Summary (for the reader in a hurry)
In this first part of the exposition, I use the theories of Pierre Schaeffer to excavate the idea of the musical instrument in Tristan Murail’s work. I link the thought and practice of these two composers because they took similar positions concerning the advent of the electronic studio. They both saw it as a watershed moment in music history and embraced its potential while staying firmly rooted in perception as a basis for musical thought. Moreover, there is enough direct and circumstantial evidence to argue Murail knew Schaeffer’s work and that it constituted a significant influence on his compositional outlook.
First, I explain that Schaeffer’s work was a phenomenological study of sound and its musical application, similar in approach to the theories of Edmund Husserl. It resulted, among other things, in an eidetic typology. In this typology, the sonic object is the correlate of sonic perception, and different sonic objects can be perceived as belonging to the same genre (e.g. “flute-like” sounds). Sonic objects apt for musical creation are musical objects, and genres of musical objects are musical instruments.
I argue that, by radically transforming sonic identities through gradual processes, Murail’s music renders Schaeffer’s eidetic categories contingent. The sonic object is no longer a phenomenologically given certitude, but just a point on a continuum. As a result, Schaeffer’s musical instruments too cease to be fixed by permanent essences. Instead, their identity becomes fluid, bound up with Murail’s gradual processes of transformation.
These, what I call ‘instruments of process’, like Schaeffer’s eidetic instruments, run the gamut of novel possibilities that came out of the electronic studio. However, again unlike Schaeffer, Murail injects these possibilities back into traditional musical practice. The instruments of process are stacked on top of the instruments of old, and singled out by their link to musical discourse.
Situation
Tristan Murail writes that ‘neither the score, nor the performance […] is the musical work. They are just representations of the work at different degrees of accuracy. It is within the sketches […] that we can rediscover the vestiges of the “ideal score”.’ (2005a: 160) He considers it essential that the ‘homothetic relationship between the composer’s concept of the “ideal” score and its audible result is maintained’ (2005a: 161).
The view of a musical composition as a work of art that springs, independent and complete, from the mind of the composer is part of a long tradition. Lydia Goehr argues that the musical work—associated with notions such as composition, performance, autonomy, repeatability, permanence, and perfect compliance—became a regulative concept around 1800 (1992: 119). Goehr’s genealogy of the work-concept includes the emergence of composers considering musical instruments in abstraction. Testimonies to that abstraction are meticulously worked-out instrumentation manuals and orchestration treatises that allowed composers to consider the complexities of instrumentation without needing to rely on the practical encumbrance of actual performance (Goehr 1992: 226).
The tradition of abstracting instruments is relevant to the functioning of an ‘ideal score’ within Murail’s musical language and philosophy. As I will explain more in depth below, Murail takes ‘the totality of sonic phenomena’ as the basis for musical construction (2005b: 124). Faithfulness to the composer’s idea of the work here implies being faithful to the idea of the sounds that make up the foundation of that work and, therefore, to the composer’s ideas of sound production.
Yet, the world in which Murail composed works like Tellur was very different from that of Beethoven. Between them lies the advent of the electronic music studio which created a tidal wave of new sound manipulations ripe for musical creation. To excavate the idea of the instrument in Murail’s musical thought, we need a better point of reference than the old instrumentation manuals. I will dig instead through the layers of Pierre Schaeffer’s generalized music theory.
For Murail, the advent of electronic sound manipulation was a watershed development for 20th-century music history, and foundational to his own musical thought. Founder of musique concrete, Schaeffer was perhaps the most important electroacoustic composer on the Parisian music scene during Murail’s formative years.[1] Circumstantial evidence and past research suggest that Murail not only knew of Schaeffer’s theories but was also influenced by them (Alla 2008; Stragier 2016; Garant 2011).[2]
The similar ways in which both composers approached the novel cornucopia of the electronic studio only reinforce this connection. Neither subjugated it to abstract parametric manipulations—as was, for example, the case with Stockhausen. Rather, their musical projects remain uncompromisingly beholden to the phenomenon of auditory perception.
When, in the 1982 article Spectres et Lutins, Murail positions the spectralist project against the then long arm of serialism, he writes: ‘a composer does not work with 12 notes, x rhythmic figures, x dynamic markings, all infinitely permutable; he works with sound all the time’ (2005c: 137). To him, Schaeffer’s sonic object (objet sonore) is among the fundamental contributions of electroacoustic music for exactly that reason: ‘the very essential idea that the musical “atom” is not the note head written on staff paper[…] [it] is a perceptual atom’ (2005b: 123).
