IANCU DUMITRESCU: It is important in my opinion to "live" the idea, to be in complicity with the idea... But... is it possible to live an idea? Can one imagine a music without having, at least, some ideas? That is the question! What I can say, assuredly, is that the ideas become music at the moment when one can live them, can "burn" them, therefore transcend them...

ANA-MARIA AVRAM: On the other hand, can one think that it is possi-ble to mirror a structure in another material, and to express it by a similar-ity of structure? That is not possible. One cannot express a philosophical idea by a structure which would be its translation. That means nothing. It is illustration. One must find the metaphor, find another method to revive the idea, but not through a similarity of structure. What is valid in one ma-terial is not in another... For example in certain works, a grand Master like Xenakis would like to express philosophical and scientific ideas, starting from a law that he wants to use to « generate » music, but finally what remains is a certain artistic force, tension, harshness and courage which is essential in his music, and not the fact that mathematical laws are ex-pressed. That is his own business, it concerns himself alone, each composer having his needs to cling to something, in order to be able to start, but the essential is not there.

Ana-Maria Avram , work session with Daniel KIENTZY for "NOUMENA" for soloists and large orchestra

SERGE LEROY: When you interpret the work of another composer, you speak about phenomenology when trying to find the idea, when trying to have this vertical impulse, despising the well-known, the imitation, trying to find the virginal impulse. But what happens when you interpret your own music?

ID: The question is very complex... Firstly, "interpretation" does not exist! Secondly, you cannot even listen to something composed in that very mo-ment. That requires the execution of the work. The score is an intermediary between the composer and the performer; and not between the composer and his public; let's be clear about that! Because the execution is, to tell the truth, if you are a true phenomenologist, all the same a creation. Therefore it is the inverse procedure. But in essence, it is the same thing: a re-creation that needs the same genuine state of spirit. It is tragic for you that you did not hear, that you did not have the occasion to know a phenomenological artist. If you have time, if you have the chance, it is necessary that you make a trip to Munich or elsewhere to meet Celibidache. He still gives courses, but apart from that, if you want to see what is "interpretation" for a phenomenologist, it is necessary to see what happens with Celibidache, because it is, to tell the truth, the negation of "interpretation." [Celibidache died in 1996, for a short biography of his life you can link to the web site: http://www.markandthakar.com -ed.]  At any rate, for a phenomenologist, the usual sense of interpretation is excluded! That does not exist!

AMA: Because to "interpret" means to pass a message by your own sub-jectivity, and that is the reverse of phenomenology. For this, one must find the objectivity of a message, where this message is found in me, in you, in him. Thus it is the common number.

[JOSH RONSEN: How does that happen?]

[AMA: You have to learn that, but also to discover in yourself how to read a score in order to reveal what is important, the direction that music aims to. Then, even if always, each time, the execution of the same score will be different, it will still be true, in the sense that it will respect each time the "intentionality," the direction, even if it would be expressed in a different way, because conditions are unique every time. This "intentionality" is in fact the common number, the objectivity of the message, that needs to be realized by the performers, the audience, the conductor. With pure intuition you have to discover this direction.]

[JR: When is the "interpretation" of a score a wrong one?]

[AMA: When, and only when, it looses its direction.]

[JR: How is this direction expressed?]

[AMA: By accents, articulations, heads of themes, by crescendo and decre-scendo, by climaxes, by accellerando and rallentando. By the reduction (phenomenological, as époché -epoche- of the vertical situation). By the transparency of the superposed themes. By the occult relation, unquantifi-able, between melody or theme and contra-theme... The tonal or a-tonal relationships. The sense of modulations....The  sense of the lack of modu-lation also. The shortness and the length of musical ideas...]

[JR: That concerns executing, reading a musical text. What about com-posing?]

[AMA: The same problem, but, if you want, the reverse. Don't miss this direction, when you are writing. Keep your genuine state and energy.  Even if it takes a very long time to write. The texture has to have the necessary, unconditioned length. The articulations of the sonorous surfaces have to be substantial enough.]

 ID: I do not know if you want to use the word "program" here! Or "foundation of the music". Music is untranslatable, thus something pure, non-expressible! Thus it is for this that one needs it. Even its "foundations" are found only within  itself!

SL: In a certain program-music one would seek to describe a battle for example, or a sensation, but this is excluded from phenomenology...

AMA: Those are always subjective things. Titles and other texts on what tries to "express" music, are only external phenomena, a poetic excitation to which composers cling. [Or only to make the public cling to something. As a bracket: that justifies, for me, the phenomenon of a large part of to-day's composers of endlessly prattling about their music. I'm not sure if this always serves to the understanding of their music, but often only to direct-ing one on a wrong way. - update, ed.]

SL: Thus romanticism cannot be phenomenological, since it is related to the sensation, to the sentiment. One senses there an experience, a mem-ory...

AMA: No! But music remains valid, because there is a difference between what the title tells, between what the composer, perhaps, imagines that this music wants to express and what it truly is. If it could truly be question of something, it is only about memory in itself, about sensation in itself, and not about the sensation of something which is defined. Music is nothing. Therefore it cannot express something concrete, palpable, like the "battle" or something else. Music is not concrete. [A lot of thinkers tried to explain and analyze music by semiotics. It is an enormous, silly mistake! Because in semiotics you always need the triangle: significant, significance and referent (object). But in music tertium non datur! (the third is excluded). There is no object, referent! Never! That's also why music isn't a language. Languages also need a referent. Even laws of a grammatical genre - or which can be compared with those - can be found in music (by analogy, only by analogy!). The lack of referent makes music something different from what a "language" has to be. -1999 update]

ID [responding to SL's remark]: Do you like romantic music?  No, nothing is related to sensation. If, for example, one speaks about Chopin, a great romantic, one cannot say that he remains on the level of sensations, that it is about something entering, disturbing, tickling a neuron. It would be to remain in the field of sensation, therefore of the sound, i.e. physics, but music is another thing. It is another level. It is the transcendental level, that which transcends the sound. It is a question of expression, it is a contact with something very complex.

[AMA: If that were not the case, "noise music" could never exist. The dif-ference between noise and music is not what we learned in acoustics class, a matter of the shape of the sound, but this possibility of transcendence, that is the musical level. Noise as noise, is in fact a true pollution, but noise in music, I think, is opening some new, deep and genuine ways of pros-pecting. -1999 update]

ID: But to return to "romanticism:" the truth is opposite to what you say! Phenomenology, being based on "pure intuition," offers us, precisely, the possibility to discover, if you want, romanticism in a pure state, not con-taminated, not spoiled. What more do you want? One has eliminated all the contaminations and finds the lived "definition" of romanticism, as a "stylistic matrix" that has nothing to do with the chat about music, but only with the music itself. It is for this that phenomenology is necessary. It can reveal the virginal "purity" of things! By phenomenology one manages to reach the absolute. One differentiates, while "living" the categories. Ro-manticism and classicism differ, thus, by their very essence... One can thus have pure representations of the styles... This "intuition" reveals the ob-jectivity which is found in me, in you, in him... By it, one reaches to what is, in us all, the last layer of conscience, therefore this stratum where be-tween subjects, between humans, there are no more differences. One reaches the given, objective, "general". Phenomenology is a generally ap-plicable, valid method. The problem is the form of application that it takes. And here, in the field of music, we can all be profound the same. Phe-nomenology is thus the only system which can explain, render music com-prehensible for all of us. It can give us even its own definition.

HYPERION Ensemble

[JR: Phenomenology's or music's' definition?]

[AMA: Phenomenology's. Music has no definition. Since I have started to think about it, I couldn't find a definition for what music is. Remind your-self: Iancu said in the first part that it is only something made with sounds, something which is born, grows and dies. But it isn't the sound itself.]

ID: It makes us find the dimension of the "other" in "myself."  Otherwise one finds oneself in a total collapse... What I apprehend, you do not under-stand... And him, he does not agree with either of us... Where can one thus arrive? As for the physical sound... The physical sound is nothing, it is...

GP: ...the  vector of the transmission.

ID: It can become even a vector, under certain conditions...

AMA: It is a moment when the physical, the substance of the sound, the signs of the music are exceeded.

GP: Thus the conductor besides conducting the musicians or directing the emission of physical sounds, leads the musicians to a state of mind.

ID: Indeed, he leads them towards a state of mind.

GP: In a somehow shamanic way...

AMA: Yes, finally, it is very close to the mystic.

ID: This is the mysterious and awkward role of a conductor. To tell the truth, the conductor does not direct. What does the conductor do? He tries to avoid the errors, to avoid the accidents, he seeks to marginalize the things which intervene against the moment of transcendence. Thus, a good conductor sees, has, the pure intuition of an error which comes, of a small accent at a certain time, of a small heaviness or I do not know what coming from the orchestra and being able to become the beginning of a general error.

[AMA: It also depends in which way one, the conductor himself, under-stands his role: as a guard of a heard or as a "psychopomp"... a guide for the spirit...]

ID: Music is something which passes. It is not something which is deter-mined. Nothing remains after the silence returns. It is like a discussion, like what we have now for example...

AMA: Even if something is written, what is this, there on the score? Pre-cisely a base from which to fly away.

ID: It is true! It is a state of mind. That is the secret. In my opinion, it is the goal of music, to comprehend a material which is the music, but for that, for comprehending, it is necessary to eliminate much, to avoid the painful moments, to try to coordinate logic a little... It is necessary to "live with" the music, with the score, if you want,  but always "hic et nunc," as one says in Latin. Here and now. Otherwise, it is the death of art...

AMA: It is finally simpler to state what a conductor must not be. He should not come with his bias, his prejudices, whatever the concrete and momentary conditions of the orchestra, of the spirit of the orchestra, of all that is related to one moment and can considerably vary, and say "there, I will do like that! I will always do like that! I will always put that accent there, this gesture there, this tempo there!"

ID: To say: "Here is my tempo!" has no meaning. The tempo is "true" or "not true." That is all!

SL: There exists all the same a difference between the interpretation and the composition. One can admit that Debussy or Ravel, at a certain mo-ment, or after a sorrow of heart, composed something on the piano... or expressed love, expressed something...

