LDV110

19 FRANÇOIS-FRÉDÉRIC GUY ‘Regulated freedom’, in other words . . . Now there’s a point in common with the style of Baroque music, if I may be so bold as to make the comparison. Yes, it’s a comparable state of mind. Murail’s style displays a freedom of thought that can be found even in the beauty of the graphic layout of the score. Barlines are abolished and certain musical phrases are made up of blocks of notes that meet or are superimposed. He paints freedom with a very personal graphism that is meaningful for the performer. In so doing, he solves one of the problems of contemporary music in the 1970s, which was sometimes overloaded with crazy barlines. Rightly or wrongly, it was thought that composers would set themselves free from cycles of beats by multiplying the barlines, as if to break with tradition. In Murail’s output, the bar has disappeared in favour of a spatialisation of sound. There were already early signs of this in Debussy’s output . . . In terms of harmony, the universe of spectral music offers fleeting points of convergence with certain chords derived from traditional tonality, which creates a rather fascinating post-tonal harmonic domain. We are never certain of the harmonic universe surrounding us, but we’re never lost either. For me, this is an almost ideal mode of musical expression in the twenty-first century.