JAVS Fall 2024

Featured Article

From Microformal Transformations to Macroformal Structure in Tristan Murail’s C’est Un Jardin Secret (1976) by Ash Mach

conceived of as a global approach with continuous, rather than discrete, categories. 5

Introduction As the co-founder of L’Itinéraire , a Paris-based contemporary music ensemble founded in 1973 that played “everything that [was] not considered establishment,” French composer Tristan Murail (b.1947) became one of the most prominent figures of the spectral movement, contributing to the development of a musical aesthetic that fundamentally changed the way composers and listeners conceive of sound. 1 Spectralism, a term derived from “harmonic spectra,” is difficult to define, as composers have adapted this label to their own artistic practice or even rejected the label altogether. 2 Spectralism is not a mathematical formula, nor is it a scientific method. It is also not the sum of a set of compositional techniques. Instead, spectralism is an “attitude towards music,” one that embraces the enmeshment of pitch and noise, harmony and timbre, time and form. 3 Spectral composers, including Murail, generally view this music as the evolution of sound through time, allowing the listener to experience a sense of temporal dilation. Through his deep understanding of acoustics and with the help of computer-assisted technology at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Tristan Murail developed a compositional aesthetic that explored the inner mechanisms of sound. 4 As is reflected in his music, Murail appreciated not just the pitch of a sound, but also its noise, micro fluctuations, and overall spectral envelope. Thus, Murail thought about music in scientific terms, swapping chromatic pitches for hertz (hz.) and rhythmic subdivisions for seconds (sec.). His music demonstrates how the structure of sound corresponds to musical form; he suggests that music should be

Murail’s compositional aesthetics are captured in his short solo viola work, C’est un jardin secret (1976). Written as a wedding present for his two composer friends, this work features brief sonic gestures that are manipulated through the violist’s technique. 6 Each sonic gesture transforms into the next through minute changes in left-hand and bow technique, creating a continuous evolution of sound. The question I pose is: how do these sonic gestures, called microforms—or the superimposition of musical elements—transition from one idea to the next to create macroform, or global structure, in C’est un jardin secret ? To answer this question, I developed a color-mapping diagram that outlines the microforms based on various sonic gestures in this piece. This color-mapping diagram shows the distinctions between sections as well as the transitions between one section and the next. To examine the microforms in more detail, I then use a recording of the piece by Paul Beckett and an audio analysis software called SPEAR (Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis) to analyze partials, noise, and attack transients of two significant microformal transitions, which I label as “Transition 1: Transition from Inharmonicity to Harmonicity” and “Transition 2: Transition from Agitation to Resolution.” Inharmonicity is defined as a spectrum without specific intervallic organization, whereas “harmonicity” is defined as a note with overtones arranged in whole-number ratios. 7 Finally, I created a roadmap based on these microformal transitions to show the macroform of this piece.

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 40, No. 2, Fall 2024

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