25/11/2015 The Oxonian Review » The Sound Iconoclast

HORAŢIU RĂDULESCU   MENA MARK HANNA

9 March, 2009 • Issue 8.7 • Europe • Music • The Arts Tweet

The Sound Iconoclast
MENA MARK HANNA

Sometime during the 6th century BC, the Greek mathematician and mystic Pythagoras
purportedly discovered that musical notes could translate into
mathematical equations. As in many suspect tales of discovery,
Pythagoras’s breakthrough was said to be a matter of serendipity. While
passing a blacksmith’s shop, Pythagoras supposedly heard anvils of
different weights striking consonant and dissonant intervals. He
discovered that the difference in sounds transpired because the anvils
were “simple ratios of each other, one was half the size of the first,
another was two­thirds the size, and so on”. Not only is this the basis of what became
known as the  Music of the Spheres—the ancient belief in a universe ordered by the same
numerical proportions that Pythagoras discovered to govern music—but it is also the
foundation of Pythagorean tuning, a setting of the scale whereby intervals of the perfect
4th and perfect 5th remain pure, untempered.

The tuning of the scale became a hotly debated issue, as musicians invented new
instruments and discovered new combinations of timbre. But by the late Baroque era
(from 1735 on), as keyboard instruments had come to dominate the musical world, nearly
all instruments were tuned to “equal temperament”. As such, the figure of Pythagoras,
intrinsically tied to the debate of temperament, fell into oblivion for most musicians,
barring the more mathematically inclined. It was not until the 20th century that a renewed
curiosity arose amongst composers and music theorists about systems of temperament,
Pythagoras and the musical­mystical connections within the guiding forces of nature.

A varied group of French composers, collectively labeled as Spectralists, have carried that
interest forward into the 21st century.  Spectralists investigate the musical attributes of the
“harmonic overtone spectrum”, a series of tones that exists in nature and derives from the
mathematical proportions originally classified by Pythagoras. The music of the Spectralists
explores time, colour, timbre and the spatial awareness of sound. It normally involves an
analysis of the overtone spectrum through a computer­based algorithm known as fast
Fourier Transform. Through FFT analysis, as it is called, sound—broken into the
parameters of time, frequency and amplitude—can literally be visualised. Spectral
composers use these images to gain insight into the birth, lifetime and death of a particular
sound.

Among the Spectralists, the éminence grise was Gérard Grisey, a composer of astonishing

data:text/html;charset=utf-8,%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22singleposttags%22%20style%3D%22font-family%3A%20'Palatino%20Linotype'%2C%20Arial%2C%20Helvetica%2C%20sans-serif%3B%20text-align%3A%20center%3B%20tex… 1/4
25/11/2015 The Oxonian Review » The Sound Iconoclast

imagination and vision who died in 1998. On the periphery of this group are many
composers still alive and active: Romanian composer Iancu Dumitrescu, Finnish composer
Kaija Saariaho and droves of younger composers who fashion themselves in a similar
manner. The most outstanding of these, before his untimely death this past September in
Paris, was the Romanian­French composer, Horaţiu Radulescu.

By the time of his death, Radulescu had grown into a fantastically famous anti­hero of the
avant­garde music scene in Paris, shunning the musical mainstream of the European
Continent and denouncing the works of other composers at contemporary music festivals.
But he was no outsider: Radulescu had a nearly perfect musical pedigree. He attended
courses at Darmstadt taught by music giants John Cage, György Ligeti, Karlheinz
Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. He studied with Mauricio Kagel in Cologne and worked
in Paris with Olivier Messiaen, who called him “one of the most original young musicians
of our time”.

Born in Bucharest in 1942, Radulescu left for Paris in 1969 and decided to settle there upon
hearing the French première of Stockhausen’s  Stimmung, one of the first works of
Spectralism. He gained French citizenship in 1974 and began his rise to prominence
through the premières of several notable and controversial early compositions (fountains of
my sky, 1973;  Wild Incantesimo  for nine orchestras, 1978). With these pieces, Radulescu
began colouring the techniques of spectral composition with the mystical philosophies of
Pythagoras and Lao­Tzu by experimenting with large combinations of instruments.
Through music, he wanted to summon ideas of a primordial time. He  wrote: “It was
necessary to ‘enter into’ the sound, to rediscover the ocean of vibrations that Pythagoras
has [sic] scrutinized two thousand years ago.”

Radulescu’s Fourth String Quartet  (1976­87)—fraught with the unwieldy subtitle “infinite

to be cannot be infinite, infinite anti­be could be infinite”—is a piece that places the listener
in the centre of this primal and ancient sound world. Scored for nine quartets, eight of
which are pre­recorded and electronically processed, Radulescu called the ensemble a
“128­stringed viola da gamba”. The 50­minute piece is certainly a daunting listening
experience, with whirling high notes whizzing about as each of the 36 instruments’ strings
are tuned exactly to their corresponding frequencies in the harmonic overtone series. It
wields a vertiginous yet enthralling effect, nearly inducing a feeling of overwhelming
anxiety in the listener.

