Hugues Dufourt's "Manifesto of the Music of our Times": Narratives Without History in L'Afrique and L'Asie d'après Tiepolo

HUGUES DUFOURT’S “MANIFESTO OF THE MUSIC OF OUR TIMES”: NARRATIVES WITHOUT HISTORY IN L’AFRIQUE AND L’ASIE D’APRÈS TIEPOLO JANN PASLER ANY MAJOR WORKS by French spectral composer Hugues Dufourt (b. 1943) have been inspired by paintings—from Rembrandt’s Le Philosophe and Goya’s La Maison du sourd to Jackson Pollock’s Lucifer.1 Since 2005, the composer has been attracted to Tiepolo’s huge frescos on the vaulted ceiling of the Würzburg Palace (1752–53) because he has found in them an “Ars poetica of the music of the future.” “Flux, swirling, lateral tensions, swelling, projections, and various degrees of distance are the new categories of these poetics,” he explains in the program notes for the recording of his Tiepolo-inspired M Hugues Dufourt's L'Afrique and L'Asie d'après Tiepolo 199 works (Dufourt 2010a, 14). Translating almost unconsciously into musical terms his visual perceptions of the images and their threedimensionality , reinforced by the architecture and the large sculpted characters bordering their frame, he observes “an entire range of tempi, a spectrum of speeds, of turbulences, teetering spaces, overhanging structures, interwoven axes and loops.” Here was a kind of material for which he had been searching: “explosive, unstable, and evolutionary,” calling for a new musical “grammar” (Dufourt 2011). And if, as he explains, “Twentieth-century music essentially built duration out of its abstract constructions, attempting thereby to avoid ‘an empiricism of intimacy,’” his first of four works inspired by this fresco, L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo (2005), “marks a return to the intuition of time and to the concrete perception of change” (Dufourt 2010a, 13, 21). L’Asie d’après Tiepolo (2008–09) focuses in turn on the “dramatic and pale figures, fragmented levels, bitterly realistic situations, and entanglement of contorted and anonymous bodies,” all animated by an “immaterial wind” that seems to “bend everything and draw it towards itself” and is dominated by “a form of expressive acceleration” (Dufourt 2010a, 14). Inspired by the frescos, as if a “manifesto of the music of our times,” the composer sets out to explore sound at its liminal edges. Grammar suggests rules and processes based on an organizational principle, but what does this mean when its purpose is to generate and maintain constant flux? Can such a work have narrativity in that “it allows a perceiver to develop expectations, grasp together events, and comprehend their implications,” whether of a narrative or nonnarrative nature (Pasler 2008, 36–37)? But how does this function in such a work that reconceives musical space and time? And what about narrative in a work that reconceives musical space and time, and when the impetus is frescos that Svetslana Alpers and Michael Baxandall (1994, 42) describe only as “para-narrative?” The frescos may call on the viewer to recognize the “human elements” in making sense of the sensual experience, but, as in Assyrian reliefs, it is the “mobile play of perception rather than its capacity to stop and focus that is addressed.”2 Our encounter with the images changes as we move up the staircase and as the light flooding the space evolves from one moment to the next. Through an experience of the imagery over time, narrative may or may not emerge in the meaning one ascribes to the fresco’s perceptual effects. If we look to Dufourt’s previous compositions, we might expect that his music might show little concern for narrative, shunning “moments of anticipation capable of creating desire for what comes next.”3 Yet, 200 Perspectives of New Music when questioned, Dufourt admitted that these works have narrative in the sense of Cassirer’s symbolic forms.4 That is, it is less important that his music refer to some external reality, than it produce a world of its own (Cassirer 1946, 8). To understand this, we must look at how the elements of music and the new technologies of sound point to one another rather than to plot, thought, or character; that is, how motivic gestures, rhythms, instrumental textures, and harmonies create the interplay of stasis and turbulence, transparency (or pure sound) and distortion, “the identical and the ambiguous.”5 Such a...