ID: They are geniuses! A genius composer who composes is, when he succeeds - because there are also moments when he does not succeed - when he succeeds, I repeat, he is in a trance. It is for this that one cannot... throw away... remove the smallest phrase. Is that possible? In Bach for example?

AMA: There is not a phrase which one can remove without changing all.  Nothing can be changed. (But that has nothing to do with his personal sor-rows, or joys! The level is so different! Communication is occulted, as between consciousness and unconsciousness.)

ID: You can't change a note! In music, it is not possible to change some-thing, because you would change the entire proportion. How do you ex-plain that? It is supernatural! Only phenomenology can give, can explain the great secrecy of a living composition which remains always alive, for two, three centuries, and of which nobody can remove a single note. Of course, there is the possibility of playing like that, like an idiot [taps ma-chine-like on the table], but that still remains a recall of something, there-fore it is also a mystery, but nobody can eliminate a thing, and that is, in my opinion,  very significant.
 

AMA [addressing SL]: I think you are mistaken when you say "the com-poser wants to express love...". However, the composer expresses the very depths of the thing, and then the music expresses itself. It does not express anything other than itself. There is no referent! One cannot point out on what it expresses. There is no precise reference. [...] This is a simplistic view of phenomenology, because in fact in the acts of consciousness, one can distinguish the moment of intentionality - therefore anticipation, future, the actuality - the present - and the retention of the past - memory - all forming the living present. The phenomenological "time" is always this "living present" which joins together past - present - future. Which abol-ishes time. Transforms it. Reduces it to the lived. Concerning Debussy's steps on the snow (which you mentioned), it is about the memory which came then, after he wrote the music. Or it is about a first impulse, there, in front of the so frightening blank page! The daydream before creation it-self... That can generate a beginning of something, a structure, a trigger. And afterwards, from the moment when you have the trigger, the music generates itself. It almost enters in an "obliged passage." To intervene, to try to change the direction that itself chose is losing altitude, wasting all !

ID: Yes, it is like that. Therefore it is a very interesting phenomenon. It does not exist in poetry. It does not exist in another art. It exists only in music. Something which self-generates... on an almost abstract level...

AMA: Out of nothing, out of itself. Out of what it was. What was obliges what becomes...

ID: Here is to make a small analysis, [Humming again the steps on the snow]: It is only one small cell, unique, and that generates... seven or eight minutes of music. It is fantastic. It is for that that we say, along with others, that Debussy is really a fantastic genius, because he could generate a mu-sic, generate a rather abstract music from the sound point of view... even only with the rhythm of a lame foot, like here.

AMA: Without calling upon traditional forms, and by generating a com-pletely different form of discursivity than those which existed until his time.

ID: And calling upon two or three very short cells, true minimal cells of music. It is interesting. It is almost like with Webern, in another way, obvi-ously.

AMA: In a completely other sense. For example one day, a friend of Mozartís  had asked him how he had composed such music. He answered: "Well, listen to it!" He played it. And his friend re-asked him the same question, for Mozart to explain to him how he had composed that. Mozart answered: "Iíll replay it for you." There is nothing to explain...  In addition and for a little entertainment: Have you seen the movie « Amadeus »? There is a sentence very well turned.  When the emperor asks "Mr. Mozart, haven't you put in too many notes?"

SL: "Too many notes, my dear Mozart."

AMA: And he answers: "No, Your Highness, there is exactly the number of notes that is necessary." It was a phenomenological answer. There are as many notes as is needed. Not more, not less. It was not a show of pride, but a very short and precise explanation.

SL: But in what music would be precisely different from poetry which al-ways describes a state, a sentiment, etc...

AMA: Because in music there is no reference... In the semiotic triangle, I repeat, there is the written word, the spoken word and the concrete physical object.

GP: The signifier and the signified.

AMA: Yes, and the real object. In "flesh and bone"... in the present, in-volved. In music the third one never appears. It exists, perhaps, but it is vague, it is abstract. It is not present as such. You can never put the finger on something: "It expresses that. It is that."

SL: And it is never fixed.

AMA: ...but  holds of another order of reality.

SL: And because music always exploits atemporality, over one duration.

AMA: It is a succession of relations of tension and relaxation. But for me, not even poetry describes something. Only prose does, sometimes... If one also calls upon phenomenology, the music is related to the sound... the sound is something having in its structure a "scale," if one can say like that, (but it is not like that!) which has a "spectrum," which has the principle of the octave, and that does not exist in any other art. After the octave follows the repetition, and that occurs over nine or ten octaves which one can hear [20Hz to about 20,000Hz -ed.]. The field is rather large... That goes from subsonics to ultrasounds. On the other hand, the field of the image goes from the infra-red to the ultraviolet ray [430 THz to 750 THz -ed.]. It is very short.

GP: In the visual field, one perceives only one octave [not even an "octave," if we mean an octave to be a doubling of a frequency; see fre-quency range above. -ed.]. The spectrum of the colours does not start again after the ultraviolet ray, or below the infra-red.

ID: And thus one can have an incredible richness in music, in comparison with other arts, because one calls upon a capacity of hearing which is com-pletely special.

GP: What hearing perceives, which we feel by the means of hearing pres-ents at the same time an identity, a similarity rather, with the same phe-nomenon with another octave, and at the same time, is offered a set of dif-ferences. There is thus an ambiguity being born, perhaps, out of that... It is the same thing, but it is nevertheless not the same thing, and listening is perhaps always done, concerning the pitches for example, by a friction around the point of ideal consonance.

ID: It is splendid!

GP: When I discovered an American composer whom perhaps you know, La Monte Young, I realized at what point it is important to listen to only one sound. I thus tried to remake some of his experiments. It is fascinating! This sound becomes a spiral where one progresses more and more deeply.

AMA: Of course, one can make music starting just from the resonance of a sound. Scelsi already imagined that.

GP [frightened by his own finding]: This opens up to much auditive analy-sis that can be very methodical, but one realizes that there exists a very large number of possible arrangements that one hears in the sounds, using what Young names their combined frequencies, and, starting from the re-lation of some generating frequencies, without being able to explore all the nature of the numerators of the frequency ratios [i.e. expressing the inter-val of a fifth by 3/2 -ed.], the qualities (to use the term employed by Alain Danielou)  of the sound spectrum, or rather, if one is only interested in one of its portion, of it that I name the octaviant field. There is an arborescent, exponential combinatory, and very quickly one realizes that one cannot master all that. There is an infinity of connection possibilities between the frequencies in interrelations, between the sounds, and that, which is even more puzzling, whatever the descriptive model of the sounds, or the chosen organizing model to account for the relations between the frequencies, to speak only about these ones, isolating them from the other important grandeurs in the sounds. That can be frightening sometimes!

AMA: It is for that the composers think that they can cling to something in the moment when they set out on a route, starting from an idea, be it mathematical, especially when the obligation of a grammar no longer ex-ists.

ID [pensive]: That is frightening!

GP: But there is no unique path....

ID: You used one sound like La Monte Young, I do not know what, to imagine, to listen to, to widen your... spirituality, your capacity of hearing, I am right, am I? But one can concentrate... on something and discover... a world. It is a spiritual exercise, of course. One can thus travel in completely magical, unknown  spaces. For me, that is very important.

GP: That there were not one model, objective, final... of description of the sounds. Everyone can invent his own.

ID: But the Essence? Where is the Essence?

GP: ...and there is an infinity of possible models, but no physical model can account for the whole. One can have diagrams of description, but they are related to a person, a group, a culture. But there is not a total objective model which makes it possible to describe and to organize the sounds. It is not possible.

AMA: No, but this is not the aim of music.

ID: Good, an  "infinity of models," but we are always confronted with the same problems: symmetry - asymmetry, of the opened forms, the closed forms; even and odd rhythms; horizontal dimension prevailing on the verti-cal or conversely, etc... For that, I evoke Zen, because Zen represents for me more than what is known and accepted in Western culture. I use the word "accepted," but in fact it would be necessary to say "lived," assimi-lated...  It was rather a long time ago that I had the chance to read some descriptive texts, which introduced me into the doctrines... For a certain time, I even had a "Master," but then I could develop my own Zen experi-ence. What I find most remarkable is that Zen remains open for a personal experience, even if not always mystical.

AMA: What it is perhaps necessary to repeat is that Zen is not a philoso-phy, not even a thought... It does not start from certain premises in order to arrive to conclusions. Deduction is completely estranged and against it...

ID: By Zen one succeeds to suspend, to stop, to block the thought, estab-lishing the absolute mental vacuum. Zen is that! The practice to obtain the mental vacuum, like the most precious knowledge... But if for Japanese the vacuum, the escape from reality, is the goal even, for me, as an European, this emptied space of consciousness becomes the place of election where new elements can germinate. A pure state, a regression towards unheard, extraordinary sounds... not yet elaborate... It is in this way that I imagine... that I compose the music. I think it is the only formula of possible elibera-tion out of the enormous crisis in which contemporary music finds itself. Temporarily contesting everything and starting everything from the begin-ning.

AMA: Because music is, in a certain sense, Zen. One can only reach there, one can only be the receptor, even, emptying oneself of all that is contin-gent. One cannot listen to or comprehend two musics at the same time...

ID: Therefore for being able to listen to Stockhausenís "Zyklus" for exam-ple, it is necessary to eliminate "Gruppen" from one's conscience. Good, something remains, inevitably, in the memory... but music is not the mem-ory! When one listens or when music is made, one is dependent of a strange link, in a permanence of the present. Music always occurs in the present! Thus, by Zen I find the spontaneity, the unforeseen so necessary for the music of today. Therefore for discovering in music something original, new, I call upon this state, this transcendental technique, which enables me to eliminate any impurity, any falsity, and to concentrate on a new evidence. It is for that I do say that music is something pure... Without recourse to a « program », to a concept.

AMA: All these external things are false! Because all take us towards du-ality. Because duality is oscillation, hesitation between two solutions... the doubt.  And yet, one can make nothing in the doubt... duplicity never leads to anything...

