Michael Levinas: Timbre, Technology and Hybridation

This chapter discusses some key aspects of the compositional development of Michaël Levinas with reference to a significant number of his compositions, including the operas Les Nègres and La Métamorphose. Levinas studied composition with Messiaen alongside Grisey and Murail, and he was a founding member of the group L’Itinéraire in 1973. While he describes his work as having progressed in parallel with his spectral colleagues, he came to recognize his distinctive contribution to the aesthetic over time. Levinas’s composition is marked by his idiosyncratic treatment of timbre, his use of technology including loudspeakers, and his interest in hybridizing musical sounds through the placement of sound bodies in vibration with one another. Achieved at first in more rudimentary ways, Levinas developed this with great sophistication at IRCAM in the 1990s to produce what he terms “the new mixity.” The chapter concludes with an exposition of the expressive potential of Levinas’s approach to sound.