GILLES  PEYRET: Iancu Dumitrescu, what do you fear, sometimes?

IANCU DUMITRESCU: Fear... I always fear something... Fear - if I had courage to say it - is my own definition... But why this question?

GP: I wondered: "What is a guy like him like? Is he courageous, timid, horrible..."   In fact, from where comes your courage?

ID: Well, if I had to confess something about myself courageously, I would say it in the manner of Ionesco [Eugene Ionesco,  dramatist of the absurd theater, whose work is similar to Beckettís - ed.]... I would say that I am... horrible!  But is it the music that I make that horrifies you so much in order to pronounce this word?

GP: I still have a "hard" question, amongst those which I have prepared for you: now, when so many others do not create anything new, how do you dare defy the moment and bring forth a perspective which implies - as I acknowledge it - a setting under discussion of the inner foundations of music? On what is based your reasoning?

ID: In order to answer your first question, and, above all, to slip away, to obviate a true answer, I would say that it is again ... the fear. I felt the need to survive, and I found, thus, the only possible formula. Confrontation. Some "courageous" people that I encountered almost by chance in life, confessed me their prowess: "Listen, I did that only because they cornered me terribly. I did not have any possible escape." Me, too. I did not have the choice. During my youth, daring to give lessons of courage to others,  I was also obliged to assume the risk...

GP: What was the risk?

ID: Of going on, by my own means, towards the discovery of my own way of evolution, an assumed path... with the risk of finding - or not - the truth, in my own manner, without too many reassuring receipts. I cannot tell you if that was difficult or not. It was only very problematic. I was always on the point of breaking my neck. Each time I appeared with my music and my ideas, I risked a scandal, and this continues even today. Nothing has been too easy for me, and at the same time nothing... too difficult. All these reactions which were stacked up against me, have stimulated me, in a certain direction. Progressively, as the conformists, the malevolent ones, put sticks in my wheels, I found energy, eagerness to resist. Or to survive...

GP: But what was your motivation to go on this way? I would like to know.

ID: I did not have the choice. To be sure, I knew something about it, maybe enough to find an alternative, eventually. But a diffuse inertia, impossible to explain, blocked me, reducing thus any possibility of movement.

GP: Therefore all this that you have made would be the product of the milieu, of arising situations? Where is your contribution in this case?

ID: I don't have any contribution! Except for collecting energies. And that was enough for me...

SERGE LEROY: But, nevertheless, what was the artistic environment in which you developed?

ID: To tell the truth, the artistic life was stuck by a true enthusiasm during the years of my studies, that were not very easy years... This enthusiasm would continue in the following years, between '62- '64 until about '75... The new music had the powerful attraction of a forbidden fruit, the bait of a true drug in those yearsí Romania. Everyone wanted to be the most informed, the most modern possible, most personal, odd... I'm still reminding what vital energy released itself and was deployed. Finally, looking at it again from a historical point of view, Romanian culture in its whole crossed, in those years, a beneficial, profitable epoch. And so did I, as well as all my generation of composers, amongst I can quote at once names like Miereanu, Radulescu, Nemescu, Cazaban, and many others... Everything starts to become more clear and continues thus since my adolescence. One resumes the severed connections, the forgotten cultural traditions, in some kind of frenzy of discoveries. The impact with modernity had occurred long before, in the years around the Second World War.  It was then a period in which Romanian culture had found its step near that of the European one, not in a mimetic attempt, but in a creative, authentic effort. It is the period of avant la lettre Dada, the absurdity in the writings of the fabulous Urmuz, of Tristan Tzara, the extraordinary heritage of Constantin Brâncusi, the coming out of personalities like Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade [Mircea Eliade worked at the University of Chicago and taught Ioan Petru Culianu. He wrote many books detailing religious life, as well as stories of magical realism. -ed.], George Enescu, Emil Cioran, Paul Celan, Stéphane Lupasco, Pius Servien (Coculescu), Matila C. Ghyka, Benjamin Fondane (Fundoianu), the outstanding contributions of Isidore Isou (founder of the « Lettrisme ») who were already true artists, entirely accomplished thinkers when they had left the country... And the rest of the artists and thinkers who had remained [in Romania], like Constantin Noica and others, the expressionist painters, like Victor Brauner, the symbolist sculptors, like Paciurea... Last but not least the musicians: Dinu Lipatti, Clara Haskil, Mihail Jora, Theodor Rogalsky, Constantin Silvestri and Ionel Perlea, Sergiu Celibidache... Later: Radu Lupu. Thus, in those years, we were about to retrieve a contact broken brutally by the years of Stalinist idiocy... The musics of Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Messiaen, Berio, being prohibited, circulated clandestinely, from one hand to another, as copies of tapes which had become almost unlistenable. But imagination continued to hear what, in fact, did not exist any more for the ears. The spirit of modernism, of new worlds, being beyond these deformed, hoarse, grating sounds... Finally, this is our small history, and I donít know if that can interest somebody nowadays....

GP: Iancu Dumitrescu, towards what is music directed today?

ID: There is no complete answer, as you would wish. I have the defect not to be able to resume things, they always seem too complex for me. All that I can say is that music does not stop. It has to move, to evolve. It cannot stop or turn back. If that were understood, the world would be more flexible, less confined to old reflexes. It would be more reconciling towards certain things, truly marvelous, for which there is no hearing.  In Taoism, it seems, the most edifying example would be that of the movement of water. Water infiltrates insidiously. Nothing can resist it. It takes the shape of the ground, it curves in the valleys... I have this vision: that musical thought, not stiff-jointed, should advance in this manner. Without ostentation, but ceaselessly. Things should not be forced. I, for example, I leave destiny to its own will. I am probably the most inactive of the existing men. My ideal would be the remote contemplation of life. I have retired... Everything disturbs me. I am never satisfied. When I watch my colleagues, so strongly limited, so poor, I start to be afraid... After having finished working on a piece - which never contents me - I leave all to the will of this spontaneous Taoist unfolding. Each thing has its time...

GP: You find yourself often with Ana-Maria Avram in Paris. You travel much. Sometimes I imagine you suspended between Romania and France, in the search for something untraceable... I would be tempted to ask you: are you in truth an adventurer or a nomad?

ID: As you say... a nomad. I believe that I am just a nomad. I am able to define myself only as a perpetually migrating subject. Circulation is finally the only way of finding oneself in the others. The search of oneself in the others... Some twenty years ago, I lived all the agitation of modern music without being able to circulate. I was like frozen in Romania. I had arrived at a paradoxical situation. Wanting at no price to remain provincial - it was almost an obsession - I was inclined to exaggerate. I imagined, in my isolation, the most strange and hermetic musical combinations. Although very informed, I could not define myself in any esthetics. I did not know exactly where I was. I always thought of being far from the requirements of European modernism, and that terrorized me. I saw my only salvation in the increasingly effort of being more and more modern, original. When, by chance, I started to circulate, I found myself again without reference marks. I didnít understand anything, I couldn't hold a dialogue with anyone. The world was different from what I had imagined. I did not find any link between Darmstadt, Amsterdam or Paris and my music. Time had to go by for me to review that I was not behind, but that I had found a place... in parallel, and that I had left the world in a remote position.  Obviously, now I am wiser. I have more courage to wait. I know, by experience, that artistic evolution is extremely complicated, that, sometimes, being  "in advance for one's time" can seem... dramatic. I know that the provincialism still threatens me everywhere. If that were possible, I would like to prolong this situation endlessly, to be everywhere and nowhere. Moreover, I am persuaded that the sluggishness of the modern age is also related to a terrible sedentary, which is the opposite of my nomadism!

