred in its concreteness. The ‘other’ become present during the writing; the music is composed because it will, at some point, be listened to.
Q2D. D anticipated the space of the concert:
You have to write a piece for ensemble and electronics … space is the problem … what I cannot have through a simulation is the space itself. … I put myself in the audience imagining a given sound situation, but I am the person! … I do not see interruptions [between writing and performing]. … I can imagine it in the concert. This from the beginning.
This future-oriented mode of listening allows D to judge his work. If the music is not satisfactory ‘I feel uncomfortable’, D reported. When D projected his listening to future listeners, ‘I anticipate a situation I don’t want to experience in the future’, D said, referring to the misunderstanding of his intention.
Q1E. ‘When I compose, I listen with the outer and inner ear …. I am the first listener. Composing and listening go together. I write a passage and while I write it, I already listen to it. The object cannot exist without the time in which it is inscribed …. To understand time, I listen’, E answered.
Q2E. E highlighted the multiple dimension of compositional listening, characterised by three modes: ‘As a composer, as a listener and as an instrumentalist.’ Conceiving music through writing, thinking about it in both the temporality of execution and in the existential time of the listener, are the elements of a multidimensional activity – a process that demands placing each of these modes into perspective in a reciprocal way. It is a matter of thinking about music in otherness, in a situation far removed from that of the composition – but at the same time using it to compose and immerse music in time. E defined this approach as critical. It is based, he observed, on the possibility of giving shape to the listening experience – invisible by its very nature – through writing:
What is written … allows one to adopt a critical listening, something that comes from outside. The memory of internal and external listening allows us to work on the musical object. The operation remains in the memory. You remember that you wrote …. There are three dimensions …. An internal listening that is not yet an external sign; a listening that derives from the vision of the sign, from the written notes; this listening puts me in relation to the internal listening.
Writing, I understand from this, allows E to establish distance from the idea; to perceive it in its entirety and in its sense. The musical object is intuitively captured when reading the piece from beginning to end. The act of pre-perceiving the whole piece over time implies a compositional reaction: ‘If this thing is out of tune, if there’s any inconsistency, it’s not good, I have to get back to work’, E observed.
The dialogue with the listener structured the compositional approaches of my interviewees. For A the ‘other’ is present from the beginning of the composition and is at the very centre of the idea of provoking the experience of a ‘multiplicity of listenings’; for B, thinking of the ‘other’ allowed him to hear the piece from outside, to perceive its weaknesses, and to conceive the composition as a dialogue. It is a concrete ‘other’. Imagining the temporality of others afforded B the opportunity to start composing from the limit of the imagined attention of the listener and to structure the composition; C, however, did not think of the listener in a direct way. Rather, C did so in a mediated manner, counting and reading; the ‘other’ is a source of anguish. The music is calculated in such a way that it did not ‘fall’, that it did not have perceptible ‘holes’; it is a repercussion, he admitted, of his insecurities. For D, by way of contrast, the thought of the ‘other’ is functional to the clarity of the message. D wanted to be able to communicate in the most effective way. He then puts himself in the place of the ‘other’ in order to be able to better reach his objective. E conceived two listenings, one internal and the other external: the mental conceptualisation of the musician’s gesture made it possible to establish a connection with the potential listeners.
This first part of the interview made it possible to engage with the composers’ conception of the composition in a dialogical context; it defines the relationship between the image of the ‘ray of light’ projected towards the listener’s conscience, through which Carter describes his compositional act, and the first level of the mimesis proposed by Paul Ricœur, which concerns the world of the action shared between the composer and the listener. The compositional act is open and connected to the ‘other’.
4. THE CONCEPTION OF COMPOSITION IN RELATION TO THE TEMPORALITY OF THE LISTENER
This section of the interviews (Q3 and Q4) allowed for a richer understanding of how this relationship with the ‘other’ determined specific approaches, engendering some aesthetic aspects of composers’ compositional strategies.
