Les moyens technologiques de la musique électronique reconfigurent les pratiques musicales. Du fait des procédures de computation et d’automation inhérentes aux machines qui médiatisent le phénomène sonore, ces moyens ont notamment la particularité d’introduire une rupture dans le rapport causal entre le geste instrumental et le son produit. Que signifie alors jouer de la musique électronique ? Comment comprendre ici les concepts de geste et d’instrument de musique qui sont traditionnellement mobilisés pour analyser les pratiques musicales ?Pour répondre à ces questions, nous avons mené entre 2010 et 2016 un travail de terrain auprès de musiciens professionnels dans des contextes musicaux variés : musique savante avec électronique en temps réel, performance audiovisuelle et musique électronique populaire. Cette approche, focalisée sur l’instrument, permet de questionner la matérialité des pratiques électroniques en la plaçant au premier plan, par-delà les esthétiques musicales. Ce travail consiste donc en une « enquête organologique » sur les pratiques des musiciens ou des groupes suivants : Robert Henke, Alex Augier, Brain Damage, High Tone, Pierre Jodlowski, Jesper Nordin, John MacCallum et Teoma Naccarato, Nicolas Mondon, Greg Beller et le collectif Unmapped. La méthode ethnographique permet de circonscrire l’usage particulier des technologies musicales à différents moments du processus de création : conceptualisation de l’œuvre, collaboration technique, réalisation artistique et performance scénique. À partir de l’analyse de l’activité musicale au prisme des configurations instrumentales, nous proposons une typologie des instruments électroniques dont le critère de classification est le geste, unique résidu du modèle acoustique de l’interaction instrumentale. L’activité corporelle permet donc d’ordonner la diversité matérielle des technologies musicales en même temps qu’elle constitue un vecteur stratégique d’expression de l’interaction instrumentale. / Technological means of electronic music reconfigure musical practices. Because of the machines’ computation and automation capacities that mediate the sonic phenomenon, the causal relationship between instrumental gesture and sound is altered. Therefore, what does it mean to play electronic music? The concepts of gesture and musical instrument are traditionally employed for the analysis of musical practices, but how should they be understood in this context? To address these issues, we conducted an extensive fieldwork between 2010 and 2016 with professional musicians in various contexts: art music with real-time electronics, audiovisual performance, and popular electronic music. Our instrument-focused approach allows us to consider the materiality of electronic music itself, beyond aesthetics. Thus, this work is an “organological inquiry” on the following musicians or bands: Robert Henke, Alex Augier, Brain Damage, High Tone, Pierre Jodlowski, Jesper Nordin, John MacCallum and Teoma Naccarato, Nicolas Mondon, Greg Beller, and the Unmapped collective. The ethnographic method sheds a light on the use of music technologies at different stages of the creative process: conceptualization of the work, technical collaboration, the making of the music and its performance. From this analysis of musical activity captured through instrumental configurations, we offer a typology of electronic music instruments, based on a gestural criterion, which is the only residual aspect of the acoustic instrumental interaction model. The corporeal activity leads to organise the material diversity of music technologies, as well as it constitutes a strategic way to express instrumental interaction.

This thesis explores the notion of ‘experimental voice’ in avant-garde performance, in the way it transgresses conventional forms of vocal expression as a means of both extending and enhancing the expressive capabilities of the voice, and reframing the social and political contexts in which these voices are heard. I examine these avant-garde voices in relation to three different liminal contexts in which the voice plays a central role: in ritual vocal expressions, such as Greek lament and Māori karanga, where the voice forms a bridge between the living and the dead; in electroacoustic music and film, where the voice is dissociated from its source body and can be heard to resound somewhere between human and machine; and from a psychoanalytic perspective, where the voice may bring to consciousness the repressed fears and desires of the unconscious. The liminal phase of ritual performance is a time of inherent possibility, where the usual social structures are inverted or subverted, but the liminal is ultimately temporary and conservative. Victor Turner suggests the concept of the ‘liminoid’ as a more transgressive alternative to the liminal, allowing for permanent and lasting social change. It may be in the liminoid realm of avant-garde performance that voices can be reimagined inside the frame of performance, as a means of exploring new forms of expression in life. This thesis comes out of my own experience as a performer and is informed both by theoretical discourse and practical experimentation in the theatre. Exploring the voice as a liminal, transgressive force requires analysis from an experiential perspective.