Other scholars have discussed the similarities between Schaeffer’s theories and Murail’s musical language. Dominique Garant (2011) has analyzed them most extensively, particularly in relation to L’Esprit des Dunes, one of Murail’s later works. The discussion below goes beyond these similarities. It illuminates a fundamental tension that exists between Murail’s attachment to gradual process and hybridity on the one hand, and Schaeffer’s sonic typology on the other.[3]
An eidetic typology
The ‘sonic object’ Murail likens to a perceptual atom is the cornerstone of Schaeffer’s generalized music theory (solfège géneralisé) (Schaeffer 1966: 491). As Chion explains in his reference work on Schaeffer’s Traité des Objets Musicaux, this theory was ‘intended to apply to the whole universe of sounds already available, or capable of being made’ (2009: 98). Furthermore, it was to be ‘an authentic means of rethinking music, and building new musical structures which take into account our perceptual structures, and can hope to create a collective consensus about their language, their systems of reference’ (101). Musique concrète, or experimental music— the term Schaeffer preferred later in his career—is a search for phenomenological knowledge about sonic perception.
Indeed, Schaeffer himself wrote that: ‘[f]or years, we often did phenomenology without knowing it, which is much better than talking about phenomenology without practicing it’ (Schaeffer quoted in Chion 2009: 262). As Brian Kane (2007) has argued, Schaeffer’s phenomenological terminology and methodology show particularly striking similarities with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Within the scope of his own field, Schaeffer’s project of a generalized music theory could then be seen as analogous to Husserl’s ambition for ‘a science of essential Being’ (2012: 3).
Like Husserl, Schaeffer does not locate knowledge in the world out there. It is not the world of facts itself, but our experience of those facts that is wholly given in our perception. If knowledge is to be gained, this must be the site of our investigation. The sonic object is therefore not the thing by which the sound is caused (e.g. the sound made by a horse’s hooves on a grassy plain), or a representational sign (the musical note). Even more, the sonic object is not a sound wave or a signal measured by the acoustician.
It is the experience of an individual sound that, to put it in Husserlian terms, has a content: the noesis, or a single experience with its various components; and the noema an ‘abstract’ structure that experiences of the same kind have in common. For example, the noema would be the abstract structure that makes a specific flute sound ‘that’ flute sound, even if heard at different times and locations, or by different people. The noesis is one experience of that flute sound. The noema does not cause the noesis, or vice versa, they are correlated (Husserl 2012: sec. 88).
Different sonic objects can also share features. This led Schaeffer to devise a typology. Within that typology, a genre is more or less comparable to what is commonly expressed as ‘a —like sound’ (a flute-like sound, a piano-like sound, etc.) (Schaeffer 1966: 519). Despite their differences, sonic objects of the same genre thus have an invariable essence in common.[4]
From Eidetic to Contingent
‘Every device from which a varied collection of sonic objects—or a variety of sonic objects—can be obtained, whilst keeping in mind the permanence of a cause, is a musical instrument in the traditional sense of an experience common to every civilization’ (Schaeffer 1966: 51). For Schaeffer, that concept of the musical instrument lies at the origin of all music.
In Chion’s words, the goal of Schaeffer’s program of musical research would then be a broadening of the concept of the musical instrument, resulting in ‘a music which would articulate suitable objects of the same genre, located and calibrated according to perceptual fields, by calibrations of criteria. This music would rediscover, by new ways and causalities, the basic laws of the instrument, stated as the laws of all music: permanence of characteristics, variation of values’ (2009: 55).
An important detail here is the articulation of suitable objects, which implies a guiding purpose. The new instruments should be able, in their permanence-variation, to accommodate a consummate musical discourse. Therefore, articulating suitable objects means articulating musical objects.
The ultimate goal of Schaeffer’s endeavor was to come to the creation of eidetic musical objects and musical instruments, free from the bounds of the history of performance practice and the cultures they are developed in. The realization of these instruments would lead to a musical practice not limited by convention, but rooted in phenomenological knowledge regarding sonic perception. The structure of this knowledge is distinctly cellular: unique sonic perceptions are unified in uniquely identifiable sonic objects which, in turn, belong to uniquely identifiable genres of objects. The conduit for all this discovery is the electronic studio, which separates sound from its physical source and helps us home in on the perception of sound proper.