Q3A. To create the experience of a ‘multiplicity of listenings’, A said that, in his sound installations,
There are choices of projections and materials. … what guided these choices were the empirical installation of the loudspeakers to create a multiplicity of renderings according to the places in which the spectator was directing. … We have composed the installation according to this multiplicity and respected the multiplication of listening points. … The installation was supposed to be a way to discover listening.
About the temporal organisation of the time, A said, ‘the material imposes itself …. Since I mainly use additive and subtractive syntheses, I find myself insituations where the sonic output is uneven compared to the registers’. A chose ‘the sound matter according to its timbre in a register given empirically, by trying’. This empirical approach extends towards the organisation of the space. The composer puts himself in the position of the listener, by walking in the room and moving the speakers; A adapts the space empirically. This type of action involves substantial musical modifications. It requires thinking of music as an organisation which moves the deepest dimension of listening, in search of the point of balance.
Q3B. B described trying to
imagine the action of the play. Because listening changes a lot if a pianist plays on the keyboard or in the piano. Action takes time. It changes the listening. It changes the time. The action has its time and makes you listen to the sound in a different way, even if you don’t see the gesture. There I imagine several temporalities of the actions.
The movement of the body of the performer, its noise, the utilisation of unusual objects, all capture the imagination of B. For B, music is a ‘dialogue’, embodied through the gesture of the musician. The musician, through the temporality of his movement, becomes the mediator between the ‘sound thought’ in its gestural-sonorous complexity, and the listener. The gesture carries the temporal articulation of music; it is, in its essence, the heart of the musical communication as imagined by B.
Q3C. Reading over time allowed C to imagine the ‘real’ size of sound objects. To prepare the piece for its public presentation, C conceived music in terms of weights and proportions:
I think in a proportional way …. There are musical objects I can predict how their sound lives in time. In my opinion, musical time is rolled up. I am very sensitive to how time goes by. I always have a certain mistrust of myself. When I am composing complex objects … in some situations, I know them very well and there is a contact with time without mediation, in other situations, I project myself in a way that is not sure. … There are a lot of decisions I make by ear.
C conceived duration and listening together: ‘I need some kind of general idea of the sections, an organised time’, said C. This made it possible to project the time of the piece. This kind of approach, as was the case with D, created crucial and anxious moments: ‘I work with objects that I interpolate. There is a listening of the interpolations. There I risk having more problems: I am anxious that holes are perceived.’ C explored a double, reflexive listening, directed towards the musical object and towards itself at the same time: ‘It’s hard to separate the thing I listen to from what I imagine. I try to imagine an object that does not suffer from the threat of reality’, C observed. Listening to his deep intentionality, the resolute search for sincerity is the main aspect of C’s way of projecting himself.
Q3D. For D, the projection serves to ‘listen to what I want to hear as a public in a concert situation.’ To do this, D said, ‘I’ll make the concrete prevail.’ There is a purpose to insisting on this concreteness: ‘I find it interesting that you go to a concert to be surprised, to listen to something in a different way from the usual thing you hear.’ D wants to surprise the listener by offering a new experience – but remaining in full control of the result of the composition, such that his intention remains as clear as possible: ‘The goal is that after the concert the person has a mark that yields a fruit that you may not see. The goal is to leave a trace.’ To achieve such a goal, the composer anticipated the effect of his compositional choices. D described composition in terms of a story, citing ‘holdups’ that allow the listener to enter the music – the capacity to be able to be surprised and to be in a completely musical world. D tells stories, fiction:
I try to make a kind of sculpture. Music is a plastic element that can be seen from several perspectives. I like to think of music as a story that takes you by the hand. I need the music to tell, because I need to leave something behind. Sculpture is as form and cinema as narrativity. I like to think that the piece is enjoyed as a sculpture in terms of temporal perceptions also in the sense that a piece can be looked at in different ways. Changing the way you listen to it is a plastic way of thinking.
