IRCAM: search and destroy

(i think boulez's own dabs at electronic music are fairly feeble, as it happens)

Don't destroy Ferrari!

(but isn't ferrari's best stuff non-IRCAM, all the same?)

this is 4th ans to this thread!

I don't know what stuff was produced at IRCAM and what wasn't actually.

''has it actually delivered the music to justify its existence, and if so what?''

well how do you measure what was worth it or not? 'value for money' args are a bit 'meh'.

it usually says on the sleeve

my instinctive beef i think is that IRCAM is kinda like a huge one-stop-shop of a single electronic instrument — so vast you actually live and work inside it, tho that is not so unusual for the very very early synthesisers, eg RCA Mk 2. It is in principle all-singin;/all-dancing, but is actually so complex in possibility that it wd take a lifetime to learn to play creatively.

(And as that lifetime passed, a lot too much of the tech involved just became obsolescent).

Georgie Born's book identifies a tremendous (inherited) division-of-labour problem — composer/performer/admin/technician/maintenance/cleaning staff — but fails to discuss the ramifications of this in re any specific work(s).

haha i mean it usually says on the sleeve if it's an ircam work

value for money ends up being a massive practical issue though: eg opera is tremendously expensive, and as a result very little opera is made today which in any way transforms our perspective of when/how opera could work (which is backformed mainly as an analysis of 19th-c opera, when it did work and did kinda pay for itself)

(a lot of wagner's works are partially shaped round quasi-marketing decisions — as they weren't then called — he had made, quite early in his his career)

I dunno mark, I keep confusing IRCAM with INA-GRM. A college friend of mine did an internship at IRCAM a couple years ago, but I don't have his info to ask him about it.

OK I think the only stuff I have from them is some xenakis (but i'm not sure).

''It is in principle all-singin;/all-dancing, but is actually so complex in possibility that it wd take a lifetime to learn to play creatively.

(And as that lifetime passed, a lot too much of the tech involved just became obsolescent).''

doesn't IRCAM actually try to develop new technology (I know very little abt IRCAM BTW and the Boulez quote from the architecture thread was pulled from a BBC doc on him that i saw a couple of years ago)?

''value for money ends up being a massive practical issue though: eg opera is tremendously expensive, and as a result very little opera is made today which in any way transforms our perspective of when/how opera could work (which is backformed mainly as an analysis of 19th-c opera, when it did work and did kinda pay for itself)''

does music 'work' when it pays for itself?

not necessarily, but less things are likely to be preying on the makers' and listeners' minds when money-problems aren't also screaming at them

ircam developed a variety of software programs: whether they're any good or not is a function of whether the use they've been put to works or not

(btw i don't think the word "works" is a simple one here, or the idea "justifies its existence")

''(btw i don't think the word "works" is a simple one here, or the idea "justifies its existence")''

yup!

Hmmm, if you judge it just based on music composed in residence there, I don't know -- I agree Boulez's IRCAM pieces aren't generally his best. But there's Birtwistle's magnificent The Mask of Orpheus, which incorporates electronic elements realized at IRCAM by Barry Anderson. And some of Jonathan Harvey's IRCAM stuff -- "Mortuos plango, vivos voco," for instance -- is stunning. Search that, and also:

• Kaija Saariaho, "Lichtbogen"
• Roger Reynolds' 2-CD set, The Paris Pieces
• George Benjamin, "Antara"

And anyway, music composed on the premises is only half the story.
Search: Max, PatchWork, OpenMusic, ...

On the other hand: destroy Todd Machover along with all of his music

MAX/MSP to thread.

(there must be more than one ilm'er, i'm positive, who's quietly hoping that perhaps in some roundabout way this thread'll help advance mark s's book by a whole line or two, if not half a paragraph, no?)

i forgot j.harvey actually: good call

t\'\'t i have despatched the fighter planes: finland's doom is nigh and it's yr fault!!

(no, actually i kinda started the thread in order to kickstart myself into organising my thoughts once more and FINISHING THAT BASTARD BOOK!)

when you finish the book remember to acknowledge me as I had the idea of starting this thread first (it got more than five replies yay!).

i intend to acknowledge everyone on ilx by name, naturally

"to my good friend julio, the snooker buff"

hehehe...I'm a darts buff as well.

