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Rich with aesthetic influences, opposing ideologies, collaborations, connections, and friendships, the work of Denis Dufour is that of several lifetimes. An exhaustive examination of it would require grasping each of his decisive trajectories. His compositional career began in the 1970s under the influences of Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) and Ivo Malec (1925-2019), and it captured and built upon the stylistic and technological developments from after the Second World War. To date, he has composed nearly two hundred high-quality and sonorous works.1 In both acousmatic and instrumental music, as well as in mixed music and real-time music,2 Dufour has composed and championed large-scale works that have frequently been hailed by critics, including Bocalises, petite suite (1977), which won first prize at the Luigi Russolo International Composition Competition; PH 27-80 (2008), which earned the SACEM prize for best electroacoustic composition; Ourlé du lac (The Lake’s Edge, 1984) for violin, synthesizer, and real-time digital transformations, which was one of the first works of this type produced with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) Syter system created at IRCAM; and Chanson pensive (Pensive Song, 1990), an instrumental piece premiered by Ensemble 2e2m. To understand the reach of this inexhaustible creator, one must also mention his outreach and educational activities. Dufour was a member of the GRM from 1976 to 2000 and a founding member of the GRM Trio in 1977 (which would become the ensemble TM+). As a professor, he founded the composition studios at the Lyon Conservatory in 1980, in Perpignan in 1995, and in Paris in 2007, where he trained more than 250 students.3 In the 1990s, he founded Motus Music4 and the Futura Festival.5
Dufour’s activity branched into three main dimensions. First, his craftmanship in composing lies in his proximity to the surrounding environment, closely related to an artisanry he developed in his childhood. Second, later in his career, he established links between seemingly incompatible musical aesthetics. Third, determined to ensure the sustainability of twentieth-century composition, notably through its inclusion in society, he encourages everyone to embrace and nurture the artistic spaces that surround us.
Dufour’s work calls into question the common distinction between art and artisanry, as he grew up in close contact with nature and was inspired to draw from it an approach to raw artistic material. Building, shaping, and inventing put him in relationship with the world around him and allowed him to take notice of its latent potential for art. “I sculpted wood, made enamels on copper plates. I was given a Super 8 camera, and I made films,” he related.6</sup In his youth, he was not immediately drawn to music. He would turn to it later in life.
As a shrewd young aesthete and a self-taught learner, he confronted art confidently and independently. Music proved to be more of a challenge for him than other artistic domains, and yet, he realized its potential for rich expression. At the age of 19, he turned his whole attention to the classical music courses offered at the Lyon Conservatory: music theory, viola, harmony, counterpoint, analysis, aesthetics, and history. By now, he had the sole objective of becoming a composer.
“Electroacoustics”— this was the word Malec repeated during their meeting at his Parisian home. Thanks to Malec, Dufour understood that contemporary music contains an immense and unexplored creative potential that can no longer be confined to the theories and instrumental techniques of the past. From that moment on, he would throw himself into exploring that potential. He studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris in Schaeffer’s electroacoustic composition studio7 in 1974, then with Malec two years later. Dufour has kept exploring ever since.
He discovered a mirror universe into which he projects reality and learns to better recognize the feelings and emotions it arouses. He then conveys them through his own artistic ideas. In this way, he does not conceive of composition as merely an abstraction of notes or an approach to their organization, but rather as a means of capturing and harnessing a part of the complex sonic universe to express sensitive human qualities. To do so takes both experimentation and practice, and this conception of musical art considers both the artistic object and the medium into which it is fused. This is why Dufour thinks of composition as artisanry. It provides a set of techniques that can be applied to the object, and, as often as desired and even as early as the conception phase, the result can be tested by playing it on sound recordings or on instruments, so that the composer can share the object and techniques with others, refine them, and see how the musical proposal stands up against the initial artistic intention.8 This approach is a result from the lessons with Schaeffer and Malec. On the one hand was Schaeffer’s musique concrète and an experimental approach built on new, twentieth-century sound technologies; it was meant to extend the boundaries of human artistic perception and comprehension. On the other was Malec’s insistence on, in Dufour’s words, the importance of “the aesthetic coherence and the functional qualities of the score, its viability, its playability.”
