The multiple currents that write the present of creative music largely exceed the sole field of written music. A reality to which this dossier bears witness, bringing together the voices of musicians and musicologists from all horizons around the question of writing.

The present of music is not necessarily a present of writing. It must be recognized that in 2022, the field of contemporary creative music largely exceeds that of what is called, precisely, "contemporary" music - by which we mean written music. The existence of Hémisphère son testifies to this, as well as the career of its contributors, who have in common that they were brought up in the Western music of the written tradition before being transformed by their contact with multiple musical movements.They have been transformed by their contact with multiple "non-savvy" and non-written musical movements - jazz or techno, improvised music or post-punk, not to mention extra-western musical traditions - and by their assiduous frequentation of numerous places and events not necessarily labelled "contemporary music". Personally, it is notably at a sound poetry festival - Sonorités, in Montpellier - that in October 2007, I had the joy of living a musical epiphany thanks to the ensemble ]h[iatus (then 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, switching from one to the other by means of improvised interludes. Bypassing the traps of classical ritual - the applause that periodically 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 ensemble ]h[iatus - and hiatus in general - is mentioned several times in this dossier, the need for which naturally arose, since writing seems to be a relevant prism for approaching the mutations that are currently taking place in the musical field. To question, also, at the same time, "its relationship to the instrument and to its culture", as Lê Quan Ninh says, about improvisation, in a text byAnne Montaron which testifies to these "paths in mixed waters" that I mentioned just now - and which reminds us how much the practice of improvisation has always been, in the West, consubstantial with composition (and not only for the organists, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Jean-Pierre Leguay or Thierry Escaich). Before time and the evolution of mentalities - a very romantic sacralization of the Work and of the Artist on which we are still largely dependent today - came to operate partitions, hierarchies, segmentations which still persist in institutional structures, and in the unconscious of many musicians.

Works without score

Today however, at least according to the multiple artists interviewed in this dossier, it would seem that the borders seem to become porous again, at least in the reality of practices, if not in the institutional structures. It is the combined result of factors at the same time endogenous and external to the field of the "learned" music, and whose nature is aesthetic as much as technological. 

Guillaume Kosmicki returns to these evolutions, and to the way in which the tabula rasa of the post-war period led many composers, in a desire for aesthetic renewal, to explore the "beyond of writing" in multiple ways: graphic scores, recourse to randomness, to improvisation. The figure of John Cage holds (once again) a central place, so much his way 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 evoked by Makis Solomos in a text devoted to another essential phenomenon: the "becoming-sound" of music. At the same time, since 1945, in parallel with the evolution of the learned musical language - which has not been without its share of debates and polemics - there have been far more structural upheavals in the musical landscape as a whole, largely dependent on technical progress. The post-war period, with the adoption of the LP format and the 45 rpm, established the hegemony of the record in the distribution of music: a hegemony that had always been favored by the infatuation of "classical" music lovers, but that capitalized above all on the success of popular music. After jazz, the triumph of rock and amplified music comes the advent of the studio as an instrument: it's another way of writing music than putting it on tape; and it's a new conception of the work that of the "album" (and no longer the score), a format that, until the internet comes to dematerialize all that, will remain the canonical format of pop music.
It is also the time of the "experimental music" which develops in the Anglo-Saxon world, always in the wake of Cage: the time of the river works of La Monte Young in the United States and of the graphic scores of Cornelius Cardew in England. At the same time, the composers of electroacoustic music explore a new way of writing music, where the magnetic tape, the adhesive tape and the scissors replace the paper, the pencil and the eraser, where the "fixed sounds" take the place of notes. The score proves to be a framework that is sometimes too restrictive in view of the inordinate extension of the field of sound creation, and too rigid to render the new nature of sounds in all its richness.

(So many approaches, by the way, which show that the "unwritten" does not automatically equate to the improvised; the border between the "fixed" and the "unfixed" being anyway often very difficult to circumscribe, as Ludovic Florin shows from the example of some contemporary jazz musicians. His text made me think of the magnificent disc recently published by the percussionist Didier Lasserre: Silence Was Pleased, which comes to "fix" a "composition" first thought 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 easily imagine discovering (with great enthusiasm) in some contemporary music hall: rigorously architected, testifying to a dizzying and often unheard of research on timbres, it is nonetheless moving at each performance, malleable, permeable to the contact of silence and the power of the moment. A work, undeniably, but without a score. 

As well as Keith Jarrett's illustrious Köln Concert, in this case an improvisation, but which other instrumentalists can now appropriate, thanks to the good care of these devoted transcribers to whom the pianist François Mardirossian pays tribute.
And we should also talk about other musical traditions, from Asia, Africa, South America, Europe or the Middle East, and in particular about music of oral tradition and the function of 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 anyway to retranscribe the harmonic subtlety specific to the maqam. Concerning folklore, we refer to the enlightening works published by Denis Laborde on the subject (and in particular Basque folklore); and we will limit ourselves to noting that these modest repertoires, these musics often considered as "poor", of which only collecting and recording allowed their survival, are today the object of a highly creative reappropriation on the part of artists and instrumentalists from all musical horizons.They are now the object of a highly creative reappropriation by artists and instrumentalists from all musical horizons, including conservatories, as witnessed for example by the work of collectives such as La Nòvia, Hart Brut or La Crue). 

Political gestures

All these developments, of course, have more or less consciously influenced the younger generations of musicians. We are not only thinking of the technological-organological progress, and the appearance of the computer as an instrument, which led to the appearance of "virtual scores" in order to widen notation to the field of "mixed" music.

More profoundly, we are thinking of the way in which this hegemony of recording and this instantaneous, globalized circulation of music have impregnated our minds, transformed our musical culture and sensibility, and in so doing have shaped new visions of musical and sound art, which blur the 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 could be described as "fluid" in reference to a fashionable rhetoric - fluidity not excluding radicality. Myriam Pruvot'smodest opera, coming from the Beaux-Arts and radio creation, as well as Mickaël Bernard 's "ephemeral scores" summon a multiplicity of musical traditions and artistic disciplines. So many writings of the present which do not necessarily pass by the writing in the traditional sense of the term.

This new freedom with regard to the score also denotes, in hollow, a political positioning. When Loïc Guénin emphasizes that his approach "to composing and sharing with performers" never places him "in the position of the knowing, untouchable demiurge genius who would master all the parameters of sound and give birth to music from his gesture", or when the founders of theINSUB META ORCHESTRA speak of their ensemble as"a micro-society where each member must find his place quickly without being crushed by a hierarchy due to seniority or his 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 Western music in the written tradition, which have, moreover, become largely globalized. These words bring 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 in order to give the performer the freedom to add his or her own stone and thus work for the well-being of the community of musicians. A score that would lead to the creation of the Scratch Orchestra, an ensemble made up of a majority of non-specialists forming a sort 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. The purpose of this dossier is not to suggest that writing music belongs to the past. Rather, to emphasize these new spaces of freedom that musical institutions would do well to take note of...

David Sanson