Survival or renewal? Structural imagination in recent electroacoustic and computer music

This article may be considered the outline of an ongoing study of different types of structural concepts, and their referential or non-referential content, in electroacoustic, computer and mixed music composed mostly in French electroacoustic music studios (GRM, IRCAM, UPIC, GMEM, etc.). This analytical study began in Hungary in 1988, in the course of a broadcast series on certain chapters of the history of electroacoustic music. This work has been supported in Hungary by the Soros Foundation. The study later investigated narrativity in electroacoustic music, In the form of a paper presented at the 2nd International Symposium on Musical Signification (Helsinki, 1988), published in French, in the No. 51 issue of MUSICWORKS Magazine, and in the Acts of the Symposium published in English, in 1995: ‘Narrativity and electroacoustic music’, in Musical signification, E. Tarasti, ed., Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. and then incorporated a more complex typology embracing formal, structural approaches in about thirty characteristic works composed since the 1970s. Work on these selected pieces offers a range of investigations into their structure, from the assumption of the oldest structural concepts through to very recent ideas. Plan of a book, some chapters of which were drafted in France, from 1990 onwards, thanks to a grant awarded to CIREM by the Direction de la Musique du Ministère de la Culture, with a view to publishing works on electroacoustic music.