Meeting with Tristan Murail
in collaboration with Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini Florence

The leading exponent of so-called “spectral” music, Tristan Murail has done more than any other living composer, not only to challenge accepted ways of writing music, but to redefine our understanding of the very nature of musical material itself.
A student of Olivier Messiaen, he won the Prix de Rome in 1971 and spent two years at the Villa Medici. Upon his return to Paris, he founded the Itinéraire ensemble with a group of young composers and performers. The group became widely renowned for its groundbreaking explorations of the relationship between instrumental performance and many aspects of electronics. In the eighties, Tristan Murail began using computer technology to further his research into acoustic phenomena. This lead him to years of collaboration with the IRCAM, where he taught composition from 1991 to 1997 and helped develop the Patchwork composition software. Tristan Murail is a professor of composition at Columbia University, New York.