Pierre Mariétan is a Swiss

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

.

Biography

Mariétan studied first at the Geneva Conservatory in 1955–60 with Marescotti, and later with, amongst others, Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...

, Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a post-WWII West German composer. He is perhaps best known for his opera Die Soldaten which is regarded as one of the most important operas of the 20th century...

, Gottfried Michael Koenig

Gottfried Michael Koenig

Gottfried Michael Koenig is a contemporary German-Dutch composer.-Biography:Koenig studied church music in Braunschweig, composition, piano, analysis and acoustics in Detmold, music representation techniques in Cologne and computer technique in Bonn. He attended and later lectured at the...

, Henri Pousseur

Henri Pousseur

Henri Pousseur was a Belgian composer.-Biography:Pousseur studied at the Academies of Music in Liège and in Brussels from 1947 to 1953. He was closely associated with Pierre Froidebise and André Souris...

, and Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

, and his earliest works are squarely in the serialist

Serialism

In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...

camp (Muggler 2001). During the 1960s he began creating outline sketches for improvisation, and beginning in the 1970s became increasingly interested in environmental sound and the problem of noise pollution.

In 1966 he was a founder of the Groupe d'Etude et Réalisation Musicales (GERM), and in 1979 founded the Laboratoire Acoustique et Musique Urbaine de l'Ecole d'Architecture de Paris La Villette, which he directed until 1990. Mariétan taught at the University of Paris (I et VIII) from 1969 to 1988 and at the Ecole d'Architecture de Paris la Villette in 1993. He was Director of the Conservatoire de Garges (Région parisienne) 1972–77, and has been a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Paris, Lille, Barcelona,Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, University of California San Diego, the Ecole Hautes Etudes Sociales Paris, Ecoles Nationales Supérieures des Beaux-Arts et d'Architecture of Paris, Besançon, and Marseilles, and the École Polytechnique de Lausanne.

Musical style

While Mariétan’s early work was primarily focussed on serialism, he turned in the 1960s to composing sketch-scores (some intended for amateurs and children) and guidelines for improvisation. Since the 1970s he has mainly focussed on combining composed music ("music of the interior"), with everyday environmental sounds ("music of the exterior"), which has led him to electronic and radiophonic composition. Paysmusique (1991), for example, combines 96 voices speaking in different Swiss dialects. He has also created sound installations and sound environments, sometimes collaborating with architects (Muggler 2001).

Compositions (selective list)

• Caractères, for flute, viola, and contrabass (1961)
• Ersatz, for solo viola (1961)
• Exposés I–II, for 21 instruments (1961)
• Passages I–III, for viola and cello (1961)
• Faces I–II, for 18 instruments (1961)
• Pièce centrale, for 21 instruments (1961)
• Récit suivi de légende, for soprano, flute, English horn, clarinet, horn, harp, piano, and viola (1963–66)
• Minutes, for chamber orchestra (1964)
• Tempéraments (1964–56/1969)
• Systèmes, for piano (1968)
• Quatemio I, for carillon (1970)
• Interfaces, for strings and tape (1971)
• Milieu et environnement, exécution simultanée de plusieurs pièces pour une ‘musicalisation d’un espace déterminé’ (1971)
• De par ce fait, for English horn, basset horn, 7 horns, and tape (1975)
• Son silence bruit, for one musician (1975)
• D’instant en instant, for three groups of 8 instruments (1976)
• Rose des vents, seven-day musical happening in an urban environment (1982)
• Transmusique I à V, for 6 instruments and 2 computers (1986)
• Paysmusique 2, for string quartet and electronics (1992)
• Bruissant et sonnant, for flute and harpsichord (1996)
• Le bruit court, radiophonic music (1996)

Writings

• Mariétan, Pierre. 1970. "Pour une musique à communication orale." VH 101, no.3. Reprinted in Schweizerische Musikzeitung/Revue Musicale Suisse 112 (1972):" 86–89 and in Feedback Papers (Cologne, 1973), no. 5.
• Mariétan, Pierre. 1977. "Son, silence, bruit." Revue d’esthétique 30.
• Mariétan, Pierre. 1994. “État de situations sonores: Pierre Mariétan redessine l'espace acoustique.” Dissonanz/Dissonance no. 39 (February): 4–7.
• Mariétan, Pierre. 1997. La musique du lieu. Bern: Commission Nationale Suisse pour l'UNESCO.

External links

• Composer’s website (in French)
• Earth to Earth website (in English)
• Composer’s Scores at BabelScores