‘ Écriture and Interpretation : L’Itinéraire, Composer-Performer Collaboration, and French Spectral Music’

This article is the first detailed English-language study of the Paris-based composer-performer collective L’Itinéraire, founded in 1973 by Tristan Murail and Roger Tessier. Pursuing a twofold focus, the article begins by examining L’Itinéraire historically in terms of French institutional politics, before moving on to the collective’s collaborative dimension. Having received a State stipend soon after being founded, L’Itinéraire played a key role in the emergence of what came to be known as French spectral music. L’Itinéraire was responsible for commissioning, workshopping and disseminating such works as Gérard Grisey’s Périodes, Murail’s Mémoire-érosion and Hugues Dufourt’s Saturne, compositions with canonical status in spectral music. Drawing on interviews with composers and performers associated with L’Itinéraire in that era as well as archival research, the article explores whether in accounting for spectral music as an historical movement greater visibility should be afforded to the first performers of its works. In this regard, suggestions are made regarding the conceptual relationship of écriture and instrumental realisation.