Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 24, No. 2/3, April/June 2005, pp. 181 – 185

Scelsi and L’Itinéraire: The Exploration

of Sound1
Tristan Murail (translated Robert Hasegawa)

Speaking of Scelsi’s influence is difficult, but I will try to describe, in a historical or

retrospective way, the encounter between Scelsi and the composers of my generation.
It came about very simply: many of us have spent time at the Villa Medicis in Rome,
and that is where we met Scelsi, who (until very recently) completely avoided
travelling. These last few years he has resumed travelling all over the world, but at the
time the only way to meet him was to visit him in Rome. He enjoyed attending
concerts of contemporary music and came to the Villa each time a concert was held
there. I will concentrate on the three composers who, in certain ways, seem closest to
Scelsi: myself, Gérard Grisey and Michaël Lévinas. The three of us are also (not
coincidentally) linked by a movement and an ensemble called l’Itinéraire; it was
through the Ensemble l’Itinéraire that much of Scelsi’s music became known in
France. I will explain later why the encounter with Scelsi affected us so profoundly.
Scelsi’s fame as a composer has been intermittent; he has gone through periods in
which he was very well known and periods in which he was completely ignored.
Before the Second World War, he was well known in both poetic and musical circles.
He wrote 12-tone music, which he has now almost completely renounced and
destroyed. After the war, he went through a period of obscurity. He returned to the
public eye in the late 1950s with the sensational premiere in Paris of the Quattro Pezzi
per orchestra (su una nota sola). Afterwards, he fell into another period of neglect, and
his music was almost never played in Paris. He had to wait for years before his music
began to be performed again. It was in 1974, I believe, that as l’Itinéraire we put on
our first piece by Scelsi. Now, perhaps thanks to us (or so I like to think), Scelsi is
widely known and performed, particularly in Germany, sometimes in England, and a
little in France. We have been able to play and sometimes premiere a number of
chamber and ensemble pieces, such as Khoom (with Michiko Hirayama), Pranam I,
Pranam II, Anahit (one of Scelsi’s most beautiful pieces, for violin and ensemble) and
Manto.
To explain how our connection with Scelsi came about, I must explain a little about
our path as musicians and composers. I will begin with myself, because it is the easiest.
While I was studying at the conservatory with Olivier Messiaen in the 1970s, the
influence of the serialists was still predominant—even with Messiaen, who insisted that

