Treize Couleurs du Soleil Couchant by Tristan Murail

I have often wondered at why sunsets are always so momentously striking, how the colors of the sky during sunset seem so vibrant, and yet why, in painting, the colors of sunsets so often come off as, well, garish, nowhere near the real deal. I never gave this much thought, really, just noticed this was the case. (In fact, I chalked this discrepancy up to the fact that the sky is just so big, and that paintings can not come near encompassing the breadth of what we really see during sunset.) A few years ago I began spending a lot of time intently listening to the music of Gerard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Horatio Radulescu, and got hooked for a while on Murail's “Treize Couleurs du Soleil Couchant”; reading his remarks on the piece I realized the discrepancy I had noted between sunsets and paintings of sunsets was addressed: It isn't the colors of the sunset in themselves that are so striking during a real sunset, but the ways in which the colors of the sunset changed over time. That this change was so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable drove the point home for me.

I mention this personal story because it addresses a true change in the ways in which I think about music, about writing music, and about interacting with music in general. This is important to me because through my upbringing and formal education, I had generally come to believe that a thing (be this a pitch, a set, a row) was that with which I should be concerned in writing music and being a musician. I wrote a lot of music thinking this way, and what's more analyzed a lot of music thinking this way. I found this to be a rigid, yet ingrained, way of thinking. To witness a fundamental shift in the ways in which I viewed and thought about music was not an easy or little thing for me; suddenly, thinking about sunsets and Murail, I began to think it wasn't things in and of themselves that truly interested me, but the relationships between things, and particularly the ways in which relationships between things change over time. Looking over what I've written I feel a little silly that such a shift in my thinking should come about in part because I think paintings of sunsets are usually so garish, but there is more to it than just this, I just don't quite know how to put it all down in words; for sure, that's a reason I write music scores more often than texts.