Q3E. E described thinking of music in its gestural-sonorous complexity: ‘I imagine the movement of the instrumentalists, plunging me into their gesture …. I try to listen to it in its becoming.’ E took into account ‘the physiology of the gesture’: ‘For example, make a longer or shorter bowing than would be correct.’ E remarked on the coexistence of different physiological movements, allowing him to create imagined physiologies: ‘In one of my cello pieces, the bowing corresponds to the breath. If it doesn’t match, it’s not right. … Consistency comes from a harmonisation of several elements, from an agreement between them.’ E conceptualised music through the movement of the musician:
I imagine the musician, then a perception of the musician and therefore also for the viewer … If it’s clear to me, I can communicate it to the instrumentalist. He understands it and therefore there are no blind spots.
The evolution of music takes place through the deepening of the movement, towards the inside of the sound: ‘There are no contrasts, no breaks, but derivations.’ E saturates gesture in time: ‘Saturation is a limit.’ E referred to himself in this context: ‘I care what I hear.’ When the piece is concluded, E then listens to it in its entirety:
I listen to the piece from beginning to end. If I feel it’s wrong, I have to work … rewrite. I always adopt a linear temporal listening. A listening as you listen to the music with the memory that works. One question is: when should I finish a literal repetition? When should a progression end?
E immerses his composition in time. The repetition must end when the object ‘becomes too repetitive’. E looks for the breaking point – ‘it’s an area to be found’ – through repeated listening. For this reason, E goes through several stages of reading and writing: ‘First I write by hand, the object, some areas of temporality. Then I rewrite it on the computer, print what I write, reread it with a pencil and then I put it back on the computer.’ In these passages, E makes some changes concerning the duration of the composition, and the time in which the musical object is presented: ‘I change the temporal stretching of objects. … This comes to mind when I rewrite.’ Rewriting gives E the opportunity to give expressiveness to his musical objects: ‘I want to fill the space with objects lying in time … I need to have a contrast … I feel the need for a point of explosion.’ For E, ‘a musical gesture produces sound and therefore time.’ E related movement, sound and perception. The gesture ‘is a symbol … a union’. For E, the gesture connects the listening to the physicality of the sound manifested by the interpreter. By saturating movement, E is able to observe exhaustion of saturation, and from this imagine its becoming. E first fixes the gestural-sonorous object, then plunges it into time as a fixed, sculpted movement. The composer composes utopian physiologies. Unlike B, who described thinking of the gesture as the materiality of the simplest movement, E constructs an imagined gesture, forced into strong musical constraints.
The composers described how they conceived the composition through thinking of the future hypothetical listener. This hypothetical dialogue with the listener was conducted by focusing on the sound experience, the musician’s gesture, the internal listening. A composed empirically until the last possible moment; B imagined the piece as an action; C defined the object through listening and writing, to balance all its aspects in search of a certain objectivity; D conceived composition with metaphors as cinema and sculpture; E, for its part, conceived the gesture of the musician as the central aspect of communication. Gesture, and its time, constituted the point of contact between the performer and the audience.
4.1. Mixing and simulating
The composers identified mixing and simulation as fundamental compositional moments. Mixing can be defined as the blending of a set of tracks into a finished composition (Roads Reference Roads2015: 369). It is an important part of the compositional act ‘connected with the articulation of the musical structure’ (ibid.: 371). On the other hand, simulation is a sonic representation of the compositional result. As such, it is an index of the object that will in due course become a reality. It emerges from the mixing, and allows the composer to perceive the time of the piece from the outside, reducing the distance between representation and reality (Rheinberger Reference Rheinberger and Schwab2018). To mix and to simulate help composers to work with the piece ‘as listened’, and to refine their ideas thus. How composers conceived these tools reveals how they pre-comprehend the reception of their works.
Q4A. For A, mixing is an endless act. A described starting with the multichannel mixing, and then adapting to the real situation. During the preparation of a sound installation, said A:
We’ve adjusted the channel mapping several times. We have mounted, moved, and displaced the device. It was an empirical spatialisation. … We made the sound living in a place. It was necessary to make some changes.
