Abstract
In November 1970, at the request of President Georges Pompidou, Pierre Boulez began work on a project to integrate a music research institute into the future Beaubourg Plateau art center. Over the next three years, Boulez consulted and assembled the team with whom he would enrich and consolidate his project. On March 7, 1974, the project was unveiled to the public at a press conference and in a brochure, which read: "The musician dreams of another world, but he will never be able to create the technology himself. The scientist, on the other hand, can accelerate the advent of this world if he is able to understand the tomorrows that the musician is babbling about."
Uniting these two worlds in a common research effort is the raison d'être of Ircam. But how does Boulez's project differ from that of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) or the Centre d'études de mathématique et automatique musicales (CEMAMu)? How did Boulez implement his vision of musical research, promoting interdisciplinarity and collective work? How do certain architectural, logistical and organizational aspects contribute to strengthening this union between scientists and musicians?
To answer these questions, we will look at the genesis of Ircam and its first years of existence, up to the February 1983 international seminar entitled "The Concept of Research in Music". Based on a study of archives - the Fonds Pierre Boulez at the Paul Sacher Foundation, the Ircam archives and those of the Centre Pompidou - as well as unpublished accounts collected as part of the RAMHO project (Recherche et acoustique musicales en France: une histoire orale), we will analyze the strategies and actions Boulez put in place at this time to "question".