GP: When I start a discussion with you, though for the moment all that you say appears clear to me, very often mysterious zones finally persist. Why do you take refuge (or one could think that you find refuge there) in kinds of abstract metaphors, with which the details are not easily definable?

ID: Perhaps you are right, but the difference which dissociates my music from that of others does not lie in things so simple to isolate. The difficulty arise from the fact that differences belong to the spirit of my music. I adopt another attitude towards the sound, another mental projection... You can comprehend nothing about this music, absolutely nothing, without understanding its reasoning. Of course, things can be transmitted directly, intuitively, without any theoretical argument, because it is about art.

GP: In order to introduce us to your world, you would have to make it more transparent. Therefore: do you regard your music as being avant-garde?

ID: Not absolutely. I think that it is, in any case, new. But with roots (because everything has them!) in a very old sense of musical practice, which was lost with the elapse of time. My approach starts from many ancestral, primitive sources. All that is archaic, elementary, magic, finds today the value of an acute modernism. My music has, I think, an amount of illuminated primitivism, accredited like style in the visual arts. For me, the return to primary sources was the only reasonable possibility, profoundly positive, to come out of the extraordinary mental blocking which even today constrains and corners the composer. How is it possible to go on ? What is left to do after all is exhausted?  In a sense, I escaped from this clenching, but the problem remains insoluble... Giving birth to a new language cannot remain a thing to be solved only on paper. It is not only an abstract question of intellect. A new language, a new technique must carry a charge of new expression. Otherwise, that does not represent anything. The world, as you can see it, diverted itself from the positivist thought - merely scientific, omnipresent - because one had observed their limits.

GP: Do I understand that you claim yourself to a tradition?

ID: If by tradition you mean something which obliges, something constraining, to be respected without hesitation, a form of intolerance, than no. If on the other hand, we refer to something alive, which could have been abandoned, forgotten, which could be found, while keeping our acquired freedom - such a manner of re-sizing things appears to me of great relevance. I myself indeed felt the nostalgia of the origins. I have as a task to constantly enrich my knowledge of rituals, magic, of this force, barbaric sometimes, of the tellurian worlds... Music should return to that!

GP: Until now I do not realize if you imagine music like a very rational play... or rather in affinity with the irrational.

ID: What is rational or irrational in music? In life? The result of a composition remains always something valid by itself. It does not reorganize anything, does not copy anything, it does not have any other reality than that of sound. I do not believe too much in mathematical and physical principles applied to music. Their realities are too remote. But it should be said, concerning writing, notation (and that has worried me for a long time) a certain arithmetic is undoubtedly necessary. Otherwise things are insoluble. But sound logic is intrinsic. The laws of construction come from the interior, from the initial sound material. Therefore I must admit the irrational in music... Hence the mystery, the interest...

GP: You studied music at the Conservatoire of Bucharest, with reputable professors: piano, harmony, counterpoint, score-writing. What remains of all that?

ID: Enough. Though, as you suppose, what remains contradicts rather than confirms... What does remain? How can I put it ... it is the reduction to essence. The practice to throw the ballast... I would not say the discipline, but rather a certain ethic, a moral fiber which gives you courage to launch out in the unknown...  In this way, there is  emotion, there are thousands of questions... An assumed peril. Without this first load, the risk would be much more difficult to assume! But school does not teach you how to preserve spontaneity, the pulsation of life. I succeeded in not erasing the mystery in composition... Thereafter, combustion, significance, spirituality, these are things that nothing or no one can transmit to  you...

GP: When I listen to Xenakis, that I have learned to appreciate rather late, a  certain rigidity comes to my attention. He always obliges me to note an abstract mental structure...

ID: A competence in mathematics, but also in philosophy. In his own way, Xenakis was welcome among musicians. It is true that coming from architecture and mathematics, his presence was not in conformity with the standard. But that brought a certain intellectual prestige. The composers therefore do not completely refuse intellect. Xenakis also has impressive results. His talent, resulting from the world of the ancient tragedy that he possesses in his genetic matrix, is striking while listening to his works.

GP: Some people think that his music is depressive, exaggeratly tense, or inexpressive...

ID: I also felt the dead ends of modernism... I sought to avoid - and partially I believe to have succeeded - certain inter-penetrations. But here it is also about something which belongs to the accents of time...  My music is rather an exaltation in the Dionysian sense of the word. By Dionysian I do not mean vulgar, but initiator, an euphoria which serves to cover a path starting from the matter towards its transcendence. I would like to draw your attention to a prosodic process, as a form of speech. A new form in music. I require from music to produce a shock. All that was thus constituted in my music, in a hermeneutic identity of Orphism... Music, like a nostalgic adventure towards a lost paradise. Form, in the most traditional sense, is the voyage towards this paradise... But to return to what happens, according to me, with Xenakis and mathematical principles applied to music... Xenakis is an exemplary case. Why? Because he succeeds there too. I repeat it. Why exemplary? Because another, less endowed or less experienced, could believe that the use of a numerical relation in music is really what is needed. But this is false! Completely false! What value can the principle of  compression of gases, the second law of thermodynamics have, according to which Xenakis organized his sound masses, since himself - and not one of his musical critics, who are all incompetent, in music as in science - wrote that he then modifies all the results in a proportion of at least thirty percent? [i.e. Xenakis uses the mathematical results as source material, not as music. -ed.] And that for an arbitrary aesthetic pleasure. What can one deduce then? That for him mathematics are only a net of protection for acrobats launching out in a mortal jump! Only crutches! It is a thing which is appropriate to alleviate the existential anxiety, which haunts all true artists in front of an initial blank page. It is totally false to strictly apply principles that hold to a logic that is external to music. As I have already said, music refuses all "programmatism," whether literate, linguistic etc... Music is born and grows by an internal law! For Wittgenstein, the essence of the world is logical, since it can be expressed and translated using logic. By logical forms, therefore. In fact, the world can only be roughly approximate, because Wittgenstein recognizes part of reality which cannot be translated, reduced to that; a remainder which cannot be expressed, but only shown, and regarding which one can only remain silent. What remains is the field of the mystic. I believe that in music there is an enormous proportion of this mysterious remainder. Otherwise it would not have any value. Its value lies only in the fact of bringing to consciousness something not being otherwise able to be thought. It brings us nuances, modulations of thought which do not have an equivalent. You see, for instance, a symphony of Brucknerís expresses states of heart not existing elsewhere, at least with this intensity. No experience exists for that apart from music. It comes with an untranslatable spectrum, it brings forth the unsoundable, the indescribable... It is a major irreduction!  To return to Xenakis, valid in what he did is not the application of mathematical structures to music, but the tragic shimmering which impregnates his music, whether calculated or not, with an additional feeling of absolute necessity. This is at least what I find impressive... Will others succeed in building another music on the second law of thermodynamics, with the same force as Xenakis? I doubt it.

