Tristan Murail in studio
Musical Tribulations: Artistic Issues
Le Livre des merveilles (The Book of Wonders), also known as Devisement du monde (The Making of the World), is the sometimes completely whimsical and fantastical account of Marco Polo's journey to China, as recounted to the Tuscan poet Rustician of Pisa. The book made an indelible impression, but it also betrays the extremely fragmented and often erroneous knowledge we still have of the Middle Kingdom today.
This hiatus is the first experience of any visitor who sets foot there: "We don't know China”, says Tristan Murail. "Or only through Westernised clichés. Everything there is very different from what we imagine: the architecture, the cuisine – and of course the music. I have been a visiting professor at the Shanghai Conservatory for almost a decade now, and I've been surprised to find that the traditions there are still very much alive, including the musical ones, some of which go back thousands of years. The Chinese go so far as to develop ‘modernized’ versions of their traditional instruments. For example, I heard a sheng – a mouth organ made up of a bundle of bamboo pipes – tuned not in the traditional pentatonic mode but chromatically, which makes it possible to play atonal music.”
This led to the idea of a musical project: the Shanghai Conservatory asked him to compose a piece for these traditional instruments, either adapted or not. Initially, the ambition was even to form a full-scale symphony orchestra for Chinese musical instruments. This proved to be a complicated undertaking, as the Chinese instrumentarium lacked bass frequencies in particular, before coming up with the idea of a composition for guzheng (a plucked string instrument from the table zither family), a 19-string ensemble, and electronics. However, Tristan Murail does not rule out the possibility, at a later date, of producing an arrangement for Chinese string instruments, such as the erhu – a Chinese violin, which has just two strings and is played like a viola da gamba, with the difference that the bow passes between the strings and the table.
If Murail has set his sights on the guzheng, it is of course because of its time-honored history dating back to the 3rd century BC. The guzheng is said to be the common ancestor of a multitude of similar instruments that spread across East Asia: the Vietnamese đàn tranh, the Japanese koto, the Korean gayageum, the Mongolian yatga, the Soundanese kacapi, the Kazakh jetygen. But it is also known for the immense instrumental virtuosity that has developed over the past 24 centuries. The performer produces sound using mainly his or her right hand, but the left hand has a wide range of playing modes at its disposal, applied to the left side of the string, upstream from the bridge: alterations, glissandos, vibratos controlled to the millimeter... One final detail that weighed in the balance: since each of the instrument's 21 strings rests on a movable bridge, they can be tuned individually, giving the composer an infinite number of pitches to choose from.
In addition to providing a sound framework for the piece, The Book of Wonders also provides a formal framework. "Marco Polo's story is made up of a multitude of stories, of varying length, some of which are clearly fictitious", says Tristan Murail. “From this point of view, the play is like a picture book that you leaf through, sometimes lingering on a few images or episodes, which may be particularly terrifying or attractive, disturbing or lavishly ornamented."
Described in this way, the set-up is reminiscent of Tableaux d’une exposition, but here the fragments are far less developed than in Mussorgsky's work, with some miniatures lasting barely a few seconds. Each miniature has its own distinctive personality however, “the difficulty lies in finding a form of continuity in this succession. While not a solo instrument in a concert type definition, the guzheng contributes to this sense of continuity, musically embodying the reader/viewer, be they Marco Polo or myself, as they stroll from one tableau to the next.”
Tuning Sounds from Within: Technological Issues
"Like many fixed-string instruments, even if you can change its pitch by moving the bridge or exerting pressure on the non-vibrating part of the string, the real problem with the guzheng is that its harmonic field is fixed once and for all”, notes Tristan Murail. "Unless you use computer music software. Harmonizer, ring modulation... then there are many solutions, both for transforming the sound produced by the soloist in real-time, but also for synthesizing other sounds that are totally foreign to the harmonic field of the instrument as it is played on stage. For over two years now, I've been experimenting with a guzheng made available to me by IRCAM, accompanied by Serge Lemouton. This is often how I proceed with my electronic pieces: first I do a few tests to see if what I have in mind is feasible. Then I compose the piece with all these electronic sounds in mind, but not yet finalized. Only then are the synthesized sounds and transformations refined."
In addition to the guzheng, the piece's electronics are also based on the sounds of a set of Chinese bronze bells. "This set, which dates from the 2nd century BC, is kept in the museum of the now infamous city of Wuhan”, explains Murail. "There's obviously no question of moving these twenty or so ancient bells – we haven't even had permission to record them. But it just so happens that the Shanghai Museum has a copy, which I was able to have sampled by a musicologist at the conservatory."
"I don't, however, use the original sound of the bells. Using a set of pre-recorded samples poses the risk of redundant effects. Instead, by analyzing these sounds, I try to recreate those of the bells in all their richness. I can also create others that are lower or higher pitched than the existing ones, or lengthen or shorten the resonance, add new partials or shift partials in frequency... Since L’esprit des dunes, which I produced at IRCAM in 1993-1994, I have developed techniques that allow me to tune the sounds from within. Instead of creating harmonies by superimposing sounds, I create them within the sound itself. Taken a step further, these techniques allow a bell sound to be stripped of its sonic identity by doing away with certain key elements of the bell's dynamic profile (a frank and brutal attack, followed by a logarithmic decay, with very significant attack transients), leaving only the color of the resonance and remaining in pure harmony."
For this work as a sound alchemist, Tristan Murail works primarily with OpenMusic software, which he describes as "the composer's headquarters". However, the programs developed thirty years ago for L’esprit des dunes no longer work in the new computer environments. They therefore have to be recreated and adjusted to obtain the desired result. For this piece", recalls the composer, "I used a method of sound synthesis in real-time, using forty oscillators put together (this was the limit of computers at the time), with partial tracking from the very beginning to the very end of the sound. The tool I used at the time is obsolete. Today, Partiel software is supposed to do the same thing, so I'll have to give it a try."
Photo : Tristan Murail en studio à l'Ircam © Elisabeth Schneider
Listen to: Tristan Murail
- L'esprit des dunes by Tristan Murail, 1994 (recorded at IRCAM, 2014)
- Désintégrations by Tristan Murail (recorded at the Centre Pompidou, 1993)
- Le fou à pattes bleues by Tristan Murail, 1990 (recorded at IRCAM, 1998)
- Cloches d'adieu, et un sourire... by Tristan Murail, 1992 (recorded at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 2003)
- Serendib by Tristan Murail, 1991 (recorded at the Centre Pompidou, 1993)
Biography