Cette thèse revient sur les onze œuvres musicales ayant jalonné mon parcours compositionnel et marqué le développement de ma pensée de créatrice. J’ai divisé la production de ces sept années de doctorat en trois sections, correspondant à trois phases distinctes de l’évolution de mon langage. Ce parcours est un passage graduel d’une pensée intuitive vers une pensée de plus en plus structurée. Bailo, String Quartet no.1, et Con fuoco sont les œuvres composées durant la première phase. La deuxième phase a mené à la composition de deux pièces où sont juxtaposées musique instrumentale et musique électroacoustique : le Concerto pour clarinette et bande et Impressions pour basson et bande. Afin d’arrimer ces deux mondes disparates, l’approche intuitive a tranquillement été écartée au profit d’une meilleure organisation des paramètres à travers l’introduction de la formalisation. La troisième phase correspond à une exploration plus rigoureuse de la formalisation par l’entremise de modèles. Quatre modèles sont abordés dans cette thèse; soit le modèle de l’objet sonore, le modèle de la linguistique, le modèle du timbre et le modèle de l’art visuel. Dans le modèle de l’objet sonore, utilisé dans la pièce Nevaliashka, la formalisation se construit autour d’un jouet duquel j’extrais le plus d’information possible. Utilisé dans les opéras Les bottes jaunes et The Feast of Nemesis, le modèle linguistique aborde la sémantique et phonétique des différentes langues. Le modèle du timbre, que l’on retrouve dans FLAW/LESS et Transition, s’attarde à la corporéité des instruments traditionnels et à leurs potentialités acoustiques. L’écriture instrumentale y est pensée comme une sculpture de timbres et la méthodologie est dérivée de celle généralement utilisée pour la composition de la musique électroacoustique. Enfin, avec le modèle de l’art visuel, mis en valeur dans la pièce Galženjaki, je m’intéresse aux interactions entre art visuel et littérature, de même qu’à la manière de transposer ce dialogue en musique. / This thesis returns to the eleven musical works that marked my compositional journey as well as my development as an artist. I divided the production of these seven years of doctoral studies into three sections, corresponding to three distinct phases of the evolution of my language. This journey is a gradual transition from an intuitive approach to musical writing to a more structured approach. Bailo, String Quartet no.1, and Con fuoco were composed in the first phase. The second phase led to two pieces in which instrumental music and electroacoustic music were juxtaposed: the Concerto pour clarinette et bande and Impressions for bassoon and tape. In order to bridge the gap between these two distinct worlds, intuition gradually gave way to a better organization of parameters through the introduction of formalization. The third phase corresponds to a more rigorous exploration of formalization through the use of models. Four models are addressed in this thesis; the sound object model, the linguistics model, the timbre model and the visual arts model. In the sound object model, used in the Nevaliashka piece, formalization is built around an object of everyday life from which a maximum of information is extracted and analyzed. Used in the operas Les bottes jaunes and The Feast of Nemesis, the linguistics model incorporates the semantics and phonetics of different languages into the compositional process. The timbre model, found in FLAW/LESS and Transition, focuses on the corporeality of traditional instruments and their acoustic potential. Instrumental writing is thought of as a sculpture of timbres and follows the methodology generally used in electroacoustic music composition. Finally, with the visual arts model, highlighted in the Galženjaki piece, I analyze the interactions between visual arts and literature and attempt to translate this dialogue into music.

