"Tellur", an analysis |
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Published in Cahiers de la Guitare n° 12 in 1984; | |||||||||||||
To try and delimit the musical and aesthetic conception of Tristan MURAIL we quote the composer : "The sudden widening of our horizon of sound opened by non-European music, the appearance of electronics has drastically changed the givens presented to composers, throwing into question the very foundations of our music. Impossible today to take pleasure in the systems of writing inherited from the past, and resting above all on a combination of note symbols making a screen in front of the sound phenomena. On the other hand, from new propositions inspired by acoustic observations and methods of synthesising sound, a systematic reconstruction of the world of sound seems possible. Acoustic observation which has revealed the internal composition of sound and the nature of interactions between sound phenomena, permits us to capture sounds in all their depth, and in this way to work sounds directly with their components, instead of being content with combining the SYMBOLS of sounds (the notes and the signs of a score). Electroacoustic practice, mixes, echoes, re-injections, filters, synthesis of new complex sounds, proposed new forms to instrumental music. The influence of electronic techniques will be felt on musical writing and also on the way of playing required of musicians (sounds without attack, continuous transformation of sounds, from "pure" sound to sounds charged with harmonics, sounds carrying controlled noise). But the sheet of paper offers the advantage, contrary to the studio, of posing no practical limit to the imagination. One can by writing strive to extend, deform, exceed electroacoustic techniques considered then as models serving the organisation of new forms." |
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Presentation of Tellur by Tristan Murail : Premiere : April 1977 in Paris, Salle Cortot by Rafael Andia I have long wanted to write a piece using the techniques of the flamenco guitar. It was the encounter with the guitarist Rafael Andia who allowed me to put this project into execution. Tellur resembles a sort of challenge: how to produce, with a short blasts and pinched instrument such as the guitar, sound continuums necessary for my compositional work, then mainly focused on processes, transitions, changes? The answer was to use the technique of rasgueado and even, more generally, the style of play, types of sound flamenco. The treatment of the attacks on the string, for example, is particularly fine and neat: thus reaches produie two textures evolving in different directions on the same rope at the same time (by decoupling the sound made by percussion nail on the ropes - sound precise and controllable frequency - and the sound from the strings own resonance). I also use progressive passages sound to noise (gradual stifling of strings), the gradual emergence of overtones, resonances harmonic chords, fingerings of unpublished harmonics, multiple trills combining left and right hand , etc. Tellur is a typical example of a score whose content derives essentially sound material provided by the instrument - an instrument, however, understood and used in a way that makes the bow to stylistic imperatives - looking for greatest possible interaction between base material and musical writing. The instrument is tuned in a special way, which allows the use of agreements or formulas rasgueado on six strings without falling back on the inevitable E-A-D-G-B-E of the guitar. |
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ANALYSIS OF "TELLUR"
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TELLUR rests on a play on the phenomenon of "entropy" and of reconstruction of sound: disaggregation and incorporation of "atmospherics" which give birth to new layers of sounds.
Entropy is an important basic idea taken from thermodynamics and describes the degradation of energy in a system. MURAIL himself gives us a definition of it in another of his works, "Mémoire-Erosion": "Entropy tends to return the music to a state of noise as the breath and the atmospherics accumulate on a track recopied several times."
TELLUR plays therefore on the fundamental ambiguity of instrumental sound (whatever that might be): in effect, this is never acoustically "pure"; it is always accompanied by a certain proportion of "atmospherics", of noise. It's a matter therefore for the composer to master this parameter, to integrate the sound with a vocabulary and finally to make it an element in the construction of the work, the other element being the rhythm. "Equally, in the ryhthmical order, the piece is crossed by a quasi-regular pulse but always unstable in tempo which can also be disaggregated by acceleration, by deceleration, infinitely. It is necessary to study carefully all the phenomena of progression in the timbres, the intensities, the accelerations and the slowings, which spread sometimes over quite long periods", the author advises
[1]
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Understood by smooth form a conception uneventful of the time in which all musical parameters (timbre, pulse, dynamic) are interwoven in a process of evolution (or involution) continuous and predetermined, and no more subject to the caprice (inspiration) of the composer or simply to chance! It lives its own parallel life throughout the score: It breaks down by rarefaction or escape towards the infinitely small; it is reborn and grows in the reverse manner.
As an example, the following graphic gives a visual account of this notion of smooth form by the internal organisation of the sound/noise relationship throughout TELLUR:
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CONCLUSION
[1]
To effectively render these effects to the ear, the durations have been calculated to the average curves of acceleration, in general of logarithmic type ( the instinctive accelerations of musicians are always of this type). |
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An Interview with Tristan MURAIL |
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Rafael Andia : You wrote: "Tellur is the fruit of the meeting of an old desire - that to write for the guitar by using all the techniques of what is for me" the true "guitar - and of a guitarist knowing these particular techniques as well as traditionals like the back of his hand". A question which will interest surely our readers: what is "the true" guitar?
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