Three periods, or styles, can be identified in Pascal Dusapin’s compositions. The first, which we might call his “youth,” extends into the late 1980s, and is “more melodic than harmonic”. Even then, his work manifested an implicit break with spectralism, the stylistic school dominant in France during the 1970s (developed, for the most part, by Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail with the Ensemble L’Itinéraire), in that the spectralist style could be described as “essentially harmonic”, as it was dependent on the spectrum (“harmony”, or at the very least the vertical aggregate) of a given timbre. By contrast, in even Dusapin’s earliest pieces, relationships among parts were organized above all through imitation. This revealed an atonal counterpoint made up of “superimposed horizontalities” more than it did any interest in vertical textures, aggregates, or specific chords. In a way, Dusapin’s writing was “engendered by the line” (as is the case, to give a representative example, in heterophony). This generative line, in his early period, was still marked by the influence of Xenakis, and was thus constantly interrupted by violent trills and tremolos. More than that, even when instrumental, this generative line was strongly constrained by the vocal, and for this reason, often appeared conjunct, drawing on multitudes of micro-intervals (which are therefore not used as they are in spectral music, where they are the measure of absolute harmonic precision, whereas for Dusapin, to the contrary, they function in service of vocal imprecision, translating “archaic” or at least “spontaneous” song). Dusapin’s lines appear to be translating an archaic, rudimentary melopoeia, whose accents the composer no doubt controlled with his own voice well before they became composition. This decidedly “carnal” vocal quality was perhaps the hallmark of Dusapin’s first successes, and indeed critics – not to mention Iannis Xenakis himself — frequently described his music as “sensual.”

Sensual, perhaps; essentially vocal, certainly. This vocal quality is likely what inspired Dusapin, quite naturally, from 1982 to the present, to compose a significant number of major dramatic pieces, including vocal ones (operas, oratorios, and an “operatorio”). These works often brought him wide success, such as Niobé (1982), Roméo & Juliette (1985-1988), Medeamaterial (1991), La Melancholia (1991), To be sung (1993), Perelà (2001), Faustus (2003-2004), and Passion, the latter of which premiered at the Festival d’Art Lyrique in Aix-en-Provence in 2008. Consistently, the vocal/archaic style of his early period (which one hears in the Niobé oratorio) imposes certain decisions on Dusapin that in retrospect might seem somewhat drastic: to imitate the human voice, he needed instruments capable of glissando and of micro-intervals, meaning that for many years Dusapin avoided writing for the piano. His early work thus reaffirmed the dictum of Varèse, his second major influence: “let us forget the piano”. In this first style, conjunct, even sliding instrumental lines, written in micro-intervals, often repetitive, created the “incantatory” character that Boulez had identified in Varèse’s Intégrales.

Dusapin’s “second style” emerged at the very end of the 1980s, possibly during the composition of the opera Roméo & Juliette, which includes a vocal quartet, Red Rock, in which the four vocalists are squeezed into the same fifth, and requires them to use the same four pitches (C-D-F-G) for an unusually long time, in musical terms. With that, the second period in his compositional life began. His style became more economical, stripped of a certain youthful mannerism, less “agitated” (with less emphasis on the forte dynamic, perhaps), and he had, for the most part, done away with the use of micro-intervals. Above all, in this second period, he employed extremely narrow ranges (around a fifth), and, within that, short scales with few degrees (generally between 2 and 5, with around half of these scales being tetratonic).

