Le 29 juin 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3206
Séance précomposée - Spectralism on the Margins: Spectral Ideas and Intercultural Influence
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Robert Sholl
Jean Louis Florentz (1947-2004) was in Messiaen’s class of 1971-72 (with Grisey, Murail and Levinas). After Messiaen’s class, he forged a different path from his fellows, recording musical sources in Africa and the Middle East. But it was from Ethiopian liturgical music that Florentz created his own unique style of spectral thought. This paper first shows how Florentz derives his system of 31 pentaphonic modes from Ethiopian music with reference to the natural resonance of the harmonic spectrum. In his unpublished treatise Hospitalité des mémoires (1995), Florentz describes his modes as forms of “musical hospitality”, a “mask, through which I can envisage a first “contact” with the other mode … and of which the transcription in our occidental notation [solfège] gives the sensibility of the same face”. Florentz, I argue, makes a “contact” with spectralism through sonographic representations and analysis of sound spectra (in his Magniciat op. 3) and through his use of harmonics. I reveal how he used the organ as a machine to inculcate fantasy harmonics in Laudes Op. 5 (1985), and analyze Chant des Fleurs (Laudes IV) to ask how these hold “the depth, diversity and even the disparity” of the ‘globalized’ sources of Florentz’s conception together.