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/07494460500154830
182 T. Murail (trans. R. Hasegawa)
we work serially and forbade the use of octaves. I tried this for a while, but then realized
that these techniques were not suitable for what I wanted to express in my music. I thus
tried to disengage myself from the serial school and at once attempted to find strong,
pure harmonic colours, for serial composition very often leads to a sort of uniform
greyness in the harmonic dimension. I also searched for a different approach to time: in
particular, a non-event-oriented time. All this (and also the influence of Xenakis, his way
of seeing music as an architecture of time and the orchestra as a mass that one could
sculpt) led me to compose very differently. One of my first pieces for orchestra written at
the conservatory, Altitude 8000, was based on these things: strong harmonic colours,
with many octaves, fifths, etc., and a sense of time very different from the fragmented
time common in serial music, or even in the music of Messiaen. A few years later, I wrote
a piece called Sables for orchestra, which was premiered at the Festival de Royan, where I
attempted a global sound with the orchestra. The individuality of the instruments
vanished completely into the fused sound of the orchestra. In a certain sense, this piece
was made up of a single sound that lasted for the duration of the piece. Here, one can
begin to see the connection with Scelsi’s music.
Some of my colleagues have had parallel paths. I think especially of Gérard Grisey, who
was also influenced by Ligeti and Xenakis. I should add Stockhausen to the list, thinking
particularly of Stimmung, a piece for six voices based on a single chord that is a fragment
of a harmonic spectrum. Grisey took this type of spectrum as a point of departure for his
later work. One of his first consciously spectral pieces was called Périodes—he wrote it at
the Villa Medicis. (I remember very well l’Itinéraire’s performance of this piece at the
Villa, which I believe Scelsi attended.) In spectral composition, musical sound (in fact,
natural sound) is taken as a model. The sound is analysed and influences the
composition of the music at both the harmonic and formal levels.
Very early on, Michaël Lévinas attempted to transform the sound of instruments
directly, in ways that recall certain aspects of Scelsi’s work. At the same time that
Grisey composed Périodes, Lévinas wrote a piece called Appels, which connected the
instruments to natural resonators, snare drums, which totally transformed the
instrumental sounds. For my part, I tried to simulate electronic processes, which later
led to the more general idea of using audible formal processes to write music,
replacing the older ideas of development and sectional form. As an example, I could
mention my piece Mémoire-Érosion, written, I believe, in 1975, in which I tried to
simulate processes based on filtering, echo and feedback (the use of several tape
recorders that pass sounds from one to another). All this was done solely through
notation, the score itself simulating the electronic processes. In the same way, and at
about the same time, Grisey simulated the process of ring modulation. A ring
modulator is an electronic device that can modify and enrich a natural sound.
I mention all of this because of the influence it has had on instrumental techniques.
At first, like many other composers, we searched for new sounds obtained by special
instrumental playing techniques. These include the well-known multiphonics on
wind instruments, or certain subtle alterations of the sound on string instruments,
techniques that are found in Scelsi’s music, but even more in spectral composition
 Contemporary Music Review 183
and the music of the l’Itinéraire composers. This new style of playing tends to allow
the fusion of instrumental timbres (or at least a very precise control of timbres and
dynamics), which was necessary in our music to build a global sound from many
individual sounds. This style of playing is now fairly well known among younger
musicians, but ten years ago it was quite difficult to make musicians understand how
to approach these techniques. I do not know if it could be said that Scelsi exerted a
direct influence on all I have talked about, but there are always unconscious
influences, and they could have been reinforced by certain convergences, which I will
now try to explain. Michaël Lévinas’s music and my own resemble each other very
little, but they share a certain number of basic ideas: in particular, the exploration of
the interior of sounds. This exploration is a very important development for music at
the end of this century, and Scelsi was the pioneer.
To be sure, the techniques available to Scelsi, who worked essentially by intuition
and experimentation, differ greatly from ours—we have access to technical, scientific
methods of analysing sounds. Modern analytical instruments, provided by
conventional electronics or now by the computer, give us the ability to understand
the structure of sounds in detail: their spectrum, i.e. the way they can be decomposed
into their elementary components; their dynamic envelope, or the way they vary in
time; their transients, the way that they begin or end. The goal of certain techniques
in spectral music is the design of a global sound from this type of analysis. Then, we
attempt to ‘resynthesize’ the sound with the technique that Gérard Grisey called
‘instrumental synthesis’, using the instruments as the elementary components of a
more general global sound, the sound of the ensemble or orchestra as a whole. This is
a completely different approach from that of traditional composition, which was
essentially based on the stacking of lines, on counterpoint and harmony.
Many of Scelsi’s works are based on a single pitch, a single sound, which is varied
and set into motion from within by many different techniques. I mentioned earlier a
work that has made a mark in the history of music, the Quattro Pezzi per Orchestra
(su una nota sola). Each of these pieces is based on a single note, which is varied and
agitated, all from within, so that the compositional process happens in the interior of
a single sound, rather than in the combination of many sounds. As a result, the sonic
material is also the form of the piece. It cannot even be said that one follows from the
other, that the form comes from the material, or that the material comes from the
form, as in much other music. They are truly one and the same phenomenon; this is
an important idea for me, which has guided me in my own work. I think it is a very
new attitude toward musical discourse—it is an attitude absolutely contrary to
classical principles, contrary to both tonal and serial music, which are both based on
the combination of pre-existing elements. I often illustrate this idea by a metaphor,