GP: The music is a dialogue with nothingness...

ID: Yes, an ontological adventure against nothingness...

SL: Sergiu Celibidache, why is he so important for you?

ID: Above all, Celibidache is, according to me, one of the greatest intelligence of this century. He is thus a thinker, a philosopher of unordinary stature. Even among the professionals, the philosophers... Celibidache is a master of thought, of the process of thought, certainly in a particular direction, but not in the direction of a thought that fixes itself in a succession of more or less arbitrary but logical arguments, written, definite, which are built finally in hundreds of pages appearing organic, connecting a philosophical system... An additional one, I mean, as feigned as many others, hundreds of others, only contradicting the preceding corpus of philosophy. Celibidache is a thinker who follows the process of the living thought, a guru who leads his meditations in an extreme synthesis, and at the same time in a flexible way, fresh, alive... In order to reach the absolute. And he doesnít do that as an amateur of philosophy, like so many second-rate thinkers setting themselves up as prophets in a moment of confusion, an a-cultural one, like the one we are living. After having attended, during his youth, systematic studies of philosophy in Romania and then in Germany, he then approached Zen, and achieved an unique synthesis, of Socratic type. The phenomenology of Husserl is thus renewed while passing through Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Buddhism, Zen. Only secondly, Celibidache is a musician, a conductor of genius who applies his motivations of thought to a material as fragile as music. For a guru - excuse me for insisting - there is no separation between life and art. Hence the source of the radiant force, the magnetism of Celibidache, my spiritual father. He does not conduct. He finds himself in a complicity with the music, personifying a principle, that of the in-depth lived thing. It is a spiritual excursion which he realizes, by means of music, of the scores, in a world always incipient, an eternal present... In addition to a sensitivity and a complicity which connects us, my guru and me, his influence is exerted by direct contact with him,  with his thought as a system if one can say (because I also come from a family of philosophers and mathematicians whose generation and concerns bring closer to Lupasco, Ionesco, Cioran). His thinking thus gave me a system of composition in which phenomenology is assumed to the maximum; from there comes, if you want, the success of this music, beyond its declared difficulty. To summarize this prolix speech, phenomenology becomes with Celibidache a praxis, a spiritual technique which can be fulfilled in various ways. Music occupies a privileged place due to its temporal dimension, not its concrete one. [for more on phenomenology, see the end of the interview in Resonance 6.1. -ed.]

GP: Were you acquainted with the music of Giacinto Scelsi when you started to compose this so mysterious, so particular music, that you give us to hear?

ID: Only now do I know it, after hearing the records, the many concerts... Until recently I did not know about him. [for more on Scelsi, see the introduction to the interview in Bananafish #12, which does not appear in the original French interview in Revue et Corrigee #30.-ed.] I often feel attracted to his music, certainly, but I have also an opposite reaction. He had a great mind. His experiments, rather meta-musical, are in a certain way closely related to mine. But I very strongly feel his limits... Anyway, it is an important contribution, especially in the sense of opening Occidental music towards Far-Eastern horizons, with significant consequences in such a positivist and rationalist  world as ours. It would be perhaps important to know his spiritual links with Romania. Radulescu was one of the first to be enthusiastic about Scelsiís music. He felt himself preceded by this patriarch, patrician of Italy. [Scelsi's scores where published by Editions Salabert, Paris. The  artistic director of Salabert in that period, who decided to publish Scelsi's (unknown) scores was also a Romanian composer and brilliant teacher of aesthetics at the Sorbonne named Costin Miereanu. He is also an interesting composer. By the other hand, Editions Salabert in Paris is full of Romanian composers, beginning with Georges Enesco - in some of whose music extra-European musical thinking can easily be found - and continuing with the oldies goldies generation: A. Vieru, St. Niculescu, T. Olah, A. Stroe, and other generations too: C. Cazaban, L. Metianu, C. Miereanu himself, C. Taranu, M. M. Celarianu, and Iancu Dumitrescu. -1999 update, ed.]. As Latin, but also by their place so close to the East, Romanians are related to Scelsiís so particular Rome and have an intrinsic comprehension of his music. Scelsi is, temporally, halfway between the time of Tibet and that of Europe. In my music also, sound subtleties, a-temporality, the transcending suspense of the duration of the sound, go still further. The Scelsi phenomenon and that of the contour of my music are two complementary facets, synchronous, of attraction towards the going beyond the European framework, towards a "planetarisation" of the art of this end of millennium. It is an idea on which the art of Stockhausen insisted, at least during a certain period. However Scelsi and Stockhausen remain, regarding the sound, in its reality, or in its combinatory, while I seek to transcend it, towards a reality which transmutes, in a very thorough way, an evolutionary sound, in perpetual movement, with its own life. In fact things should be explained at greater length.

GP: Had György Ligeti had a significant influence on you?

ID: Ligeti? No, he never influenced me, I think... His music is a model of compositional evolution based on combinatory laws, from which I strongly separated myself a long time ago.

JOSH RONSEN: Do you mean he builds his music part by part to achieve a whole? Or do combinatory laws refer to something else?

 ID: I mean both... The musical construct is made by structures (textures is maybe a better word) that are juxtaposing one to another. The morphology is also a structuralist one, going from the classical manner of organizing pitches and rhythms. But very recently, I discovered in some of Ligetiís writings on music - very brief, only some pages - a spirit of an immense opening, turned towards a "new music". In those pages he has a presentiment of this different music, in which he thinks with a not easily foreseeable and conceivable intuition, without a real contact with this music. These pages are superb... I would like to make you read them!

JR: What are these writings?

ID: It is an interview in Romanian (probably translated from German), when Ligeti had a meeting with St. Niculescu in 1992 in Vienna, and another text from a conference sustained by Ligeti at the occasion of the Balzan Prize Award in 1991... Very interesting proposals. Published in « Muzica Magazine », Bucharest, No . 4 / 1993. But Ligeti was certainly an example among some others (Stockhausen, Xenakis, Boulez...) of courage. They all knew to assume without hesitating the responsibility for their thoughts, for the thrust of what they wrote. Ligeti is moreover, to a certain extent, Romanian. He was born and lived in Romania, studied in Cluj-Napoca, and in Bucharest. The Romanian language, as much as the Hungarian, was almost his mother tongue. Thus, he was for me a familiar model. Like Xenakis, a resembling case of  citizen of the world, Greek-Romanian, French, born in Braila, in Romania, (just like Bela Bartok, Kurtag, bound to Romania by the spirit, being born and having lived here)...

GP: Which composers are recognized among the frames of your musical influences?

ID: Stockhausen, at a certain period... a certain tendency in the music of Cage... But all my works, for more than twenty-five years, have had a self-generated development, came from a spiritual experience which belongs to me, a search in which I "plunged."

GP: Do certain musics of Asia, of the Himalayas, constitute any influence for you? Ivan Vandor, in his work on ritual Tibetan music, draws attention to the fact that this music comes from the Dévas and would rather be intended to them than to humans. This devotional aspect, is it present in your music, or do you seek more modestly that the listener should somehow perceive the plans where the Dévas evolve? It should be noted that Scelsi often gave to its works titles borrowed from various mythologies.

