Scelsi and L’Itineraire: The Explorationof Sound1

Tristan Murail (translated Robert Hasegawa)

Speaking of Scelsi’s influence is difficult, but I will try to describe, in a historical orretrospective way, the encounter between Scelsi and the composers of my generation.It came about very simply: many of us have spent time at the Villa Medicis in Rome,

and that is where we met Scelsi, who (until very recently) completely avoidedtravelling. These last few years he has resumed travelling all over the world, but at the

time the only way to meet him was to visit him in Rome. He enjoyed attendingconcerts of contemporary music and came to the Villa each time a concert was held

there. I will concentrate on the three composers who, in certain ways, seem closest toScelsi: myself, Gerard Grisey and Michael Levinas. The three of us are also (not

coincidentally) linked by a movement and an ensemble called l’Itineraire; it wasthrough the Ensemble l’Itineraire that much of Scelsi’s music became known inFrance. I will explain later why the encounter with Scelsi affected us so profoundly.

Scelsi’s fame as a composer has been intermittent; he has gone through periods inwhich he was very well known and periods in which he was completely ignored.

Before the Second World War, he was well known in both poetic and musical circles.He wrote 12-tone music, which he has now almost completely renounced and

destroyed. After the war, he went through a period of obscurity. He returned to thepublic eye in the late 1950s with the sensational premiere in Paris of the Quattro Pezzi

per orchestra (su una nota sola). Afterwards, he fell into another period of neglect, andhis music was almost never played in Paris. He had to wait for years before his music

began to be performed again. It was in 1974, I believe, that as l’Itineraire we put onour first piece by Scelsi. Now, perhaps thanks to us (or so I like to think), Scelsi iswidely known and performed, particularly in Germany, sometimes in England, and a

little in France. We have been able to play and sometimes premiere a number ofchamber and ensemble pieces, such as Khoom (with Michiko Hirayama), Pranam I,

Pranam II, Anahit (one of Scelsi’s most beautiful pieces, for violin and ensemble) andManto.

To explain how our connection with Scelsi came about, I must explain a little aboutour path as musicians and composers. I will begin with myself, because it is the easiest.

While I was studying at the conservatory with Olivier Messiaen in the 1970s, theinfluence of the serialists was still predominant—even withMessiaen, who insisted that

Contemporary Music ReviewVol. 24, No. 2/3, April/June 2005, pp. 181 – 185

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2005 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/07494460500154830

we work serially and forbade the use of octaves. I tried this for a while, but then realized

that these techniques were not suitable for what I wanted to express in mymusic. I thustried to disengage myself from the serial school and at once attempted to find strong,

pure harmonic colours, for serial composition very often leads to a sort of uniformgreyness in the harmonic dimension. I also searched for a different approach to time: in

particular, a non-event-oriented time.All this (and also the influence ofXenakis, hiswayof seeing music as an architecture of time and the orchestra as a mass that one couldsculpt) ledme to compose very differently.One ofmyfirst pieces for orchestrawritten at

the conservatory, Altitude 8000, was based on these things: strong harmonic colours,with many octaves, fifths, etc., and a sense of time very different from the fragmented

time common in serialmusic, or even in themusic ofMessiaen. A few years later, I wrotea piece called Sables for orchestra, whichwas premiered at the Festival de Royan, where I

attempted a global sound with the orchestra. The individuality of the instrumentsvanished completely into the fused sound of the orchestra. In a certain sense, this piece

was made up of a single sound that lasted for the duration of the piece. Here, one canbegin to see the connection with Scelsi’s music.

Someofmycolleagueshavehadparallel paths. I think especiallyofGerardGrisey,who

was also influenced by Ligeti and Xenakis. I should add Stockhausen to the list, thinkingparticularly of Stimmung, a piece for six voices based on a single chord that is a fragment

of a harmonic spectrum.Grisey took this type of spectrum as a point of departure for hislater work. One of his first consciously spectral pieces was called Periodes—hewrote it at

the Villa Medicis. (I remember very well l’Itineraire’s performance of this piece at theVilla, which I believe Scelsi attended.) In spectral composition, musical sound (in fact,

natural sound) is taken as a model. The sound is analysed and influences thecomposition of the music at both the harmonic and formal levels.

