Pierre MICHEL
After gaining his degrees in Musicology at the Sorbonne (Paris IV), Pierre Michel taught at the Strasbourg Conservatory before taking up the post of Lecturer at the University of Metz and then at the University of Strasbourg in 1998 (where he was appointed Professor in 2008). Pierre Michel had met Ligeti at the Acanthes-Academy (Aix-en-Provence) in 1979, and the composer supported him in the project of writing a book on his music: the result was the first book to be published in French in 1985 (Éditions Minerve, Paris), with interviews made in Vienna in 1981. After that Pierre Michel published several other papers on the “Chamber concerto” and “Le Grand Macabre”, and produced a webdocumentary in 2016 on the “Trio for violin, horn and piano” for UOH (Université Ouverte des Humanités : http://www.uoh.fr/front/notice?id=22d63080-640a-4af2-b934-d61b5fae7c0e), then produced together with Philippe Lalitte a special issue of Musimédiane concerning Ligeti's "Ten Pieces for Woodwindquintet". He translated an important part of the second French volume of Ligeti’s writings entitled “L’atelier du compositeur” (Éditions Contrechamps, Geneva). He has organised numerous conferences and workshops with musicians, has published also articles and books about composers like Luigi Dallapiccola, B.A. Zimmermann, Klaus Huber, Hans Zender, Franco Donatoni, Wolfgang Rihm, Gilbert Amy, Paul Méfano, Walter Zimmermann. He edited several volumes of writings by composers in France : Ferruccio Busoni, Luigi Dallapiccola, Gilbert Amy, Tristan Murail (also available in English), Hans Zender, Wolfgang Rihm. He has supervised many MA and PhD theses. He also edits several French publications. He implemented the project to set up the GREAM Centre of Research Excellence (in 2011) whose director he was till 2016. He is also a musician, mainly in the field of jazz, with bands like "Bise de Buse" and "Ovale". His research work covers Western art music since 1945, including modern jazz.
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Introduction
By Pierre Michel
Pascal Dusapin's music, along with other French composers of his generation (Philippe Fénelon, Philippe Manoury, Florence Baschet, Philippe Hurel, Philippe Schoeller and others), still calls for study and closer scrutiny from various points of view. A number of books (including those by Jacques Amblard and Olga Garbuz) and journal issues mentioned by the authors in this collection have already extensively examined his work. The development of his music, however, really deserves attention, not only for the quality of the works, some of which are detailed here, but also as a kind of bearer or marker of the changes that have taken place in western art music since the early 1980s, like Wolfgang Rihm in Germany, for instance. His works have been a landmark of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, ranging from solo instrumental works to opera; they have often been premiered in Strasbourg, where the initiative for our one-day conference in 2019 originated, and have been commissioned by Strasbourg-based performers such as Armand Angster and Françoise Kubler (founders of the
Ensemble Accroche Note)1. Although this issue of Music as Act cannot cover all the topics or give a comprehensive overview of Dusapin's output, given that it is based on a brief one-day study session organised by the university and the GREAM research centre in conjunction with
the Strasbourg Conservatoire, the articles in this issue will nevertheless provide a useful addition to existing publications, offering new insights and examining Dusapin's work from a much more up-to-date context. To give a true temporal perspective on his development, we have also republished a number of older texts that are not widely known today.
In the first section of this issue, Jacques Amblard provides a "framework" for a more musicological exploration of recent works, taking a retrospective look at the past and offering a survey of Dusapin's career since the end of the twentieth century, noting that he "became an important opera composer" with Medeamaterial (1991), and discussing the "textural romanticism" of the 2010s. It strikes us that this specialist perspective is particularly useful
today if we are to gain a better appreciation of this composer's recent artistic achievements, especially with regard to opera and the piano.
The second part of this issue concerns the analysis of works and research in performance practice. We republish here an earlier essay by the late André Riotte, who took a formalist approach to analysing Inside for solo viola (1980) that focused on micro-events and the "code of symbolic representation of language". This text was published by the Villa Médicis in Rome at the time of the work's premiere in 1981. In a different vein, Chen Fan (PhD student at the University of Strasbourg) analyses "For O." for two sopranos and two bass clarinets (1988, premiered in 1989 at the Festival Musica in Strasbourg), examining in detail the relationship between music and text and the interactions between voices and instrument.
