Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-4ws75 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-05T17:47:21.193Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

DIFFERENT TRAILS: ON THE MULTIPLE GENETIC ROOTS DETERMINING A DISTRIBUTED COMPOSITIONAL PROJECT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2019

José L. Besada
Get access

Abstract

Although it is a mistake to believe that the material traces left by a composer's practice can help us to properly reconstruct the creative process, compositional sketches may throw light on it. Nevertheless many such accounts take their respective case studies as isolated objects that are, unfortunately, sometimes decontextualised from the whole record of their authors. Ethnography potentially offers a better methodology and auto-ethnographic accounts, third party observations, and mixtures of these approaches have already been applied to contemporary music. This article aims to combine both these approaches in a discussion of a recent compositional project at IRCAM, carried out by a team of three people. I consider how the previous artistic experiences and achievements of these people, jointly and separately, have had a substantial impact on their shared project. In addition, as the case study had a scientific underpinning, I comment on the cognitive bridge that the composer had to build between scientific and musical conceptions.

Information

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 73 , Issue 290 , October 2019 , pp. 56 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

I warmly thank Hèctor Parra, Jean-Pierre Luminet and Thomas Goepfer for allowing me to follow their meetings during the Inscape project and for access to the various documents they produced. I also thank Gerard Pape for his valuable help.

This paper has been published within the framework of the IdEx Unistra and benefits from state funding administered by the French National Research Agency as part of the ‘Investments for the future’ programme.

References

1 Luminet, Jean-Pierre, Illuminations: Cosmos et esthétique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011), pp. 193–4Google Scholar. Earlier versions of this hypothesis can be found in Luminet, L'univers chiffonné (Paris: Gallimard, 2005) and Luminet, et al. , ‘Dodecahedral Space Topology as an Explanation for Weak Wide-Angle Temperature in the Cosmic Microwave Background’, Nature 425 (2003), pp. 593–5CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 Jean-Pierre Luminet, ‘Gravitational Music. On my Collaboration with Hèctor Parra’, Contemporary Music Review 38/1–2 (2019), pp. 193–205.

3 Concerning the study of distributed compositional projects, from first-hand accounts to external tracking, see for instance Fitch, Fabrice and Heyde, Neil, ‘Ricercar: the Collaborative Process as Invention’, Twentieth-Century Music 4/1 (2007), pp. 71–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donin, Nicolas, ‘Domesticating Gesture: The Collaborative Process of Florence’s Baschet StreicherKreis for “Augmented” String Quartet (2006–2008)’, in Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, ed. Clarke, Eric and Doffman, Mark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 70–87Google Scholar; and Clarke, Eric, Doffman, Mark and Lim, Liza, ‘Distributed Creativity and Ecological Dynamics: A Case Study of Liza Lim’s Tongue of the Invisible’, Music and Letters 94/4 (2013), pp. 628–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Luminet, Jean-Pierre, Le destin de l'univers II. Trous noirs et énergie sombre (Paris: Gallimard, 2006)Google Scholar.

5 Luminet, Jean-Pierre, ‘Musique avec pulsar oblige: À propos du Noir de l'Etoile de Gérard Grisey’, Les Cahiers de l'IRCAM 4 (1993), pp. 133–43Google Scholar.

6 Rovelli, Carlo, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (New York: Riverhead, 2014), pp. 42–9Google Scholar.

7 Israel, Werner, ‘Event Horizons in Static Vacuum Space-Times’, Physical Revue 164 (1967), pp. 1776–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Parra came upon the expression through Thorne, Kip, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994)Google Scholar.

8 Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Luminet, Le destin de l'univers II, p. 544. For a reproduction of Parra's sketch, see Luminet, ‘Gravitational Music’, p. 199.