A similarly dizzying work of powerful creativity is Radulescu’s Intimate Rituals XI(2003),

scored for viola, and his most curious invention,  the “sound icon”: a grand piano that
stands sideways and is bowed or struck with gold coins (gold, since it is a particularly soft
metal, resonates very well). The effect is mesmerising. The sound­icon sounds something

data:text/html;charset=utf-8,%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22singleposttags%22%20style%3D%22font-family%3A%20'Palatino%20Linotype'%2C%20Arial%2C%20Helvetica%2C%20sans-serif%3B%20text-align%3A%20center%3B%20tex… 2/4
25/11/2015 The Oxonian Review » The Sound Iconoclast

like a massive amplified sitar, and the viola hovers over it, gawking through a treacherous
terrain of uneven rhythms derived from the Fibonacci sequence. Das Andere (1983) an 18­
minute piece for viola sola, cello solo, violin solo or double bass solo tuned in perfect fifths
follows a serpentine trajectory of soaring and shrieking string harmonics. It feels uneven
and exhausting but the music is incredible, a spectral tour­de­force (you can find the viola
version performed by Vincent Royer  here). These pieces and others like it,
notablyByzantine Prayer  (1988) scored for 40 flautists, sound unlike anything ever
composed before.

Perhaps this is because Radulescu believed that one could experience music—physically
and spiritually—by surrounding himself in it and feeling the vibrations of it. He said: “The
music we are composing is, above all, the music of a special state of the soul, and not the
music of action.” In effect, the sound­icon presents the traditional instrument, the grand
piano, “in a new light; it resembles a religious object—a Byzantine icon”.

One can read Radulescu’s music as a reaction to the ultra­modernist music of the 1950s
and 1960s, when composers like Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt sought to serialise every
parameter of music in a strict, tautly organised manner. Their music was composed purely
for the interest of the composer, purposefully inaccessible. An example of this is
Babbitt’s now infamous article titled “Who Cares If You Listen?” (1958) in which the role
of the scholarly composer is not a public one, but instead akin to that of a physicist or a
high mathematician working within the confines of the academy.

Radulescu, conversely, sought to reinvigorate music with ritual. He meant for it to be

consumed by the listener and the performer. His later works, the piano concertoThe
Quest (1996) and the Lao­Tzu Sonatas (1991­99) for piano, have a far more accessible idiom
than his early works, but they still display his concern with the physical matter of sound,
which Radulescu referred to as “sound plasma”. These massive pieces, which incorporate
his transcriptions of Romanian folk song into huge monochords, have made him especially
popular amongst the listening public. In Darmstadt, Radulescu claimed that he was
“pursued in the streets by fans”, and the recording of The Quest by pianist Ortwin Stürmer
and conductor Lothar Zagrosek have now sold tens of thousands of copies, a monumental
feat for someone who originally had been considered a marginal figure.

Since his death, Radulescu’s legacy has grown larger. A handful of musicians saw him as a
kind of modern day mystical Pythagoras, a composer of “passionate, hallucinatory music,
and of vital importance in the history of spectral music”. He has attracted a zealous
commitment from several of new music’s most preeminent names. The Arditti Quartet,
violists Vincent Royer and Gérard Caussé, pianist Ian Pace and flautist Pierre­Yves Artaud
have been fervent champions of his music—music that is not only strangely beautiful and

data:text/html;charset=utf-8,%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22singleposttags%22%20style%3D%22font-family%3A%20'Palatino%20Linotype'%2C%20Arial%2C%20Helvetica%2C%20sans-serif%3B%20text-align%3A%20center%3B%20tex… 3/4
25/11/2015 The Oxonian Review » The Sound Iconoclast

intoxicating, but also a testimony to his uncompromising creative spirit, which constantly
tested the limitations of performance, physicality and sound. A year before he died, in
an interview with a Parisian journalist, Radulescu admitted: “I’m writing for the future,
I’m writing for posterity.”

Mena Mark Hanna  is a composer, conductor and chant scholar, pursuing his DPhil in
Music Composition at Merton College, Oxford.

Photograph of Horaţiu Rădulescu © Guy Vivien, analogartsensemble.net

data:text/html;charset=utf-8,%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22singleposttags%22%20style%3D%22font-family%3A%20'Palatino%20Linotype'%2C%20Arial%2C%20Helvetica%2C%20sans-serif%3B%20text-align%3A%20center%3B%20tex… 4/4