ID: For that I say that I do not seek music... I find it! Because I cannot have doubts! When I have them, it is that I am on a false path, on an uncertain terrain. As I move towards the immaculate, in music, and as there is no duality - I hope we have come to an agreement on that - there cannot be the pure and impure at the same time, for the simple reason that I have only one conscience! With it, I cannot perceive two truths! I cannot say, for example, that there is a cluster and at the same time an unison at the violin! My conscience possesses an unit... But, I return, Zen is the worship of the ONE. Of the Unity. Of the indivisible.

GP: Is it not too intolerant?

ID: Yes and no! As my conscience cannot perceive two truths, how intol-erant can it be?

GP: Is there possible consensus then?

ID: Precisely! It is here that finally it is necessary to arrive. It is that, the objective state which one can reach: it is a question of reaching, each one among us, what is, philosophically speaking, "pure consciousness." Elimi-nating any duality being in us, therefore emptying, drawing aside all the ear-phenomena and prejudices, remaining with a virginal conscience, one can arrive at the pure conscience. If there is an objective truth, one will certainly find it like such. That is imperatively essential. Therefore it is not intolerant.

AMA: And this truth cannot be modeled. Because frankly speaking...

ID: No, because music is not something solid, material, that one can touch. Music is a subtle energy, a « substance » between people, if one can say, or between you and your loudspeakers which emit something and provokes you to express. To transcend, to imagine, provokes you towards a concen-tration. A psychophysical and mental experience in a special way, as in Yoga,  for instance. No, there is no model in music. There is not something which one can take in our hands like that and say: « Here is music. That is  music. Here is the model ».

AMA: It is a message, but it is not a message that one can describe in the basic sense of a description. There are grammars which organize the sound, but it is not sure that with them one arrives to music...

GP: And even, it is not sure that an absolute universal grammar exists to organize the sounds.

AMA: No, it certainly does not exist.

GP: One starts to realize it even in the field of sciences. Thus all the mathematical models of description of substance, for example, are only models; one speaks about standard theory while being conscious of its provisional nature, but none corresponds to the true organization... they are approaches.

AMA: Yes, because finally, one starts from an impression, an idea that we ourselves imagine, from a design, from a design on the substance and then one can...

GP: Model mentally. I express that in the form of a question, paraphrasing the remark of a Zen Master: "Do the mountains have a (true) form?"  I just arrived at the idea that the mountains do not have a form.

AMA: Yes... There is no model. One can model all... And thus reduce, minimize all... Move away from the truth by love of exactitude... Music, on the other hand, is a field where the models, the theories are not seen, are not heard... The mind discovers things never reached, but it is always in its chemistry, not elsewhere... It is for this reason that I make music. Thus, the mind of a composer enriches the domain of reality... and for this demiurgic invention he desperately, relentlessly pursues music.

GP: One can well make very complicated calculations to approach the shape of the mountains, that will be never a true mountain.

AMA: That will be perhaps an exact mountain, but not a true mountain.

GP: In music also (or in musical theory?), it is similar.  Neither the sound which one hears, nor the music have form, they do not have a true form.

AMA: Yes, and then... people try to approach an ideal form, but finally I believe that people have thought subsequently on the forms... They have found certain forms in certain composers but I donít think that the true creators of these forms have really realized what they have done. For in-stance Haydn, who created the "sonata form," did not imagine it in the way in which those which came after him would describe it. He wanted quite simply to remake a particular form of discourse, another form of discourse than those which existed before him.

ID: No, it is not another. It was something necessary for him...

AMA: Yes, but his need was different.

ID: Fundamentally.

AMA: Different from that of his ancestors. Bach and all the rest. But in fact I donít think that he started by theorizing the duality between the two themes, the development, the re-exposition of the themes in a new relation, all that people, after having read Hegel, imagined to be able to find in the sonata form.  And, at the opposite, Webern who saw "themes" in the dif-ferent forms of the series that he employed in his compositions... while he composed a completely new music, answering all other formal principles... Today there is no professor of analysis who would explain to his pupils the music of Webern from the point of view of the sonata form... There are, of course, according to the epochs, the cultures, specific "horizons" of the style, which are found, resembling, in the various fields... Who draw their "truths" in the collective unconscious. But beyond that, what is to say on  "forms?"

GP: Reconsidering the question of models, concerning the timbre, in the description of this one remained, until the end of the 50s, a model estab-lished towards the end of the 19th century to represent the timbres, on the basis of the theories of Fourier, of Helmholtz.

AMA: One cannot explain the timbres.

GP: Then the search was resumed, for instance at IRCAM, with computers, to make a more thorough analysis, and one saw that timbre depended not that much on these successions of harmonics, but rather that it was neces-sary to take into account into the sound, in the sounds, as have shown the works of Jean-Claude Risset, for example, this that is transitory. And in fact, there is nothing, whatever the model, that shows the timbre.

AMA: Absolutely.

GP: It is uniquely related to sensation. Mathematically that does not exist. One cannot find it.

AMA: Yes. One can find components which form the higher partials. One can know what  forms the higher partials, but one cannot find the rule... Fortunately.

GP: Fortunately!

AMA: The sensation is, in this case, the important part, but this is not  music. Not yet. One does not seek it for itself, but for the need to commu-nicate something. One transcends the feeling in order to arrive at the "sense."

GP: Perhaps there are two approaches of music, of arts in general. Or of oneself in general.

ID: There is an approach which is done by means of models, this is that of science, more and more perfecting the models, and an approach which seeks right away the immediate, as in Zen, the direct sensation, the direct knowledge, which is not the mental knowledge of rational intellect, and without being supposed at all to neglect the latter, and then one tries to transmit this feeling. Or, to be more specific, the means for others to have access directly to the same knowledge,  transmitting the possibility of this feeling, of this knowledge. One tries to present it, but not by means of models, but by metaphors, sentences sometimes voluntarily absurd or seeming such. They are two antagonistic reasonings, but perhaps not as much as that, and I believe that they are present in all the creative activi-ties, whether art, philosophy, sciences. Either one seeks instant conscious-ness, or one perfects a model, one approaches more and more... indefi-nitely...
AMA: But one is never in the truth.

GP: And I fear that with the method of the models one never gets to know things intimately.

AMA: One goes around the edges, but... But one is never inside...

GP: The model in fact permits one to comprehend other models more and more, to refine the models, because they reply to each other. And these conversations of models bring a number of significant questions, but it is not the direct experience of the thing. And one can ask if the scientists are not either people who have or would have initially had the intuition of the thing and would have then tried to express it.
AMA: But it is an already known fact! One knows it is that! Because any experience... means that one has experimented, that one seeks to try out  something on an idea that one has, or an intuition that one has. Because one can do experiences on anything one can find all through experience, start-ing from an idea. The idea is always of primary importance, the intuition as well. And then afterwards, which would be the manner to be able all the same to learn something? To make progress in this domain?

ID: It is there that the analysis intervenes, and thus we give diagrams, we discover the (or some) diagrams. Don't get me wrong, finally one simpli-fies.

AMA: It is not said that they are not beneficial and do not have their value; they have it, but with the condition of not making them absolute, of con-sidering that they are essential and absolute... The "essence," the "being" of things cannot be modeled...

ID: French people, it is true, are a little... too Cartesian, if you agree... The young French composers made spectral analyses and calculations to see what is the, say,  "twenty-third" harmonic...

AMA: They modeled the spectrum...

ID: Thus they made the spectral analysis -  I vulgarize when I say like that, "the twenty-third harmonic" or "eighty-fourth" or I donít know which. But finally, when they compose, they compose with a real sound, therefore what does the "eighty-fourth" harmonic mean? It is  perhaps... arbitrary.

AMA: It is the octave X for the oboe which did not start from a funda-mental that is audible, that exists on the instrument.

ID: G sharp perhaps, a little higher or a little lower...

AMA: But it is idiotic, and here one is completely wrong, because as truth is never perfect, falseness is. Here it is necessary to be very clear. For in-stance they say: "I have a fundamental at such position" and they will play a real sound, a note, and never the real harmonic of this fundamental. But the performer, the oboist for example, does not have this fundamental in his spectrum, therefore his first sound has nothing to do with this funda-mental and is, perhaps, much higher.

GP: It is perhaps not tuned exactly according to this fundamental; the location of this fundamental like a low C of some bass octave could have been done starting from two different instruments.

ID: Obviously, it is almost impossible.

AMA: He cannot exactly play this harmonic as this one is linked to this fundamental, he can only mimic this sound.

ID: But all the same if one discusses the very high harmonics, they are almost inaudible, one can only imagine them.

GP: But if one makes him play it as the "eighty-first" harmonic of the low-est sound of his register and folded back by divisions inside it?

AMA: Thatís it! Or another harmonic which in the end comes closer by some subterfuge of what one wishes, finally, by a certain position of tongue, lips, in order to sound slightly out of tune, as if it were the "eighty-first" harmonic. But this "as if it were" hasn't any value...

ID: It is very relative...

AMA: Very relative, yes, because if the instrumentalist has a problem with his lip, he will play a little higher, and that will have nothing to do with the spectrum which one wants.

ID: Where is the arbitration? Music is conceived on a reference system. Tuning is always a problem of reference to something: one can intonate "false" with respect to something and "less false" with respect to something else. Intonation is not given once for always: it is a continuous correction of errors. A manner of being always placed in the right place. He who designs composition like a "papier musik" has no idea. The clarinet, for instance, has no true sound, as one could believe it, on the instrument. Like the piano. The clarinetist is the one who places his sounds (more or less well, according to his technique, his ear) by the pressure, the squeezing of the reed, the different positions, as the sense of music requires it... Not to mention the brass, and also the strings... Music is not done in an asepti-cized laboratory! Otherwise all is lost from the artistic point of view! It is, probably, rather difficult to carry out this  "referential" aspect of the music. But it is essential. If, as a digression, you would explain to somebody that a CD is full of errors, but the disk player avoids the greatest part of them, rendering them inaudible to our conscience, who would believe you? And, however, it is absolutely true!  In a score of "spectral music," usually music is written with real sounds, but calculated, interpreted... pre-interpreted... like harmonics. But, basically, they play especially with  "somehow false" real sounds in the best of the cases...