ID: Of course I have listened to music from Tibet, Japan, India... Sometimes with great satisfaction, but not always... My music is indeed related to the Far East. It "dreams" of an imaginary Far East. Each time, the contact with this remote spirit (that I have imagined not only enigmatic but also refined) gave me the emerged dissatisfaction of a lack of refinement, or of what I perceived as such, of a reality slightly rough, lacking aesthetic search. To all that I retorted with Orphism, theory and praxis which is very close to me. Orphism intervened in my aesthetic design under several aspects, one of them being  the highest degree of refinement. On Orphism and its hermeneutics we should, as well, emphasize, in relation to aspects which I could only announce here.

JR: What is Orphism? We know Orpheus (from Ovid) as a musician so skilled that he could charm the god of death. Do you refer to the magical power of music? Is this a personal system, or did you learn it from someone
else?

ID: Oh, this question alone needs as answer an entire book! Yes, the Orphism comes from Orpheus, the Tracian god-artist-shaman who could transcend the human condition by his artistic skills, by his artistic intensity, so different. The Orphics where also a Gnostic sect in the early Roman Empire. Celebrating Orpheus as a god, their rituals were impregnated with a particular magic dimension, in connection with death, initiation and resurrection (as a rebirth of the initiate). In fact, in Orpheus as well as in Orphism, I found the expression of an absolute form of being in art, a maximization of all the parameters of the artistic sound and thought, as a limit impossible to reach, but as a more than essential reference. More than that: as an artistic technique, it implies, from the start, a setting in a different position for the artist, the composer or performer, from where he can be inside the problem and at the same time (synchronously!) outside it. This is a privileged and in the same time an impossible position. This is the unity of contraries! That can be obtained, with an extreme artistic sincerity, in a direct contact with all the materials and with an absolute discern, continuously being « critic » with each moment of the creative act. That demands a spiritual exercise very difficult to achieve. It's an infinite adventure. It starts from approaching art between life and death. It maximizes all the categories. Because in fact what can we see in art? Great artists who can incite the infernal forces but don't know what to do with them. Concretely, marvelous sounds, lacking meaning, Therefore this particular point, which can give us enormous revelations, is a mystical secret - mystic meaning something absolutely real, unavoidable. Thus, the artist is living with the greatest intensity his artistic act, almost until blindness, and at the same time he keeps an exceptional form of illumination, a rational, critical lucidity I mean. This is in fact a supreme fusion between the knowledge of the subject and the object to be known. Why is this attitude so difficult to obtain? Because it needs an inalienable faith, which I find normal to call mystic. An absolute consistency, non-critical this time. Its deficiency crumbles everything. Let's come back to the Orphic myth: Orpheus manages to arrive at the bottom of the world, in Hell, to get Euridice. He obtains her. Only a last exigency: he cannot doubt! Attention: truth is beyond doubt, an unity of opposites, without any shadow of doubt. That means the knowledge sui-generis of the indivisibles. But Orpheus doubts. In his doubt he dissociates once again: is that truth or not? And, instantly, he looses everything. The most elementary hermeneutics shows us that the settings in the position I spoke about must not be disturbed, in order to obtain the result. I will thus resume: "I hope that, in that way, with this attitude when making music, by the means of sound, you can dissect the nucleus of the world."

GP: Does an idea-force, a devotional intention guide you during the composition of a work and thus perhaps in the choice of a title? Why are certain pieces classified by Greek letters, those being always Alpha, Gamma and Epsilon, such a numeration giving the impression that your compositions transmit some unknown  mythology?

ID: One always finds a load-bearing idea, a meaningful presentiment, a meaningful intuition... They develop in the spirit, they germinate inside, obscurely, then they are clarified, intensified... Finally one proclaims them, they are noted, one can transmit them. They become objective. They become sometimes - to answer the latter question - families of compositions, classes of compositions which claim more or less the same meaningful ideas. I employ the enumeration Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon, like an enumerative option of the Ancient Greeks, also as regionalism, if you wish, as descendant of the Tracians, fraternal population and root of the Greeks.

GP: Does the word " Movemur " have for you a particular emotional weight, for your imagination for example?

ID: " Movemur " comes from Latin - another ascending - "Movemur et sumus" means "to be driven and we are", "to be driven to exist". It is a call for the evolution of ideas, towards the non-stagnation, freedom of the spirit, towards the perpetual adaptability and redefinition. "Movemur et sumus" is a kind of secret message towards new forms of sound. You really seized the call to this message (we will exist moving). I still had the privilege to study Latin in College, according to the old pre-war programs, like a former mother tongue, which was not the case any more for the following generations.

GP: Concerning the sensation of pitch: is it important for you the sensation of a pitch to be that of an explicit pitch: an A for example? Do you hope that one can perceive the different spectral webs, the different partials or groups of spectral webs "on the air," i.e. independently of all pitch connections, knowing that the perception of the pitch connections imply an analysis made by the inner ear and the psyche, or do you conceive them like some independent sounds, acting by themselves?

ID: In any case, it is not about one simple sensation of pitch when we perceive a musical sound in a composition. The sound here is transcended, directed, with a semantic energy. It thus does not refer to the pure sensoriality. Obviously I work with precise sounds, as in any classical composition. A composition employing multiphonics on the clarinet, for example, requires a specific notation, indicating the basic sound, the fingering, the pressure of the breath and the mouth, the effect... In fact, concrete, technical things belonging to the alphabet of the scoring, that almost any instrumentalist having finished his academical studies - whether flutist, trombonist etc. - must know. The writing is concrete, academic if you wish. It is true that finally, things being not so simple to reach, to obtain, being fragile even (the practice of the instrumentalist also accounts for much), there is also an aspect linked to interpretation....  Thatís all! The big drum, the tam-tam, always have some unspecified pitches, but here other acoustic laws act that are not very familiar to those who lack practice of the instrument. And these laws create the effect by which these same non-tunable instruments enter, in a completely natural manner, in resonance, and in the tonality of the work (whether tonal or built on micro-scales or in sonorous fascicles), making a common body with the whole, without discordance.  In the case of my music, there are harmonic sounds of various sources, multiphonics, microintervals, sound beams, clusters, agglomerations of clusters (of the given spectra and which, with non-tunable instruments, create interference spectra), micromodes (modes of microintervals), interferences of micromodes... All the sensations "on the air," independently of any relation, are obviously felt by themselves, like a transcendent underline, between life and non-life, in a nirvanic zone where one meets a pure migration of the spirit. It is the zone of pure freedom, where any terrestrial attraction is canceled. At the same time, even the temporal determinism disappears. An interstellar space, without gravitation, like a projection of the soul towards the divine.  What good is the field of the spectrum if it is not for similar voyages where the gravitational body (the fundamental sound), or the first harmonics (which could reconstitute the matrix) are almost lost, in favor of a suspended wave, which travels like the projection of a yogi? All these are things obtained with difficulty, not randomly, but with a yoga-type concentration, using phenomenology, the elimination of any ballast, any vulgarity, etc., emptying oneself as in the Zen, vacuum creator of pure and new sound images.  Each time when this concentration is not achieved, my result is poor. It works like the pure intuition (Husserl) which - in order to simplify, for a quicker comprehension - is equivalent to the Zen technique.

