Born in 1955 in Domfront (France), Philippe Hurel accomplished his initial musical studies in Toulouse. From 1981, he was a pupil at the Paris Conservatoire in the classes of Ivo Malec (1st prize for composition) and Betsy Jolas (1st prize for analysis). From 1983 to 1985, he has followed Tristan Murail’s classes on the relationship between composition, acoustics and information technology. From 1985 to 1986 and from 1989 to 1990, he worked at the IRCAM in the field of “Musical Research”. From 1986 to 1988, ha was resident at the Villa Medicis in Rome.

In 1995, he received the Siemens Foundation prize in Munich for his Six miniatures en trompe-l’œil, a work commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Since 1997, he has been teaching composing by computer to students at the IRCAM. In addition to his activities as a composer, since 1990 he has been artistic director of the Ensemble Court-Circuit, which he founded with Pierre-André Valade.

His works have been performed by numerous ensembles and orchestras (Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Avanti, Itinéraire, 2e2m, Musique Oblique, Erwartung, the Ex Nuovo Ensemble of Venice, the IGNM of Basle, soloists of the RAI, Oslo Sinfonietta, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne of Montréal, the Ensemble des 20. Jahrhunderts of Vienna, Court-Circuit, the Ensemble Musique Nouvelle of Bordeaux, Nieuw Ensemble of Amsterdam, Tactus of Milan, Tokyo Sinfonietta, the National Chamber Orchestra of Toulouse, Percussions de Strasbourg, Musicatreize, the Helsinki Radio Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Melbourne Orchestra, the Stockholm Royal Philharmonic, the Santa Cecilia Radio Orchestra, the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre National d’Ile-de-France, the Poitou-Charentes Orchestra, the Lorraine Philharmonia, etc.), working under such famous conductors as Pierre Boulez, Esa Pekka Salonen, Kent Nagano, David Robertson, Ed Spanjaard, Peter Eötvös, Markus Stenz, Arturo Tamayo, Antony Pay, Lorraine Vaillancourt and young conductors such as Pierre-André Valade, Pascal Rophé and Renato Rivolta.

Philippe Hurel belongs to the generation of composers who have developed the principles of so-called “spectral” music, begun by Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail at the end of the seventies. Conforming to the characteristics of this aesthetic trend, Philippe Hurel’s music, strongly based on timbre and showing concern for listener comprehension - involves processes which allow it to pass progressively from one given state of sound to another. But Philippe Hurel, equally interested in counterpoint, has managed to reconcile this principle of constant transition with the more classical style of variation, to such an extent that since Pour l’image, all his pieces involve the return - within the framework of changing musical progressions - of “musical situations” which have already been heard. This principle of double perception multiplying levels of listening characterizes the composer’s taste for ambiguity. So most of his works offer sound anamorphoses set between threads that fuse together a collection of instrumental lines, and polyphonies which allow melodies and instrumental timbre to reaffirm their individuality.

Greatly influenced by work carried out in psychoacoustics, these paradoxal passages place Philippe Hurel among those composers who have best restructured melodic and rhythmic functions over the last few years.

All the melodic lines he writes are conceived according to the recursivity principle, which he has built up since 1986, and lead to polyphonies able to carry off particularly successful transitions between line and texture. On a harmonic level, Philippe Hurel constructs untempered sound aggregates, which he manages to link together with ever-increasing audacity, since he considers the exploration of micro-intervals to be one of the major questions in music today.

While he was at first satisfied with organizing fluxes made up of different periodic rhythms, the composer is today attempting to organize complex rhythmic structures where each voice is affected by a different process (non-linear deceleration or acceleration, tempo modulation, etc.). Since Miniatures, he has also reintroduced genuine rhythmic patterns which are heavily - and deliberately - influenced by jazz.

Philippe Hurel’s music, while appearing to be based on a rigorous approach, also aims at achieving great heterogeneity of style.