10 Susskind, Leonard, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), p. 298Google Scholar.

11 Randall, Lisa, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), pp. 24–7.

12 The title apparently pays homage to a famous article by Smolin, Lee, ‘Atoms of Space and Time’, Scientific American 290/1 (2004), pp. 56–65CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

13 In particular the terms ‘microdisorder’, ‘mesochaos’ and ‘macrostructure’; see Pape, Gerard, MUSIPOESCI. Écrits autour de la musique (Paris: Michel de Maule, 2015), pp. 140–42Google Scholar.

14 Readers unfamiliar with these theories might consult respectively Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark L., Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, and Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). On the implementation of these theories in music, see Zbikowski, Lawrence M., Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On their value in analysing compositional practices, see my book, Besada, José L., Metamodels in Compositional Practices: The Case of Alberto Posadas's Liturgia Fractal (Paris: Delatour France–IRCAM, 2017)Google Scholar.

15 Hutchins, Edwin, ‘Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends’, Journal of Pragmatics 37 (2005), pp. 1555–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Saslaw, Janna K., ‘Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music’, Journal of Music Theory 40/2 (1996), pp. 217–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brower, Candace, ‘Pathway, Blockage, and Containment in Density 21.5’, Theory & Practice 22–23 (1997–98), pp. 35–54Google Scholar; Larson, Steve, ‘Musical Forces and Melodic Patterns’, in Theory & Practice, 22–23 (1997–98), pp. 55–71Google Scholar; and Johnson, Mark L. and Larson, Steve, ‘Something in the way she moves: Metaphors of Musical Motion’, Metaphor & Symbol 18/2 (2003), pp. 63–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 As empirical psychology suggests; see Eitan, Zohar and Granot, Roni Y., ‘How Music Moves: Musical Parameters and Listeners' Images of Motion’, Music Perception 23/3 (2006), pp. 221–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Eitan, Zohan and Timmers, Renee, ‘Beethoven's Last Piano Sonata and Those Who Follow Crocodiles: Cross-Domain Mappings of Auditory Pitch in a Musical Context’, Cognition 114/3 (2010), pp. 405–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Related results taking conceptual blending as a framework are shown in Athanasopoulos, George and Antović, Mihailo, ‘Conceptual Integration of Sound and Image: A Model of Perceptual Modalities’, Musicæ Scuentiæ 22/1 (2018), pp. 72–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Zbikowski, Lawrence M., Foundations of Musical Grammar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration, ‘Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger’, in Physical Review Letters 116 (2016), https://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102.

20 Cairns-Smith, A. Graham, The Life Puzzle: On Crystals and Organisms and on the Possibility of a Crystal as an Ancestor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 121–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 It is significant that before Curtis Roads developed granular synthesis Iannis Xenakis had already formulated his conception of ‘sound quanta’; see Xenakis, Iannis, ‘Musiques formelles’, La Revue musicale 253–254 (1963), p. 61Google Scholar. Xenakis was, in turn, echoing the quantic theory of sound surmised by Gabor, Dennis, ‘Acoustical Quanta and the Theory of Hearing’, Nature 159 (1947), pp. 591–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Gibson, Benoît, The Instrumental Music of Iannis Xenakis: Theory, Practice, Self-Borrowing (Hillsdale and New York: Pendragon, 2011)Google Scholar.

23 The aural sources for these estimations are the third performance of Avant la fin … vers où? during its weekend premiere – recorded by Radio Nacional de España (22 April 2018) – and the French premiere of Inscape – recorded by France Musique (14 June 2018).

24 Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild and Harkins, Paul, ‘Contextual Incongruity and Musical Congruity: The Aesthetics and Humour of Mash-Ups’, Popular Music 31/1 (2012), pp. 87–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Personal communication (7 November 2018).

26 Its English translation is reproduced in Luminet, ‘Gravitational Music’, pp. 200–201.

27 For a more extended commentary see Jérémie Szpirglas’ programme note for the première of Voces Nómadas, at http://brahms.ircam.fr/works/work/40594/.