The act of mixing consisted in the transition from an abstract conception to a concrete realisation:
I thought of mixing in an abstract way according to the number of speakers. However, what works theoretically doesn’t always works the way you want it to. So, I saved the work and modified it in concert.
A’s preference would be to mix in real time: ‘I’d like to check and change the balance in concert.’ For the moment, A noted, the prepared material serves as a text: ‘I find in my work the paradigm of acousmatic music.’ The mixing is functional to the search of the balance of the perfect point of observation sought by the composer.
In his interview, A described a Max patch which allows him to act empirically on musical processes, to compose and to simulate the final result. The patch has a matrix that makes it possible to select sound distribution across an array of loudspeakers:
I chose the temporal and spatial relationships empirically. It’s interesting to see the matrix evolve because it raises questions about how to diffuse sounds in a very distributed way or not. Once it is recorded, I lose the appearance of the visualization. … Once registered I can no longer modify the thing or change.
Q4B. B always mixes: ‘Without a good mix, I can’t show the action and make it clear to the musician’, B observed. Mixing is undertaken very carefully, controlling the time of events and ‘the distribution of energy in the sound spectrum.’ The mix determined both the ‘sound score’ and the detail of the concert or performance time. Mixing, for B, serves to clarify the gesture, and the movement of the interpreter who will make this gesture. The composer uses mixing to listen to the gesture-sonorous object in its entirety, and to define in detail the role of translation of the instrumentalist and the device.
For B, the simulation is audiovisual. The composer recorded the instrumental pieces himself. B described giving the performer ‘a simulation of the piece to see if he can perform it himself’. The author placed himself in the listener’s place. B listens to the simulation at different times, ‘even when I walk and I’m in a situation where I do something else. … I look if I enter in the time of the piece. I try to listen to the piece to imagine and know if it works.’ The composer tries to ‘imagine different temporalities of the action.’ ‘I do the action myself’, B explained.
I record the action and make videos with the whole piece played by me. This gives me an exact idea of the time of the piece. I have an idea of the temporality of any part of the piece. I make a recorded version of the piece and listen to it several times. I listen to it in many situations of daily life. For me there is a close relationship between the action of playing and making a sound with the listening with the time of the piece. If we know the time of the action we notice well, we can have a clear idea of the time of listening that the audience has in listening.
B projects himself from his gestural and bodily experience, imagining that his experience is interpreted.
it’s not a simulation that I do with libraries but it’s a simulation of the action that takes into account the time to make a sound. A simulation of action and not sound. We can imagine a dance but when we dance the temporality is completely different. It’s more like dancing. I’m trying to write this down. I write the action rather than the sound.
Q4C. For C, mixing is ‘perceived as a multiple-scale temporal object. In the last piece I made an object that is unique and at the same time multiple.’ As with A, the mixing is connected to the public presentation of the piece, the amplification of the instruments, and the balancing with the electronics. To mix served to temporalise the musical objects: ‘I build music with sound families. I am very guided by listening, but I am attracted by the out-of-time. There is a crucial step that it is the fact of temporising what is out of time.’
Q4D. D for his part, explained that he continues the act of mixing until the last possible moment. Mixing and composing are almost the same thing, feeding into the same endpoint: a performance. D said about a recent premiere: ‘the mix … was not working in the hall. Because I got the front and back wrong. I tried to change it in the hall, but it was not possible. I changed the location in the space and then I re-filtered. Far away I lowered the treble while I put the ones close to the audience in the middle’. For D,
simulation is for projecting. My acoustic pieces are also projections of electroacoustic pieces. Simulation is looking for something that I can re-orchestrate. Something that can be played by an instrument but not completely, so as to create something new. So, you build a simulation for a piece of orchestra built in a certain way. The simulation goes beyond the object, but not completely. Simulation is a writing instrument, a sketch. If I listen to the simulation again, I project myself into the composer, that is me, who thinks about what he should do. The big thing is the relationship with electronics. I can’t relate electronics and instruments without simulation. This is also a matter of experience. It’s hard for me without being able to listen. I use it in a projective sense.