Marta Grabócz, the organiser of the 2019 one-day seminar and a musicologist with a longstanding interest in contemporary repertoires, has highlighted certain notions, concepts and statements by the composer related to questions of form and expression, taking as an example
Solo No. 1 for orchestra: Go (1992); she emphasises what was perhaps most apparent in the music of this period: the search for expression and emotion for the listener. Mengqi Wang approaches the second movement of Beckett's Bones, "When Forty Winters..." as an object of analysis, comparing the two versions (since an early version of the work was entitled Echo's bones) on the basis of the poetic texts used, then focusing on the vocal writing and the fluidity of the overall sonority. Meanwhile, Arthur Skoric examines a "perennial work" by Pascal Dusapin entitled "In Nomine Lucis", commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron to mark the pantheonisation of Maurice Genevoix on 11 November 2020, a veritable sound sculpture that marks one of the composer's recent collaborations with other artists, in this case the German Anselm Kiefer. Finally, pianist Kotoko Matsuda looks at the Etudes for piano from the point of view of the performer, noting that Dusapin "is surprisingly open to the possibility of letting the pianist's own interpretation influence the musical result". Her essay, drawing on a masterclass with the
composer and a performance of Etude No. 1 in his presence, examines several recorded versions, complete with score, in order to shed light on recent practices in the piano performances of contemporary works.
The third section of this issue brings together a number of documents that have already been published but are little known to the public because they date back a long time and were issued in rather specific contexts. In the La Rochelle interview (May 1980), Dusapin often talks about Xenakis and his influence at the start of his career, and about the context of the time; one
work in particular is discussed: the String Trio "Musique fugitive", which was premiered two months later in Aix-en-Provence. The composer's text, written a few years later for the Villa Medicis in Rome (April 1982), takes a fairly precise musical approach to the two major pieces of the early 1980s: "Musique fugitive" and "Musique captive" (also from 1980, for instrumental
ensemble). Oliver Class concludes this issue with a review of the Ensemble Accroche Note's 2020 compilation CD, an opportunity for the author to revisit the almost forty-year collaboration between Dusapin and the Strasbourg-based ensemble, which has given rise to three monograph recordings and numerous premieres.
Pierre MICHEL
His music’s timbral qualities have never been examined in depth, even though they struck me as soon as I began researching it. Back then I read an article by Gérard Grisey whose musical thought I found stimulating, and occasionally close to some of the Italian composer’s concerns, even though Dallapiccola’s style by no means resembles that of Grisey.
Beyond the obvious links between his works and those of the Second Viennese School, I argue that this rapprochement with some of the musicians of later generations with a particular interest in timbre is relevant today in relation to the research on timbre and orchestration undertaken by the ACTOR project, and in particular the work of Touizrar and McAdams.
The focus here is primarily on vocal works from Goethe Lieder (1953) to Commiato (1972), centered on the ‘super-instrument’ described by Alain Galliari (in his book on Webern), with a few orchestral exceptions (as techniques are occasionally comparable).
A number of pieces that combine voice or several voices with instruments (without getting into opera) are examined, in an effort to carve a path for research on the composite timbre of vocal and instrumental works. The paper is divided into six parts : I – Counterpoints, canons and timbre ; II Conception and perception of timbres beyond the study of combinatorics ; III Timbre and form ; IV A distinctive instrumental group ; V - Proposals for a textural auditive (listening) analysis ; VI – Segmental grouping and instrumental voicing: Commiato. It concludes by discussing the question of interpretation, based on recordings by various singers and on a few ideas put forward by singer and theoretician Valérie Philippin, emphasizing the importance of achieving a suitable timbral fusion between voices and instruments.
Videos of the rehearsals on 20 and 21 April 2016 in Zurich
Video interviews with the conductor and some of the musicians
Photos of personal scores annotated by the conductor
https://www.musimediane.com/numero-13/
To explore this new path in Ligeti's work, which was followed by several choral pieces or pieces for vocal ensembles with texts, Pierre Michel and Maryse Staiber propose a multidisciplinary musicological and literary approach that they have already developed around other composers and poets (Wolfgang Rihm and Paul Celan, Paul Méfano and Paul Éluard or Yves Bonnefoy, etc.). This essay will also make it possible to better acquaint the English-speaking public with the context of German poetry and the profound references of these poems, as well as the musical specificities of this important work.
musical works are understood, taking into account the approaches adopted by the
musician, the composer, the scholar-analyst and the scholar-musician. The aim is
to encourage readers to take a fresh look at the functions of the score within the
general context of non-tonal works in post-1945 Europe. Theoretical approaches
based on several criteria that should help us understand such music will also be
proposed, including the performing process and interpretation of works in terms
of listening and music reception, above all during a concert or a rehearsal. From
this standpoint, the performer is a key stakeholder in the music ‘as act’. An attempt
will also be made to define approaches for a pluralistic evaluation of works by
affirming the status of a living, sonorous and visual art that lies beyond the score
and the composer’s indications.