{"id":468,"date":"2016-01-13T16:20:32","date_gmt":"2016-01-13T22:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/?page_id=468"},"modified":"2016-01-14T05:52:32","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T11:52:32","slug":"tristan-murail-cloches-dadieu-et-un-sourire-1992","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/tristan-murail-cloches-dadieu-et-un-sourire-1992\/","title":{"rendered":"Tristan Murail, \u201cCloches d\u2019Adieu, et un Sourire\u201d (1992)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Murail is associated with the movement, or aesthetic, or group, or set of techniques, known as spectral composition. (See Wikipedia<\/a> for an introduction: members of the \u201cgroup\u201d traditionally deny it\u2019s a group, and its definition has never been distinct beyond an interest in the acoustic properties of sound, especially timbre, as they are revealed in electronic analyses.) This piece is an homage to Murail\u2019s teacher, Messiaen, who wrote a piano prelude called Cloches d\u2019angoisse et larmes d\u2019adieu;<\/em> it\u2019s the most ambitious of the eight Preludes. The evocation of bells in Murail\u2019s piece is done in several ways: with clanging chords that play changes on simple harmonies; and with repeated drone bass tones, first g and then b.<\/p>\n

The problem is long-term structure.\u00a0 There are echoes of Messiaen\u2019s piece thorughout, at first in tempo. Messiaen\u2019s piece also has isolated g\u2019s and b\u2019s in the opening pages. Murail\u2019s piece ends with three rising chords that include the same notes, b E# B, as the end of Messiaen\u2019s piece.\u00a0 But those echoes don\u2019t account for the form of Murail\u2019s piece, which is largely independent.\u00a0 An interview with Alvin Lucier (link is on Wikipedia\u2019s page for Murail) suggests that a great deal of what happens in Murail\u2019s scores is intuitive, and that seems right: but it begs the question of what justifies the length and form of the pieces. \u201cCloches\u201d is both an A-B-A structure, with a climax in the middle, and a rising structure of bass notes. Neither provides much traction. The opening page is a very interesting evocation of the clanging of a large bell, which can seem to introduce harmonies and dissonances as it resonates. The second page is an equally convincing evocation of sounds dying away. But the virtuoso falling chords on p. 3 and 4 seem to be part of some different logic: they are reminiscent of the way Messiaen put all sorts of landscape features into his Catalogue d\u2019oiseaux.<\/em> But in the absence of notations to that effect (Estuaire<\/em> has some such notations, about waves building up and breaking, and passages to be played \u201clike embroidery\u201d) one can only assume Murail is drawing on some result of acoustic analysis, such as Fast Fourier Transformation, which isn\u2019t audible — i.e., the structure doesn\u2019t make sense in situ. And that, in turn, relieves me of the obligation to attend to large-scale structure.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Parenthetically: it seems clear I\u2019m missing something: what, I wonder, is the \u201csourire\u201d?)<\/span><\/p>\n

Murail\u2019s score is easy to play — far easier than, for example, Estuaire<\/em>, which is handwritten, and which Lemoine<\/a> sells in a version that\u2019s almost too small to read.<\/span><\/p>\n

(These notes were written without engaging in the literature on spectralism; see the review of “Territoires de l’oubli” on this site<\/a> for more on the question of spectralism’s sense of its purpose.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Murail is associated with the movement, or aesthetic, or group, or set of techniques, known as spectral composition. (See Wikipedia …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/468"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":516,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/468\/revisions\/516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}