Abstract:
This Ph.D thesis is placed half way between two disciplines: musicology and musical composition. We propose to take up the study of compositional systems based on the notion of variation and more precisely on the process of modification of one sound meaning unit by variants. One of the objectives is to observe how the experimental currents of the XXth century- the Spectralism and the Cybernetic in particular- have been synthesized, at the end of the last century, by some aspects of the tradition. Orality and recent experimentation share the same composition process by variants. This notion is central in our musicology study and characterizes the chapters of the thesis dedicated to the compositional practice and to the transmission of the compositional knowledge. After having investigated the technique of variants in the musical language of Horatiu Radulescu(Bucarest 1942-Paris 2008) and Franco Oppo (Nuoro 1935). as well as the Sardinian and Romanian orality, we could test other possibilities of composition by trying to go beyond the notions studied and by proposing a personal usage. We will take up our compositional approach by variants by analyzing our piece Sonata for piano, spatio-temporal space where the memory of the audience is called to rebuild a temporal linearity transformed by our strategy of variable repetitions spread all over the work. Our compositional method shares the classical rhetorical figure of digression.
