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La Dynamique des fluides

Note

To begin with: a desire for lightness, flexibility, versatility, the preoccupation with avoiding grandiloquence and rhetorical effects as much as possible.
Few violent and forthright contours, but rather gentle curves, spirals and surprises. Fluid motion disturbed by turbulence of its own creation.
In the "chaotic" images of the turbulence, we find the same structures at all levels of observation: from a distance, from close by, through a microscope...
Thus, in La Dynamique des fluides we note perpetual transformation on numerous different levels, of a simple spiral movement - whirlpools, turbulence, sometimes extremely slow, sometimes so accelerated that the forms become fleeting or undergo a change in nature.
On a grand scale, the whirlpools become great flows, slopes of music. On a smaller scale, they transform themselves into identifiable representations, reoccurring in the piece, but always different.
Sometimes, miniscule spirals, like will-o'-the-wisps, try to escape from the dominant flow and divert it.

Tristan Murail
From: Tristan Murail, texts edited by Peter Szendy
collection Compositeurs d'Aujourd'hui
L'Harmattan editions / Ircam-Centre Pompidou,
Paris, 2002, 158 pages (pp. 137-138)