De Natura Sonorum 2 and 3

The second and third movements of De Natura Sonorum share hidden origins in direct response to the orchestral tradition in western art music. Accidents/Harmoniques (Accidents/Harmonics) was originally envisioned as a parody of Instrumental Music ("with a capital I", says Parmegiani), and Géologie Sonore (Geology of Sound) took a specifical inspiration from Arnold Schoenberg's Klangfarbenmelodie, opus 16, no. 3, the famous orchestral work that emancipated tone color as a common set of pitches rotate around the orchestra. Both movements originated with orchestral samples, largely obliterated in the published work, although oblique traces remain.

Accidents/Harmoniques, spelled throughout this book without the intervening slash, is based around the note A, the standard reference note for tuning, heard at the beginning of orchestral concerts. "I wanted to call this movement: music (or maybe a certain music, I don't remember any more). In any case, it's around the notion of 'music' that my ideas crystallized." Parmegiani tried all kinds of samples from orchestral and jazz records, constructing blocks, chords and groups into aggregates and agglomerations. Virtually all of this work was discarded, leaving only the idea of the 'A' backbone, around which he grafted a few remaining sampled chords and isolated sounds from classical and exotic instruments. One of the other candidate titles for this piece was "Patchwork," but he found he was starting down a path where satire nearly became the principal theme, not where he wanted to go for De Natura Sonorum. The authors see an ironic revenge of the marginalized electroacoustician, isolated from the classical music establishment, creating a promethean and utopian metamusic "capable of humbling and supplanting instrumental music," an opinion shared by another theorist, Michel Chion, in his untranslated 1976 book Les Musiques Électro-acoustique.

The final product, constructed fairly quickly once the initial researches were discarded, was similar to Incidences/Resonances, a continuum interrupted by various events. "I played two tracks in parallel, and sometimes I decided that such and such an event was going to interfere with the timbre in the continuum, and other times it wouldn't. It all happened very quickly." He knew in advance that he wanted to proceed toward a complete anarchy and chaos, and he even introduced an aleatoric sequence near the end. Most of the sound sources were from various records and tapes, with very few original recordings. Instrumental sounds came from violin, double bass, flute, trombone, piano, horn, vibraphone, baritone sax, bandoneon, crumhorn, and various percussion instruments. The chaotic sections near the very end were based on an orchestral recording playing an aleatoric sequence pizzicato, superimposed several times to obtain a very dense texture. These sections are bounded by recordings of wood blocks, slowed down to conserve the sudden, clean attacks but creating a thicker and more imposing event. The wispy materials in the treble around 3:40 are a recording of a Beethoven string quartet run through a ring modulator. He used a synthesizer to create the continuum sounds, often accumulating different partials to get different timbres and splicing them together to get the variations. There's an especially audible example of this at 1:30.

Géologie Sonore has two separate inspirations. One is an image of the earth seen from an airplane, where one can see the ground without details of the exact forms, simply the passage of global forms, dark or light colors, etc. The other is the twin musical inspirations of Arnold Schoenberg's orchestral piece opus 16, no. 3 (the famous chord-color piece) and John Chowning's seminal FM piece Turenas, one of whose aims was the exploration of continuous timbral modification. As with Accidents Harmoniques, Parmegiani started with an hommage to orchestral music, using samples from Schoenberg, Debussy and Verdi, but these were obliterated in the final piece. Instead, there was a long period of sound gathering to create a catalog of wefts (trames), a technical term from Pierre Schaeffer's groundbreaking theoretical work Traité des objets musicaux. Schaeffer's work is still not available in English, but Michel Chion's commentary, translated by John Dack and Christine North, defines a weft as "a type of excentric sound of prolonged duration, created by superimposing prolonged sounds … which are heard as groups, macro-objects, slowly developing, scarcely differentiated structures."


