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The multiple currents writing the present of creative music go far beyond the field of written music alone. This dossier bears witness to this reality, bringing together the voices of musicians and musicologists from all horizons around the question of writing.
The present of music is not necessarily the present of writing. It has to be said that, in 2022, the field of contemporary creative music far exceeds that of precisely "contemporary" music - by which we mean written music. The existence of Hémisphère son bears witness to this, as do the careers of its contributors, all of whom have in common the fact that they were brought up on Western music in the written tradition before being transformed by their contact with a wide range of musical styles.s by their contact with multiple non-written, "non-savvy" musical movements - jazz or techno, improvised music or post-punk, not to mention extra-Western musical traditions - and by their assiduous frequentation of numerous venues and events not necessarily stamped "contemporary music". Personally, it was at a sound poetry festival - Sonorités, in Montpellier - in October 2007, that I had the joy of experiencing a musical epiphany thanks to the ensemble ]h[iatus (then only recently formed): In a trio, Martine Altenburger, Tiziana Bertoncini and Lê Quan Ninh performed works by James Tenney, Carl Ludwig Hüsch, Salvatore Sciarrino and Helmut Lachenmann, moving from one to the next with improvised interludes. Bypassing the pitfalls of classical ritual - that untimely and periodic applause which breaks the spell - this concert was a pure moment of music, inviting the listener to open his ears and abandon his blinders, while blurring the boundaries between the fixed and the instantaneous, between the Work and the ephemeral.
The ]h[iatus ensemble - and hiatus in general - is mentioned several times in this dossier, the need for which naturally arose, given that writing seems to be such a relevant prism for approaching the mutations currently taking place in the musical field. It is also a way of questioning both "one's relationship to the instrument and to one's culture", as Lê Quan Ninh says of improvisation, in a text byAnne Montaron that bears witness to the "intertwined paths" I mentioned earlier - and reminds us of the extent to which the practice of improvisation has always been, in the West, consubstantial with composition (and not only for organists, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Jean-Pierre Leguay or Thierry Escaich). Before the passage of time and the evolution of mentalities - a thoroughly Romantic sacralization of the Work and the Artist, on which we are still largely dependent today - led to compartmentalization, hierarchies and segmentations that still persist in institutional structures and in the subconscious of many musicians.
Works without score
Today, however, at least if we are to believe the many artists interviewed for this dossier, it would seem that the boundaries are once again becoming porous, at least in practice, if not in institutional structures. This is the combined result of factors both endogenous and external to the field of "learned" music, and whose nature is as much aesthetic as technological.
Guillaume Kosmicki looks back at these developments, and at how the tabula rasa of the post-war period led many composers, in a desire for aesthetic renewal, to explore the "beyond of writing" in a variety of ways: graphic scores, recourse to aleatorics and improvisation. The figure of John Cage (once again) takes center stage, as his path seems to have marked all those who crossed it, from Karlheinz Stockhausen (and his "intuitive music") to Meredith Monk, from Éliane Radigue to John Luther Adams.
The latter is one of the composers discussed by Makis Solomos in a text devoted to another essential phenomenon: the "becoming-sound" of music. At the same time, since 1945, developments in scholarly musical language - which have not been without their share of debate and controversy - have been accompanied by far more structural upheavals in the musical landscape as a whole, largely driven by technical progress. The post-war period, with the adoption of the LP and 45 rpm formats, established the hegemony of the record in the distribution of music: a hegemony that had always been fostered by the infatuation of "classical" music lovers, but which capitalized above all on the success of popular music. After jazz, the triumph of rock and amplified music came the advent of the studio as an instrument: it was a different way of writing music than putting it down on tape; and it was a new conception of the work, that of the "album" (and no longer the score), a format which, until the Internet dematerialized the whole thing, would remain the canonical format of pop music.
This was also the era of "experimental music" in the English-speaking world, still in the wake of Cage: the era of La Monte Young 's lengthy works in the U.S. and Cornelius Cardew 's graphic scores in England. At the same time, composers of electroacoustic music explored a new way of writing music, where magnetic tape, adhesive tape and scissors replaced paper, pencil and eraser, where "fixed sounds" took the place of notes. The score is sometimes too restrictive a framework for such a vastly expanded realm of sound creation, and too rigid to capture the new nature of sound in all its richness.