GP: Would you want to cease listening to the double bass and the other instruments in order to listen only music itself, to listen to an acousmatic instrumental music, or, having given up listening to the instruments, we do listen to the sound exempted by any instrumental reference? Can one hear all the sound details of your music at the time of a concert?

ID: During a public concert, when the ensemble of musicians manages to transcend, all impediments are exceeded. Interpretation then reaches, by a good proportionality, by an ideal relationship between the parts, between the detail and the macrostructure, the profound sense of the work. This profound sense, if it exists, is an indivisible one! It is like a predestination, absolute, inalterable... without alternatives!  For me, art has value only for that, uniquely, because by this means you can transcend raw reality, the primary materiality. In this state of supreme freedom, but also of flexible concentration, you are or you are not! Without intermediate phases! Thus, in the moment when, on stage, the artists manage to transcend, the listener also submerges in a similar state of concentration, being in a contact not mediated, not interceded with the whole work. You ask yourself if you will hear or not... details? You will hear all, or absolutely nothing! Besides... such a music, without details, would be a true horror! When the means of hearing, the discs, and even the CD's are poor... nothing is more horrifying! To be able to listen to these recordings, it would be necessary to have completely open the entire spectrum of a signal, with an optimal correction of high and low registers. Any lack is fatal! Luckily, at  least at the time of a concert, if there is at least a minimum of acoustic quality, the result is incomparably better!

GP: But how can you know that a gong will produce that very cohesion of spectral lines when part of the sound spectrum which it emits combines, joins exactly certain sounds played by the double bass... What appears then on the score of the double bass?

ID: Very concretely: the gong, apart from its fundamental sound, which is a privileged sound, has a multitude of other components and adjacent fundamentals, which form a family. The double bass is a true factory of fundamentals, with a multitude of harmonics. When it is  question of obtaining harmonic sounds on two instruments, like you say, these harmonics do not become discordant, because they produce a sort of enharmony of partials. Thus, the ninth harmonic of a spectrum can be found like the seventh harmonic of another, or like the third of a different fundamental. In fact, we deal with a spectral modulation, notion that I was the first to introduce in spectral thinking.  Obviously, their characters are, if you want, different. But there are possibilities, apparent interlacings, full of combinative possibilities! Exactly as is tonal enharmony in traditional harmony. Very few people realize that we deal with a new functionality in the spectral domain. But the relationship gong - double bass, or more generally, non-pitched instrument - pitched instrument is one which respects the classical utilization principle.

GP: What do you write on your scores? « Medium III » is one of your most characteristic works regarding your musical aesthetics.

ID: « Medium III » is a score (a music) which is based, if you want, on a process of feedback. A perpetual response of the instrument to a primary stimulus. A total adventure by means of the sound,  based on a request of the performer and a continual response of the instrument. « Medium III » is thus a provocation. A provocation of acoustics, up to the reaching of the limits of the possible, a provocation of the instrument itself... In the same time, a provocation of the spirit, therefore of the instrumentalist that finds himself in transcendental state. As in Zen -  you see, I always return there -  it is a prolonged concentration on a fixed point (ekâgrâta). Here it is about concentration, for long periods of time, on a unique sound (fundamental), generated by the free strings. The free strings are forced, by various bow techniques to emit most unexpected sounds, colours, "electronic" effects. It is a setting under a magnifying lens, under a microscope, like a miraculous contemplation of a microcosmos... I want to underline this inciting, creative aspect of sound feedback. We talk about a new type of performance technique, a new manner of performing. The first sound created by the performer becomes continuous creative incitement for all the feedback sequences. That's to say, it provokes its instrument (by change of bow position, pressure, speed, accents, etc...). And the instrument answers with a sonority that lacks a precedent, which becomes a new deadlock, a new provocation, for another sequence... Music generates itself, in a continuous eternal present, without any artifice of arbitrary construction.

GP: What is the part of the performer, his freedom in the creation of the sounds? What freedom do you give him?

ID: The performer does not have any freedom! The appearance is that of an enormous freedom. Some can imagine that it would be improvisation in the most trivial sense of the term. But it is not the case. On the contrary, the instrumentalist is related to the physical laws of his instrument. He enters in the vibration, comes out of it, glides on the surface of the string, brushes the harmonics "sul ponticello" [on the bridge] in a manner that only an authentic initiation in the secrets of bowing can achieve. Whoever has not undergone  it, does not succeed in anything! In absolutely anything! Only if you at least raised these questions about the instrumental part, which are cardinal for any music, can you have access here. Thatís why there is no freedom: because a true knowledge is necessary! That afterwards, just like for the classics, one becomes free while playing Bach -  that is a different thing. To tell the truth, that  is the meaning of freedom. But you obtain it at the time when the questions of decision, of material precision, are taken. In any case, there are few alternatives. It can be a question only of a high possession of freedom, and that, only at the moment when the "details" are entirely decided. It is a high degree of control... When it is reached, other explanations are found. One should not forget, in the case of « Medium III », the magnificent result of Fernando Grilloís, the "Buddha of the dou-ble bass" as Stockhausen called him. He introduces in his interpretation the literal meaning of the excursion, of the adventure in a dialogue with him-self. Fernando Grillo is, from this point of view, a high artistic authority. He clarifies the ideas with the warmth of his formidable talent. Confronta-tions with such landmarks always have an emblematic value.

GP: « COGITO/TROMPE-L'OEIL »: In this work do you seek a visual result or a result evocative of the visual, more than a musical one?

ID: No. Not a trace of plastic idea. « Cogito » represents, for me, the wait-ing for an almost abyssal statute of the hearing, but almost nothing in the visual domain. It is true, the sound is sometimes so powerful and precise that its expression can create certain reflexes in the imagination.  It is the only connection I can see...

HYPERION Ensemble in Romanian Atheneum, Bucharest

GP: I have the impression that in « Cogito » you try to play with memory? The location of the sources becomes so difficult that finally one must give it up.

ID: « Cogito » is, I believe, one of the highest results that I could obtain, in the acousmatic-instrumental sense. In the acousmatic-orphic one. It is liv-ing in a different space, in a third dimension... I do not agree much with the "location" of the sounds. Whatís the point? It can make sense only in the case of an analysis. I find it natural to give it up.

GP: In this "acousmatic", is there a secret sadism which would be ex-pressed by the occultation of the sources?

ID: Not at all. The acousmatic brings an enrichment, a sound metaphor, without calling upon the picturesque, nor the vulgar. It is a high degree of lived musical realities, in a process of spiritualization of reasoning. Re-garding the "acousmatic," shouldn't I explain myself, later, more con-cretely?

GP: « AULODIE MIORITICA »: Why didn't you write a concerto? In or-der to show the differences with a concerto having themes, melodies, figu-rations...
ID: A concerto means a traditional form. A kind of sonata form having two themes, in a major and minor dialectic. I always found it improper to re-sume titles like this one, that have an established meaning in other styles, and to combine them in new forms. It is a cause of confusion which always displeased me.