Very early on, Michael Levinas attempted to transform the sound of instrumentsdirectly, in ways that recall certain aspects of Scelsi’s work. At the same time thatGrisey composed Periodes, Levinas wrote a piece called Appels, which connected the

instruments to natural resonators, snare drums, which totally transformed theinstrumental sounds. For my part, I tried to simulate electronic processes, which later

led to the more general idea of using audible formal processes to write music,replacing the older ideas of development and sectional form. As an example, I could

mention my piece Memoire-Erosion, written, I believe, in 1975, in which I tried tosimulate processes based on filtering, echo and feedback (the use of several tape

recorders that pass sounds from one to another). All this was done solely throughnotation, the score itself simulating the electronic processes. In the same way, and atabout the same time, Grisey simulated the process of ring modulation. A ring

modulator is an electronic device that can modify and enrich a natural sound.I mention all of this because of the influence it has had on instrumental techniques.

At first, like many other composers, we searched for new sounds obtained by specialinstrumental playing techniques. These include the well-known multiphonics on

wind instruments, or certain subtle alterations of the sound on string instruments,techniques that are found in Scelsi’s music, but even more in spectral composition

182 T. Murail (trans. R. Hasegawa)

and the music of the l’Itineraire composers. This new style of playing tends to allow

the fusion of instrumental timbres (or at least a very precise control of timbres anddynamics), which was necessary in our music to build a global sound from many

individual sounds. This style of playing is now fairly well known among youngermusicians, but ten years ago it was quite difficult to make musicians understand how

to approach these techniques. I do not know if it could be said that Scelsi exerted adirect influence on all I have talked about, but there are always unconsciousinfluences, and they could have been reinforced by certain convergences, which I will

now try to explain. Michael Levinas’s music and my own resemble each other verylittle, but they share a certain number of basic ideas: in particular, the exploration of

the interior of sounds. This exploration is a very important development for music atthe end of this century, and Scelsi was the pioneer.

To be sure, the techniques available to Scelsi, who worked essentially by intuitionand experimentation, differ greatly from ours—we have access to technical, scientific

methods of analysing sounds. Modern analytical instruments, provided byconventional electronics or now by the computer, give us the ability to understandthe structure of sounds in detail: their spectrum, i.e. the way they can be decomposed

into their elementary components; their dynamic envelope, or the way they vary intime; their transients, the way that they begin or end. The goal of certain techniques

in spectral music is the design of a global sound from this type of analysis. Then, weattempt to ‘resynthesize’ the sound with the technique that Gerard Grisey called

‘instrumental synthesis’, using the instruments as the elementary components of amore general global sound, the sound of the ensemble or orchestra as a whole. This is

a completely different approach from that of traditional composition, which wasessentially based on the stacking of lines, on counterpoint and harmony.

Many of Scelsi’s works are based on a single pitch, a single sound, which is variedand set into motion from within by many different techniques. I mentioned earlier awork that has made a mark in the history of music, the Quattro Pezzi per Orchestra

(su una nota sola). Each of these pieces is based on a single note, which is varied andagitated, all from within, so that the compositional process happens in the interior of

a single sound, rather than in the combination of many sounds. As a result, the sonicmaterial is also the form of the piece. It cannot even be said that one follows from the

other, that the form comes from the material, or that the material comes from theform, as in much other music. They are truly one and the same phenomenon; this is

an important idea for me, which has guided me in my own work. I think it is a verynew attitude toward musical discourse—it is an attitude absolutely contrary toclassical principles, contrary to both tonal and serial music, which are both based on

the combination of pre-existing elements. I often illustrate this idea by a metaphor,saying that with this approach, the composer becomes like a sculptor: he disengages a

form from a single mass, rather than constructing a form with a number of bricks likea mason.

This approach leads to a different conception of time, and the second majorconvergence between our music and Scelsi’s is what I call smooth time [temps lisse]. It

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is almost impossible to analyse most of Scelsi’s works in formal terms. Time unfolds

in continuous motion, without a break. I am aware that one can also find pieces inScelsi’s oeuvre with more abrupt rhythms and short segments, and I have sometimes

found it difficult to understand how these pieces are related to the ‘smooth’ pieces.Sometimes, the two tendencies coexist: for example, in Khoom, certain movements

are of the rhythmic type—somewhat contrapuntal, and a little angular—while othersare in the more typical continuous style. Be that as it may, Scelsi’s idea of smoothtime links him to several other composers who arrived at a similar concept; whether

they influenced one another is difficult to say. Ligeti, of course, belongs to this group.Gerard Grisey’s Jour, contre-jour is one of the most formally smooth pieces; it is based

entirely on continuous transformations, but (strictly speaking) has no sonic events.Smooth time does not necessarily mean stasis or the absence of movement or change,

but rather that there are no sharp breaks, and that the form is not sectional. Smoothtime is based instead on a continuous form, on continuous processes, and on