From conception to reception, a musical work is always situated within a perceptive reality. It cannot be reduced to theoretical systems. This almost naturalist conception of music makes Dufour’s approach accessible even to novices of art music. His works reflect a personal relationship to individuals and their rites (Messe à l’usage des enfants [Mass for Children], Messe à l’usage des vieillards [Mass for the Elderly], La douceur a des cils [The Softness of Eyelashes], En effeuillant la marguerite [Plucking Daisies]), psychological troubles (the cycle [work: 58731][Le Livre des désordres] [The Book of Disorders], Notre besoin de consolation est impossible à rassasier [Our Need for Consolation Cannot Be Quenched], Litanie pour les vierges [Litany for Virgins]), objects of daily life and human activity (Bocalises, Altitude, Cinq formes d’appel, Hentai), animals (Cycle des Marais [Cycle of the Marshlands], In-quarto, La Nuit de Dibdak [The Night of Didbak]), urban environments (Entre dames [Among Ladies], Les Cris de Tatibagan [The Screams of Tatibagan]), plants (Dionaea, Amor Niger L., Symphonie des simples [Symphony of the Simple]), landscapes (Terra incognita, Nautilus, Avalanche), and nature (La terre est ronde [The Earth Is Round], Le Mystère des tornades [Mystery of Tornados], Tapovan). Through composition, Dufour brings the surrounding environment closer to the listener, as if to suggest sounds emanating from our inner worlds. Inversely, this dreamy musical mirror-world, even if it might stand alone as art, also offers a way to “reopen one’s musical ear” to the potential art that surrounds us. That world seems to better grasp what is real and recall the circumstances of artistic perception.
This proximity to reality makes it all the more obvious when Dufour breaks free from this theme in other pieces. First, he shaped a musical sound environment in which articulations and sequences are organized by rules that are plausibly quasi-natural — a “why-not aesthetic,” to adopt an expression from Dufour’s friend Jean-Christophe Thomas. Then from the 1990s, Dufour unveiled new rules: a supernatural, or quasi-supernatural, order with registers similar to those in fantasy, mythology, or tales. The universes of Tom et la Licorne (Tom and the Unicorn, 1991), Archéoptéryx (1992), Allégorie (1995), and Blue Rocket on a Rocky Shore (2013) are examples. According to Dufour, music must be nourished by the psyche. It is evocative and has the power to skip between a sometimes realist, sometimes fantastic narrative. Music reminds us that the preoccupations, questions, and contemplations we feel in reality can tend toward surprise, stupefaction, or strangeness. In this way, his work illustrates his ambition to maintain a broad openness to all sound proposals, even when narrative references blur and dissipate so that listeners can construct their own paths.
Although Dufour somewhat distances his music from the scholarly musical tradition, his aesthetic affinity with Jean-Philippe Rameau is clear in the “movements, phrases, soaring figures, and motifs that can be committed to memory,” as well as “in dynamics and balance” mastered through compositional “precision.” Dufour perpetuates longstanding formalities so the music will seem relevant to the listener and can be explained and systematized, or theorized in relation to familiar experience. He has explicitly referred to Rameau’s work. The fifth movement of his instrumental piece Cinq formes d’appel (Five Types of Calls, 2013) is a revised transcription of Rameau’s The Call of the Birds. Dufour has also alluded to more general correspondences between contemporary music and music from earlier times, such as between “La Comptine” from Variations pour une porte et un soupir (Variations for a Door and a Sigh) by Pierre Henry and Sarabande from Cello Suite No. 5 by Johann Sebastien Bach. Dufour explicitly reuses forms from early music, such as in his two masses, which “use the structure of an ordinary Catholic mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Agnus Dei and Sanctus.” In a completely different register, his Variations acousmatiques (Acousmatic Variations, 2011) are a theme and eleven variations, each sixty-six seconds long, in which recorded sounds are treated with classical imitative processes, including retrograde and transposition. For Dufour, contemporary music is never completely cut off from fundamental points of reference. These continue to be perceived to support a piece’s internal coherence and continue to be questioned, if not reused, even by the most radical composers of today. “The driving forces behind music are often the same,” Dufour said, “whatever the period, practices, or technology.”
In many respects, Dufour’s work is rooted in our times, particularly in terms of the theoretical and practical advances that were an inevitable breaking point for a whole generation of composers. The most brutal, profound, and irreversible upheaval was certainly that of technology, which led to the chaos of two world wars and the crisis of tonal music. Depending on the composer and the evolution of their artistic intentions, sound technology was treated with skepticism, radicalism, or opportunism. Dufour combined technology and musical artisanry, inevitably filling his works with the characteristic sound markers of this transitional period. Primary are the materials he uses: sounds from sources of all sorts, including new technologies. He explored sounds that, on their own, were not considered musical, to the point where today “there aren’t any sounds that astonish anyone.” Secondly, he developed the tools of his time and of his contemporaries: acoustic and analog sound, magnetic tapes and synthesizers.9 However, even with the advent of the digital, Dufour remained focused on the source of sound rather than relying on plugins, which he found are overly systematic in the way they transform sound and which he compared to “industrial tomato sauce.” His vocabulary is not constrained to sound effects or innovations from engineer-composers.10 Rather, in his instrumental and acousmatic works, he allows major and minor chords and other traditional melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic “possibilities.” In sum, he seeks out a wealth of material, even if it is simple and familiar (for example, the mason jars used for Bocalises). After having patiently put together his sound palette, his work consists in assembling the pieces of a temporal puzzle and fitting them together into a fresco of contrasts and lyricism.11
It is worthy of mention that Dufour sometimes uses conceptual systems and formulas to generate ideas, whether it be for structure, melody, rhythm, dynamics, or other aspects. He nevertheless pointed out that “as a final measure, I use perceptive criteria to verify the relevance of a score.” Ultimately, his musique is not written in an abstract way, ex nihilo, but rather reassembles a soundscape which, rich in its organic events and properties, could (or should?) have been. The resulting music reveals a proximity to the contemporary listener in its familiarity and accessibility, and within contemporary musical evolutions. All the while, Dufour aims for his music to transcend the grip of evolving technologies, by remaining focused on the original principles of music, particularly to be “a recognizable originality, sound, and form.”
