« Towards a Consideration of the Contemporary Musical Work as a "Work in Progress" »

     Communication dispensée par Pierre MICHEL (membre du GREAM) dans le cadre du Colloque « Investigating Musical Performance: Towards a Conjunction of Ethnographic and Historiographic Perspectives », à la Fondazione Giorgio Cini de Venise (Italie), le 10 juillet 2016 de 11h à 11h30.

     This paper proposes ongoing open reflections on the diverse ways musical works are understood depending on the approaches adopted by the musician, the analyst or analyst-musician (all philosophical notions being excluded here), and even the non-specialist listener. (The last topic will not be covered here.) My considerations are based on a range of experiences arising from collaborations with contemporary music composers and performers during residencies, master classes and filmed concerts.

     The contrast between understanding the work (its form, musical content, meaning, etc.), its possible memorisation or internalisation (obtained via the instrument or mentally via the score), the way the music is "projected" on stage (for the performer) or the work is received and mentally processed (for the musicologist and listener) relates to the types of representation, mental patterns and different sensory experiences that do not necessarily fall within the same "reference framework" in terms of perceptions and expectations. In view of the evolution that the scientific disciplines and the arts are undergoing today, it seems vital to supplement existing knowledge of research in various fields (analysis, performance studies, the study of interpretive gestures, etc.) via a comparative or cohesive approach between a somewhat "abstract" analytical approach (in brief: the primacy of the score) and a rational, concrete and sensitive observation of the resulting sound as rendered during the concert or raw recording. My research is not concerned with the recording in its final phase following studio editing, and issues concerning the record or CD as a "finished product" that has undergone sophisticated studio work will not be taken into account here.

     On account of the writings of performers, conductors, researchers and sociologists, I will try to define the basic tenets underpinning a pluralistic vision of the contemporary musical work from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century and the calling into question of a conception of analysis that is too often founded on the written score. Musical praxis and the observable realities during concerts, rehearsals and recording sessions show that the contemporary musical work does not exist in a vacuum, and that various factors (time, concert venue conditions, the ability of the musicians to play the music in a precise or expressive way in a given context, the acoustics of the venue, the location, the atmosphere, etc.) determine a form of momentary culmination that is both relative and tangible in the way the work is projected to and received by the concert-goer. Why not therefore give serious and rigorous consideration to the notion of "work in progress" as being an equally fundamental aspect of the contemporary musical work today?