AMA: Besides, they do not even put the fingerings that would be neces-sary for obtaining these sounds. And that is not... professional, because if you really want that sound, it is necessary to put there the fingerings, and the real fingerings for these sounds. Composers believe this is not their business, but that of the instrumentalist... but if it is not their business then they are playing with things without controlling them. One should note the spectra as it is necessary, the fingerings for the multiphonics, for the false sounds -  as there are certain precise fingerings, necessary to be marked, or else... If one does not really imagine those sonorities, it is necessary to use the real sounds, thatís all! Otherwise, there is no hundred per cent spectral music. But perhaps one simply wants to be different from those which use tempered sounds.  But why different? How?

ID: For classical music, one exploits very clear positions, very precise, which give a tempered approximation of intonation...
AMA: Like the sounds of the piano, not quite, but...

ID: Almost tempered. For the flute, the clarinet, for the oboe, the bassoon, for example, there also exist other positions, which are a  little...

AMA: ...out of tune... which means that they are finally different harmon-ics from other fundamentals.

ID: Then the spectrum becomes almost confused, for example the spec-trum of C, a fundamental C, combines nevertheless with a spectrum of G... In fact, the sounds are almost similar, but are nevertheless really and no-ticeably different.

AMA: There are microtones.

ID: Very sensitive and different, microtones identifiable on listening. Be-cause, when one has in mind the very distant harmonics, they are, on the space scale, at the same time very little spaced, agglomerated and very close to each other! A little confused. Because of this, a "modulation" of spectra becomes possible. If one counts that each harmonic has in the spectrum a particular function, one can reduce and thus approximate, when passing to a different spectrum, two harmonics having comparable pitches. One can thus consider a modulation within the spectrum, process which would resemble the enharmony of classical music. Principle that is, be-sides, rather widely used in this spectral music. I myself use much of it...  I never heard anybody speak about the modulation between spectra! Even if there would be others to employ it, they do it without being conscious of the fact! Just imagine (for improvisationís sake) an equivalence which is created between the twenty-fifth harmonic of a spectrum and the thirty-second of another. In this manner, sonorities are found in a pan-consonance, though, in fact, concretely, they sound slightly squeaked, tended. For that, when you ask about the violin sometimes sounding like an unspecified harmonic of the tam-tam, that is made explicit by this phe-nomenon of pan-consonance, by the reduction, the equivalence by the ear, of the functionality of the sounds in different spectra. I can thus travel from one spectrum to the other... Nobody ever grasped that...

AMA: And if one truly wants to make a spectral music, this is not dog-matic, because a musician plays with the harmonics... And when a musi-cian is inside a spectrum, one really feels something out of tune. We have antennas, in our being to recognize very easily, to feel that this is false when it is. We are certainly capable to reduce, in the phenomenological sense, to find similarities, but in certain limits. It is different enough from what occurs in the case of a series: a series (of twelve sounds) cannot be reduced, nor recognized on listening. A spectrum, yes!

ID: For that matter we have, for example, even today, clarinet in B flat, clarinet in A, clarinet in E flat which are tuned up in fundamental tonali-ties, and if one is in the key of D Major, one has the possibility to play on the clarinet an A or a D, which are different from those played on another clarinet, in B flat for example. It is quite banal to say that this depends on the ambitus of the music. Where is the falsity? From where does it come? From the fact that these composers write a supposedly spectral music with real sounds, starting from calculations which they make on the spectrum.

AMA: Thus, they apply principles suitable for structuralist, serial or other music, to the spectral domain which is "given" and not "fabricated." One could say, like Heidegger, "es gibt das spektrum!" [the specter is given]. Why use those ideas if we do not use the spectrum, but real sounds? And that is a question of art, which preoccupies us, it is our problem, because for us this is a fundamental problem.

ID: This is a spectral thought. It is thought before being a composition. Because in our conception the concretization of the score is done with very defined notes which are harmonics and multiphonics, always noted as such, and not with the real classical sounds having the function of harmonics. Well, in a certain sense, a music of harmonics is even that of Mozart, be-cause even the tonality is an extension, a historical rationalization, a phe-nomenological reduction of acoustics and thus of the spectrum. All the accords come from the natural resonance, am I right?

AMA: More or less. They are corrected. It is obvious that the tonality has natural bases, but what makes the difference is the rationalization, therefore the "falsification" of the spectrum.

ID: Obviously. To return: in scores like those of Tristan Murail, which, by the way,  I like much, and which fascinate me by their complexity, believe me, we deal with a widening of the dodecaphonic concept that, in my opinion, is very concrete, obviously with microtones...

AMA: Microtones, but which, for all that, are different from the naturality of the spectrum, theoretically at least. But there, one can make a speech with a whole theory explaining why, for the oboe or the clarinet a  G sharp is written a little higher with a sign like that, but without any reference to "how to obtain it."

ID: Because it is the "eighty-second" harmonic of B flat (of course, we are improvising)...

AMA: And the poor oboist, he will play a real sound. He will try to ap-proximate, in his manner, the sign, but he will play a real sound.

ID: He tries... but does not succeed, because he cannot be aware of  the fundamental necessary for obtaining the true sound requested, fundamental which sometimes is not even on his instrument.

AMA: It is necessary that he plays a little higher, but how much higher? How much lower? Because one cannot "be aware" of a fundamental sound in a music which, in fact, is almost serial, does not have any center. There-fore, to return at what we were talking before the digression, that is a fun-damental sound that the oboe will never have, because its last sound is the B under middle C. Hence he will never be able to play G sharp as if it were... the "eleventh" or I donít know which other harmonic, the "thirteenth" of a fundamental that his instrument does not have... And to return to what Iancu Dumitrescu said... I would like to recall that even in a traditional symphony, a big orchestra can have problems of intonation... What then with a completely new music, unheard of?

ID: Because it is necessary to say there is an infinite richness of notes, of sounds! I have the impression that one speaks without entirely knowing reality. In this domain it is only the "praxis" that counts.  As I note that you are quite strong in theory, I would like simply to ask you: how do you think that 16 first violins, 14 second violins, 10 violas, 10 cellos and 8 double basses could play different micro-intervals, divisi [scored sepa-rately- ed.], in measurement and tempo, with a minimum of control of their intonations? Do you think that it is possible in a similar case to control, to correct the intonation? When one does not hear either oneself or his neigh-bour? And if, moreover, there is a thunder of percussion and a chaos of brass? Dear friends, it is much more complicated than you believe! I my-self would be reassured if theories could work instead of the sound reality. The means of thinking are quite as vast as the sound space. The essential is to be able to organize in practice this infinite space! And how can we cor-rect the intonations, as it is the case in a remarkable work, like "Disintegrations" by Murail, where the musicians must "struggle" with a four track electroacoustic tape, overloaded and with non-tempered (but not for that matter spectral) sounds which posses enormous problems of syn-chronization, and which permanently confuses you? The conductor, who directs with headphones where the tape and the beeps of synchronization enter, can he control,  in real time, what are the musicians playing? Is he a superman? My friends, art gives provocations much more dramatic than simple assertions... To return: it is a richness of the instruments, there are thousands of sounds to organize... The great difficulty is there, which really requires a truly "pure" intuition! But, to continue on the authentic basis of the acoustic process, it should be known that the instruments do not always emphasize exactly the same multiphonics, the same harmonics under acoustic conditions which differ. Even with three bass clarinets having the same manufacturer, the possibility of difference might exist. One does not have the right to ignore that. The same thing with the trombone, the horn, the trumpet... Their embouchure can sometimes cause insurmountable dif-ficulties. In a room with a certain acoustic richness, their effort is lessened. On the contrary, in a very dry place, that can become a catastrophe! Even the place, the site on stage counts! If you do not take into account these givens, you are null! Scribblings on paper, the world is full of them, as it is full of aberrations of all kinds. Name me a composer who has the least idea of the way in which one can mix, associate, multiphonics, harmonic sounds, micro-intervals in an orchestra? An orchestra with its so noble, so marvelous instruments, but, therefore, at such point imponderable...

AMA: In electroacoustics it is different. There one can do anything. All is possible there, but note the difference between the possibility of organizing and the possibility of achieving. This is part of the problem. It should also be emphasized that work with the spectrum by making additions and sub-tractions does not have to do anymore with a theory of the spectrum. Why use a living organism which is the sound with its harmonics, to treat it as if it were a dead material? One will never be able to feel as spectral a music which is not composed in this spirit, which does not take into account the sound and its harmonics. The listener must be able at each moment to re-late the sounds which he hears to a fundamental, to a pedal, to an axis which organizes an universe, even if it is an imaginary axis, and then he can even approximate, include, recognize other sounds as forming part of the resonance.

NOUMENA for soloists and large orchestra by Ana-Maria Avram
Rehearsal at Ploiesti PhilhArmonic Orchestra Cond Ana-Maria Avram

GP: That hardly has to do with the potentialities of the chosen sounds. It is a mental construction starting from a model of the sound.

AMA: Music can be beautiful, but has nothing to do with what one says about it. It is different. And afterwards, you can return to the other way of conceiving the idea of spectrality...

ID: As you know it, we have another perspective, a little simpler if you want. A little more practical...

AMA: More  "primitive", one could say...

ID: More cosmic. Closer to the laws of acoustics. It is simple as in Tibetan music, as in the music of India, as in Zen music. One listens to the savage harmonies, therefore to the natural harmonics. That also exists in all the folklore, in all the primitive ages of the folklore, for example in our ances-tral folklore.

AMA: The more a folklore is primitive, the more it is connected to the idea of spectrality, the more it is natural in the sound scales which it employs.

ID: Me, in spite of my sometimes scientific readings, which also inspire me, I almost always work in a rather intuitive way. The harmonic sounds are not ordinary sounds, they have a certain natural brittleness. Unheard of, infrequently employed in fact, they attract me because of their unique "ethos," which enriches the domain of the sound expression in my music. In the way in which I imagine them, these sounds have been little used in European art, no matter how absolutely natural, as you know. Therefore we play with the harmonics, but with a conscience of the fundamental.

AMA: We truly use the harmonics.

GP: And the fact that the fundamental sound were always emitted?

ID: It is not always obligatory because one keeps it in mind, but one flies away in the highest-pitched harmonics. Very spectacular combinations are made...
AMA: It is true that there also is an imponderability. It means that you cannot be completely sure, taking into account the technique of the instru-ments, always to have this harmonic or another. It is in fact more impon-derable than the other kind of music, more imperceptible, too.