Parmegiani provides the following descriptive inventory of the wefts that he used (which I have slightly abridged):

• Meta-instrument: an orchestral continuum in which the instruments follow one another through successive dissolves, a sort of continuous metamorphosis. The sequence was recorded live from the radio, then flattened and rendered unrecognizable through montage. Master weft, present almost throughout the entire movement
• Keyboard + organ: the keyboard of the electric organ, a continuous sound obtained by pressing all the keys on the keyboard, sped up
• organ + ring modulator: the preceding sequence treated with a ring modulator = a slow ascending movement of the mass
• harmonic trumpet: a continuous trumpet sound captured for an earlier piece, Jazzex
• orchestral foundation: an enormous non-tonic agglomerate. A recording of a symphony orchestra making a continuous rumbling or murmuring, elongated through successive dissolves of the recording with itself.
• Meta-instrument: the initial sequence slowed down and played backwards
• Martenot + ring modulator: Ondes Martenot treated with a ring modulator to enlarge the sound spectrum
• Transparent Screen: an electronic continuum from the video evoking millions of grains emanating out from a dense center
• violin + notch filter: a violin treated with a notch filter for a slow variation in the timbre

For each weft, Parmegiani created a graph, marking the various colors, dynamics, and tessituras on a temporal axis. Armed with all of his wefts, he started the painstaking creation of a series of pre-mixes. He avoided putting timbres from similar families in the same groups, but in general he tried to make the transitions between the wefts as interesting and sensitive as possible. He ended up with over a dozen different reels of tape, which he had to mix down to three in preparation for the final mix. Unlike other movements, where he was able to create short sequences and splice them together, the final mix for Géologie Sonore had to be done in a single pass. In hindsight, he would have liked more diversity between the different colors, more flagrant transitions, but he was unable to put enough bite in any of the transpositions; the technology of the time was too limiting.

The image is an excerpt from the mixing score for Géologie Sonore. I am unable to match this image with anything specific in the music.

This post is the most recent in a very occasional series about L'Envers d'une oeuvre, by Philippe Mion, Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Jean-Christophe Thomas, published in 1982 by Éditions Buchet/Chastel and INA/GRM. The first post in the series has an overview of the book. Click here to get them all.

De Natura Sonorum 1 and 4

De Natura Sonorum thematizes contrasting binary pairs, one of which is stated at the outset with the first piece, Incidences/Resonances. Excerpts from the interview:

I wanted to check out the different ways that concrete elements could combine with electronic elements, always seeking a certain homogeneity. It was about making composite objects, where the attack was concrete and the "resonance" electronic. In spite of the artificial operation of the montage, I stayed within the natural logic of the percussive objects (percussion-resonance).

In this piece, concrete sounds only appear as points, and everything that is prolonged is electronic. Anyway, the sounding objects that I used don't have long resonance, or very interesting either. They obey the law of rapid decay, well known and rather banal. When all is said and done, striking a crystal glass (one of the sources in the piece) and removing its attack is nothing more or less than a very poor resonance, almost pure, which one could create electronically. So it's the sharpness, the attack, that's interesting. This is why I sought in this piece to play with a variety of different attacks.

Another investigation, another starting point for this piece: the sudden interruption of an incident into a resonance (or a continuum). These incidents are "foreign bodies" that interfere with the development of the sound; taken from a material different from the continuum (for example a crystal strike in a long metallic resonance), the foreign body perturbs the continuum in different ways; in general by modifying the harmonic web, thickening, doubling, … sometimes completely changing the continuum.

An incident may or may not have any consequences on the musical passage, like the "false note" in the traditional system (that doesn't lead to a modulation). There are, in Incidences/Resonances, two or three sounds that are sufficient unto themselves. They are 'incidental.'

The technical specs provide the concrete sources (crystal glasses, a triangle, metal bowls, a bronze bell, and a sine wave generator), struck with all manner of percussions (wood, metal, glass, plastic, rubber, fingers, fingernails, &hellip). The electronic sounds form the drones, fabricated after the concrete attacks and superimposed to create microtonal beats. Through microscopic editing of the original sound material and judicious use of reverb, Parmegiani created a wealth of composite percussion strokes. One of his resonance constructions would tighten the gap between the beginning and the end, removing the instrument's natural resonance in the middle of its decay time. One other interesting sidebar is that the opening sequence (from 0:04 through 0:45) was remixed and reused later, from 1:30 through 2:30.

