Allegories confronts the instrumental world with synthesized sounds. Rather than a magnetic tape, which requires rigid synchronization,
Allegories uses a fairly simple real-time synthesis system. The synthetic events, sometimes very complex, are triggered by a musician using a synthesizer keyboard connected to the computer. Thus, it is the synthetic part that follows the conductor, and not the other way around.
Generally, the synthetic sounds must blend into the instruments, complement them, extend them, announce them, transform their timbre. At a few rare moments, they are heard more individually, like a kind of counterpoint or rather the base of the sound structure. Most often, they are produced by "additive synthesis" (a technique consisting of combining simple, sinusoidal components to obtain complex sounds).
The project of
Allegories is also to seek great flexibility, great mobility, in the formal unfolding. The notion of "process" (progressive change from one sound state to another) is thus expanded: every sound event can be considered as a process. Processes can be compressed until they become gesture or sound, or create processes governing progressions of processes... thus recreating a true musical discourse, while avoiding basing it, as in the past, on notions of thematic or cellular development. Sometimes, the processes are barely sketched, summarized, accelerated, symbolized, the music then functioning as an
allegory of the underlying process. Time, finally, does not unfold linearly, but rather like a spiral where the musical substance tends to perpetually return upon itself, however under forms constantly changed by these process games. The piece is thus almost entirely contained in the initial "calls".
Tristan Murail
Recording:
1 Accord CD, AC4658992
Allegories - Aerial Views - Territories of Oblivion
Ensemble Fa, Dominique My (piano and direction)
Author: MURAIL Tristan
Discipline/Instrument: 6 instruments and synthesis device
Medium: Score
Style/Genre: contemporary
Release date: Jan.-90
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