-Guy Lelong

When we retreat and disintegrate are subjective, whereas periods of progress have an objective direction. The whole of the present time is retreating, since it is a subjective “era” or again, “The universal sickness of today is subjectivity” and yet again, “He does not deserve to be called a poet who knows only how to express his own few subjective experiences, a true poet is able to assimilate the entire world and express its thoughts” (Eckermann, Gespräche, 29-01-1826). 

Now, if there is one composer who is able to assimilate the entire world and express its thoughts in music, that composer is Gérard Grisey who, like Goethe the botanist, took a genuine interest in science and nature. That evening in Oslo, I was struck by yet another another example of his thoughts, the very long piano solo in Vortex temporum. The rapid juxtaposition of widely differentiated elements, as well as the constraints imposed by the tuning of the piano (four of its notes are deliberately put out of tune), lead to an impressive display of compositional and performing skills. Never had Gérard’s music sounded so violent to my ears. Despite the spectacle before my eyes, and the apparently untamed sound of the solo, it was the deliberate gestures that engaged my attention, for it was they that gave rise at every instant to the dramatic tension. When Gérard died, I was working on a piece for piano and vibraphone of a playful nature. The immense grief that suddenly overwhelmed me led me to abandon the project, of which nothing but the instrument names remained. How better could I pay homage to Gérard, other than writing my very own music, with no reference to his, no signs of his influence? Nevertheless, it was the very violence of the Vortex temporum solo that started my piece off . It was imperative not to study the score, and yet to retain its force and use it as a possible metaphor. I had never had to confront this type of work before. The piece took on the appearance of a ritual, and the vibraphone player found himself with extra instruments such as cow bells, Thai gongs, crotals and woodblocks - all to “disturb” the piano without actually putting it out of tune, as Grisey had done. For the first time ever, my music will not be objective. I had great difficulty in evaluating the material, and my momentary yielding to complete intuition might not have pleased the dedicatee. The piece is, however, imbued with Grisey’s spirit, and could not have seen the light of day without him. ‘In the end we are all part of society, however we look at it. We have but little, count for so little of what we could call our own, in the purest sense of the term. We all of us must accept and learn, both from them who came before us, and from those who are with us now” (Eckermann, Gespräche, 17-2-1832).

-Philippe Hurel

(b. 1984) The music of composer Nina C. Young is characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her musical voice mixes elements of the classical canon, modernism, spectralism, American experimentalism, minimalism, electronic music, and popular idioms. Her projects, ranging from concert pieces to interactive installations, strive to create unique sonic environments that explore aural architectures, resonance, and ephemera.

Young’s works have been presented by Carnegie Hall, the National Gallery, the Whitney Museum, LA Phil’s Next on Grand, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Aizuri Quartet, Either/Or, the JACK Quartet, wild Up, and Yarn/Wire. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Young has also received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Award, Aspen Music Festival’s Jacob Druckman Prize, and honors from BMI, IAWM, and ASCAP/SEAMUS. 

In 2019 Carnegie Hall commissioned Out of whose womb came the ice with the American Composers Orchestra: for baritone, orchestra, electronics, and generative video, commenting on the ill-fated Ernest Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-17. Other recent projects include Tread softly that opened the NY Philharmonic’s Project 19, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh from the Philadelphia Orchestra, and The Glow that Illuminates, The Glare that Obscures for the American Brass Quintet alongside an immersive audio-visual installation version commissioned by EMPAC showcasing a vertical orientation of their wavefield synthesis audio system.

A graduate of McGill University and MIT, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor of Composition at USC’s Thornton School of Music. She serves as Co-Artistic Director of New York’s Ensemble Échappé. Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.

ninacyoung.com

Marilyn Nonken, Live from Roulette (May 23, 2016)

“Vortex Temporum Revisited” Project

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Patricia Franchini: What is your greatest ambition in life?

Parvulesco: To become immortal… and then die.

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Patricia Franchini: It’s sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you’re sleeping together, you’re all alone.

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“À bout de souffle” (English “out of breath”) takes its title from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film (English: Breathless). My piece shares no direct relation to the narrative of the film, but the compositional process drew inspiration from both the (then) innovative use of jump cuts that film critic Andrew Sarris analyzed as representing “the meaninglessness of the time interval between moral decisions”, and the two quotes above.

