L'Itinéraire
l'Itinéraire (French for about "the way", "the (march) route") is an easy-going group of composers founded by Hugues Dufourt , Gérard Grisey , Tristan Murail and Michaël Levinas in 1973 (except for Dufourt all of Olivier's students Messiaens ). It stands for the development of a trend in modern French music, which became known as " Musique spectrale ", and which focuses on the possibilities of compositionally exhausting the overtone spectrum of tones.
General
With its work, the Itinéraire not only developed a new musical aesthetic , but also a new dimension in music writing and sound research . This aesthetic, which Hugues Dufourt described in an article in 1979 as “ Musique spectrale ” - a term that has since established itself in music history - describes the work of composing as directed directly towards the inner dimension of sounds. Composition is therefore based on an all-encompassing control through the overtone spectrum and consists in extracting structures from the material that can be derived from the spectrum. This aesthetic is new in that it differs radically from serial practice . It negates the reduction of a sound to a mere combination of parameters and the search for a “nouvelle simplicité” (new simplicity), which from the point of view of the spectralists would mean a neo-expressionist step backwards.
The Ensemble l'Itinéraire, founded in 1973, is closely associated with the composer group .