Schaeffer’s school of thought, of which Dufour was a student, was marked by technological advances, but also transversal partnerships with other art forms. Within the Research Department,12 several research groups operated in parallel to the GRM and produced collaborative and emblematic works, such as La symphonie pour un homme seul (Symphony for One Man Alone, 1950) by Schaeffer and Henry, accompanied by Maurice Béjart’s eponymous ballet. At the GRM, Dufour was an assistant to François Bayle, Guy Reibel, and Marcel Landowski. His works transmit an entire generation’s respect for the father of concrète/acousmatic music. Just as Dufour had reinterpreted Rameau’s music, he would also dedicate an entire cycle to Schaeffer: Souvenir de Pierre (Remembering Pierre), Stèle pour Pierre Schaeffer (Stela for Pierre Schaeffer), and others.
Dufour has continued in this collaborative spirit, whether in educational initiatives on contemporary music, events that have brought together different media arts (such as in the initial project for the Futura Festival to feature acousmatic music, cinema, photography, painting, and sculpture), or collaborative composing. He worked closely with Thomas Brando on the sound production, mixing, and scenario for Hérisson-cathédrale (1990), Chanson pensive (1990), Avalanche (1995), and other pieces, and on the poetic texts read in Les Invasions fantômes (Phantom Invasions, 2011) and sung in Cinq miniatures pour Barbe Bleue (Five Miniatures for Blue Beard, 1998) and Post mortem (et puis paf!) (2012), among others. He collaborated occasionally with others, including Agnès Poisson for Les Joueurs de sons (Sound Players, 1999) and Henry for Chanson de la plus haute tour (Song from the Highest Tower, 2000). For Voix-off (Voice-over, 2005), as many as fourteen artists from different backgrounds, including Dufour’s students from Perpignan, contributed to the piece’s text, recordings, and revisions. This project promoted promising new actors within the contemporary scene and was a way to pursue evolving technologies without leaving the field of composition.
For Dufour, composition is a social commitment. As long as music supports cultural traditions and attitudes, it helps establish a connection with the surrounding world. Although “music has become progressively freed from functional aspects, while composers have become freed from their masters,” “social rules” cannot yet completely disappear, notably “this religion of the concert.” The main stake is to defend the place of contemporary music in the present-day artistic universe, taking into account musical forces at play and the social concerns they may represent.
Dufour has been a spectator in many ideological and institutional conflicts, including those within the GRM. One notable example is the opposition between concrète/acousmatic music, which is made in a studio and which Schaeffer developed and defended, and the real-time music of Pierre Boulez. The underlying cultural issues are considerably different when interpreting a piece that is fixed, for example, recorded on an acousmonium (an ensemble of various kinds of speakers), versus when dealing with the costs and logistics of the crew and equipment needed for real-time works.
Dufour has sought to adapt artistic techniques and transmit practical knowledge even in areas far removed from the distribution centers of the institutional art world. In short, he has wanted to reach as many people as possible, which is an aim no different from that of the radio, from which musique concrète and electroacoustic music emerged. Today, he observed, “the way in which we work on sound in musique concrète is everywhere, in international pop music and techno, as well as in commercials and cinema, where sound design plays an important part.” Dufour has never stopped promoting a dialogue between different types of present-day music. For example, in Le Mystère des tornades (1999), he alternated instrumental music and acousmatic music. He also wrote Piano dans le ciel (Piano in the Sky, 2001), an acousmatic work to be interspersed between piano pieces by other contemporary composers, including Boulez, Gilbert Amy, and Magnus Lindberg, demonstrating his will to gather them together. Confirming Dufour’s intuition about compositional means and their reach, today we can observe that the young generation of composers more easily adapts to the circumstances of the musical message, whatever the aesthetic heritage.
