Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T09:11:07.399Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

BOULEZ, INFORMATION SCIENCE AND IRCAM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2016

Robin Maconie
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The rise of information science and its effect on contemporary arts is a topic raised in Stravinsky and Craft's Memories and Commentaries in 1959. It makes sense to inquire how the fundamental priorities and exact discriminations of communications science might have altered the ground rules of musical invention and contemporary listening habits. Answers lie thin on the ground, the few composers most deeply implicated in the information revolution – Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage in particular – having chosen to remain silent on issues relating to the hidden side of the avant-garde. ‘No gossip!’ said Stockhausen to me, in a blunt email in 1998.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 71 , Issue 279 , January 2017 , pp. 38 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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.)

References

1 ‘Stravinsky at Eighty-Five’, New York Review of Books, October 1967.

2 Gertner, Jon, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin Books, 2012)Google Scholar.

3 Cage, John, ‘For More New Sounds’, Modern Music (April–May 1942), reprinted in Kostelanetz, Richard. ed., John Cage (London: Allen Lane, 1970), pp. 64–6Google Scholar.

4 ‘The Voder – Homer Dudley (Bell Labs) 1939’. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyI_dM5cGo (accessed 22 June 2016).

5 ‘Percussion Concert: Band Bangs Things to Make Music’. LIFE, 15 March 15 1943. Article reproduced in Kostelanetz ed., John Cage, figures 7–16.

6 Dmitri Tiomkin's score for the 1951 sci-fi movie The Thing (from another world) is typical. Alexander Courage's theme music for the Star Trek television series substituted a wordless soprano voice for the ondes martenot, at producer Gene Roddenberry's insistence, in order to avoid frightening younger viewers. Steiner, Fred, ‘Music for Star Trek: Scoring a Television Show in the Sixties’, in Wonderful Inventions: Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound at the Library of Congress, ed. Newsom, Iris (Washington: Library of Congress, 1985), pp. 287–309 Google Scholar.

7 Goléa, Antoine, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris: Julliard, 1961), p. 248 Google Scholar.

8 Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen, p. 251.

9 Perle, George, Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 146nGoogle Scholar. N.B. This is the only mention of Messiaen and Mode de valeurs in Perle's entire study.

10 Samuel, Claude, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen, tr. Aprahamian, Felix (London: Stainer and Bell, 1976), pp. 46–7Google Scholar.

11 Samuel, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen, p. 116 (emphasis added).

12 Célestin Deliège to the author, private communication, May 2003. My translation.

13 Letter to Cage, August 1951, in Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, ed., The Boulez–Cage Correspondence tr. Samuels, Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 98–103 Google Scholar.

14 Pierre Boulez. Interview with Hall, Barrie, Music and Musicians, 14 (1) (1965)Google Scholar.

15 Peyser, Joan, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma (London: Cassell, 1977), p. 181 Google Scholar.

16 Berio, Luciano, Two Interviews: with Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), p. 19 Google Scholar.

17 Forte, Allen, The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

18 Deliège, Célestin, Pierre Boulez: Conversations with Célestin Deliège (London: Eulenberg, 1976), pp. 55–62 Google Scholar.

19 Gertner, The Idea Factory, p. 325.

20 Schrader, Barry, Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), pp. 152–3Google Scholar.

21 Mathews, Max, in Curtis Roads, ed., Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 9 Google Scholar.

22 Gertner, The Idea Factory, p. 185.

23 At its premiere, the reception of Poésie pour Pouvoir was lukewarm, and the work was subsequently withdrawn.

24 Mathews, Max V. and Rosler, Leonard, ‘Graphical Language for the Scores of Computer-Generated Sounds’ in Music by Computers, ed. von Foerster, Heinz and Beauchamp, James W. (New York: Wiley, 1969), pp. 84–114 Google Scholar

25 Risset, Jean-Claude, ‘Musique et informatique’ in La musique en projet, ed. Marger, Brigitte (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 48–68 Google Scholar

26 Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma, p. 260.

27 Interview in Computer Music Journal 4.4 (1980); reprinted in Roads, Curtis, ed., The Music Machine (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 5–12 Google Scholar.

28 Pesic, Peter, Music and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

29 Alex.Bellos, Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers, and Numbers Reflect Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 131 Google Scholar.

30 Born, Georgina, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Pierce, John R., The Science of Musical Sound (New York: Scientific American Books, W. H. Freeman, 1983)Google Scholar.