movements coming from within the sound itself. In Scelsi, one does not always findclearly oriented processes; that is to say one does not always have the sensation ofgoing towards something. The Fourth String Quartet is a clear exception. Its form is

extremely simple: a continuous climbing, a single sound that rises continually—except for, at certain moments, harmonic blossomings or lower resonances of the

endlessly ascending overall sound. It is a piece that is truly based on a singlephenomenon. The occasional absence of temporal orientation in Scelsi’s music is one

of the essential differences between his music and my own or Grisey’s, because westrive above all to create dynamism in our music, to give the music a clear

directionality, an orientation (in the topological sense of the word).Both this temporal aspect and the exploration of sound are built on certain

instrumental techniques, which could be described as research into a new type ofsound. I believe that this is one of Scelsi’s major preoccupations. I speak now not ofform, inspiration or aesthetics, but of technique. One of his main interests has been

the search for new sounds from instruments and the voice; this interest has made hima great connoisseur of instrumental effects, especially variations of timbre.

Particularly on string instruments, which he uses very often, he specifies the differentplaying techniques in great detail: for instance, the placement of the bow sul ponticello

or sul tasto, tremolo effects, or a wide vibrato. All of this, which is notated veryprecisely in his music, must be executed with equal precision, which is not easy. Scelsi

also uses many dynamic effects, such as sforzandi, which are, in my view, more thanjust surface effects. Often, he calls for scordatura, the retuning of a string instrumentso that the same pitch can be played on all four strings—not at the same time but in

alternation, as an arpeggio or in a fast tremolo. The pitch has a different timbre oneach string, owing to the different degrees of tension. This type of timbral subtlety

can be found in Grisey’s scores, and also in my own compositions. We havesometimes even gone so far as decomposing timbre into harmony, or recomposing

harmony into timbre. In fact, in the technique we use, timbre and harmony areconsidered two aspects of the same thing.

184 T. Murail (trans. R. Hasegawa)

Scelsi told me one day, ‘The quarter-tone is a true note, it is a note like all the

others.’’ He is right, but I do not completely agree with his approach to quarter-tones. For him, they act to modify the overall timbre of his music— truly to create

harmonies in quarter-tones would be entirely foreign to his musical language. Rather,he uses them to distort harmonies. Although the harmonic aspect is not the most

important in his work, one very often finds in Scelsi’s music strange harmonies,similar to triads or familiar chords, but slightly different. This effect is frequently dueto the use of quarter-tones, the use of almost-triads.

Microtonal intervals, and quarter-tones in particular, are used quite frequently intoday’s music. Many young composers use quarter-tones in one way or another.

However, I find that Scelsi’s use of quarter-tones is very different from my own,where the quarter-tone is no more than an expedient that provides an

approximation, finer than a semitone, to an exact acoustic frequency. Scelsi, onthe other hand, uses quarter-tones to give an expressive nuance to the sound.

To finish our discussion of instrumental techniques, I should mention the varioustorture instruments that Scelsi uses from time to time, in particular the resonators. Incertain pieces, he calls for special mutes (for string instruments), which he invented

himself. These mutes have the effect of adding a sort of interference, creating an‘impure’ sound. I believe this is one of the essential principles of Scelsi’s sound. I

could draw a comparison with African musics, where the most beautiful sound is not(as it is in the Western tradition) the purest sound, but on the contrary, a sound that

is enriched, distorted and charged with many interfering resonances. One of thetechniques is to make the sound of the instrument set another sounding body into

resonance. I would also include Scelsi’s vocal techniques in this comparison; theyproduce an ‘impure’ sound by comparison to classical vocal techniques. Here, I see a

connection to Michael Levinas, who uses the same type of sounds, and who hasundertaken the same sort of research with both voices and instruments.

Scelsi did some experiments in the domain of electronics, without doubt wilfully

primitive. You have to have visited him and seen his old tape recorders tounderstand. Scelsi had an Ondioline—one of the ancestors of the synthesizer, dating

(I believe) from 1945 or 1950—which showed his interest in electronic instruments.He made some ventures into tape music—I remember particularly a piece he played

for me, an experiment that consisted of completely twisted and saturated pianosounds, made with a small microphone and his ancient tape recorder, which easily

overloaded.2

Notes

[1] Editor’s note: This text was transcribed from an oral presentation given at Royaumont in1988, during a colloquium on Scelsi.

[2] I believe that this ‘tape piece’, once transcribed for strings, was the source for the very oddFifth Quartet.

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