Written for the same scordatura tuning as Grisey’s magnus opus Vortex Temporum, it was a great hurdle to compose something new in dialogue with such a monumental and personally influential work. I focused on simultaneously highlighting and obscuring the relationship between the piano’s standard equal temperament and the four quarter-tones available. I play with the idea of Grisey’s structural arc and the Ravel arpeggio by presenting repetitive ostinato gestures nested in sonic, resonant arcs that bloom and decay through processes of dynamics, timbre, and registral expansion – a sort of restless breathing.

(b. 1946): was born in Belfort on June 17th, 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris. Here he won prizes for piano accompaniment, harmony, counterpoint, fugue and composition (Olivier Messiaen’s class from 1968 to 1972). During this period, he also attended Henri Dutilleux’s classes at the Ecole Normale de Musique (1968), as well as summer schools at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena (1969), and in Darmstadt with Ligeti, Stockhausen and Xenakis in 1972.

He was granted a scholarship by the Villa Medici in Rome from 1972 to 1974, and in 1973 founded a group called L’Itinéraire with Tristan Murail, Roger Tessier and Michael Levinas, later to be joined by Hugues Dufourt. Dérives, Périodes and Partiels were among the first pieces of spectral music. 

In 1974-75, he studied acoustics with Emile Leipp at the Paris VI University, and in 1980 became a trainee at the I.R.C.A.M. In the same year he went to Berlin as a guest of the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst), and afterwards left for Berkeley, where he was appointed professor of theory and composition at the University of California (1982-1986).

After returning to Europe, he has been teaching composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris since 1987, and holds numerous composition seminars in France (Centre Acanthes, Lyon, Paris) and abroad (Darmstadt, Freiburg, Milan, Reggio Emilia, Oslo, Helsinki, Malmö, Göteborg, Los Angeles, Stanford, London, Moscow, Madrid, etc.)

Among his works, most of which were commissioned by famous institutions and international instrumental groups, are Dérives (1973-1974), Jour, contre-jour (1978-1979), Tempus ex Machina (1979), Les Chants de l’Amour (1982-1984), Talea (1986), Le Temps et l’Ecume (1988-1989), Le Noir de l’Etoile (1989-1990), L’Icône paradoxale (1993-1994), Les Espaces Acoustiques (1974-1985 - a cycle consisting of six pieces), Vortex Temporum(1994-1996), Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1997-1998).

Gérard Grisey died in Paris on 11 November 1998.

It is difficult to overstate the profound influence Gerard Grisey’s compositional style had on the trajectory of 20th and 21st century music. As one can see from the first work on this evening’s program, Grisey created an entirely new ecosystem of music and sound, one that paved the way for contemporaries and successors to continue through the doorway that he opened, of what is commonly called the “Spectral” movement in music. Grisey, naturally, hated the term, “Spectral”. Just as Debussy and Ravel rejected and stayed well away from the notion of their music being “Impressionist”. In an interview with David Bundler, Grisey sums up his thought on the matter rather succinctly:

DB: But in your mind, you start with the concept of a spectrum? GG: Yes. Or several concepts. At the very beginning, I started with real spectrums that I would analyze and then transform into external types of writings. But now, not anymore. I quit. That was 20 or 30 years ago. DB: So actually, you’re not a spectral composer anymore?

GG: Well, I don’t care! (laughs) I really don’t care. That’s just- as I told you- just a sticker that we got at a certain period. I think my attitude is basically the same, but the departure point of spectralism was- besides the two points I noted- was the fascination for extended time and for continuity. How to compose an extended type of time in a composition without writing the sort of chromatic clusters like Ligeti in Atmospheres. What language does that extended time imply? That is really the starting point of spectralism and not the writing of spectrums or whatever.

–Los Angeles, January 18, 1996

Vortex Temporum is considered by many to be Grisey’s magnum opus, his crowning achievement, attained only two years before his death in 1998. As the title implies, this work is principally one that deals with swirling circles of sonic color and the exploration of time, expanding and stretching the boundaries and dimension of the listener’s experience.

–George Nickson