SL: I never find the feeling of a true orchestra, an orchestral musical ensemble. And here in a paradoxical manner... Because it does not have woodwinds and brass. What are the instruments that you use?

ID: Enough of them! I used things technically adequate with those used in the solo part. There must always be a coherence of style! The orchestra uses many multiphonics, natural harmonics. Classical timbres are eluded in a completely conscious way. When you affirm not having the feeling of an orchestra, I take it as a true homage! This "deconstruction" so to speak, of all the specific automatisms is a success of the acousmatic, of the orphic. In the score you can find many pages for brass: horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba, whose sound is transfigured, in a natural way however. And that, I repeat it, having motivation of style, by pure necessity for another thing... You thus have this new reality.

GP: What does one of your scores resemble? And what does it represent for you?

ID: A score remains, today like yesterday, something fundamental, very significant. Though today we have in addition the recording (which is another form of writing), the score remains a starting document, from which we can decode the meaning of a work. It must thus express the direction, the sense of the work, its configuration. At the same time: "L'Urformen."

JR: « Urformen »  means Archetype?

ANA-MARIA AVRAM: No, just the "Urformen ": this is a particular concept in German (Gestaltist) thinking that means: original, first, of the beginning form. The Gestalt theory (from Gestalt-structure, shape, form) tries to apprehend phenomena in their totality, without dissociations of the elements which compose the whole. Separately, these elements don't have a meaning anymore. This idea is a traditional German pattern, and in fact, phenomenology and Gestalt-theory have the same roots.

HYPERION Ensemble

ID: The "Urformen" is the cardinal objective that must be transmitted to the performer. Moreover, with a quantity of details, agogic indications, graphical signs, accents, literal messages giving explanations, impulses. These details are never enough!  It is necessary to add explanatory texts, a set of graphic symbols with their explanation. There is, moreover, an oral tradition, practical, "academic", which crystallizes at each moment. Without it, many things, even in the classical field would have definitively lost themselves. Many essential things. My scores have, sometimes, a very unusual, accentuated graphical aspect superposed to the indications of pitch, rhythm, etc., due to the fact that I feel the need to see the music. A great need to see as well as to listen, to hear. I often find the scores of other composers too morose, only too late helping me to feel the true configuration of the music. It is sad not to be able to see the evolution of the densities of the voices, the gravitation of the lines of force of a score. Thatís why, from the start, I attached a particular importance to the graphical aspect of my scores. During a certain period, each of my scores had its particular graphism, emerged from its own needs, having its own image. Later, I had to repeat myself... I composed too many! Time at my disposal was too short for writing, as I often do, on tracing paper, with rulers, stencils, Indian ink. That took too much energy. For that reason, my former ambition, to always create unique scores, as each composition is, weakened a little... But, I certainly will buy myself a computer to restart the research in this field, to reconsider unsolved problems... I will manage this, perhaps... [now that we have two computers, scores can often be as in my dreams. -1999 update - ed.].  To answer more exactly your question: the score is something sacred. For a music so new, that of which I dream, the graphics, the symbols, the subtleties, require an immense effort... It is a matter of creation!

GP: And yet, I feel a kind of mistrust in the effectiveness of the written page! Do you find that there is a dichotomy between written sign and music, between writing and sound?

ID: I see your point! Perhaps it is necessary to start from elsewhere: up to a very recent epoch, each notated music, as you know it well, was an "ars combinatoria." [You have to let this term stay like that, I think. It's from the Renaissance: Raimondus Lullus, and other occultists too, that invented engines to combine each word to another, starting from mathematical models. It means that the signification of the word is not important anymore, but only the laws of combinations are. That was the prefiguration of the computer era, I'm sure. -1999 update- ed.] Harmony, polyphony, melody, orchestration, combination, all came from this superbly flourishing combinative ideal. The scores based on this idea, in spite of their inaccuracies, which were present even then, were very effective, functioning very well, though calculations sometimes proved false - see the great differences of tempi, for so many conductors - but at the same time specified, concrete. The needs of music have changed since then, though the resources of combinative thought were proven immense. And one cannot envisage how long they will still last. The combinative musical thought changes with the transformational thought. At the beginning in a very timid way, then more decided. This evolution certainly received an impulse from the electroacoustic practice. In my case, things are even more thorough. The transformational principle has become omnipresent. 60 to 70% of the music that I imagine is transformational. A sound is a being which is born, develops and dies, while transforming its qualities, its colours, its form, its micro-harmonic components; it is in a perpetual and essential becoming. Besides, music is nothing concrete, nothing existing in itself. It is only something which becomes! Therefore my music, in a way more thorough than many others, is essentially evolutionary, in a continual swinging between concrete, palpable and subtle, pure and impure, refusing in a conscious manner the banal concrete, the already known. Obviously, with a departure from such premises, where each element of the composition is, indeed, an adventure, a becoming micro-structure, something without existence in immediate reality and being able only to be imagined, foreseen... The problems of writing are infinitely more complex. How can one write down the imponderable? The insoluble?

SL: Is there an exit?

ID: This is the question! In any case, continuing to write canned music is not one of the solutions. That does not interest anybody any more! And I donít care about it either. Transformational multisounds, a passage through the natural harmonics series is not something which one can control and which can be immediately performed by the interpret. Even when it appears during a concert, it has been experienced before, practiced, in order to fully reappear, to evolve in the necessary direction. The whole phenomenology of the birth of a sound is implied. That does not depend only on physical aspects, like the trajectory of a bullet. I see more than a physical aspect, I see an adventure of the spirit. Exactly as was the case with the alchemists. The sound reflects a will of existence, of direction towards a goal... But the chemist is not successful in all his experiments. Neither is the musician. The musician in such an attempt assumes the gesture of existing, of being, gives birth to an unprecedented world. We talk thus about an enormous change of roles. The composer proposes a strategy, outlines a range of possibilities, circumscribes the adventure in a definite territory... But it is the performer who assumes the final concrete adventure. Thatís why the only valid answer is offered by phenomenology. You wonder, as you should, what becomes of the scores, in such a context? Well, I answer you: an incitement! A tendency to strike roots where the soil is completely missing, a limitation in order to avoid the skid to the arbitrary. A maintenance of the direction of the work. Of course, there is more of it! One finds fantastic passages of development in their road to follow, and also solid, concrete, relentless moments, which gather the totality of the elements. Concrete, hard things guide, articulate the form. The others, the "madness," become brackets, according to the case. I must inform you that, obviously, it is only after two decades that I have arrived at todayís freedom. After having written "controlled" scores, conceived in the technique of usual composition. In this technique, the one I find ancient, I think I have brought some modest contributions. Todayís « freedom » is in fact a very constraining form taken by the conquests of the assumed technique and artistic conscience... Conquests painfully obtained.  I have been a conductor for almost 20 years, and when I checked some of my assumptions, I eliminated many of them. Yet a few remained, nevertheless... valid! In order to arrive to these results, above all, I released myself from a certain sluggishness of the spirit (not of the mind) in which many artists of nowadays enjoy themselves. During periods of transition, like ours, rare are those who open up, with courage, new territories. They have the additional chance to be forgotten thereafter... When all calms down,  the true geniuses come who fill the vacuum. But without the first characters, what boredom in the art of the world! Concerning myself, I prefer being... forgotten later, than unnoticed or not counting at all!