Parmegiani explicitly contrasts Incidences/Resonances with the fourth piece in the series, Étude Élastique, a comparison the authors explore further in a brief interview annotation. (A second annotation touches on the foreign bodies and hot philosophical issues around hetero- and homogeneity.) Incidences/Resonances was composed systematically, like an étude, whereas the latter ( the étude in the title is deceptive) was composed more intuitively. The Étude Élastique came to Parmegiani "so quickly that I didn't even notice myself working" and claims to remember little about its genesis. So the authors instead jump right into the technical notes, "the precise description of all of the operations for realization, from the capture of the sounds to the final mix." There were five sound sources:

• balloons (baudruches), inflated and deflated, which are rubbed, twisted, struck with fingers (dry and wet), nails, the palm, etc. It's worth noting in passing that the translation of "baudruche" in the original CD notes was "goldbeater's skin", referring to a membrane from a cow or sheep used to separate layers of gold leaf. But in common French usage, the word indicate rubber balloons, and the translation is corrected in the notes accompanying the box (although "baloon" is misspelled).
• a zarb (the Persian percussion instrument also known as a Tonbak or Doumbek.
• this same zarb played into a grand piano with the sustain pedal up to capture all the resonance. Some of these strokes can be heard without much manipulation around 2:15.
• an electric organ with all the keys held down and manipulated with a wha-wha pedal. One of his actions was a sforzendi created by opening the pedal quickly, followed by a gradual closing; these actions can be heard without much manipulation starting around 4:20.
• a synthesizer to generate white noise and sine waves.

The authors extensively catalog the manipulations, transformations, and major structural points, with all of the lists cross referenced. For example, the first section, up to a zarb stroke merged with a white noise resonance at 1:35, features a sound he calls "white sparks" (flammèches blanches). In one of his sequences on the electric organ with the wha-wha pedal, the pedal was played irregularly in order to get agitated and complex sequences. These were further transposed up, "contracted in time for their global forms to emerge, which at normal speed were too distended to be perceptible" and mixed independently onto two tracks, superimposed as the left and right channels.

The authors identify transposition as one of Parmegiani's primary manipulations in Étude Élastique. Some of his balloon sounds were slowed down to make the inner rhythms distinguishable. These became some of the percussive sounds in the first 95 seconds, where they gradually merge with the less manipulated percussive sounds from the zarb. Electroacoustic composers frequently strive to eliminate audible transitions between different types of material, at an extreme becoming the slow music of Éliane Radigue where transitions are eliminated almost altogether. The theme of inaudible transitions is a big part of De Natura Sonorum, audible in almost every piece and undoubtedly assisted by Parmegiani's research into Pierre Schaeffer's morphologies. Balloons transposed up are part of the textures in the second half of the piece, where the sounds are blended with the organ sforzendi, and which I hear as a marked contrast with the white sparks from the beginning. Both the balloon and organ transformations are examples of how Parmegiani uses speed to unveil the internal workings of a sound, and they give another dimension to the elasticity of the piece's title.

In the annotated interview, the authors probe Parmegiani's conflicting information about the piece's genesis and reveals some aspects of his creative process. He remembers clearly the idea of independent tracking, and that he had tried unsuccessfully to create white spark sounds from a white noise generator. Meanwhile, he also had some recordings of percussionist Jean-Pierre Drouet playing the zarb, and made an intuitional connection between Drouet's zarb playing and his own balloon manipulations that he describes as a certain "touch". If the analogies and memory conflicts seem a bit confusing or irrational, nevertheless these are the mental operations that galvanize the creative endeavor.

The image is the first two minutes of Parmegiani's listening score for Étude Élastique; click it to see a larger version.