With meticulousness, perseverance, and an understanding of art as artisanry, Dufour creates works free from affectation. Composing is his way to approach the world with a fresh outlook, stripped of the biases of music theory, and favoring, on the contrary, a “verification of perception.” This attitude is close to that a concert audience has, whether they are well-versed in music creation or not. Proximity offers listeners a freedom to go back and forth through a piece, to dive into it, to move around it, to take the time to listen. This new way of exploring music became possible thanks to the technical innovations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dufour adapts his practices so that the tool becomes the mere means of building bridges with perception. This tool is then concealed in order to give way to new artistic and musical perspectives. He delivers his musical propositions in the immediacy of the listening. In other words, he composes the listening, as detached as possible from the means of production, instrumental or recorded. His style noticeably evolved with his human concerns, as well as with those of his contemporaries, with experiences, and with encounters, allowing timeless compositional subjects to emerge. With this awareness of aesthetic, technical, and social stakes, Dufour wrote music that reflects and diffracts the music of an era particularly rich in sounds. His work thus helps us focus on the fundamental needs and qualities of contemporary musical production. Beyond aesthetic norms and technical and institutional constraints, contemporary musical production must involve social developments, beginning with teaching and transmitting practical knowledge as an artistic, independent, demanding, and generous social skill.
Translated from French by Jessica L. Hackett.
1. All of Dufour’s music is published by Maison ONA. Certain instrumental pieces have been released by the Motus and Kairos record labels. Since 2021, Kairos has released his full acousmatic works. The first set Complete Acousmatic Works Vol. 1, which includes more than seventeen hours of music, received the Charles Cros Academy International Grand Prize. The complete catalogue is available on https://www.denisdufour.fr/ (link verified on 15 January 2023). ↩
2. For Dufour, although these schools both combine instrumental sound with sound transmitted through speakers, they remain distinct: “mixed” music includes a recording that, after being edited in a studio, is projected via loudspeaker during an instrumental performance. The terms are often confused today, among several other trends in electroacoustic music, although their underlying creative processes differ. See François-Xavier Féron’s postface on this topic in Vincent ISNARD, Entretiens avec Denis Dufour: La composition de l’écoute, Editions MF, 2021. <a href=”#ref2” title=”Return to footnote 2 in the text”>↩
3. The following people count among his students: Carole Rieussec (1953), Philippe Le Goff (1957), Franco Degrassi (1958), Jean-Marc Duchenne (1959), Franck Yeznikian (1969), Jonathan Prager (1972), Lautaro Vieyra (1973), Tomonari Higaki (1974), Vincent Laubeuf (1974), Bérangère Maximin (1976), Armando Balice (1985), Paul Ramage (1986), and Maxime Barthélémy (1989). ↩
4. Motus is a music company that Dufour created in 1996 to promote and propagate contemporary music. ↩
5. Futura is an international festival of acousmatic arts, begun in 1993. ↩
6. Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotes are excerpted from the interviews with Dufour available in ISNARD, Entretiens avec Denis Dufour. ↩
7. Offered from 1968 to 1980 by the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique and the GRM, this class was originally entitled Musique fondamentale et appliquée à l’audiovisuel (“Fundamental Music Applied to Audiovisual Media”). ↩
8. Dufour’s presentation L’Écriture acousmatique describes his way of working with sounds, articulations, sequences, phrasing, etc. The presentation is available online at https://webmedia.inagrm.com/2015/dufour/co/Ecriture_acousmatique_D_Dufour.html#S3hkGeEuEKjwFBQ8Chhfg (link verified on 15 January 2023). ↩
9. He especially engaged in this work with the Trio GRM, which was among the first experimental synthesizer trios. As early as 1978, Dufour composed pieces for the trio, such as Souvenir de Pierre, for two synthesizers and prepared piano. ↩
10. Schaeffer was a polytechnician, Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was an engineer and an architect, and Jean-Claude Risset (1938-2016) was a student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and obtained an agrégation in physics. ↩
11. See, for example, Dufour’s presentation on the acousmatic work Nautilus: https://webmedia.inagrm.com/2016/nautilus/hd/co/D_Dufour_Nautilus_youTube.html#BE298eeKz3hVpL676EBjag (link verified on 15 January 2023). His work on articulations, which is complementary to his work on sounds, is just as meticulous. He set it in opposition to the systematism of “music of explosions,” which “uses the two standard sequences that are tension-explosion and tension-rupture” to “attract” and “occupy space.” ↩
12. The Research Department, open from 1960 to 1974 at the Radio, was founded and directed by Schaeffer. It was composed of several research groups including, in addition to the GRM, the Technology Research Group, the Visual Research Group, and others. ↩
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