GP: Concerning «PIERRES SACRÉES». This work sounds almost like « musique concrète ».

ID: True! But I donít know if one could really call it musique concrète. It is a completely different thing! For several years I have been haunted by an intuitive penchant, an inner necessity, urgent and perfidious at the same time, to connect the instrumental timbre to an envelope of noise. It is what sometimes synthesizers do... I have this presentiment for a long time: the noise field is necessary to music, but in a more subtle way. Because the hyper-consonance, the hyper-spectrality also require duller shades, more stringent, hard, which counterbalance them. You cannot build only with glass. You must also employ steel. In the case of « PIERRES SACRÉES », we deal with an acousmatic form about which I've already spoken. The art of disguising, of masking the sound source to make it more precious. It is the sound metaphor, something parallel to the poetic metaphor. What would poetry be without metaphor? I believe that, from the point of view of the source employed, this kind of ambiguous sound situations, even if it is a question of traditional instruments, can be invested with a "detimbration," a metalization or with a certain "concreteness," like in true musique concrète, which brings to the living composition of today not only a completely necessary modern spirit, but an unheard, semantic richness. The musical sign, thus, is revealed by its symbolic value...

GP: Are special techniques necessary to collect the sound?

ID: Certainly.

GP: I do not hear at all the prepared piano, or, in any case, I do not hear it as such. Each time you use instruments or prepared objects, do you give indications for the use of the  preparing of sound?

ID: However, it is only with the piano that similar sounds can appear, that I find special... On the strings of the piano. It is an electronic manner of pre-paring the piano. Something which is done for the first time...

JR: What do you mean by electronic preparing? Not the same way as Cage prepared pianos?

ID: Yes and no... It means I'm employing different positioning of micro-phones which I manufacture myself (not commercial ones) and their con-nections with the piano... Things like that. Now I have a « new genera-tion » of this kind of... small interesting sounds, with which I'm preparing some new music...

GP: Thus you give, for each composition, indications of use for the metal plates or are the objects "invited" by your music?

ID: It generally concerns instruments which have a rather rich and diversi-fied sound, relatively easy to handle. More complicated was for me to rec-ord and construct the work with so few elements. But, you know it well, true art is done with a parsimony of means. « PIERRES SACRÉES » excels by a way of living music intensely, with an exceptional tension. In acous-matic, everything lets itself be invented. Starting with the form of the work, with the recording technique, the instruments - craftsmanís sometimes - that you use, that you invent. Here, the question is of the result of a few years of experiments which, finally, after many failures, found their way of accomplishment.

GP: « HARRYPHONIE » (alpha). The double bass often sounds like a trumpet...

ID: The answers return to the same concepts. You have a very fine hearing, and cultivated as well... It is possible for this to appear thus. An additional effect due to the acousmatic. All that you have perceived is the acousmatic, Orphic effect. In my design, that is a high science of the most precious combinations of harmonics. This alchemy of the vibrations can generate the most remote sound metamorphoses...

ID: Towards the end of the piece, the part named the "sectio aurea," the large drum and the harryphono dialogue. What happens: the acousmatic Orphic is also based on the transcendence. The ensemble must give the impression of greatness, of cosmicity of the music. In the instrumental acousmatic, in the Orphic, it is enough for one instrument to carry out the acousmatic jump, the step towards the transcendent, for, instantaneously, all the other instruments, all the sounds to become secret, contaminated... with magic, also touched by the transcendent force! That is why my music is, in a certain sense, cryptic, exploring the final meanings of the sound... The listener is attracted in this occulted search, losing his... points of refer-ence. It is a call towards the life of the sound fact. Thus, it found a chance to attract... a spirit that was as well in search...

JR: What is a harryphono? (In English, this suggests it is made of hair!)

ID: Not at all! In fact it is made of steel.... The name comes from Harry Halbreich, to whom I dedicated this instrument I have manufactured. It can be played as an acoustic percussion instrument, or it can be employed with microphones. The material is essential for its sound. I can't explain more.... it is a matter of experience.

GP: « A PRIORI »  for ensemble. This work, as well, is almost musique concrète. The presence of an electronic sound as background...

ID: In the case  of « A PRIORI », it is also about Orphic screening. It is rather a music for the 21st century than for nowadays. « MYTHOS » as well... My music is addressed to the listener of the 21st century. Obviously I employ prepared sounds. I would not say that they are only timbres, be-cause it is not only a question of colours. They are complex sounds, charged with accents of explosive force. It is the general construction, the form which preoccupied me the most. It is a continuous variation, very free, based on a logical apriorism. The logical forms are not a volitional creation of the composer, in spite of the appearances or the simplistic con-ception of materialist, reductionistic thought. The logical forms have a metaphysical origin. For this reason they are so easily combined. They come out the force of the creative genius, that is of the unconscious. The human talent comes from the unconscious, and thus it cannot be taught, learned. The talent for music: you have it or you do not have it. That's all. But what are forms as sonata, lied ["Term generally used in English for the Romantic art song from Schubert to Wolf and Strauss" -The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music - ed.]? Mozart, like Bruckner, was not interested in the form of his works (in the sense of sticking to the form). Their logical forms belonged to the great metaphysic entities. Their success was not to disturb them, not to deteriorate them. Besides, the logical forms belong to the col-lective unconscious. That is why they are felt, forewarned, understood by all. On the level of artistic culture, they reach, touch the degree of the su-pra-conscious. They fall from the sky... For this reason, they cannot be indexed.

GP: For this work do you develop your ideas starting from a combination of timbres, from a timbre, from the sensation of a specific timbre?

ID: I always start from a timbre which I imagine. I prepare these timbres intensely, assiduously. As a painter would do for his nuances. I prepare them by carrying out new tunings, changing scribblings, studying various non-orthodox techniques of execution. When I succeed to have complete sounds, full of explosive force, accents, expressive vectors, I continue with the thought of musical construction. But both arise almost simultaneously. For « A PRIORI » another thing is significant: the form is a continual variation, free, beginning from elements already given. All the ensemble has as basis a logical apriorism of the discursivity. You see how the logical forms are not a volitional creation, due to the whim of the creator. The logical forms, those which appear objective to us, those in which I myself, you, others, find themselves, are of metaphysical origin. They are given to us, they come to us from a higher position than ours... There is no more innovation which could occur. In such a music, so difficult and, as I have the impression and I repeat it, having more affinity with the 21st century, I havenít invented anything. I have only seized articulations which you do not know and... when  you will  have time to perceive them, you will real-ize that, on one hand, they are absolutely... logical, and that on the other hand, they are objective... That means... an apriorism! The proof that what is in ourselves, eventually even masked, encrypted like here, belongs to us like an a-perceptive data belongs to the apriorism of musical logic. There-fore to an absolute metaphysics! In this way, I have the ambition to demon-strate something in addition. That liberty does not exist at all. We have the apriorism of the forms. We also have the apriorism of liberty!!! When somebody tells you to be free, only for the moment, thinking that you must do something special, you start to have headaches! There is nothing to do with freedom! Nothing special! If only to assume it, to assume what it would be possible to do! The one who tells the young composer: add 3 measures there, put 6 beats there... makes a huge error! The only thing to say, in similar cases, would be: "rip it up and start again!" One must thus discover, I would not say the archetype, but the necessary proportion which governs everything!