" finland's doom is nigh and it's yr fault!! "

o-oh... b-b-but the number of Finnish-composer-who-have-made-crap-music-at-ircam hardly can be *so* huge as to justify such Draconic methods of music chroniclin'!? ...hm, actually i dunno -- i'm hardly able to count 'em all, from where i am ("right across the Gulf of Finland" ;-) )
as regards Estonia's younger composers, on the other hand, quite a few have studied at ircam and some of the best of them (e.g.Helena Tulve) even admit to that experience being creatively rewarding -- but i'm yet to hear any of her compositions that were written there...

I liked Repons.

I liked the Georgie Born book mentioned by mark s above, 'Rationalizing Culture'... (she was a late period member of Henry Cow)... it's about her residency at IRCAM and it basically reads like an expose, documenting all the administration & politics at the heart of the 'creative' environment. well, what did she expect, though it really does sound like it was poison to live through...

The book mentions MAX/MSP only once, vaguely, about 350 pages in... hah

I wonder if there's any significance to the fact that my initial reply (thrown together as a straight-ahead S&D, with no additional conscious agenda) mentions no *French* composers other than papa Boulez. Lots of French composers pass through the doors of IRCAM, certainly, and they get lots of government support (meaning they're published and recorded). For one reason or another I've hardly noticed many of them.

I should add that I recently spent a very satisfying and productive 4-month residency at IRCAM -- but in the scientific division, not above ground with the composers. I had thought in advance of this trip that I would discover lots of new composers during my time there, but I ended up not making an effort because I was so consumed with my own work. (I poked around in the Mediatheque a bit, but mostly got excited about hard-to-find scores by English composers I already knew and liked...)

When I think about the importance of IRCAM I suppose one major thing is that it's the place where "spectral" design as the basis for harmony really gained a foothold -- and this was explicitly regarded by some key practitioners (Grisey, Murail,...) as the invention that would Save the World from Serialism.* Lots of the technological innovations at IRCAM run parallel to what springs up elsewhere (and lots of people and ideas there, especially in the early days, were imported from the U.S. anyway). But "spectralism" (yucky word) was a truly French product, with roots you can trace back to Debussy and through Messaien. But it never had much export value. (Or maybe you could point to the stream of composers passing through IRCAM and say "yes it did" -- but I think foreigners come in search of machines to play with.)

My sense now is that the younger composers at IRCAM regard the "spectralist school" as being old-fashioned.

(haha I am a neo-serialist and regard myself as old-fashioned)

*The asterisk in my preceding post refers to nothing in particular.

Taking sides: IRCAM vs. XEBEC.

(XEBEC = underdog in this matchup, surely. But maybe there's a good case to made...)

"above ground"—this only feeds my unenlightened fantasy that IRCAM is encased in a titanium bunker.

That's about right, Tracer. The "tower" is for administration (towering over the rest, naturally), the blockier building is the educational division with composition studios, and the scientific division is literally underground (kind of tucked in under the fountain on the Stravinsky plaza). I can't imagine anyone writing a book about the whole institution can resist the metaphorical possibilities in all this.

(I can't confirm the titanium part.)

Revive! ...not least because I've been listening to Tristan Murail (particularly Gondwana / Desintegrations / Time And Again) and finding that the computer-generated elements remind me more of Repons than I was expecting. So this talk of the institution itself as a "single electronic instrument" suddenly makes sense.

Murail is enjoyable nonetheless. The aforementioned Debussy->Messiaen->spectralists lineage is immediately evident even to these unschooled ears. Not a bad thing!

I really love Desintegrations. The electronically reinforced overtones fuse perfectly with the ensemble playing, they sound inseperable. You can tell it's the same 'instrument' Boulez used for Repons, some of the sonorities are similar, but to very different effect.

Other good earlier Murail: Ethers, from 1978. (Accord released three CDs of Murail, I also have the blue one, it didn't grab me as much as the green one).

still have to hear Jonathan Harvey's "Mortuos plango, vivos voco"