Schaeffer never managed to realize his ultimate goal, writing that the object-structure chain, ‘like our grandmothers’ knitting, unravels in one direction. It is not so easy to knit it up again by progressing from preexisting objects to automatic structures’ (1966: 480). Murail, on the other hand, summarizes the early years of his career as ‘understanding the natural rules of the organization of sounds, then of formalizing those rules, making generalizations, and from these observations creating a vocabulary, a syntax, and finally—why not?—expression’ (2005a: 150).
At first sight, he seems to have taken up the torch of Schaeffer’s unfinished project. However, a closer look shows that the electronic studio which Schaeffer used to build his eidetic cellular edifice inspired Murail to tear it down. For the spectralists, one of the key insights of electroacoustic research is that the traditional parameters of (Western) musical perception are revealed to exist on a continuum, and a vast world of hybridity exists between them. The overtones of a single pitch contain a bridge to harmony and, vice versa, harmony can be manipulated such that it crosses over into timbre. Rhythm can become pitch (if sufficiently accelerated), melody can turn into harmony, sound can morph into noise, and the list goes on.
For Murail, a fascination with ‘transforming objects and creating hybrids’, is fundamental to his musical thinking (2000: 7). This idea is reflected in one of his precepts of the ‘spectral attitude:’ ‘thinking in terms of continuous, rather than discrete, categories (corollary: the understanding that everything is connected)’ and ‘construction with a functional, not a combinatorial method’ (2005a: 152).
Murail’s early works then consist of slow metamorphoses of one sonic identity into the next, of one Schaefferian musical instrument into the next. An aptly explicit case in point is the much-discussed first section of his iconic orchestral piece Gondwana (1980). In this section, a bell-like timbre harmony and envelope morph slowly into a more harmonic pitch aggregate with an envelope reminiscent of a brass instrument (Murail 2005d). Through twelve pitch aggregates, we hear a Schaefferian musical instrument change beyond recognition, without really knowing where the bounds of its identity end and a new identity begins. The very point of Murail’s slow transformations is to expose a music beyond Schaefer’s permanence-variation.
When Murail then compares Schaeffer’s sonic object with the ‘musical atom’, and calls it ‘a fundamental contribution of electroacoustic music’, he is adopting a heritage of optimistic aspiration (2005b: 123). He commits to the complete universe of available sounds, and to realizing a ‘synthetic’ composition that takes the totality of sonic perception as its raw material: ‘the sculpting of music, as a sculptor moulds marble, gradually revealing manifold details from a global approach’ (2005b: 123). But equally, he leaves Schaeffer’s sonic object behind: ‘[i]t is possible as well that there is no perceptual atom, that music is indivisible, that we perceive only flux’ (2005b: 123).[5]
In Murail’s hands, the realizations of the electronic studio have gone past revealing the inadequacy of a notehead, and have effaced the very concept his predecessor spent decades studying. Schaeffer’s music of objects too has been shown inadequate. Objects and instruments are no longer ideal certainties, but contingent on the processes they help constitute.
Instruments of Process
A predilection for traditional instruments adds a final twist to Murail’s relationship with technology. His catalog does not contain purely electronic compositions. This is not for a perceived lack of possibilities.[6] Rather, he relates the sound of traditional instruments to the ‘very foundations of our culture’, and wishes to incorporate that cultural heritage alongside more recent technological and scientific advances (Murail 2005a: 123; 2005d).[7]
In the end, Murail’s musical instrument, like that of Schaeffer, inhabits a space in which any sound can be investigated for its musical potential, free from the accumulated conventions of notation and performance practice. However, it differs from Schaeffer’s on two counts:
First, he finds that the studio environment cannot subsume that of traditional music making. Instead, he sees the two as different components of the totality that he must integrate into musical practice. Traditional instruments still take center stage, but they have outgrown their traditional use. Looking again at the example from the first section of Gondwana, we see that the orchestra has become a resource for instrumental synthesis, analogous to the additive synthesis of the electronic studio. Each instrumental part is an elementary component of a greater whole modeled after its own paradigmatic example (e.g. a bell sound).[8]
Second, he defines the ‘paradigmatic’ nature of the instrument radically differently from Schaeffer. His gradual processes of transformation demonstrate that its permanence—an unchanging core that determines its identity, is not required to establish musical discourse.[9] Conventions of performance and notation are not replaced by eidetic certainty.
All of this leads to a fascinating perceptual tangle. The traditional instrument still lives but—with help from the electronic studio—a new instrument is stacked on top of it. That new instrument is not singled out by an eidetic essence, but by its role in a musical discourse of unrelenting transformation. Murail’s superimposed instruments become what I would call instruments of process.