GP: It will take a negligible slip of the finger to knock the 20th harmonic to the 21st.

AMA: Thatís it! That remains always possible, it is a possibility assumed in advance.

GP: But that will not be predictable.

SL: That will not be calculated from the beginning.

AMA: Because one cannot do it. Not that one does not want to, but be-cause it is known that it is not possible. In the same way in which one can-not calculate the possible trajectory of a moving electron. Thus, quantum physics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle could be  applied to the laws of the micro-sound universe... Therefore, in musical practice, it does not matter if the sound will slip from the 20th to the 21st  harmonic...

SL: It is not possible in instrumental practice?

AMA: No, it is not possible. And also not necessary...

GP: In fact, I would like you to clarify this aspect. When you write an indi-cation asking to play such an  harmonic, you take in account that it is ex-tremely delicate to produce, very sensitive and that a minute slip of the finger will oscillate the sound obtained between harmonic 20 and har-monic 21, but without one being able to foresee with certainty which one  it will be?

AMA: But one will not be out of tune if that happens, that will always remain in  the same spectrum.

GP: Do you always take into account this imponderable, unpredictable aspect?

AMA: Yes. It is in fact "a priori" accepted in this music and therefore assumed. If not, we would have preferred to study the structure of the crystals... that seeming to be much more fixed, though I am persuaded that it is only the appearance...

GP: Because often in works of Iancu Dumitrescu, there are harmonic slips like that, and the question arises if they are all explicitly written, and even described on the score. From time to time there are expositions, harmonic successions (I was close to say series...); are those written explicitly, or then is it written: "from this one to that one" knowing that a great number of paths is possible?

AMA: It is often the case, but it is still not a rule, because we do a lot of work with the musicians. Human potential is very important. The acquired experience, at the same time with the instincts of the moment of the per-formers who always play our works. And you imagine that such a music solicits to the maximum the artistic force of the performer.

ID: Because it is also a state of initiation in this domain. When you see it from afar, you have the impression of something almost arbitrary, but it is not the case at all! It is not that!

AMA: Because of that, the personal work with the artist, the performer, is very important. Each work is born out of a similar confrontation, always renewed. The player himself, I suppose, grows, develops through the achievement of such a work.

ID: You have the impression that it is very complicated, and that it is al-most impossible always to obtain the objectivity, therefore to remake the same crossing of notes, but when you rehearse, when you begin to work, and get in the depth of the question, of the problem, you begin to discover even the technique which gives very precise solutions, therefore which gives a possibility to write, to make a composition, as rigorous as the clas-sical, because there are not an infinite number of solutions...There are two or three possible combinations which one obtains by calling upon the natu-rality of the sound. There is one fundamental sound, and after one starts like that, it is not possible to obtain anything else except a well-known crossing, almost well-known, precise. It is the contrary of what you have said. There are not so many possibilities of harmonic paths. Moreover, a composer does not live in the vague, he asserts limits which by-pass the arbitrary. But it is true that at once - because it is like that in music - a pas-sage of development arrives. It is a passage of culmination, an amalgam of several voices, thus you are not able to believe that each musician still has in his conscience the fundamental sound and all that... You ask yourself whether there is not something a little improvised there... how shall I put it... some arbitrary agitation... something which comes, which forces, which pushes the performers towards a different idea, apart from the tech-nique related to resonance. In fact there are very precise indications, al-ways specified in the score: "push heavily with the bow", for example, but these things are very clear from the point of view of orchestral technique. I mean by this that there is no doubt regarding the effect to obtain.

AMA: There are very precise practical details which oblige the musicians to arrive at the anticipated sound result...

AMA: To certain points, all the same.

ID: One cannot afford to improvise with one hundred musicians on stage! It is already too complicated for taking additional risks! There is therefore a slight flexibility. In classical music, in the 18th century, there is question of a very simple music if one compares it with contemporary music, is it not? But there also we have a variation, a margin of chance...

AMA: But the variation is included, it is assumed by the score. In such margins it is possible for it to be O.K. The problem is not to find yourself outside these margins. The conclusion would be to say that in all music there are certain fixed parameters and others mobile, which take different values each time music is played, but these parameters differ according to the epochs and styles.

ID: Even if one cannot be aware of all the things, of all the harmonics in a passage, as one knows the probability for such event to be produced; if one, for example, plays the violin with much bowing on the seventh posi-tion... that always gives precise results. Or equivalent enough. It is a very accurate composition, but which respects the soundís naturality, the acous-ticís naturality.

AMA: Finally in any music, in all musical style, there exists a relation between freedom and precision, and differences concerning the parameters implied in this relation.

ID: For us, music is something which gives freedom. We make music for that, even to obtain freedom of the mind, that is for freedomís sake... For the spirit... To tell the truth, the crisis of contemporary music also comes from the fact that the composer has become so apart from the instrumen-talist, from the player. They now form two almost opposite poles. For-merly, any composer was, before even writing a line, a virtuoso of one or several instruments... Brahms, it seems to me, was among the first not to be able to play by himself his violin concerto... When the instrumentalist is exceeded by the composerís thought, when the composer considers the performer idiotic and continues his ranting in the laboratory, what of the public? The public doesnít give a damn about this music. And then, the poor violinist, who does not like to work eight hours a day for being booed at the end of a concert, advisedly refuses to deal with the new music. From here, as you can see, my attachment, my eagerness, my obstinacy for working directly with people... With their sounds.

GP: In fact, rather than to tell the musician: "play such harmonic and such harmonic, that one and these ones," you tell him to play in a certain way.

AMA: It is obligatory to offer the solution, apart from a sound model es-tablished for a long time! Yes, because if you tell him "Play this har-monic," the musician will play a more or less real note, but false. Thus, it is always necessary to give practically the solutions and not to impose a result... the result. Because the result, we know it, and we know that it will be always reached as soon as the technical conditions are accomplished.
Ana-Maria Avram and Andy RUSSO, RTBF, World premiere of Dumitrescu's "Derives Chaotiques",

ID: And that existed in music ever since. For example when one plays the music of Webern, a complicated music, one cannot always comprehend, cannot have the perspective of the entirety, of the whole. Each musician of an orchestra cannot have an absolute comprehension of the entire ensem-ble, of all the music. But he respects it in his score, he is almost like a sol-dier. One respects in a movement the indications of the score, without be-ing conscious of what occurs, generally, in music. It is the conductor who manages and who has the general image. What occurs in our music is not, therefore, alleatoric. It is something very definite. More than that, because it is phenomenological.
AMA: There is a degree of freedom in our music. I repeat it. But there is no art deprived of freedom.

ID: Because it is phenomenological, one starts with something, one has a direction towards something, that becomes an obligation impossible to divert. When you do not follow the direction you are not in the score. When you do not succeed, you cannot comprehend what is necessary to do, what is  music, what is the score, but on the other hand when you are in the good direction, everything becomes very simple, very precise. You then enter a kind of determination.

AMA: For example, in the interview [Text in French -ed.] that I made a few years ago with the musicologist Harry Halbreich, he said in connection with the music of one of our colleagues, H. Radulescu, the following fact that he found very attractive and which was a revelation: from the moment when music was played as it was to be played, therefore that the musicians were in the truth, there was a certain melody which arose. But only in the moment when it was played as it should. These melodies would arise by means of natural resonance, which would produce certain harmonics not arising otherwise. They were not written, they had to result from a recom-bination from different spectra from various instruments, which produced melodies similar to those of Romanian folklore. (Harry Halbreich would speak about Romanian folklore, that he knew, but it was in fact about pan-folklore, another degree which was not  in the reality, which was not mate-rial, not physical).

ID: But that intervenes only when the tuning is absolutely perfect, natural, when one is conscious of the fundamental, of all the fundamentals, and when all is respected. That can be done only with the pure intuition Husserl speaks about.

AMA: And it is certain that each one can achieve it. I had experiences which I really never believed would be successful. For instance, I did not have at all the impression that I was going to be successful with an ensem-ble of twelve very young artists forming the saxophone ensemble of the CNSM of Paris, directed by Claude Delangle. They were people who had never played any multiphonics, who had never done similar things, and in a truly record time, in two days, I succeeded in doing exactly what I wanted, what was indicated in the score, very imponderable things. And each time, after they comprehended, after they realized what it was about, they suc-ceeded in making these imponderable things without any problem.

SL: For reaching this level, before even starting to play the score, doesn't that require, precisely, a certain state of  receptivity?

AMA: Absolutely. To the maximum!

GP: But more precisely, and in a simplistic way of course, I imagine a musician getting off the subway, he is there with his worries, he arrives in the room of rehearsal. Is there something, a technique which enables him to disregard all that, to arrive in this state of "virginity?"

AMA: The charisma of a true conductor also resides there, I think.

SL: Is this also the direction of which you spoke of and which music must capture? To be able to concentrate?

AMA: That also belongs to the charisma of the conductor, I repeat it. To be able to induce the favorable state in the musician who is in front of him and must play the music. Even before he plays a simple note. Even before or right after (laughs).

GP: Because at the time when the person opens the score and prepares to play it, he already has it in mind. During ten or fifteen minutes the con-ductor will try to make the musicians forget about the concerns not related to music and thus lead them to concentrate on the score. There are many techniques to which one appeals, but which are no longer musical. The musical techniques are there when the musicians perform, but what about before?

AMA: I donít know, that cannot be explained. That belongs to the instinct of each person.

SL: Something seems to me a little paradoxical or antinomic with phe-nomenology: it is the practice of an instrument. One cannot learn an in-strument immediately. There is no spontaneous practice. One precisely needs for some memory to accumulate for managing to play an instrument. It is thus a little contradictory, no?

ID: No, it is not contradictory. It is like an athletic exercise that confronts at one moment with a trigger: the discovery of direction and sense.

GP: Yes, but one never treats this knowledge with disdain! On the con-trary, one intensifies this knowledge.

AMA: One transcends, after knowledge is acquired.

Andy Russo, Yukari Bertocchi, Ana-Maria Avram in Mons, RTBF

SL: But it is needed, therefore it is necessary to pass by this horizontal dimension in order to reach verticality. I wanted to say that if phenome-nology calls on  verticality, on the instant, on spontaneity, it cannot sepa-rate itself from the horizontality which is the knowledge.

