Do you notice a mistake?
Hugues Dufourt contributed to the spread and indeed to the very definition of the French school of Spectralism, which, in the 1970s, took as its point of departure the precise analysis of the inner life of sounds, visualized using a spectrogram and then by computer. The evolution of the “formants” of a harmonic spectrum was taken as a model the composer could use for instrumentation, or consider freely as base material. Contrary to serial music, described by Dufourt in 1979 as an “art of brilliance and contrast”, which combines heterogeneous parametric spaces and which “is based on an underlying violence, in that it must reduce and intersect competing and constraining systems,” spectral music begins by working on continuities, slow transformations, shifts. “The only characteristics that can be worked with are dynamic. They are fluent forms. Music is thought of in terms of thresholds, oscillations, interferences, oriented processes”. At the same time, this approach acknowledges that the new importance of percussion in the 20th century “provoked the resurgence of unstable acoustic forms that classical instrument-making had carefully attenuated: attack and decay transients, complex mass sounds, blurry processes. Auditory sensitivity may be said to have returned. It is now interested only in tiny oscillations, roughness, textures. Sound’s plasticity, its fleeting nature, its minute alterations, have taken on an immediate suggestive force1”.
Dufourt, unlike Murail or Grisey, was not a student of Messiaen, and as a composer, he starts from a broader, or more abstract, definition of the spectrum: what he seeks in it is not so much the charm of new and fascinating colors or pathways that indulge the listener’s perceptions, but the instability that timbre introduces into the art of orchestration, and the possibility of conceiving forms through the evolutions of masses and ruptures. Thus, Dufourt introduced René Thom’s theory of catastrophes into his compositions. From it, he created a typology of sequences based on crossing thresholds, overlapping, sudden changes, etc. As an orchestrator, he advanced toward zones of fragility, explored unorthodox pairings, with instrumental timbres that do not fuse, reading “Rimsky-Korsakov’s Treatise backwards”, as he put it2. This form of poetics was expressed in different ways, both in works where percussion played a central role – Erewhon (1976), a symphony for six percussionists and 150 instruments, or Saturne (1979), combining percussion and electronic instruments – as well as in later pieces that slowly kneaded, weighed out, turned over, and scrutinized infinite successions of harmonic objects; the chords are then “warped” by instrumentation that placed them at the boundary line between timbre and chord; in fact, as Dufort said in 1977, the orchestra “is still our best synthesizer”. In Surgir (1984), the orchestra is supposed to form its own coherent environment, a field or a material with its own laws, rather than translating or clothing itself in structures that were created outside of it, following other rules. “Its true domain is part of a tradition of energy that can only be rediscovered by radicalizing it. To write for an orchestra is to make sure that the dynamic, the whole, the synthesis, are what prevails. I sought out a grammar adapted to this explosive, unstable, or evolving material. None of the principles of writing with pitch at the center can resist the lava flow of the orchestra3”. The ensemble (97 musicians) also includes five percussion parts. The constant presence of the percussion, often woven in rolling, trembling, sonic fabrics, brings to the surface in an unexpected way the noise-like or “inharmonic” dimension of the overall sound, while also playing a symbolic (rather than purely acoustic) role. As the first twelve minutes of the work make plain, with slowly rising intensity, the percussion seems to surround the orchestra, which seems hunted, unsettled, almost besieged.
At the same time, timbre, for Dufourt, is more embedded in the Schoenbergian tradition of Klangfarbenmelodie (timbre melody): the notion of “inharmonic” timbre inspired his arrangement and his strange layering of the chord in space, without ever aligning with the microtonal bombilation spotlighted by the computer. If one analyses the morphology of the chords in Watery Star for eight instruments (1993), for example, one notices that the melodic figures that emerge from time to time are for the most part conjunct lines, but which avoid sequences of more than three chromatic pitches or whole tones, in order to sidestep any historicizing allusions. Indeed, there is a clear avoidance of any “classical” chord structure – meaning, an interval of an octave, an fifth, or a fourth between the lowest note and the one immediately above it; aggregates of two- or three-note clusters, placed in the low register of the chord (an “anti-tonal” layout, as well); or, to the contrary, clusters stretched over the entire sonic space in order to obtain an effect of distance; numerous unisons; a predominance of sequences that move forward using notes shared by both the chords and the harmonic pedals. The analysis confirms what Dufourt wrote in Musique, pouvoir, écriture: “As for myself, I never wanted to give up the freedom of articulation I feel is the best part of the Serialist legacy. And so I put together a grammar of pitches that was independent from the grammar of timbre, but able, where necessary, to be congruent with it. The composition of intervals as with chords respects the classic taboos. It avoids diatonic progressions, chromatics, consonant triads, scales of half- or whole-tones, fifths in the low register. The advantage of this method is that it achieves a veritable language of dissonance, and guarantees harmonic, monodic, and contrapuntal coherence 4”.