(All of which, incidentally, show that the "unwritten" does not automatically equate with the improvised; the boundary between the "fixed" and the "unfixed" being in any case often very difficult to circumscribe, as Ludovic Florin shows from the example of some contemporary jazz musicians. His text made me think of percussionist Didier Lasserre's recently released album Silence Was Pleased, which "fixes" a "composition" originally conceived for the stage. Bringing together around Lasserre a septet of virtuoso improvisers - Benjamin Bondonneau (clarinet), Christine Wodrascka (piano), Jean-Luc Cappozzo (trumpet, flugelhorn), Laurent Cerciat (viola voice), Gaël Mevel (cello), Denis Cointe and Loïc Lachaize (sound treatments) - Silence Was Pleased is a piece that one could well imagine discovering (with enthusiasm) in some contemporary music hall: It is rigorously architected, bearing witness to a dizzying and often unheard-of research into timbres, and yet it is fluid with each performance, malleable, permeable to the contact of silence and the power of the moment. A work, undeniably, but without a score.
Just like Keith Jarrett's illustrious Köln Concert, in this case an improvisation, but one that other instrumentalists can now make their own, thanks to the good care of those dedicated transcribers to whom pianist François Mardirossian pays tribute.
And we should also mention other musical traditions, from Asia, Africa, South America, Europe or the Middle East, and in particular music with an oral tradition and the function played by the score. In Ottoman music, for example, as Kudsi Erguner reminds us, it is above all a "memory aid" - traditional Western notation (and organology) struggling in any case to retranscribe the harmonic subtlety specific to maqâm. As far as folklore is concerned, we refer you to Denis Laborde's enlightening works on the subject (and in particular Basque folklore); and we'll simply note that these modest repertoires, this music often considered "poor", whose survival was only made possible by collecting and recording, are today the object of a highly creative reappropriation on the part of artists and instrumentalists from all musical horizons.e.s from all musical horizons, including conservatories, as demonstrated by the work of collectives such as La Nòvia, Hart Brut and La Crue).
Political gestures
Naturally, all these developments have had a more or less conscious influence on younger generations of musicians. We're not just thinking of technological-organological advances, and the emergence of the computer as an instrument, which have led to the appearance of "virtual scores" to extend notation to the field of "mixed" music.
More profoundly, the hegemony of recording and the instant, globalized circulation of music have permeated our minds, transformed our musical culture and sensibility, and shaped new visions of music and sound art, blurring established hierarchies. By giving immediate access to other aesthetics, other traditions, other ways of making and transmitting music, they have led to the emergence of a new type of composer, one that might be described as "fluid" in reference to a fashionable rhetoric - fluidity not excluding radicality. Myriam Pruvot'smodest opera, a product of the Beaux-Arts and radio creation, and Mickaël Bernard 's "partitions éphémères" summon up a multiplicity of musical traditions and artistic disciplines. These are all writings of the present that do not necessarily involve writing in the traditional sense of the term.
This new-found freedom in relation to the score also reveals a political stance. When Loïc Guénin stresses that his approach "to composing and sharing with performers" never places him "in the position of the knowing, untouchable demiurge genius who masters all the parameters of sound and gives birth to music from his gesture", or when the founders ofINSUB META ORCHESTRA speak of their ensemble as"a micro-society where each member must find his or her place quickly, without being crushed by a hierarchy based on seniority or role in the group", they are simply expressing a desire to break with the customs, codes and modes of operation in force in the world of traditional Western written music, which have, moreover, become largely globalized. This brings to mind Cornelius Cardew: in 1969-70, with The Great Learning, he invented a score whose seven "paragraphs" play in a fascinating way with traditional notation, leaving the performer free to add his or her own contribution to the well-being of the community of musicians. A score that was to inspire the creation of the Scratch Orchestra, an ensemble of mostly non-specialists forming a kind of democratic micro-society... Taking up this utopian aim, the new generation of musicians seems to aspire to a more democratic way of creating music, and above all of sharing it. The purpose of this dossier is not to suggest that writing music is a thing of the past. Rather, to highlight these new spaces of freedom, which musical institutions would do well to take note of...
David Sanson
