The creation of structural hierarchies in the orchestral music of Tristan Murail The spectralist style was notable among the post-war avant-garde for its focus on techniques capable of producing forms and structures that were clearly, audibly perceptible; while acknowledging its influence, Tristan Murail complained of serialism s refusal to make even the slightest concessions to the phenomena of auditory perception. 1 Though spectralism s harmony has received much analytical attention, its innovations in the temporal/formal realm are the more significant achievement. Structures arise not solely through harmonic progression, but via texture, timbre, surface motivic material, and especially, control of formal proportions. Here I challenge the notion that a non-tonal harmonic scheme and intricate surface textures prevent modernist repertoires from articulating complex but perceptible largescale foreground-middleground-background hierarchic structures. 2 This paper examines three Murail pieces Désintégrations, Gondwana, and Time and again that do this to varying degrees. Each piece opens with bell-like orchestral attacks, with the space between attacks in unmetered durational time. 3 These establish the notion of directed process as central to the spectral soundworld (Fig. 1). They also pull our time-sense up beyond the level of localized meter where it would generally rest in a metered piece. Because no foreground rhythmic pulse is established, our perception focuses on a middleground meter in which we perceive timespans of 10-30 seconds as a single beat; the successive attacks, each evolving perceptibly from the previous one, weld the beats into a unified bar lasting several minutes. Désintégrations (1982) is best heard as an example of Jonathan Kramer s moment form, in which each bar /section is self-contained and isolated from the others. 4 Its many sections do not overlap and each section s process is internal and completed before it moves on to the next. Gondwana (1980) contains fewer discrete sections. Its climactic moment is accomplished by fiat, discernible more by surface salience factors (maximum textural density, extreme dynamics) than by deep structure; but the piece nevertheless more nearly approaches a form in which each section is heard as discrete but integrated with the others. Time and again (1985) contains the most convincing use of foreground and background activity to complement the middleground temporal strata that characterizes all three pieces (Fig. 2). Its foreground is rich in thematic elements which, as they recur in shifting contexts, unify our hearing as an unfolding totality. At the deepest level, A.1-G.1 serve as structural upbeat, and timbre, texture, and formal proportions unite with harmony a dramatic statement of the pure overtone series, previously withheld to articulate the structural downbeat at G.1. The identification of structure at deep levels is a subjective art. This paper offers new strategies for hearing the structures of spectral and post-spectral pieces. In doing so, it argues for the possibility of complex relationships and hierarchy in the postwar avant-garde repertoire; but it argues, too, that analysis need not rely too heavily on patterns found more in the score than the aural experience of the piece for such structures to emerge. 1 Murail, 2000 2 Glaser, 2000, Kramer, 1988 3 Cornicello, 2000 4 Kramer, 1988
Fig. 3. Spectralists, post-spectralists, proto-spectralists, quasi-spectralists. Spectralists Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) Tristan Murail (b. 1947) Hugues Dufourt (b. 1943) Michaël Lévinas (b. 1949) Post-spectralists (studied with or influenced by spectralists) Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) Philippe Hurel (b. 1955) Marc-André Dalbavie (b. 1961) Proto-spectralists (cited as influential by spectralists) Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Edgard Varèse (1883-1965) Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) Quasi-spectralists (contemporaries not directly associated with the spectralists whose work shows aspects of spectral thought) Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) Per Nørgård (b. 1932) Horațiu Rădulescu (1942-2008) Georg Friedrich Haas (b. 1953) Bibliography Anderson, Julian and Tristan Murail. In Harmony. Julian Anderson Introduces the Music and Ideas of Tristan Murail. The Musical Times, vol. 134, no. 1804 (June, 1993): 321-323 Castanet, P. A. 2000. Gérard Grisey and the Foliation of Time. Translated by Joshua Fineberg. Contemporary Music Review, vol. 19, no. 3 (2000): 29-40 Cornicello, Anthony. 2000. Timbral Organization in Tristan Murail s Désintégrations and Rituals by Anthony Cornicello. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation.) Brandeis University, MA Fineberg, Joshua. 2000. Spectral music. Contemporary Music Review, vol. 19, no. 2 (2000): 1-5 Glaser, Susan. 2000. The Missing Link: Connections Between Musical and Linguistic Prosody. Contemporary Music Review, vol. 19, no. 3 (2000): 131-154 Grisey, Gérard. 2000. Did You Say Spectral? Translated by Joshua Fineberg. Contemporary Music Review, vol. 19, no. 3 (2000): 1-3
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