Music is presented here as a harmonic texture that is homogenous yet molded, held up by the work of timbral differentiation; all of this can be considered in terms of what Lachenmann referred to as Strukturklang, in other words, a structure intended to produce an overall sound for the entire piece. This, according to Dufourt, is based on a “dialectic of timbre and time. The notion of timbre includes all dimensions of writing and, with computers, can be understood in the reflected separation and conjunction of frequency and intensity. The concerted relationship between these two dimensions produces specific effects of iridescence on the sonic material. Both in large and small ensembles, timbre is characterized by its formidable solidity. It resists transformation: freedom slips into it by barely perceptible degrees. The Watery Star, Dédale, and Le Philosophe selon Rembrandt were in this way conceived as wholes that gradually differentiate without dissociating, similar to warp that is pulled apart and then weaves itself together again, without ever interrupting the forward motion of the fabric. The music is organized at a deep level according to a swirling motion that pushes past every limit. The unity of tone nevertheless protects the work from dissolving. The flow of temporal continuity would appear to remain congruent with the production of differences, the emergence of the heterogeneous”.
Scansion in Dufourt’s pieces is regular – often organized by “steps” comprising two, three, or four successive chords, followed by a breath mark on the score – and obsessively slow; the music interrupts itself from time to time to allow brief moments of agitation to pass – too brief to signal the existence of an independent formal section to the senses. Instead, they evoke short-lived flows of lava or bursts of flame erupting from an active volcano. More rarely, retreats occur (the bass clarinet solo at the end of Philosophe selon Rembrandt), or even moments of shadowy figuralism – in Les Chasseurs dans la neige, d’après Brueghel, for example, there is an allusion to church bells and extensive initial imagery, with iambic rhythms, timpani calls, walking or scurrying rhythms, fanfares made harsh with muted brass instruments and strident percussion sounds, or, in La Gondole sur la lagune d’après Guardi, a few dance steps as the piece opens, and floating, swaying rhythms as it draws to a close.
As Philippe Albèra has noted, “what is at issue for this kind of thinking is its ability to give rise to form, to sustain over lengths of time with no dramatization, with no perceptible articulations, nor moments of waiting and expectation capable of engendering the desire to know what will happen next, nor even the surprises that accompany them5”. But that is precisely what Dufort wants, to hold music in the oppressive balance of “neither…nor,” that stakes itself – here we might almost take up Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance — both on the constantly deferred event and the infinite differentiation of the sonic texture, which is the subsumption or reabsorption of all events: one cannot expect anything but that which occurs, for there will be nothing else. Musically, as the composer summarizes it, “the space is no longer the thought of an immobility. It is a form in the making. Change is no longer linked to trajectory, it presumes imperceptible transitions, unascribable shifts6”.
Here, Dufourt finds support and substantiation in pictorial art, drawing less on the subject of paintings than on the role of color and light in relation to the subject (with the exception of abstract painting, as in Lucifer, d’après Pollock), which play a comparable role to that of timbre in music. Thus, speaking of Tiepolo’s allegory of Africa (Africa, from the fresco Apollo and the Four Continents in the Würzburg Residence), whose pale light and “dense clouds of sulphur” inspired him, the composer has remarked, “Nothing is better adapted to suggesting space than color, which becomes the true medium of the musician. Colors, in music, depend on complex writing processes of which they are the highly integrated end result. The same chord may appear homogeneous on the surface and heterogeneous below, bright and pellucid at first glance and rough and dark in the twisted creases of its folds, like an emerging tension. Music is an art of alteration7”. References to painting and to images are manifold – Saturne was inspired by Erwin Panofsky’s celebrated iconology; Hommage à Charles Nègre was inspired by a photograph; La Maison du Sourd was inspired by the work of Goya, to give only a few examples. What is retained and transposed from these, however, would appear to be the more-or-less muted vibration of their colors, or a glimmering. In other words, what gives a painting its dynamic force produces near-stillness in music, a static quality that attempts to hold back sound in its flight.
This musical attitude means that in Dufourt’s theorization of his own work – whose grandeur and force of conviction do not require theorization to be appreciated – certain pathways can be established toward the political (a dimension Pierre-Albert Castanet has highlighted) as well as the aesthetic. Emotions of darkness, tension, melancholy, mute violence, are thus interpreted in one sense or another – either despair at the event or observation of an inevitable “dialectic of Enlightenment” à la Adorno, or the sublime darkness of an art that, in Rilke’s words, sees that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror”. What is certain, at any rate, is that Dufourt’s singularity within the French school of Spectralism is to be found in this (possibly “German”) theme of the negative: holding himself at a distance from Bergson’s élan vital, from faith in nature and the sovereign or hedonistic sequences of subjectivity – a legacy that would include Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, Grisey, Murail, Dalbavie, and Pesson – Dufourt did not see color as a state of grace, but timbre as a form of labor: his, but also ours.
Do you notice a mistake?