The upcoming 32nd edition of the tradition-steeped Vienna Days of Contemporary Piano Music, scheduled to take place at the mdw from 30 January to 3 February 2026, will feature Tristan Murail as a guest—reason enough to present a brief portrait of this intriguing composer.
Tristan Murail was born in the northern French port city of Le Havre in 1947, and one can well imagine how such a place will have offered barely any cultural impulses to curious young people during the immediate post-war years. The situation changed, however, when Murail’s family—including his father Gérard, a poet, and siblings who would likewise devote themselves to literature—moved to the metropolis of Paris. There, Murail first studied political science and economics. He also began playing the Ondes Martenot, an instrument from electronic music’s pioneering era. This led to contact with Jeanne Loriod—the world’s premiere performer on the Ondes Martenot and sister-in-law to Olivier Messiaen—and ultimately with Messiaen himself. The latter, who recognised Murail’s outstanding musical ear, then posed him the consequential question of whether he might like to study composition. And in 1967, Murail actually did become Messiaen’s pupil.
The circles thereby opened up to the young Murail were strongly influenced by the aftershocks of the 1950s avant-garde. In the minds of many composers, post-serial thinking was still dominant: they would accordingly start from certain parameters (such as pitch or duration) and then develop strategies by which these could be structurally arranged. A number of rebels, however, had long since started radically questioning the hegemony of this mode of thought: Giacinto Scelsi, for instance, had begun to explore the inner lives of individual tones—viewing them no longer as individual parameters but as immeasurable microscopic universes of sound. Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti were likewise moving away from thinking in terms of pitches as such, instead shaping them into clusters and surfaces. Later on, in a text entitled The Revolution of Complex Sounds, Murail was to ponder whether these composers were not, in fact, the true leaders of the revolution in contemporary music.
Whatever the case may be: Murail took Scelsi, Xenakis, and Ligeti as his own points of reference, which were then joined by a decisive additional element in the 1970s: that era gave birth to entirely new technical possibilities in terms of exploring the inner life of sound, ranging from the first sonograms (graphic reproductions of sound spectrums) to live electronics later on. This surge of technical innovation offered young composers a whole world of previously unheard(-of) sonic details, and Murail himself was involved in driving forward and shaping all of these developments. In doing so, the aspect of practical realisation was paramount: 1973 saw him join forces with several colleagues to found the ensemble “L’Itineraire”. And in the subsequent interplay between sonic research, composition, and interpretation, a new aesthetic gradually took shape that became known as musique spectrale.
“Spectral” composing (a term that has always been controversial but is probably here to stay) is not to be confused with simply writing out the overtone spectrum: spectra as employed by Murail range all the way from spectral purity to white noise. A great many such complex sounds can be heard in Murail’s works, with his music’s sonic aesthetics having evolved step by step. This is owed partly to the aforementioned technological innovations: while the composer had still needed to calculate ring and frequency modulations for Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (1978) and Gondwana (1980), by L’Esprit des Dunes (1993/94) he was already capable of referring to detailed analyses of not only static sound segments but also instances of sonic evolution over time. The other thing that one can observe is a departure from his original purism in terms of spectral sound processes—which has indeed been the case with nearly all spectral composers. More and more, Murail has come to integrate literary references and allusions to older forms. Computer-supported techniques have receded into the background, and he now relies on his excellent ear and his feel for the psychologically effective shaping of temporal sequences.
Murail is also a renowned pedagogue: in 1997, he was appointed as a professor of composition at New York’s Columbia University, where he taught until 2010. Later on, he served as a visiting professor at Mozarteum University Salzburg as well as Shanghai Conservatory. At the latter, he showed how spectral music’s sonic orientation exhibits fascinating touchpoints with Chinese musical thought—and it is likely no coincidence that Murail composed his most recent work (Le Livre des Merveilles, 2024) for the guzheng (a Chinese arched zither), further instruments, and electronics.
Particularly the period since 2000 has seen Murail compose a large number of piano works. Therein, he succeeds in looking back while still retaining his curious and experimental stance. It is thanks to these qualities that his piano music is played by numerous performers—among them many students—all over the world, including at the mdw. We can hence look forward to what will surely be an intriguing encounter with this great musician!
