EMS Proceedings and Other Publications

Words on Words: Interviews with electroacoustic music composers about the written presentation of their works

Florence Lethurgez

Florence Lethurgez, Aix-Marseille Université – Laboratory IRSIC (Institute of Research in Information and Communication Sciences), EA 4262
florence.lethurgez@univ-amu.fr

Article

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Abstract

From the fifties, electroacoustic music works as contemporary music in general, come with presentation notes introducing and giving listening keys, for specific listeners, expert or neophyte, prepared or fragile.
They are recorded on concert programs as on the discographic booklets and may be written by musicologists as by the composers themselves. It is the latter that interests us here, writing becoming a kind of subtle mirror of the work, the words to ‘tell the music’ to listeners, categories from which the compositional ‘being’ and “making” are expressed: more particularly intentions and writing processes. After analyzing a corpus of electroacoustic composers program notes at the EMS Network 2014, in order to update most often used processes and discursive fields, more particularly for conceptualizing the aesthetics of sound as well as to address the listener, this time we focus on the analysis of interviews with a sample of electroacoustic music composers.
According to the specific sociology ‘comprehensive’ approach, the analysis of the interviews allows to build a typology linking the writing practices of these texts to the universe of meaning that composers combine with them. The typology obtained allows to clearly distinguish two subgroups: exclusive versus occasional composers of electroacoustic music. The exclusivity of practice makes electroacoustic music composers more sensitive, if not in a specific way, to metalanguage and listening questions, more particularly during the interview where they are asked to have a ‘word on their word’ to have a reflective look at the words they involve to present their music.
From a spoken word to a written word, from an interview situation to a communicative situation, from an artificial framework to a natural framework, the reflexive work of the composer reveals the principles and tensions by which he is led to theorize all practices that revolve around the creation, including ones more ‘external’ to the compositional act. We thus hypothesize that this practice and comments composers make, build up a renewed prism analysis of issues related to the field of music creation and more particularly to electroacoustic music.

EMS15 Proceedings