The vocal constraint of the line, beyond the continuity that marked his first period, remained in his second period in the form of repetitiveness and even enclosure within a narrow frequency. The line, meanwhile, has imposed on it the restrained ambitus characteristic of ancient song, or even of speech intonations, giving rise to what might be called Dusapin’s “intonationism.” Indeed, the archetype of four degrees squeezed into a fifth precisely recalls the model for intonation theorized by the linguist Pierre Léon. During the first two minutes of the finale of Celo (1996), the solo cello articulates more than 200 notes within the fifth (G#– D) and on the tetratonic scale (G#-B-C-D). In addition to working with such short scales and with even more drastically reduced ranges, the trombone solo in Watt (1994) – which, according to many other composers, notably Henri Dutilleux, is Dusapin’s masterpiece – finds its archaic vocal quality and perhaps its “speech” in the use of other specific procedures: the slide makes a “vocal” glissando, a constant “megaphone”; certain multiphonic sounds give the impression of wailing, and seem to achieve the grain of the voice Barthes spoke of in his eponymous work; the wa-wa mute appears to resemble the way diphthongs are pronounced (ˈwɑːwɑː). The trombone’s brazen instrumental intonationism can already be heard in Indeed (1987), for solo trombone; indeed, as is likely the case for most composers, Dusapin seems to have used his many small chamber pieces, including some twenty solo pieces, as little laboratories for future larger-scale orchestral or dramatic works. The vocal quality of Watt reaches its zenith when the soloist, in the middle of the piece, using a modern instrumental technique (likely first used by Globokar in Fluide in 1967), succeeds in singing through the instrument, creating an archaic melopoeia (using a tetratonic scale squeezed into a fifth, an archetype of which Dusapin, as we have seen, is quite fond).

Go, written in 1990, was the first in a series of seven “solos for orchestra”. Here, again, Dusapin’s voice seems, metaphorically, to be the soloist implied by the subtitle – a voice that has been “augmented” by the orchestra.

It was in Go that Dusapin employed a pet phrase of his for the first time, “restrained modal”, as well as what might be called short “Go scales” of peculiar form: composed of four degrees, often squeezed into a fifth – once again, the model described above – but also and above all scales that include a “relative gap” between the 2nd and 3rd degree (as, for example, in the scale A-B-flat-D-E, as well as in the scale C-D-F-G) of Red Rock, mentioned above). This was probably a way of differentiating them from Greek tetrachords (which seek a relative equidistance between degrees) used in tonal – or let us say modal – music since the Middle Ages, making them too heavily connoted.

These short “Go scales” are characteristically deployed in the form of collective fake collective improvisation. As was already the case in Ligeti’s Lontano (1967) or even in Lux aeterna (1966) and then O King, excerpted from Berio’s Sinfonia (1968), an initial degree is put forward by one member of the orchestra, which is then imitated by the others, some of whom then put forward a new degree, which is then imitated by the others, etc. In this way, the entire scale is revealed little by little, in what appears to be the slow awakening of the ensemble. This kind of fake collective improvisation is used in Coda (1992), and then at the beginning of his third quartet (1993), as well as in the third movement of Celo (1996), Trio Rombach (1997), and the Sanctus of the Dona eis (1998) “requiem”.

Extenso (1994), Dusapin’s second “solo for orchestra,” is an excellent illustration of how the composer organizes his forms at a larger scale. Here, he begins with a faked improvisation, during which the orchestra literally appears to be “slowly learning how to talk,” (like the “stuttering voice of the composer,” which will soon be squeezed into the little Go scale E-F-B-C). The ambitus then follows the motion of expansion suggested by the title, as the orchestra, as we see further on, appears to be “learning to sing.” In most works, such mechanical motions of extension, deformation, or, to the contrary, of reduction, “brakes”, or at least “strong external constraints”, are metaphorically imposed to the initial small scales. These then evolve toward others or explode, functioning as a kind of “discourse” and therefore as “characters” that are mistreated, dramatized, taken up in theatrical meanderings that these constraints represent. These metaphorical constraints are themselves the result of observing other art forms. Dusapin is constantly inspired by these (notably photography and architecture) and indeed by formalism outside of music, for example in mathematics (Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal theories or René Thom’s morphogenesis fascinate him), or by industrial drawing, to transform these small scales, to free them from their narrow ambitus, to enrich them with degrees or have them slowly modulate toward other, equally restrained melodic scales.

