Analyser l’interprétation de la musique du XXe siècle. Une analyse de l’interprétation des Dix pièces pour quintette à vent de György Ligeti
Category
Book
Authors
Lalitte P.
Year
2015
Language
Français
Title
Analyser l’interprétation de la musique du XXe siècle. Une analyse de l’interprétation des Dix pièces pour quintette à vent de György Ligeti
ISBN
978 2 7056 9025 0
Abstract
20th-century art music has reinvented its materials, categories, languages, notation, techniques, forms and concert practices. Whether a soloist or a member of an ensemble, the performer is in direct contact with the creation process. The musician’s projection in a contemporary work is therefore of a completely different nature than the one of the performer of the “great repertoire”. The aim of this book is to examine the consequences of these radical changes for the performer and to show how musicology can account for the performance of this repertoire. It is part of the field of Performance Studies which, since the 1990s, has initiated a paradigm shift in musicology inviting new thinking on musical art, questions in a new way the concept of work and restores the performer to one’s place in the creation process. The first part seeks to report the technical, aesthetic and social factors that have changed the approach of works in relation to other repertoires, the interpreter's involvement in the creative process, his or her role in the dissemination and transmission of the repertoire, and finally the way in which he or she approaches new works. The second part examines theories and methods of performance study while offering new ways of using computer tools for visualization and audio feature extraction to analyze performance. Audio features, already used in the area of music information retrieval, constitute a complementary solution to spectrograms and other visualizations of sound, allowing extracting precise data on performance in terms of tempo, timing, articulation, timbre, dynamics, roughness, and gesturing control over time. The last part is devoted to a computer-assisted comparative analysis of ten recorded performances (spread over more than thirty years) of György Ligeti’s Ten Wind Quintet Pieces. The performance analysis process examined both overall characteristics (duration of recordings, sonority of ensembles, frequency range) and local characteristics according to each piece (dynamic balance between instruments, quality of texture, role of tempo, virtuosity, intonation, duration of silences, beating, etc.). The results obtained have shown that the performers’ creativity is fully exercised with a score that is precisely noted and particularly virtuoso. These results have made it possible to identify the performance variables specific to this work and to bring out singularities and convergences among the performers with regard to musical time and expressivity. Thus, the deviations noticed have made it possible to reveal trends in the sense of form, some favoring kinetics and continuity, others static and fragmentation. As for expressivity, some have opted for Apollonian aesthetics, while others have opted for Dionysian one according to their own conception of Ligeti's music and their own artistic sensibility. In addition, this performance analysis has renewed the vision on the work itself.
Number of pages
330