Abstract
"Music doesn't need a laboratory". With these words, the famous physicist and Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg at the Max Planck Institute rejected Pierre Boulez's project for collaboration between science and music in 1970. Did Werner Heisenberg believe that music is solely the domain of subjectivity and intuition (whereas violin making, for example, involves a high degree of technicality guided by musical criteria)? That scientists and musicians couldn't establish a dialogue and stimulate each other?
In the first part of my talk, I'll look back at the various attempts - both successful and unsuccessful - made at Ircam in its early years to organize this famous collaboration between scientists and musicians in order to explore the new possibilities offered to music by emerging technologies, particularly in the field of computer science.
In the second part, I'll look at the different ways in which I worked with Pierre Boulez between 1980 and 2011, during the production of his works at Ircam: Répons, Dialogue de l'ombre double, ...explosante-fixe ... and Anthèmes 2. Our collaboration has sometimes focused on the search for an electronic musical vocabulary, sometimes on a musical idea, sometimes on a metaphor that should guide the electronic realization. These latter points will be illustrated by a few examples drawn from the works of Pierre Boulez.
