Tristan Murail

Tristan Murail (born 11 March 1947) is a French composer associated with the "spectral" technique of composition.

Among his compositions is the large orchestral work Gondwana.

Murail was born in Le Havre, France.

His father, Gérard Murail, is a poet and his mother, Marie-Thérèse Barrois, a journalist.

One of his brothers, Lorris Murail, and his younger sister Elvire Murail, a.k.a. Moka, are also writers, and his younger sister Marie-Aude Murail is a French children's writer.

Following his university studies in Arabic and economics, Murail attended the Paris Conservatory, where he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen from 1967 to 1972.

Among Murail's awards are the Prix de Rome (presented by the French Académie des beaux-arts in 1971), the Grand Prix du Disque (1990), and the Grand Prix du Président de la République, Académie Charles Cros (1992).

Murail's works are published by Éditions Transatlantiques and Éditions Henry Lemoine.

His music has been recorded on the Una Corda, Metier, Adés, and MFA-Radio France labels.

In 1973 he was a founding member of the Ensemble l'Itinéraire.

He taught computer music and composition at IRCAM in Paris from 1991 to 1997.

While there, he assisted in the development of Patchwork composition software.

From 1997 until 2010, he was a professor of composition at Columbia University in New York City.

Murail is associated with the "spectral" technique of composition, which involves the use of the fundamental properties of sound as a basis for harmony, as well as the use of spectral analysis, FM, RM, and AM synthesis as a method of deriving polyphony.

Major pieces by Murail include large orchestral pieces such as Gondwana, Time and Again and, more recently, Serendib and L'Esprit des dunes.

Other pieces include his Désintégrations for 17 instruments and tape, Mémoire/Erosion for French horn and nine instruments Ethers for flute and ensemble, Winter Fragments for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello and electronics as well as Vampyr! for electric guitar.

Murail also composed a set of solo pieces for various instruments in his cycle Random Access Memory, of which the sixth, Vampyr!, is a rare classical piece for electric guitar.

In addition to deriving much of the musical material from the harmonic series over a low E—typically the lowest note on the instrument— the composer also references the timbre and performance style of guitarists in the rock tradition, citing Carlos Santana and Eric Clapton as examples in the instructions to the score.