The Revolution of Complex Sounds

After reading the previous note, this will appear to make more sense.  It has more details about how the work was put together.  Reading through the article while listening to his work explains the idea well.


The clip again is taken from NewMusicXX. Enjoy

Murail, Tristan (2005) "The Revolution of Complex Sounds", Contemporary Music Review, 24:2, 121-135

p. 121

The enrichment of musical material is not, in fact, new.  It occurred slowly over the entire course of the 20th century, first with the development of percussion instruments, then with the appearance of electronic instruments. ..... But it is after World War II (1939-1945), of course, that the domain of electronic music begins developing rapidly, starting with work on analogue tape in the classical studios and ending with the computer, passing along the way through synthesizers, and miniaturized studios that allow the creation of live electronics.

p. 122

Along with the birth of new instruments, instrumental technique also renewed itself, giving the composer an entire category of sounds with previously unimagined characteristic--sounds that fall between two categories, paradoxical sounds, unstable sounds, complex sonorities that defy the traditional classification of harmony and timbre completely, inhabiting the unclaimed territory between them.

Despite this outpouring of new methods, of new concepts--or perhaps because of them--we are currently witnessing many composers performing a kind of turning backwards, a reversion to a maternal embrace, to a collective refusal of instrumental innovations, a refusal even of serialism or postserialism, a return, finally to techniques dating to the period between the wars.  Fear of the unknown, lack of imagination, or balking in front of the immensity of the task?  This path is often disguised as a virtue, under noble pretexts: the return to 'expression', to 'simplicity', to 'harmonic' (sic) music.  Like all forms of neoclassicism, like all examples of 'retro' styles, it is fundamentally sterile.  The unlimited promise of electroacoustic music was doubtlessly deceptive.....

p. 123
Composers naturally sought to create these electronic continuums within the orchestra.  It was in this way that began to think in terms of masses, rather than lines, point and conterpoint.  The true musical revolution of the 20th century lies here, in the fluctuation between abstract concept and aural perception that permits access into the depth of sounds, that allows us truly to sculpt sonic material, rather than piling up bricks or layers.  One might speak of an opposition between the traditional compositional practice of amassing and compounding elements advocated by harmony and composition textbooks, and another method I designate as synthetic: the sculpting of music, as a sculptor moulds marble, gradually revealing manifold details from a global approach.

p. 124
.....This creates and accretion of sounds that is theoretically infinite.  The process is not a classical canon, even if today's machines are without imperfections.  The interest in the process is that the sound, recopied and, above all, continually remixed with the new signals, is progressively worn down, degraded, transformed, destroyed.  The sound merges with white noise, and the process end with the emergence of new frequencies, of self-generated rhythms, of interferences.

p. 125
This bring us to the closely related concept of entropy, which I have found highly fruitful--about all when composing with processes.    Positive entropy is defined as the progressive passage from order to disorder.  The entire universe is subject to its law: natural erosion, one of its manifestations, destroys geological structures to create disorders, the final stage of which is indifferentiation.  Life, considered as negative entropy, constructs and ephemeral order.

p. 126
.....'filters' that latch onto the harmonic series in various ways, by selecting on certain components, to produce aggregates of frequencies with interesting properties; a 'band-pass' filter, for example, which masks all but a portion of the spectrum.

It is also easy to imagine a type of 'comb filter' in which every third harmonic starting at the third partial are selected, or every fifth starting from the fifth, or an irregular selection, etc.

It would be equally possible to create filters inspired by 'phasing' that would produce a kind of filtering in motion.  Transposed to instrumental writing, this process would generate internal movements within harmonic aggregates, a sweeping through all frequencies; .....

Properties of spectra, then, support harmonic ideas, and allow the fabrication of agglomerations that are neither harmonies nor timbres, but rather progressions within the domian of timebre-harmony--for example, progressive decompositions from timbre to harmony.

p. 129
.....where harmonic relationships are quickly distorted, might provide an entry into the domin of inharmonic spectra, including the piano and the tubular bells.  Inharmonic spectra themselves give rise to particularly rich and interesting spectra and can be classified under this new category of complex sounds, since they resist analysis as either harmonies or timbres.

p. 130
Frequency modulation provides a process rich in spectral synthesis.  This technique has been highly developed in computer-driven synthesis: it can also serve to calculate frequency aggregates for 'instrumental synthesis'.

p. 135
It seems to me that the entire range of complex sounds can be integrated functionally within a musical logic, rather than used as a startling daub of colour, or only for expressive ends, for their anomalous or paroxysmal qualities.  But on a more fundamental level they have an irreplaceable role in all processes of harmony and timbre.  With their help, timbres are split into harmonies, harmonies fuse as timbres; without them, certain types of evolution that by definition require intermediate stages would prove impossible.  They also demand that we open our musical horizons, and burst the traditional grids with which we have tried to imprison music (ring or frequency modulation in electronic music, like complex instrumental sounds, require us to abandon the tempered scale, and will not permit us to replace it with another filigree just as arbitrary,like and octave divided into 24 or 36 microtones.  From this new reality of sounds should grow new methods of organization capable of embracing all categories of sound, past and future.

It will be an organization of energies, or paths--the path from pitch to noise, from smooth frequencies to rough ones, from periodic to random rhythms, etc.  Musical form will no longer consist of frozen structures but of forces, and dynamisms.  The old oppositions of container and content, of form and material will lose all meaning, since compositional process will have become an art of synthesis, born of a continuous movement from differentiation to integration.