AMA: No, precisely, it coagulates verticality. One coagulates what is al-ready learned.

SL: In how the instrumentalist plays. But, all the same, verticality is neces-sary... One can never separate the two.

AMA: But one obligatorily should not take things, knowledge, like that... Even for phenomenology, for the phenomenological approach, there is a technique which is learned, and which should be exercised. It is some-thing... which is discovered. An instrument, if you want, is learned by suc-cessive steps, by "jumps."

ID: Which are activated in the same way. In the inside. Celibidache men-tioned the fact that one evening, when he was already for some time a con-ductor and had given several concerts, with several rehearsals, at a given time, during a pause of a concert, in front of a mirror, he had the catch, the intuition, the "époché" [the Greek word Husserl employs for the moment of pure intuition: the parentheses of all the non-significant things, the ability of concentrating on the essential -1999 update] of what conducting meant. For the first time he had the trigger of what he had to do... The tragedy of musical life in general, if one speaks about the orchestra, comes from the conductors who disturb the general atmosphere. The most important thing in music, for an ensemble, is to listen to itself, to listen to each other, to know what  everyone does. In every moment there is a reactivity. I make a small decrescendo for example, or a small crescendo, you follow me, and one can really carry out something of a very special quality, in the moment when all that intervenes, without any extra sound, extra musical impulse; when a whole orchestra transcends towards the same thing because it feels the need for a direction towards a little forte, a little piano, a little rubato. It is something which is not explained, and which is not even conducted. But in general conductors have ears of...

Iancu Dumitrescu & Harry Halbreich, Bruxelles, Theatre Marni

AMA: of wood!

GP: Really?

ID: Of wood, maybe... Without explaining it more, this is reality: it is a tragedy, a scandal! Why should "interpretation" be eliminated? Because it is a subjective action. And if we admit subjectivity, one arrives, with a group of musicians, in chaos, or in a "dictatorship" of the conductor, in the arbitrary. Both of them, unacceptable, I think. Music requires parameters absolutely impossible to handle as one wants it as a conductor. I let the music construct itself. Thatís it...

[JR: You've mentioned subjectivity several times, yet I am still confused on the issue. It seems to me that subjectivity is important. Why do I need you to present the objective -the common number as Ana-Maria said earlier - to me? I assume that I am capable of finding this common ground, or is that the difficult task (as attaining Zen-Enlightenment is difficult)? It seems I should be interested in what I myself cannot find, what only you can find. Isn't this the basis of what is so valuable about your work? Or is it that the objectivity acts through us in different ways depending on our background or circumstances?]

[AMA: Josh, your question is the essential point in understanding phe-nomenology. Which means a different way in using and understanding subjectivity. As a superior form of Cartesian criticism, phenomenology appeals to subjectivity. To the consciousness of the subject. Phenomenol-ogical subjectivity is different from psychological one. In fact you want to say that unicity, and difference, and originality are important, and not truly subjectivity. Subjectivity in psychological approach means that I under-stand differently the things than you do. That means that no one can per-ceive and understand anyone else. That goes to solipsism. The fact that you can understand our music, that's the proof that I can recover myself in you, and in him, and in somebody else, and vice versa. There are a lot of com-posers and producers of experimental music who send us their works as to a guru. But their music say nothing to me. I can't recover myself in it. And then, with regret, I can't answer them anything. I don't say we don't like it, but only they are engaged on a different, completely subjective direction which we can't pursue. Sure, to discover in a philosophical sense what means the common ground could be assimilated with a Zen Enlightenment. Sure, we are all interested in something that we can't find ourselves, but to identify yourself with and to understand somebody else, that means that you can find yourself in what this person did, in its ideas and so on. This is not possible in pure subjectivity, this is chaotic and solipsist. Objectivity never acts in different degrees. It is or is not. It is absolute. By "époché", by elimination of the conjectural thing, you can arrive to feel the pure sub-jectivity, in phenomenological sense. That means the pure intuition, the direction of things. The intentionality. Where to? Things have to evolve. This can't be subjective. Only when you can perceive at this degree, can you be sure that another has to communicate to you something that you have missed, but that you can understand. Then what is really important is to eliminate (by "époché" which is finally a Zen technique) all the epiphaenomena, the jammings, the unimportant things, but first to identify which is jamming and not important, to arrive at something essential.]

ID: It is necessary for me always to listen. There is a reactivity. An or-chestra with a good conductor is a fantastic family. If you encounter a true conductor per month, an inspired conductor, a conductor who listens, it is already an event in my opinion. Everywhere, here in Paris, anywhere, in Berlin, in London or in Bucharest, the musicians play like that, mechani-cally, they do their job as they can, but without even listening to their mu-sic partners. It is like that. It is a shame.

AMA: And to listen to your music partners does not only mean to have the same bowing, the same bowing pressure. It is much beyond that!

ID: Things are the same for contemporary music. What happens? They play like that. They give some indications on the material. They repeat without knowing what it is, without knowing where art is or whether they are playing true art. Without having any preexistent sound image of the work! Without seeking one. To try to assemble works like ours, it is neces-sary to have completely special conditions. Which should be normal con-ditions, but which are never granted for this kind of music. It is necessary to have somebody who can make music, somebody who has a technique of conducting, a good beat technique. After that, one needs somebody who can imagine what occurs in the score, because a score like that is more difficult to imagine than the classical scores with so many references. These scores are full of secrets.

GP: And Boulez, then...

ID: This  happens even with Boulez. When you notice that he does not conduct music other than the dodecaphonic one or [Elliott] Carterís, for me that seems like an incomprehension of true new music...  Or new music is born every day...

GP: I ask myself if you are right!

ID: I would be afraid to give Boulez, even if I were sure that he were a great conductor, that he were a musician of very good quality, I would be afraid to give him one of my scores because I have the impression that he does not have the necessary experience to know what happens when one lets the unheard energies of such tension begin to pulsate. The conditions must always be special.

AMA: For that, we only work with a few conductors. All that should not take much time, finally.  That should not be so long, if one masters all the data.

ID: After a few minutes, things enter a direction... They are... it is almost impossible to destroy the direction, when one commits oneself to it. It is interesting. It is an incredible force. For that I say that it is not the chance, it is the determination, it is more than the classical concrete perfection. It is an implacable determination.

GP: A determination by the substance of music itself?

ID: Yes and no. When you think of that, when you start to see the sub-stance, when you start having a concrete contact with the substance, it is impossible for someone to get you out of it. Obviously if there is a con-ductor or a musician who is like that, a little stupid, if he is making some "efforts." It is necessary to make true efforts to come out from there, from the good direction you're engaged in, and to return in the false.

GP: Therefore in your scores you explain what  it is necessary to do rather than  note what one must hear.

ID: Usually, I even make two staves. One with the traditional notation, if I can call it like that, and a range with the position and a description, for strings, for example, indicating how the fingers are put, where it is neces-sary to push. For instance the first finger is on the G string of the violin, A, B, obviously A flat and B flat, C, D, E if one moves the pinkie a little. I note each position (real notes). For example we have position A, on the G string, but with playing with the bow "sul ponticello", very near the bridge, with a specific pressure... It sounds very different.

GP: By moving the bow in a very precise way?

ID: Very precise, yes. Generally.

AMA: And after that there is a range where Iancu Dumitrescu sometimes marks the effect, he suggests...

ID: ...the  results. At any rate for the first measures, I do it almost system-atically, but afterwards it is not necessary any more, therefore I note only the position. The instrumentalist knows that he plays on the G string, he plays with four fingers, doesnít he? It is something very concrete, but sounds differently, "acousmatic", and on the other staff, there are the har-monic sounds, therefore the effects. What does that give? There is the tab-lature and there is also the effect: the result.

AMA: That also works for the wind  instruments.

ID: It is thus very concrete.

GP: And for the evolutions of sounds? There are always combinations of fingerings which make it possible to transform the sound, but you do not write "open the sound on this area of harmonics?"

AMA: It is quite possible to write that as well. For winds also, there is a combination between the words which one writes, a drawing which must suggest the evolution of the timbre, and fingerings. For the microtones, there are always the fingerings, (otherwise there is the risk they'll play only "real" notes) to emphasize certain sounds. That is also valid for my scores...

ID: But the notation of the effect is also related to the air pressure. If one speaks about the clarinet, there is a pressure if one wants to have rich sounds in the first zone of harmonics, one leaves the lips a little free, slack-ened. On the contrary, if one wants to obtain the highest harmonics, one tightens the teeth, one tightens much, a pressure is obtained, and one in-jects a significant pressure of air on the reed.

SL: Precisely, since you speak about the way in which you use the wind instruments... There is sometimes the impression, in particular in the work called « La Grande Ourse », that you [ID] make the bassoons sound like horns. We referred a little to the musics of Tibet a few moments ago...

AMA: There, in  «La Grande Ourse », there are prepared bassoons.

[JOSH RONSEN: How does one "prepare" a bassoon?]

[AMA: Well, if you can prepare the piano, you can also prepare the bas-soon, or other instruments as well. Iancu made them play with the exit opening stopped by a skin instrument. Also small wooden pieces put  into some of the keys and orifices, etc...]

SL: And another question: generally, for all the bow movements, for ex-ample, in your scores, is their number specified?

ID: That is another thing. That belongs to the rhythm. There is a whole theory with the rhythm; if you have patience, I can state something rather particular on that. Always, in all the fields of music, of composition... I call upon primary, primordial things.

GP: How did you obtain, how could you obtain the truth?

ID: I had a premonition and after some time I discovered - obviously with-out other means than intuition at the beginning - that it was possible to make another music, different from the "new music." I felt the "great change" as a "necessity". All these new musics are, to tell the truth, unnatu-ral things. I was disturbed by that, by the artificiality. In my meditations I start by posing between brackets the historical evolution of music. I believe that the historical evolution of  music is an evolution... which came with a work very thorough on paper, apart from the artistic ground, from the rea-son of music. Therefore apart from a true contact with the sound, with the "biology" of the rhythm. And as I speak now only about the rhythm, I had the intuition to see that the natural rhythm is another rhythm than the mu-sical one, the cultural rhythm. The European traditional musical rhythm is a rhythm which is articulated by the meter...