This post is the most recent in a very occasional series about L'Envers d'une oeuvre, by Philippe Mion, Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Jean-Christophe Thomas, published in 1982 by Éditions Buchet/Chastel and INA/GRM. The first post in the series has an overview of the book. Click here to get them all.

Bernard in a book

Through an accident of education I majored in French at university back in the 1970s. For several years I maintained it by continuing to read trendy French fiction and philosophy, but gave it up a decade ago and celebrated by reading Proust in the revised Moncrieff translation. Anything I might want to read would eventually get translated, I thought. Well, wrong again. In 1982 Jean-Jacques Nattiez collaborated with composer Philippe Mion and Jean-Christophe Thomas in a full-length book about Bernard Parmegiani's De Natura Sonorum entitled L'Envers d'une oeuvre. "Une oeuvre" means "a work", and l'envers generally means the flip or reverse side of something like paper, or inside out when speaking about clothes, but it's also a preposition corresponding to 'towards.' One of my last piano teachers always talked about moving towards something in music, and wrote 'towards' all over my scores, so I read this connotation in the title as well.

Bernard Parmegiani is one of the best known of the French electroacousticians who emerged from Pierre Schaeffer's pioneering studio, the Groupe de Recherche Musicale (GRM). He premiered De Natura Sonorum in 1975, crediting the work with exorcising his music of repetitive forms which had been so much a part of Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d'Orphée and Et après. "Finally it was thanks to De Natura Sonorum that I managed to emerge from my chrysalis, like an insect before its moult.… I was leaving a certain larval state, and I needed something with the rigorous character of an etude, and that was De Natura Sonorum." The work was pivotal for the GRM composers as well, one of the first that moved beyond the pure pleasure of the virtually unlimited wealth of new-found sounds available through technology. Parmegiani demonstrated a real mastery of the theoretical principles detailed in Schaeffer's massive Traité des objets musicaux and catalogued all of his sounds for De Natura Sonorum using Schaeffer's typology. Continual technological improvements permitted him precise control over the sound material to realize his visions.

The three authors interviewed Parmegiani at some length about the work, apparently split into two extended sessions over a year apart, giving them an opportunity to use the later interviews for clarification and additional detail. For each of the ten pieces on the original LP release (Dynamique De La Résonance and Incidences/Battements were added later for the CD reissue), they present relevant selections from the interviews, along with annotations, little essays on one or another aspect, a listening score, and a technical outline of the original sources, manipulations, transformations and montages. Their goal is to present Parmegiani's music on three levels:

1. the level of fabrication ("recipes", creative thought processes, from the poetic-philosophical conception up to the point of scissors cutting tape)
2. the musical level, of the complete work (such that Parmegiani and we can agree to describe intersubjectively)
3. a "superior", or rather infra-level, the meaning, the "obsessive" (or recurring) themes of the composer, and, inevitably, of the man Parmegiani (his phantasms, his problems, psychological, philosophical, particularly regarding composition).

My own reading of L'Envers d'une oeuvre has been sporadic, but I feel compelled to write about it, even well before I've finished it, sort of a live-blogging event stretched over months. I'm very happy reading one chapter in between other more sustained reading, accompanied by a close listening of the piece under the current microscope. Blog posts in this series should be ongoing, may appear unordered compared to the original work (and the book). One can only hope that some enterprising, bilingual, Parmegiani-obsessed graduate student undertakes a real translation of the entire book for her thesis.

The photo of Parmegiani in his studio is by Guy Vivien and comes from the booklet inside the INA-GRM release Violostries. The insect quotation is from an interview with Évelyne Gayou, published in Parmegiani's Portraits Polychromes book, page 33. Excerpts from this interview appear in the program notes for the Parmegiani box. L'Envers d'une oeuvre was published by Éditions Buchet/Chastel in Paris in 1982, and the bulleted goal list is from the Preamble, written by Thomas, on page 32. Translations are my own.