Murail

I'm on holiday now, in a certain European capital, so I decided to pop
into IRCAM. There isn't much there for visitors, but they have a few
books to read. Some of it has some information about spectralists,
particularly Tristan Murail. (It's co-edited by Bob Gilmore and is
sort-of in the community.) Anyway, a few things I learned:

Murail prefers eighth-tones and Gerard Grisey sixth-tones. But
neither of them care much about the numbers. They both stated their
positions as being against "theory" or "mathmatics" or "systems" or
some such. Murail says he isn't interested in equal temperaments and
isn't doing what Partch did.

What they do is take pitches from timbres, as we know. The timbres
needn't be harmonic -- and as they have no theory there's nothing
special about harmonic timbres. Murail said he was more interested in
the deviations than the pure harmonic series. The idea is to use the
sound rather than mathematics. I don't know how he works out those
deviations, but the electronic realizations use 'distortions' applied
relative to just intonation. Sometimes the timbre is taken above more
than one pitch and in one case they're separated by a minor third of
300 cents. So he isn't a purist about intervals coming from the
timbre. He keeps the electronics with precise tunings (in cents) but
the notation is either quartertones or eigth-tones. Performers can
listen to an electronic version to learn the correct pitches more
precisely.

There's one piece based on fractals, so obviously he doesn't use
mathematics in a different way to other people who don't use
mathematics.

Graham

--- In tuning-math@yahoogroups.com, Graham Breed <gbreed@...> wrote:

> There's one piece based on fractals, so obviously he doesn't use
> mathematics in a different way to other people who don't use
> mathematics.

That's nothing--you should see how I don't use mathematics.