AMA: And always foreseeable. Even if the meter changes.

GP: That also gives pleasure...

ID: Even if the meter changes, because one can do that: one two three / one two / one two / one two three four... these are complications that I cannot... detail. It is as in the music of Stravinsky or Bartòk, it is a little repetitive. But there are, even with simultaneous changes of tempi and of the value of the unit, there are always rigid cells. Stravinsky is a splendid case, but there are still many musics that are written with measurements combined like that: three, two, five, etc... The music of Boulez  is of an incredible complexity to carry it out. There is a rhythm which is obtained on paper, therefore one makes calculations like that, abstracted a little, and one comes afterwards in the concert hall and that becomes music. In my opin-ion, that is only little or not at all natural, an exaggeration of the  mind if I can say that.

GP: A play of the mind, a mental construction.

ID: A play, yes... During that period, in what concerns me, I believed I succeeded in arriving in states of a rather great concentration. I even ob-tained states... of a hallucinatory transparency. Sublimation... I lived, sud-denly, something very clear: the pulsation of the Thing, the pulsation in oneself... I had thus the revelation of the fundamental rhythm of life, the natural "Hauptrythmus". In those moments, all the rest appeared too ex-plicit, too banal, very artificial to me. At that epoch - and it still remains valid - I noted that nobody raised the question of a new discovery in the domain of rhythm. Apart from Messiaen. Messiaen has, of course, a revo-lutionary contribution: the rhythm related to bird song, that one inspired by the traditional musics of India, the symmetrical structures, the non-retrogradable rhythm, the "modes" of rhythms; what else? The "chromatic" rhythm of an exceptional value according to me. Well, in that period, (when my readings reached the level of the  mystic, Joseph de Maistre, Meister Eckhart, of the hermeneutics, but also Eliade, Yoga, etc.)... I had, with even more facility, the revelation of primary things. By exercises of a maximum concentration, I had the image, the revelation of the fundamental rhythms of Being, of life. Different from the rhythms of musical culture... Which are related to the meter. To the paper. That is even more valid for the contemporary music than for others: see Boulez, Stockhausen during his first period, Nono and all the others...  All this conception of rhythm, I put it between brackets! That, after having as well used, in my youth, all these principles, to be honest. This new revelation, I then "combined" it with ideas that I had on science, on the semiotics of numbers, an "ad hoc" numerology which I configured. Finally, to summarize and simplify a little, in this design, I consider each number-figure corresponding to a rhythm having an unique individuality. Having an "ethos," an ethics, an esthetics in itself. There is thus the rhythm of  "one," of "five," of "three," of "thirty three," etc... Each has a different image. No possible confusion! It is not only a quantitative difference, but of essence. Generally, the type of accent which gives an impulse to the first attack indicates the numerical  "monad," of each rhythm's entity.

GP: How do you obtain this surprising result?

ID: I always obtain this image - I repeat it - through a Yoga-type concen-tration, if you wish, or, better still, through a "phenomenological reduc-tion"; as in this case I find the Yoga concentration more profound, of a different nature as well, I would say that I employ them both... After hav-ing succeeded in isolating the en-static (from en-stasy, inside, reverse of ec-stasy) sense of the rhythm of "three" (in reducing the "essence" of the "three"), I pass to the following rhythm, and so on, in a sequence of lights followed by shadows.  Repeated. Therefore by these profound concentra-tions, I manage to surpass the opposites, the polarities. To accede to this unity, this primordial ONE, which is the absolute. Thus I remove all the dualities, the multiplicities of contingent reality, and I can possess, through a technique which always makes this result possible, I can  reach the ab-solute.

GP: ... [... -ed.]

ID: It is like this: "ta-ta-ta-ta;" "one-two-three-four" that, for "four." And for "three" it is "ta-ta-ta."  Thus, concretely: I imagined a rhythm of "one." It is a little unusual to say that. A rhythm of "one." What does that mean?

GP: It is visionary, that!...

ID: And a rhythm of "two," of "three?" I made then an operation of intro-spection to discover how to explain the difference between the one and the two, the three and the five, the five and the seven. I retrogress a little. There is an active part, it is always like that: an active part and a passive part. Therefore: "one"  is the movement when the action, the beat is lis-tened to, and there is also a pause; if one does that in a laboratory, artifi-cially, one has an active part equal to a passive part. But when one dis-cusses on esthetics, in the domain  of esthetics, that complicates: the action of the active part gives a deformation of the inactive part. When the "one" is more accentuated, or more loud, it is necessary for the pause to be a little  longer.

AMA: If  "one"  is sharper...

ID: If "one"  is sharper, like that, stacatissimo, without any shortening,  that will be very different, without force, the pause will be a little com-pressed, too. Now one can speak about "two". It is "one-two," therefore "one-two." "One-two" active, "one-two" passive. "One-two-three," active, "one-two-three" passive. It is always like that, and that depends on the inner aesthetic and ethic force of the tension...

AMA: ...on the nuance, on the timbre of the instruments, too. If you have three triangles, that will not be the same thing as three timpani. Certainly. That will have a completely different sense.

ID: And the pause can even be lost... It is like a small nervous explosion in the cosmos and the passive energy is lost, dissipated. I have "invented" like this another language. For classical music, the rhythm was something which always held of a determinism, but, nevertheless, there too, it is not possible to quantify, to say which is the good performance... Thus, there, though always measured, the rhythm, when it is "lived," takes slightly dif-ferent forms. This is the "agogic."

AMA: But in your music, this "agogic" acts in a different way. The accent of the beginning is completely different; it has another character.

ID: I thus propose to the conscience a "Zen-like emptiness" and  thus, discovery through pure intuition, without any contamination, of a European cultural preconception, of this monadic identity of each number-rhythm. For the moment, that can appear arbitrary, but, by concentration, it becomes accessible. In this manner one discovers that such a rhythm has two facets. In accordance with the principle of the vacuum and the full.  For the reasoning, for example, there is a moment of action, and afterwards there is a preparation for taking the second step. Thus have I discovered that there is an active aspect and an inactive one. Because with pure phenomenological intuition I wanted to seize what was the natural, biological rhythm, the "grund" [German for base/cause -ed.] of the cosmic rhythm, the rhythm in quantum, subatomic physics, in biology - to give you two or three examples - the systole and the diastole. The inactive part  is like the shadow of the moon, if you want. Therefore the hidden face of the moon. The non-active part is a part which prepares. It is silence. But which at the same time draws, projects a tension, anticipates the character of what will follow.

AMA: The future. This which follows. It is always a loaded silence. It is not an inert silence.

ID: Therefore: each rhythm has a continuation in its pause. The rhythm is neither continuous, nor metric. That can appear arid to you but... it is nevertheless very simple if you engage yourselves on the way of my thought. With regard to the poly-rythmy, to the superposition of rhythms, equally no metric to coordinate the verticality exists: it is about monads [elementary building blocks] whose meeting is contingent. It is a juxtaposition: like the extra-systoles of my heart in this moment, parallel to your palpitations, which are, of course, different. But all can be found in a same space. They are "given", "objective" things that one cannot deform or comment upon... Not to annoy you any longer, I stop here. But what is significant in my opinion is that, for a long time from the point of view of the rhythm, my music is conceived starting from these principles. And that is valid from the poundings on the tam-tam to the most subtle beats - which also create a rhythm - of two close harmonics. From the succession of "rebounded" sounds at the viola and of "pizzicati" at the double bass until the groups of two, three, five notes of the piccolo. It is an unitarian principle, which governs the entire development of my music. I repeat:  I "invented" another componistic language... It is, in my opinion, an abstract theory but which comes from the natural. That enters in a state of objectivity, of causality that entraps you, that impedes you to  leave it.  I reformed the musical concept, regarding sound (as spectrum), colour, rhythm and temporal evolution. Regardless of all other external, parallel musical achievements, of all other musics and ways of thinking music.
AMA: Indications, suggestions are related to something that happened or has to happen. Forte like this, in the absolute, does not exist. Everything is linked to the referential side of music.

ID:  In order to analyze it deeper, it is like this: (ID humes the theme in the 40th symphony of Mozart) there is an evolution, a crescendo, because one repeats the same notes in this theme. But how can we locate them, how can we spot them? We can repeat like that in two or three manners, maybe. (ID humes accelerating). Playing all the sounds equal is mechanically. Itís inexpressive, far from being artistic. Music is not like this, or is it? We can have a crescendo, followed by a diminuendo (he humes it). Like this it is not very logic either. It seems...

AMA:  Because the structure is ascending, it climbs.

ID:  Because an augmentation occurs, right? Why does it have to be repeated all the time?

AMA: In order to reach the A flat.

ID:  The development of the symphonic science is of help. (He sings in a constant crescendo). How  do we do this? Can we have it done like this (he humes more and more sweetly)? No, it is impossible. Something is wrong. But if we do it like this (resumes the theme in a modulated crescendo)... we do have something, an expansion... And even in the domain of tonal functions, in classical music, fundamental, dominant, subdominant functions occur, existing thus a link between inner tensions that we can analyze starting from the forces we do feel. Itís getting to psychology, to the energetics of music. We know why "classical" musicians are playing I-IV-II, for example, or II-IV-IV-II, playing between the two forms of the subdominant. It is about the function of the harmonics, you see?

GP: Yes. That means there is a link between the harmonic connections and the rhythmic expression.

ID: Because the harmonic tensions are also expressed, reinforced, valorized through the accent, the rhythm. Itís arbitrary to make I-V-IV-II, on the contrary it is normal to do I-IV-V. We can play between the second and the fourth, between the fifth and the seventh, the third also. When we write down an example of harmony, in pupil-like manner, we know how it is because our teacher has told us what is right and wrong, what are the things we cannot do. We then discover, feel that, indeed, it is wrong.  Because it doesnít seem to be logic. Maybe.

AMA: In a given style.

ID:  In a given style, yes, but maybe at a general human level...

AMA: That is why things have survived for some hundreds of years. There were reasons for it. A style, when there is one, is never arbitrary. We can even say that it crystallizes as it eliminates the arbitrary.