In Extenso, as we have seen, the first twelve measures “speak”. The “spoken improvisation” then ceases in measure 13, and the lines deploy their ambitus as they learn to “no longer speak, but rather to sing”. In this singular work, they are eventually placed in a “note for note” counterpoint, a slow homorhythm in the service of “complete chromaticism”; in other words, one that is incumbent upon each part, one might say, in the style of Wagner. In passing, this homorhythm makes it possible to consider each chord and therefore to approach more harmonic musical conceptions, and the work may owe its success to this rather neo-romantic atmosphere. Here, above all, one notes what would, starting in the 2000s, become the composer’s style in his third period (a “third style” that no doubt resembles an aesthetic return), which emerges as a “lyrical” unfurling after an atonal “intonationist” debut.

In the opera Perelà (2001), Dusapin broadens, if you will, this dialogue between his second and third styles (which might be called “spoken” and “sung), which articulate the form of the work as a whole. The second style is particularly effective when it appears – as it naturally often does – with the trombone (which even appears on stage), his preferred instrument, that harbinger of melodic intonationism. The third style, pleading, also unfolds with Dusapin’s favoured lyrical timbres, strings, which are often languid (and subject to rather slow tempi).

Dusapin’s second style, and with it, his intonationism, appear to have been definitively set aside in the opera that followed, Faustus (2003-2004) – and indeed already in his fifth solo for orchestra, Exeo (2002).The lyrical song of the strings, somewhat weighed down, using old expressive devices (notably simple bowed semi-tones) in a broad ambitus – “traditional instrumentals” – now reign supreme.

The aesthetic of the second, “intonationist” period is perhaps the style most specific to Dusapin. More than once, it recalls the metaphor of the echo. Notably, the word ‘echo’ evokes the voice, and returns us to the world of vocals. The echo also wipes out consonants, leaving behind only vowel sounds – precisely what occurs in intonationism, which reproduces the intonations of speech. Echo, too, is what emerges from the depths (of the cave), reminding us that Dusapin’s second style evokes what has been repressed, the language of earliest childhood – again, intonation. Moreover, the echo is an immediate sonic mirror, occurring “in real time,” and this real time is that of composition using false improvisation, composition using anyone’s intonations, of Dusapin’s own work (in openings using “orchestral awakenings”). The echo is also a sound phenomenon that moves in the opposite direction of the initial sound, and, by the same token, the determinism of Dusapin’s atonal material moves in the opposite direction of the equivalent atonal material in 20^th-century music: it is a “yes” (atonality as a positive and precise search for a “naturally” atonal model of the archaic voice) where atonal material is so often displayed as an eternal “no” throughout the 20^th century (already anti-tonal for the three Viennese). It thus contains a deliberate gesture and “theatricality”, used openly from the beginning, rather than unintentionally and grudgingly; this in contrast to the perception of gesture in serial music, or to the theatrical in spectral music, which would appear to be parasitic, all in all.

Let us add, in conclusion, that from the extreme aesthetic sophistication achieved by great music with atonalism, the echo pulls us back toward a sound that has been packed with its opposite: the archaic. In this way, two extremes dovetail. What began with Stravinsky and Varèse (the paradoxically cultivated and refined exaltation of the unrefined and the violent) is completed by Dusapin, the self-taught “barbarian musician”, who ingeniously picks up the thread of music history, something made possible by this equivalence of extremes. Just as Schoenberg and then, above all, Boulez were seeking something well beyond tonality, Dusapin appeared at an equal and opposite moment in music history – well short of tonality. Despite what was imagined in the utopias of early 20^th-century thought, the world of art does not turn out to be an endless straight line, time’s arrow, whose abstraction might well extend out into infinity. Rather, it appears as centered, limited, a universe balanced around certain invariables. “In the end, the invariable we find in all human activity is humans themselves, it is the mind”. To this we might add that the invariable in all human sonic activity is the voice. The echo, acting as a filter, retains only the simplified blueprints of 20^th-century complexity. It returns nothing but the “result”: the sound, stripped of concepts, the “images” that underlie scores or scientific models. It has thus been delivered, not only from the visual logic of the score, specific to serial music, but also from the “numbing” scientism of spectral and post-spectral music. It seems, in this way, to confirm the hypothesis of Danielle Cohen-Lévinas: “The history of music may well be […] a history of writing that borrows the breath of life from the voice”.