Music was no first choice for Tristan Murail: he opted for Arabic and economics before joining Messiaen’s stable at the age of twenty. His horizons, however, extended well beyond Messiaen’s class: Murail was very much aware of the presence in Paris of Iannis Xenakis and looked also to Giacinto Scelsi as well as György Ligeti for creative impulses.

Like many of his contemporaries in France, Britain, and elsewhere, Murail (together with his friends Gérard Grisey, Michaël Lévinas, Hugues Dufourt, and Philippe Hurel) founded an ensemble to perform their music: L’Itinéraire (1973). Perhaps even more important than performances was their mutual goal of developing a new aesthetic, which derived from their research of the overtone spectrum of sounds. Dufourt’s article of 1979 (published in 1981), “Musique spectrale” gave the movement its name.53

In 1980, the group attended a course at IRCAM and Murail in particular engaged, with the help of the computer, in a thorough exploration of acoustic phenomena. Between 1991 and 1997, he taught composition at the same institution, lectured in Darmstadt and at the Centre Acanthes.

Tristan Murail lives in the United States, where he is a professor of composition at Columbia University.

I.

No doubt about it: during the course of his career, a composer’s thinking undergoes changes, but they rarely occur from one moment to another.

I studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire, together with Gérard Grisey, Didier Denis, and Michaël Lévinas. At that time, almost all my generation composed in a postserial style: the Reihe replaced the idiom of Gabriel Fauré. However, the institution itself did not change—it retained its conservative, academic spirit.

I felt I had reached an impasse. I wanted to start from scratch, to begin with point zero. I longed for clear harmonic structures, a sound world based on different principles. Even if that endeavor may have been basically intuitive, the example of Ligeti and Xenakis proved most helpful. It did not show me a particular direction of development but it confirmed my choice of path and liberated my thinking.

I owe a more radical change to my discovery of electronic tools and computers. They enabled me to evolve models of thinking which nourish my work to this day.