saying that with this approach, the composer becomes like a sculptor: he disengages a
form from a single mass, rather than constructing a form with a number of bricks like
a mason.
This approach leads to a different conception of time, and the second major
convergence between our music and Scelsi’s is what I call smooth time [temps lisse]. It
184 T. Murail (trans. R. Hasegawa)
is almost impossible to analyse most of Scelsi’s works in formal terms. Time unfolds
in continuous motion, without a break. I am aware that one can also find pieces in
Scelsi’s oeuvre with more abrupt rhythms and short segments, and I have sometimes
found it difficult to understand how these pieces are related to the ‘smooth’ pieces.
Sometimes, the two tendencies coexist: for example, in Khoom, certain movements
are of the rhythmic type—somewhat contrapuntal, and a little angular—while others
are in the more typical continuous style. Be that as it may, Scelsi’s idea of smooth
time links him to several other composers who arrived at a similar concept; whether
they influenced one another is difficult to say. Ligeti, of course, belongs to this group.
Gérard Grisey’s Jour, contre-jour is one of the most formally smooth pieces; it is based
entirely on continuous transformations, but (strictly speaking) has no sonic events.
Smooth time does not necessarily mean stasis or the absence of movement or change,
but rather that there are no sharp breaks, and that the form is not sectional. Smooth
time is based instead on a continuous form, on continuous processes, and on
movements coming from within the sound itself. In Scelsi, one does not always find
clearly oriented processes; that is to say one does not always have the sensation of
going towards something. The Fourth String Quartet is a clear exception. Its form is
extremely simple: a continuous climbing, a single sound that rises continually—
except for, at certain moments, harmonic blossomings or lower resonances of the
endlessly ascending overall sound. It is a piece that is truly based on a single
phenomenon. The occasional absence of temporal orientation in Scelsi’s music is one
of the essential differences between his music and my own or Grisey’s, because we
strive above all to create dynamism in our music, to give the music a clear
directionality, an orientation (in the topological sense of the word).
Both this temporal aspect and the exploration of sound are built on certain
instrumental techniques, which could be described as research into a new type of
sound. I believe that this is one of Scelsi’s major preoccupations. I speak now not of
form, inspiration or aesthetics, but of technique. One of his main interests has been
the search for new sounds from instruments and the voice; this interest has made him
a great connoisseur of instrumental effects, especially variations of timbre.
Particularly on string instruments, which he uses very often, he specifies the different
playing techniques in great detail: for instance, the placement of the bow sul ponticello
or sul tasto, tremolo effects, or a wide vibrato. All of this, which is notated very
precisely in his music, must be executed with equal precision, which is not easy. Scelsi
also uses many dynamic effects, such as sforzandi, which are, in my view, more than
just surface effects. Often, he calls for scordatura, the retuning of a string instrument
so that the same pitch can be played on all four strings—not at the same time but in
alternation, as an arpeggio or in a fast tremolo. The pitch has a different timbre on
each string, owing to the different degrees of tension. This type of timbral subtlety
can be found in Grisey’s scores, and also in my own compositions. We have
sometimes even gone so far as decomposing timbre into harmony, or recomposing
harmony into timbre. In fact, in the technique we use, timbre and harmony are
considered two aspects of the same thing.
 Contemporary Music Review 185
Scelsi told me one day, ‘The quarter-tone is a true note, it is a note like all the
others.’’ He is right, but I do not completely agree with his approach to quarter-
tones. For him, they act to modify the overall timbre of his music— truly to create
harmonies in quarter-tones would be entirely foreign to his musical language. Rather,
he uses them to distort harmonies. Although the harmonic aspect is not the most
important in his work, one very often finds in Scelsi’s music strange harmonies,
similar to triads or familiar chords, but slightly different. This effect is frequently due
to the use of quarter-tones, the use of almost-triads.
Microtonal intervals, and quarter-tones in particular, are used quite frequently in
today’s music. Many young composers use quarter-tones in one way or another.
However, I find that Scelsi’s use of quarter-tones is very different from my own,
where the quarter-tone is no more than an expedient that provides an
approximation, finer than a semitone, to an exact acoustic frequency. Scelsi, on
the other hand, uses quarter-tones to give an expressive nuance to the sound.
To finish our discussion of instrumental techniques, I should mention the various
torture instruments that Scelsi uses from time to time, in particular the resonators. In
certain pieces, he calls for special mutes (for string instruments), which he invented
himself. These mutes have the effect of adding a sort of interference, creating an
‘impure’ sound. I believe this is one of the essential principles of Scelsi’s sound. I
could draw a comparison with African musics, where the most beautiful sound is not
(as it is in the Western tradition) the purest sound, but on the contrary, a sound that
is enriched, distorted and charged with many interfering resonances. One of the
techniques is to make the sound of the instrument set another sounding body into
resonance. I would also include Scelsi’s vocal techniques in this comparison; they
produce an ‘impure’ sound by comparison to classical vocal techniques. Here, I see a
connection to Michaël Lévinas, who uses the same type of sounds, and who has
undertaken the same sort of research with both voices and instruments.
Scelsi did some experiments in the domain of electronics, without doubt wilfully
primitive. You have to have visited him and seen his old tape recorders to
understand. Scelsi had an Ondioline—one of the ancestors of the synthesizer, dating
(I believe) from 1945 or 1950—which showed his interest in electronic instruments.
He made some ventures into tape music—I remember particularly a piece he played
for me, an experiment that consisted of completely twisted and saturated piano
sounds, made with a small microphone and his ancient tape recorder, which easily
overloaded.2

Notes
[1] Editor’s note: This text was transcribed from an oral presentation given at Royaumont in
1988, during a colloquium on Scelsi.
[2] I believe that this ‘tape piece’, once transcribed for strings, was the source for the very odd
Fifth Quartet.