technologies

esearch and development – 2016
GEMME
Musical Gesture: Models and Experiments
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Teams Involved: Analysis of Musical Practices, Sound Music
Movement Interaction
Funding: ANR - programme blanc shs
Calendar: November 2012 — June 2016
Partners: Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis (CTEL: Centre
transdisciplinaire d’épistémologie de la littérature)
Coordinator: IRCAM
In the beginning of the 21st century, gesture became a
significant means of interaction with technology for the
general public, and also within the musician community.
While musical writing has put a strong emphasis on
deconstructing and reshaping the acting body of the
musician-performer for nearly 50 years, it is interesting
to note that for the past 10 years there has been a strong
multidisciplinary convergence on this research/creation
topic, drawing the attention of composers, performers, and
computer scientists as well as the domains of engineering,
psychology, physiology, biomechanics, and cognitive
sciences. This concept of gesture, commonly used in
numerous domains, notably in the performing arts such as
theater and dance, has only been the subject of embryonic
research in the domain of musicology. The GEMME project
offers an analysis of theoretical texts and musical works, and
also carries out investigations before and after the premiere
of a score: what theoretical and technical possibilities of
the formalization of gestures are available to composers?
What gestural procedures can they test on paper and during
the performance of a work? What means of transmission
of the gestural information are created not only during the
collaboration between composer and performer, but also
when the performance of the work is taught? This project
endeavors to answer these questions via four main themes:
1. Tacit Theories of Gesture: genealogy of the compositional
notion of gesture, its categorizations and periodization,
the current state of the art
2. Gesture and Stage: study of a paradigmatic method—that
of Kagel—where the musical idea is connected to its staged
expression in the framework of musical and instrumental
theater
3. Gesture and Instrument: study of a contrasting
paradigmatic method—that of Lachenmann—where the
composition calls upon a breakdown of the organological
possibilities of sound production in relationship with a
political and social criticism of expressive conventions
4. Gesture and Technology: a series of musical analyses
of a group of seminal scores, from Ferneyhough’s Time
and Motion Study II to Luna Park by Aperghis, that offer
a variety of technical and computing paradigms that
formalize and/or accompany the instrumental gesture.
Theories of Musical Composition
of the 20 th Century
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Teams Involved: Analysis of Musical Practices, Musical
Representations
Funding: CNRS, Réseau international d’études des écrits de
compositeurs (Université de Montréal), éditions Symétrie (Lyon)
This editorial project began in 2003 and aims to publish a
substantial panorama of the main compositional theories
of the 20th century. While certain theoretical corpora have
been broadly published and commentated (e.g. Schoenberg,
Xenakis, Boulez, Stockhausen), others, just as important
for history and the musical aesthetic, remain relatively
unknown due to a lack of available introductory texts. Today,
neither musicians nor musicologists have a comprehensive
reference source on the fertile relationship between
composition and theory during the last century. Even so,
the fertility of this relationship was a determining factor in
the development of contemporary music, and particularly
of computer-music.
Crossing historical musicology, discourse analysis and
musical analysis, the book edited by N. Donin and L.
Feneyrou will fill the current void with a collective reference
publication on the compositional theories of past century—a
century characterized by a profusion of writings by artists,
aesthetic manifests defining musical techniques and
technologies, and research carried out on compositional
systems. Sixty international specialists have come together
to treat, on one hand, compositional theories specific to
an individual or a school—from Schoenberg to Hindemith
to Carter to Rihm —and on the other hand, the categories
and problems that surfaced throughout the century such
as algorithmic music, musical theater, live electronics,
or spectralism. Theoretical corpora unknown in French,
sometimes unpublished, are presented alongside the most
widely explored themes by musicologists during the past
40 years. The contributions offer a synthetic presentation,
both technical and historical, of these notions and/ or
doctrines, based on the most current knowledge about the
articles, manifests, etc. on the composers studied. The level
of diversity of the participants reflects different aspects
of 20th century musicology, from Philippe Albèra to Elena
Ungeheuer, from Angelo Orcalli to Richard Toop. éditions
Symétrie published this two 900-page volume work in 2013.
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