SL: Can  you explain how you use the « acousmatic »?

ID: The answer is too complicated... Until the end, I hope that you will find its sense yourself. The acousmatic would somehow be the highest diagonal science of the sound material. The purest degree. The most solitary adven-ture of hearing. Elevating the sign-sound to the highest degree of abstrac-tion. It would be the supreme Stage of subtlety, of the civilization of the ear. The argument, the only one, of the pure, virgin sense, of human  thought by means of sound. The acousmatic - which comes from the Socratics - refers to the art, the science to disguise the source of the sound, to mask it, to  ocult it, with the purpose of making it more precious, pene-trating, unrecognizable... reverberating, richer. The acousmatic is about concealing the process of the emission of the sound using instrumental techniques other than the established ones. It is, in any case, different from what imagined those who designed by this name the production of « sound-enigmas » on tape ! The instrumental acousmatic has to do with a diagonal (unusual) technique of the instrumentalist, who produces sounds unheard of, thus finding himself in borderline situations. He extorts of his instru-ment all sweetness and poison. That is Acousmatic, and not the music made beyond a curtain, as with the contests for a place in an orchestra. Acousmatic is the « spiritualization » of music, where the ethic and aes-thetic speculation join to find the value of the uniqueness, of the unrepeat-able. The negation of materiality, of the raw sound. And something more: the insane hope that, from there, by the means of the sound, you could dissect the nucleus of the world.

GP:  How did you begin this approach towards an enigmatic music till a certain point, in such a thorough search?

ID: It is difficult to say! The course was not exempt from retreats, dramatic ones sometimes. I started with the search of the inside of the sound. Inside the sound there are gravitational forces which act. A terrible force of cohe-sion, of nuclear attraction. Dislocating the vibrations which compose the natural sound gives birth at the same time to a formidable energy, compa-rable with the energy of the particles. For more than fifteen years, I have based my creation on that... It is necessary, first of all, to disturb the peace of the sound, to create a Brownian motion... The force is no longer that of my music... but that of physics itself. The great problem is to agree with physics, to listen to its laws. Not to reverse these laws...  I put the sound under a magnifying glass, to watch it. As something marvelous. I thus contemplated under the microscope the interiority of this ocean of micro-scopic proportions, a world hardly foreseeable to the naked eye. I culti-vated a different listening sensibility. I always had a presentiment that something was hiding  below.

GP: How is  music constructed in such a state of mind?

ID: How is it constructed? I have never asked myself the question. Except for the moments of confusion. The resolution imposes itself. It is enough to observe. To let yourself be carried away. To live this new reality at the most. In music, I am in the search of this "Urphaenomen", the primordial fact, where I feel the initial essence of the musical fact. That is why you will not find in my music melodies and melodic figures. What will you find then? You will find an embryo which generates music, by itself. It self-generates it... When I attain the elementary and find myself on the level of the components of the sound, I then sense I have touched the ger-minal fiber, the embryo of life... being born out of something mysterious... Here I find the original fecundity of music... You know? Substance has its own intelligence! It thinks by itself... What you must do is to learn how to read inside it. Like Plato said: "He who is not a geometrician does not have the right to enter there!" The search for  the "Urformen" appears to me as a purification while coming out of false motivations, as the intuition of pri-mary topologies. Lacking either discursive or figurative. A plant grows naturally, we just have to look at it.

GP: But then, how do you compose?

ID: I try to surround myself with a new reality. I see  things in their pri-mordial nature, I pursue... what precedes the already formed. The uncertain preoccupies me. Therefore impulses... beginnings. There is something paradisiac inside those things. A purity, an initial halo. The world needs more and more the ingenuity of expression, and searches for it, without knowing where to find it.  I had the chance to return to the sources. I re-turned to the Orphic mythology. We have the sound and the cultural thought, symphonic, and another thing: the natural sound. Between the natural and the cultural there are significant differences. The natural sound is a complex of pure and impure things: noise, inconstant doublings, adja-cent effects, beats, spectral rubbings. The natural can enrich the cultural. That is what I do.  All this belongs to the idea of a pre-language. Is one allowed to say that? An "Ursprach" without connotation, without denota-tion. If something could characterize my entire work, that would be a state, a "miraculous" one, of the beginning of the world. Sound appears like something not generated, non-created. What follows is a sort of fascination for the ontology. An ontology lived in truth. Almost always, my music liberates latent forces, allows them to develop by themselves as would do Leibnitzís monads. Only afterwards do I start to organize a conflict, to produce a more or less spectacular jump towards other substances and, towards the end, the arc collapses. Energies gradually die out. Inside I have an insane distillery of timbres, situations... is it a good summary? For « MEDIUM III », one should not forget the staggering, illuminated version offered by Fernando Grillo. Grillo is indeed, as Stockhausen surnamed him, the « Buddha of the double bass ». For his intuitive genius, all these theoretical pretensions - so to speak - that this music claims (and it is not only question of this work which I wrote) are its own way of existence. Fernando Grillo is a high artistic authority, and I had many times the possi-bility, the chance to collaborate, but also to confront myself with him.

GP: Are the rattlings of bows explicitly written in detail? How do you con-duct the performers?

ID: Sometimes they are explicit, expressly required, but other times they are successive, adjacent, related to the pressures, the changes of bowing. The technique, the processes are complex. I donít know  what is it exactly that you have in mind...  I want to say that, just like in the school of classi-cal style interpretation, there also is a style, a series of technical knowl-edge, specialized, academic, absolutely obligatory, that is transmitted, like yesterday, by direct contact of the Master with the pupil. Without that, musical development would be impossible. All of todayís surprises are for me things already selected, experimented, discovered, practiced for almost twenty years. It is the fate of those who explore, in art, the virgin terrain. After a certain time, all these things become a kind of collective folklore, generally one forgets the author of the "small invention." In what concerns me, I hope that at least, as it is a question of a new system of musical thought, some of the essential things will perhaps be likely to remain, to resist time...

GP: Do you play the double bass?

ID: Yes, to a certain extent. I have a rather good right hand technique, which aids me for many instruments, traditional or self-made. I thus have the advantage of knowing, in the most profound and practical sense, the instruments. For this reason, when I write, I do not only have the intuition of solutions, but also a minimum, at least, of practice of their physical "writing", of the way in which the sound occurs. My experience as con-ductor has also helped me much.

GP: One can use phenomenology to interpret the score of someone else, but can one use it for his own score?

ID: It is the same thing. You are a phenomenologist or you are not at all. You can be a native phenomenologist, without speculative possibilities, but  with the clear sensation out of which truth pulsates. The geniuses do not need a theoretical method. They instantaneously embody the essence. The phenomenological reduction, which is named, briefly, reduction, is abso-lutely necessary to any composer. The first image of a composition, which is absolute, appears to have all the details; after that, follows the realization of all the proportions and the structural elements, a pure image, thanks to phenomenological intuition.