ID: Therefore they are almost human archetypes... Resuming on numbers: I always indicate numbers, in a manner almost... maniacal; I need to be able to specify essential details! But in the case, for example, of a free string, one very long duration will be always played with rhythmic variations of the bow movements. These variations, obviously, will also contain numbers. What/how is the pause that follows the active event? The pause is determined by the accent which precedes it. I do not know "what/how" ...in an abstract way. Its dimension is alive, regardless the number. Somebody prepared for that, for this action, for this kind of work, starts immediately to comprehend what it is about, even if you find that a little obscure now. Even very obscure, isn't it? But you need to know that appeals to the musical instinct of human sensibility! It is given!  After the played sound, it is the pause about which I have spoke. I can note, for example, if it is a question of the number "two": two small eighth notes with two eighth notes of pause. Afterwards: "five," it depends then. All is noted, but all corresponds to a unique, original theory and practice, which you can detect in-depth only through practicing together with the instrumentalists. In asking the same questions together! By going through the  same experiments.

AMA: And there were similar results with very different artists, because there is not only Fernando Grillo who plays this music. There are at least hundreds of performers who worked with us - to speak about the soloists and the ensembles also - always arriving at very close results. Does that once again appear to you "improvised", arbitrary perhaps? But it should not be forgotten that it is only in the European tradition of the last 4 - 5 centu-ries at the most, that you find this ambition to note everything in a score. Most important, essential, is what one owes to the living, oral traditions... If at one moment the musical practice had stopped in the long run, do you imagine that today, only according to the scores found in libraries, some-thing similar could remained alive? Could we, today, play Mozart in the same way? I doubt it extremely. Besides, in many other musical cultures, even very sophisticated, complex, like in India, in Japan, in China, in spite of the fact that the notation was perfected, it always remained in music a side which was learned only through long exercises that hold to the "experience"; one tried to "live" a rhythm, a mode, a pause... And, to return to our scores: if we use bars, it is to have reference marks, because you need to know what is to be done when someone looses his way, in order to reintegrate him, to recuperate him. There is only the reference mark, in the bar of measure, but not the sense which normally has the meter.

ID: In what I do,  scores are determined but not regulated by the meter, by mechanical frameworks; they are innerly determined by the effect of an energy, starting in a manner, then developing with the interior impulse [élan] of the first sound. There is always an occult proportion.

SL: The initial energy?

ID: The initial energy, yes. For me, the beginning is essential. The rhythm is articulated, but in the bars it is juxtaposed. When there is a dialogue and you play with me, on a drum, for example... there is something which im-plies the spirit... like in jazz.

GP: It is a mirror effect very often. Reflections, references...

ID: Yes, it is also... like panic. You begin to panic and what are you doing? It is also an important resort in my - let's say - spiritual technique, to "aggress" slightly the performer because he...

AMA: He has inertias...

ID: He has an inertia, which owes much to Boulez, for example, because for him there is always only this exact side, measured, very complex, but which can - which even must - do without the "lived!" It is too external. In my music, as it lacks bars of that kind, I count on the implication as I have already said, because... how can that be explained? When I rehearse with a musician and  he fails to enter in my score, finally, as the concert ap-proaches, he feels himself more and more "attacked." He is thus obliged to do something. And thus he discovers by himself, inevitably, what I have thought  and dreamt of two months ago. You see, I count on the panic. Moreover, it is an authentic cognitive revalorization of music. The musi-cian, as I conceive him, wants no longer, in any way, to be "minimized," as if a non-conscience... like an instrument... (From here, perhaps, the idea of "instrumentalist," of somebody "manipulated"). No longer being reduced to the aesthetic issue either, as it was until not too long ago.

AMA: The act of composing is developed from the cognitive point of view.
ID: Therefore we find ourselves through music... We discover what we did not know... We are filled with wonder by the unknown which surrounds us!  It is enormous! And that, not only because we comprehend music - it is not obviously question of a notion - a series of sensations, an incarnated theo-retical idea... but of something... which "burns" in us, which is lived, cov-ered, like a prayer, like an "isichasme," as in Zen. A technique which brings us Deliverance! Which unwraps us of any dependence, of any slav-ery! It abstracts us from the daylight and projects us in... eternity. The eter-nity of a moment...  As I said, I moved towards the primary things, first, towards these essential re-definitions... As music is only becoming, evolv-ing, I accentuated in my reasoning not the state, the non-movement, the stiff mortification, but the transformation, the nuance in evolution. The modification of parameters. But it is not only the modification of the forms, as it can appear, but also of the essence, of the morphological senses. Therefore all evolves at each moment in my music.  Instead of the themes, motives, thematic developments, if you analyze my music, you will find only the principle of conductibility.

AMA: The scores are very precise landmarks, as much as they can be. Very precious, also. They symbolize, schematize the fundamental energies of the musical thought...

ID: I write scores for myself. I have my personal writing, it is for myself. It is like drafts, scratch pads. Well, they are scores, although they are for myself and for my performers, my companions who are familiar with the things with which one works frequently, who have had the same experi-ences with me, by my side or by themselves. These are sensitive things, but I generally finalize the process, I finally make scores for publication, de-finitive scores.

AMA: This is also important: we live an epoch when things can again be noted and understood. Perfectly even. Or almost. Things which one be-lieved impossible to be transmitted only through notation, but could have been in a direct way, through the obliged presence of the composer on stage. One time when things are positioned back little by little, regarding the musical technique. And scores come back, find another statute, are no more under the sign of orality, or that of a fixed structuralism - two ex-tremes having, each one, their limits.

ID: It is clear that it is not only the score which counts, because in the score, it is written fortissimo, attacca or I donít know what. That is not yet the music, it is true. But when somebody comes who does not have a cor-rect representation of the things, he does not have any possibility of mak-ing "true music" (and that is also valid for any music!). The things must be "lived".  They are not immutable, of course, but it should not be under-stood, for as much, that they should not be respected. To be really able to "read" a score is a cardinal thing! It appears that there is a contradiction, but in fact, it is precisely that! But where is the great moment of art? In my opinion, it is when one looses the feeling of time. For example when one sees a film which is a true creation, of an absolute beauty, one loses the sensation of time, one loses the sense of temporality.

[JR: What film? I am curious.]

[AMA: I think only a few.... everyone has his own films I think, when he looses the feeling of time. For me they are those of Antonioniís  first pe-riod.... But I'm watching movies only during my gym exercises, because I can't read then!]

AMA: Because finally for the majority of people, and even among those who make music, there is a time, and there is a music which engraves itself in time.

ID: But this is false.

AMA: In todayís music, it is music itself which creates its time, its own time. Time exists only when music creates it. It is the time music generates. There is no other time! It should not be forgotten. Space is created by the fact that there are bodies. There is not a space in which something would fit. Things create their own space, their own time.
ID: This is interesting. What shall we think about the musicians who write explicit durations in seconds on their scores or I donít know what special combinations of numbers? They believe that the value of music resides in this mechanical relation seven out of sixteen, of thirty five on ninety-six... If the performer makes the least error, all collapses!

AMA: And then after if they have common sense... On stage, sometimes, the one which has  common sense (but this is rare!) notices that it is com-pletely different, there are not three seconds, it lasts ten seconds. There is an incredible difference between three seconds and ten seconds!

ID: On stage you cannot control the duration. It is necessary to control the music, which finds its own duration, tempo, truth.

AMA: It is necessary to have the common sense to acknowledge that one cannot control the tempo on paper: one can only give very relative refer-ences...

ID: Only like a suggestion, perhaps, but when you note seconds... That is too precise. There are even composers who... [lowers the voice as to entrust a secret] change the notes! That is incredible! They write thousands of notes, but afterwards they tell the musicians: "No, no, it is not like that. Can you try it this way in fact. Yes, but there do it like you feel, as you want." (!)

AMA: Even Xenakis, in connection with calculations he made, you know... He modifies the results afterwards.

ID: But what is significant, what I really wanted to say,  is that truth, in art, is not obtained without mystery, emotion, without the "lived!" It is espe-cially necessary to have boldness in your ideas, they must be disconcerting, stimulating... If not, what is all this masquerade for? All this... "uselessness?" Music  means transposing  life in the abstract, in the "metaphor." For that all my tirelessness, which could appear external. An enormity! It is not it! Not at all! In an artistic milieu like that of the present, which finds itself in a true impasse at this end of the millennium, and, for that matter, tries to resume in a manner more than coarse, vulgar even, some process of yesteryear, impoverished, now, of all energy, of all spirit, I continue to "see," however, a possible, infinite purity of art.

GP: Is it truly possible to reach the light?

ID: By an effectively profound search, calling into question every assump-tion, you arrive, nevertheless, to the light! And when you reach this  "freshness" of the search, of the study of the nature of things, you can only become optimistic once again! The paths of art are infinite! Innumerable! If you divert from this fundamental search, like a simple  "free" artist, a thick, opaque, impenetrable wall bars your road. If, on the other hand, you start from the elementary, with this spirit of search, the sense of creativity is interminable! Knowing to place oneself in the space of the artistic thought is, if you want, wisdom and astuteness. Somebody said to me: "here, I fixed myself well, I know, mathematically, all the assumptions of my future evolution... I could not start working before knowing all with precision." Well, I strongly doubt all that! I answered: "I am sure only of the fact that, always eliminating what I consider as being a possible ballast, I will have the chance, perhaps, to arrive one day, finally, to know what art is. Therefore to be able one day to place myself in a significant, sensitive "point!" I could thus watch. See. I would have clarity. I would sense the authentic.

GP: Is it not too fragile, in fact?

ID: In fact, we belong to a "minority." A possible, but nevertheless minute artistic group where "fragility" still counts. Does it frighten you, this "fragility?" "Fragility" is the very condition of man! Balance is always fragile! Music is almost a metaphysical form of survival! Nothing in  music can be "preserved" from one moment to the other. It escapes us, it "flees", conceals itself from the conscience of the performer, of the composer. What we consolidate one day, collapses the following day... That's crazy! All is valid only in that very moment. But in fact, all the immense qualities of music reside in its "fragility." But, may I ask you, for who do these eva-nescent subtleties still count today? This is why I said "minority"... Sur-vival... We are survivors. But  strong ones!