‘LA NOTATION NE PEUT RENDRE COMPTE DU FAIT’: PERFORMING MURAIL'S ‘TERRITOIRES DE L'OUBLI’

Extract

For contemporary music in America and Europe, the 1970s were a time in which the old order was changing, giving place to a new avant-garde. In Germany, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik was stagnating under the inept leadership of Ernst Thomas, savaged by the press and ridden with inner squabbling and politics. For 25 years a bastion of musical innovation and experimentation, Darmstadt now seemed little more than ‘the crumbling edifice of the avant-garde's chief fortress’. The focus was shifting to Paris, where, in 1977, IRCAM opened beneath the Centre Georges Pompidou. Led by Pierre Boulez and staffed by Luciano Berio, Vinko Globokar, Max Mathews, and Jean-Claude Risset, its stated mission was to reunite science and music and create new modes of performance. Across the Channel, the composers of the New Complexity (Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon, Richard Barrett, and Chris Dench) were also redefining performance practice, focusing not on technology but on notation and its implications for virtuosity. And in America, different schools of musical thought were colliding in the streets and the academy. Leonard Bernstein delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, then presented his ‘unanswered question’ to the American public, on television, in 1976. And uptown and downtown were ensconced, with Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman appointed to the faculties at the Juilliard School and the State University of New York at Buffalo, respectively. On both sides of the Atlantic, seminal artistic statements were being made, heralding the unruly adolescence of a new and disparate avant-garde no longer directly connected to the Second World War.