TEMPORA

Furthermore, the use of sequencers and transcription software has modified the very practice of writing, giving keyboard improvisation, for example, a role comparable to the one it has always held in the West, apart from a brief period in the 20th century. The result is a different sense and control of time. This explains, technically, the choice of title, and, aesthetically, the particular exploration of duration that this work illustrates. The initial version for three samplers, created by Tristan Murail, Michael Levinas and Fuminori Tanada, unfortunately had to be replaced by a fixed version, as computer resources are always subject to the commercial dictatorship of rapid obsolescence.
Tempora has a long duration, but cannot be considered a “great form”. Whereas a musical work is often the temporal application of a “language”, i.e., the sonic organization of concepts whose task is to square the formless, to arrange time in such a way as to control its mortal flow, the aesthetic wager here is rather the opposite: to confront the unspeakable, to rediscover the unrecognized, unparameterized sound, and to decondition perception and memory to the point of risking the fascination of the instant without the usual safeguards of logical categories. In so doing, this enterprise joins a whole heritage that goes back to Debussy, and which the twentieth century has frequently brought to fruition.