For D, simulation makes it possible to engage with the dimensions of the piece, and to play with its projected reception:
For me, simulation has the value of knowing what it’s going to be like. Simulation is also writing to know how to project into the future. That’s why simulation is exploration. Often, I arrive with a sound result. It could be used for a single instrumental piece and so it is exploring situations. Simulation is a kind of guarantee. If I have a simulation, I have a ‘guarantee’ that what you are writing will work.
Q4E. E conceived the mixing in connection to the musician’s gesture. The use of live electronics allowed E to establish such a relationship: ‘I didn’t want to add anything to the instrument. In my opinion, the electronics are moving towards integration with the instrument, changing the sound, exploring the timbre.’
Simulation and mixing prepare the composition as a material for the performance (Small Reference Small1998). They allow to conceive the reception of the composed music; are ‘configuring interfaces’ of the composed and listened time. Simulation and mixing, one may reasonably conclude from this, are themselves a form of writing. They allow the composer to compose music, and assists in its temporal evolution in relationship to a future listener.
5. CONCLUSION
As Eliott Carter pointed out, comprehensibility and temporality are intimately interconnected. The comprehensibility of a music depends on its temporal organisation and on the shared temporality of the composer and the listener. Paul Ricœur’s theory of mimesis has allowed to study this reliance. Starting from such a theoretical assumption, I analyse the interrelation of mimesis I – the temporality of the composer – II – the ‘arrangements of facts’ in the plot – and III – the temporality of the listener – interviewing five composers.
In the first part of the interview (Q1 and Q2) I tried to understand if and how the compositional act of the composers is projected towards the future listener. Mimesis I is defined by the ‘thought of the other’, as all the composers interviewed have acknowledged. However, this ‘thought of the other’ was different for each one. For A, the ‘thought of the other’ is ‘diffused’; A conceived this relationship starting from the space of the concert, which can be inhabited and travelled. B established an immediate relationship with the listener; music was basically a confrontation, a dialogue. C concentrated on his individual listening; C thought time ‘in an abstract way’. For D the ‘thought of the other’ was functional to the composition; D tried to create a music that leaves a trace on the listener. For E the composer is the first listener; the ‘other’ is thought of starting from E’s listening.
The second part of the interview (Q3 and Q4) allowed me to understand how composers conceive their compositions. Mimesis II is declined differently by each of the composers. A defined ‘multiple listening’ through the composition of space and timbre; B thought of the action of the musician; C ‘weighed’ the sound objects, ‘counted’, tried to perceive the precise dimension of the object in order to ‘offer’ a gift to the listener; D conceived the composition as ‘cinema’ and ‘sculpture’; ‘cinema’ defined music as a narration; ‘sculpture’ as an object that can be observed from several angles; E thought of the gestural-sonorous object, deforming and repeating it.
It would be interesting to see how mimesis III declines from the point of view of the listeners. For the moment, I can say that mimesis III is present to the interviewed composers: they integrate a future listener in their own temporality. The compositional act can be seen as a ‘temporal configuration’ of the composer and the listener. Time is not just the ‘screen’ on which the music is projected; time is implemented in the concrete reality of music. Composition is characterised by choices that are deferred in their realisation. French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), in his Dialectique de la durée, argues that time lived is anticipated by time thought: in this time, the reflection prepares the concretisation of the individual project (Bachelard Reference Bachelard1950: 17). It would seem, at least to this writer, that this thinking is that of the projection towards the future, questioning, through the musical object, the temporality of the listener. As the inquiry shows, mixing and simulation, intimate moments that concern the composer, are instruments of this kind of ‘temporal configuration’. These instruments are concerned with the time of the compositional activity and forward-looking thinking. This time is the one lived through the constraints and the expectations of the composer; the one that defines, unceasingly, every creative act and every attempt of the composer to project oneself towards the ‘other’.