Mémoire en recherche-création ; Aide financière octroyée : CIRMMT Student Award / Les conditions d'utilisation de théories scientifiques au cours du processus de composition musicale et plus généralement pour l'élaboration de théories esthétiques musicales sont au coeur du travail proposé. Une position critique est tout d'abord avancée relativement aux nombreux écueils historiques relevés. Elle permet d'en dégager quelques pistes d'exploration pour les processus compositionnels que je me suis proposé de suivre au fur et à mesure des pièces électroacoustiques et mixtes présentées. En particulier, des spécificités empruntées aux mécanismes vibratoires non-linéaires, aux modèles sociologiques déterministes ou prédictifs sont injectés au sein même des processus de création des mes oeuvres. Cinq pièces sont présentées. Les thématiques et les contraintes occasionnées par les modèles empruntés sont décrits ainsi que les réalisations techniques qui leur ont servi de support. Chaque pièce présente donc une démarche et des outils technologiques et informatiques particuliers. Ces pistes exploratoires feront intervenir contrainte formelle, limitation du contrôle du compositeur, improvisation, traitement et spatialisation en temps réel et développements originaux implémentés en Max/MSP et en Python. Par ailleurs, un outil d'aide à la composition spatiale proposant une perspective inédite de visualisation du champs de pression produit par les trajectoires et par le système de reproduction virtuel, et développé pendant ma maîtrise est présenté. / The use of science theories during the compositionnal process, especially in a purpose of esthetical properties abstraction is questionned. First, a criticist point-of-vue is adressed, on the basis of several historical examples. A personnal method dedicated to the development of original compositionnal process were deduced. In particular, the specific mecanisms related to nonlinear vibrations and deterministic sociological model could be inserted into the creative processes. Five electroacoustic and contemporay music pieces are presented. Themes and constraints provoked by the model insertion are detailed. They gather form-contraints, control limitations, improvisation, real-time processing and real-time spatialization implemented in Max/MSP and Python. Moreover, a refined sound-field rendering tool dedicated to computer-assisted composition is introduced.

In the summer of 1953, Karlheinz Stockhausen began composing his first piece of elektronische Musik at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. Up to that point, Stockhausen's only experience with electroacoustic music was his time spent at the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française the previous year, where he assisted Pierre Schaeffer and composed a piece of musique concrète. An early case study in the marriage of serial aesthetics and electroacoustic techniques, Studie I is a rigorously organized work that reflects Stockhausen's compositional philosophy of a unified structural principle in which all musical materials and parametric values are generated by and arranged according to a single governing series. In spite of this meticulously wrought serial structure, Studie I displays features that are the consequences of the realities of electronic sound production either imposing on the sonic result, or altering the compositional plan entirely. I use a three-part approach to my analysis of Studie I by examining Stockhausen's serial system, the electroacoustic studio techniques in use in 1953, and the original recorded realization through spectrographic analysis. Using this methodology, I expose the blurring of the supposed divide between elektronische Musik and musique concrète by exploring the features that lie between the serial plan and the technical processes Stockhausen used to realize Studie I.

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Subject of this study is the evolvement of the radical art music scene in Sweden. In this development took the labour movement an active part during the 1960s. The purpose of this study is to examine how the relationship between the radical art music scene and the labour movement was constituted and what this relationship implied for the Swedish radical art music scene during the 1960s. During the 1960s radical music became an influencial part in the Swedish music scene of modern art music. In this development the artists’ society Fylkingen had a central position. In the early 1960s Fylkingen began to incorporate writers, engineers, scientists, sociologists, philosophers, economists, etc. in their work and a number of projects were initiated which interacted with common society. A proposal for a public record company was developed together with KSF (Social Democratic Association for Cultural Workers) and was presented to the Swedish parliament. In collaboration with ABF (Workers’ Educational Association) the first studio for electronic music was build in 1960 and the relationship between the labour movement and the radical art music scene was institutionalized as the Stockholm Electronic Music Studio Foundation. This thesis uses the terminology of Ludwik Fleck to examine the relationship between the radical art music scene and the labour movement. The concepts of Thought collective and Thought-style are used to draw conclusions about common values and objectives within the Thought-style. The radical art music scene and the labour movement are understood to be part of a common Thought collective with a common style of thought. Because of this relationship, projects initiated in the radical music scene came to emphasize the democratic and educational aspects of music. In the latter half of the 1960s it was conceived impossible to achieve these goals under the existing program, leading to the notion within the style of thought that technological advancement was a prerequisite for a democratic music scene.