Pierre Boulez and Antescofo
Pierre Boulez left us on January 5th 2016. The Antescofo team lost one of its main musical and moral supporters. In the past year, we lost many others such as composers Emmanuel Nunes1) and Jonathan Harvey2) and researcher David Wessel3), whose imprints are highly visible in the design of Antescofo today. Intellectual contributions of these personalities along with those of Pierre Boulez were instrumental in the development of Antescofo. As a tribute to his memory, I wish to share some personal recollections of my interactions with the human behind.
When Antescofo was first conceived in 2007 for Marco Stroppa's ... of Silence, the use of score following in the mixed music repertoire (joining human musicians and computers in a joint compositional and performance computer music paradigm) was limited, with great practical difficulties, to few but major repertoire pieces by Pierre Boulez and Philippe Manoury. To say things honestly, by 2007 Score Following had become a burden for every one using it and not a tool that would enhance in any way compositional or performative paradigms4)! Criticisms of "real-time for real-time" were not lacking and many of them (including those by Stroppa, Risset and Chadabe) were concrete and real.
With Stroppa, we thought that Score Following by itself does not represent a musical goal; our aim was a "virtual interpreter"5). Antescofo was an answer to this lack by combining both machine listening and authorship within one single workflow, and thus bridging the gap between compositional and performative aspects of computer music. Stroppa's … of Silence was premiered in November 2007 in Shizuoka, Japan. Almost immediately, Alain Jacquinot 6) trusted me with a performance of Pierre Boulez' ... Explosante-Fixe... with the Los Angeles Philharmonics in January 2008. Antescofo performed twice for 37 minutes and without any prior training on the flute7). Antescofo was in version 0.1 at the time8) and the news of its relative portability and stability started crossing borders.
After the Los Angeles performance in 2008, we got a call from Boulez' office. He wanted to meet the … of Silence team. You should imagine at this point that the man was in his 80s, and fully booked with great orchestras around the world! We set up a studio meeting with Stroppa, Boulez and me. Boulez wanted to understand everything at stake. He was looking at the music score, and attempting to understand the authorship and the interactive results during performance simulations. What is striking for me in this story is the man's level of curiosity and eagerness to learn new things. Thanks to my job, I collaborate with many composers of different generations. To this date, with few exceptions, I have rarely came across such a demand : wanting to see what's new despite aesthetic differences in the music. What prevailed for him was new knowledge and potential new synergy between the arts and science in a non-superficial way. This was just the beginning! He came back again when we achieved the first robust polyphonic score following for Vassos Nicolau's Otemo in 2009. There, we also discussed the new possibilities in Antescofo for writing electronic phrases (the Group construction). He insisted that the synchrony between such phrases and the performer were not musical! This ended up becoming a research paradigm by itself undertaken by Echeveste in our team and younger composers such as Christopher Trapani9). For the perfectionist that he was, Antescofo was always far from anything that could be fully integrated into a complete musical workflow but this did not evade him to receive us and push us further despite his limited time and extreme status.
In 2010, the world was celebrating the 85th anniversary of the conductor and composer. This is when we decided to port Anthèmes 2 to Antescofo10). Initial tests were tough! String instruments have unstable sounds and are not as easy to follow as winds. We put together a version that gave birth to concerts in Louvre, Chicago Symphony and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Berlin. These concerts coincided with the period Apple computers and software were gradually moving from PowerPC to Intel. In the Chicago performance, Boulez gave a pre-concert talk about Anthèmes 2 reminding how difficult it was to bring in such a performance abroad in the 1990s and how scalable technology has become since then. Boulez insisted that we wait for him to join us at the mixing desk before we start. Few seconds after the performance, we experienced a huge sonic explosion in all 16 speakers of the 2500 seat concert hall due to what we known today as denormal floating point problem across computer architectures11). We had to restart the piece and everything went fine! Technology failed us in a concert tribute right after the talk of the maestro in front of 2500 seated audience and guess what! We (me and fellow sound engineer Jérémie Henrot) were representatives of this technology there! It just couldn't have been worse!
What would you do in reaction? Boulez talked to us after the concert to hear our analysis of the situation. He was in no way furious. Back to Paris, with fellow composer and computer musician Gilbert Nouno we modernized the concert patches' infrastructure12) and prepared the Berlin event few months later with Michael Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra's Tribute to the master. The concert went well. Back to Paris, Boulez called me and Gilbert (now 85 and still extremely active all over the world) and invited us to lunch to thank us for our efforts!
If you had entered Ircam in the 21st century like me, you would not actually see Boulez really in the institution. If you were a person who had the man's poster in your teenage room, and were having lunch with him, you would probably ask him like me if he was going to "come back" (as naive as it may sound). He told us that he left Ircam so that the institution gains its own identity. As obvious as it may seem, how many leader do you know whose legacy did not last? Are we as generous to build as much for others?
Today, Boulez' three pieces for musicians and live electronics namely Anthèmes 2, …explosante-Fixe… and Répons employ Antescofo. It took us years to learn (musical) lessons and translate them to research and development13). The score following paradigm revived in Antescofo and employed by few ambitious composers only before 2007, has become common ground in many pieces at Ircam and also abroad. In 2014, we released an Anthèmes 2 Remake as part of Antescofo Composer Tutorial to share our rich adventure with everyone in the community.
The last time I met him personally was in the last days of 2013 before he would definitely leave Paris for Baden-Baden for rest. He was physically tired but mentally sharper than anything imaginable. He was specifically eager to know what the younger generation of composers, musicians and technologists were doing those days. The last time I saw the man was during a concert at Ircam, in the public, dedicated to young composers.
We miss Pierre Boulez, not only the conductor, composer and institutional master; but also the always curious, risk-taker, the generous; and his modesty and ability to accept failure when progress is at stake with sharp perceptions towards future.
Arshia Cont
Paris, France.
11/01/2016