"Art, working with art and making art, is in itself an invitation to boundless freedom. There can be no submission here," writes Wolfgang Rihm. "Uncertainty predominates, the only potential for an agile mind." Four pieces of one of the most significant and provocative post-war composers whose titles speak for themselves: "Gejagte Form" or hunted form, "Verborgene Formen" or concealed forms, "Chiffre I" or cipher, and "Silence to be beaten (Chiffre II)". Four pieces of music that attempt to realise what Wolfgang Rihm considers "art's purpose": "Not to be a place of refuge but a reservoir of energy in regressive times." From the inner info

The composer demonstrates his great virtuosity in spectral manipulation as well as the results of sound analysis, heard as conglomerates with characteristics that can be broken down today: wind, diaphonic singing, traditional instruments, etc.

Allégories, completed in 1990, was commissioned by the french State for the Ensemble Musique Oblique, who first played it at the Ars Musica Festival in Belgium. It is scored for a small mixed ensemble of wind and strings with a complex live electronics set-up, featuring notably a Yamaha TX-816 linked to a Macintosh computer. Using the "MAX" programme created at IRCAM by Miller Puckette, complex sequences of synthesised sounds from the TX-816 can be triggered in real time by one of the performers, allowing a far greater performance flexibility than the use of pre-recorded tape would have. This work follows on from Murail's Désintegrations (1982), for ensemble and pre-recorded tape. As in that earlier work, the aim is for the electronic sounds and the instrumental music to be completely mixed so as to be often indistinguishable from one another.
In Allégories, most of the sounds are constructed by using the techniques of additive synthesis, as piling many pure, sinusoidal tones upon one another to create timbres which form the substance of the instrumental harmony. The temporal and harmonic structure of the work is far more complicated than in many of Murail's earlier pieces: there is still an obsession with rigourous processes, but they move at a much faster speed than in Territoires, and are often greatly abbreviated. Thus the music heard often implies processes and forms which are left unstated, the music functioning, as Murail has said, as an "allegory" of the implied process. Furthermore, sections of material recur throughout the piece (the opening, for example, recors just over half-was through) creating an ambiguous pattern of time-loops, recalling Murail's orchestral work Time and Again (1985). The resultant music contains the volatile. As in Territoires, the music moves through zones of high activity and moments of near stasis, but he form here is not as unidirectional, and is consequently richer.
Julian Anderson

Numerous sequences of “Partiels” announce a new technique, that of instrumental synthesis. Analogous to the auditory synthesis used in the programmes of digital electronic music, this writing style uses the instruments (micro-synthesis) to express different elements of the sound and elaborate an overall sound form (macro-synthesis). The result of this treatment is that our perception, the different instrumental sources disappear to the advantage of a completely invented synthetic timbre. These different mergings allow for articulating and organizing a whole range of timbres going from the spectrum of harmonics to white noise, by the way of the different spectra of inharmonic partials.
The end of “Partiels” progressively moves towards silence, but perfect silence does not exist – there is always a spectator who coughs, musicians who drop their mutes or begin to put their things away! Therefore, I staged this impossibility of silence; in fact, two procedures alternate: the first goes from sound towards silence, and the second from silence towards a group of noises taken from the daily life of the instrumentalists (turning pages, horn players who drain the water from their instrument, string players putting away their bows…); but at the end, it is truly silence, for even the public is held breathless: the percussion who slowly separates his cymbals, while the other musicians quote a fragment of “Partiels.”