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“Artists are also researchers” — this was the conviction of engineer Bernard Baschet (1917-2015) and his brother, François (1920-2014), an author, sculptor, acoustician, and designer. Working together in the 1950s, they created the famous Baschet sound structures — including the Cristal Baschet1 — a set of instruments that used modern materials to produce innovative sounds. Their niece, composer Florence Baschet, absorbed this inventive spirit from an early age, shaping her own creative path through intuition and empirical experimentation. “I was a luthier before becoming a composer,” she has remarked.
Her own remake of the Cristal Baschet spans five and a half octaves, offering a rich playground for exploring timbre and microtonality. She traveled the world improvising on her Cristal — whether in duets with a percussionist or as part of a quartet with sitar, tablas, and a four-holed Carnatic bansuri flute. The experience became a formative education in listening, one she continues to praise today. The Cristal has allowed her to act upon sound and enrich musical language through timbre. “I wanted a Cristal that was highly responsive, one that wouldn’t just produce only sheets of sound,” she emphasizes.
In 1988, at the age of 33, she presented a piece composed for the Cristal Baschet as her entrance audition for the composition and music technology program at the National Conservatory (CNSMD) in Lyon. The piece explores the inner depths of sound on a single note, recalling the works of Giacinto Scelsi.
While studying in Lyon with Philippe Manoury at the Studio Sonus, Baschet gradually moved away from the aesthetics of spectralism. Nevertheless, the creative possibilities offered by the studio fueled her desire to compose. She continued to use the Cristal Baschet, combining it with electronics. In 1991, she composed Nuraghe, a mixed-media piece — a genre she would frequently explore — for four keyboard instruments (vibraphone, marimba, piano, and Cristal Baschet), string trio (viola, cello, and double bass), and a live electroacoustic setup.
Among those who have influenced her career, she cites Luigi Nono (particularly his works La Fabbrica illuminata and Fragmente-Stille), whom she met in 1989 at the Centre Acanthes, where he was a guest professor. She was drawn to his ideas about silence, space, and “this way of engaging with the world through inner listening.” As Nono would often say, “Composing implies knowing how to listen.”2 She also acknowledges the influence of Elliott Carter, particularly his string quartets; Gérard Grisey (Vortex temporum more than Espaces acoustiques); and early music composers such as François Couperin (Leçons de ténèbres) and Claudio Monteverdi (L’Orfeo), for their vocal writing and approaches to making the text come alive.
Baschet entered the computer-based music and composition program at IRCAM in 1991, and after a year in the program, she went on to lead her own research into mixed-media sound spaces. She created tools that establish a unique, sensitive, and responsive interaction between the soloist and electroacoustic system, imitating the dynamics among chamber musicians.
In her Cursus piece Alma Luvia (1992-1993), the Cristal Baschet serves as an interface between the voice, instruments (viola and clarinet), and real-time electronics. The vocal writing in this work marks the beginning of her exploration of text (here using excerpts from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and its enunciation.
Anticipating her later study of the interactivity between instrumental gestures and real-time electronic systems (gesture tracking), Baschet composed Electrics (2005) for flute or saxophone. This open form mixed-media piece is designed for both professionals and students looking to explore technologies associated with their instrument. Electrics is built around a fundamental pitch — middle E — which the performer both plays and sings into the flute. The frequency is recognized and analyzed in real time by the Max/MSP software, which generates sound transformations based on variations in the flutist’s dynamics (across nine levels) and tone (including quarter-tone fluctuations). The system allows the performer to control the electronic sound output through their own playing technique. Within this dynamic electroacoustic flow, the performer guides the musical direction in a constantly interactive experience.
When trying to establish a truly interactive relationship between instrumentalists and electronic systems, the question arises: how can the instrumentalists interpret the system? Indeed, if the instrumentalist is the performer, the interpreter of the musical text, it is, in my opinion, important that they also be an interpreter and actor in the way their sound is transformed by the electroacoustic system. They should also be able to “play” the electroacoustic score heard through the speakers as well. The compositional challenge is then how to compose this interaction and within what appropriate space.3
From 2005 to 2008, with the support of IRCAM colleagues Serge Lemouton and Frédéric Bevilacqua — who provided expertise in analysis and gestural recognition tools — Baschet embarked on pioneering research into gesture tracking. Building on Antescofo (a score-following synchronization patch developed by Arshia Cont), Baschet pushed interactivity even further, shifting the focus from following pitches to following full gestures.4 This research culminated in two landmark works in her catalog: BogenLied (2005) for “augmented” violin and real-time electroacoustics, and StreicherKreis (2006-2008) for “augmented” string quartet and real-time electroacoustics.
“I didn’t want any cables or pedals on stage,” Baschet emphasized. For BogenLied, she and IRCAM collaborators developed a gesture-recognition system using a miniature, lightweight sensor attached to the frog of the violinist’s bow. This system detected the musician’s gestures and triggered pre-programmed transformations. Three specific bowing techniques — détaché, spiccato, and martelé — were modeled using software that responded to the amplitude, energy, and speed of the player’s movements. The score reads: “Freely perform from large to small détaché, from large to small spiccato, with a lot or little energy in the articulation.”
The sound space is entirely determined by the bowing technique of the violinist — in this case, Anne Mercier of the Ensemble l’Itinéraire, who premiered BogenLied (“The Song of the Bow”) in 2005. The piece became one of the first compositions for augmented violin.5
From 2006 to 2008, Baschet continued developing gesture-based interactive systems with Lemouton and Bevilacqua. During this period, she became a “research composer” at IRCAM and composed the string quartet StreicherKreis.
Baschet explained her approach:
As a composer, I believe that both listening and compositional intention should be focused on bowing. For a violinist, the gestural phrasing of the bow expresses their instrumental thoughts. The bow is the tool that helps to elaborate the sound, that shapes the timbre of the sound object through its speed, energy, position, or angle on the string. Mastering bow technique requires many years of study, as does the left-hand technique. A cellist friend once told me that his bowing gestures felt very personal to him. I wanted to create a new type of interaction between the computer and the musician, based on these gestural phrases. After all, it is the player’s bowing that defines the parameters of the sound synthesis in real time.6
In StreicherKreis, the string quartet is treated as a sixteen-string meta-instrument, with each of the four instrumentalists contributing to the whole. Gesture recognition and tracking devices create dynamic interactions between the instrumentalists and the machine, as in BogenLied. As Baschet wrote (referring to another of her string quartets, Manfred), “The instruments of the quartet form one body of sound, whose gestural and timbral elements may be specific to each instrument or common to all.” Six small gesture tracers were attached to each bow, for real-time electroacoustic processing. “In general, I don’t want it to mask the sound of the quartet, but rather allow it to melt into the writing: there is only a subtle distance between the instrumental sound and the transformed sound,” she notes.
The piece, which premiered on 13 November 2008 at IRCAM, was performed by the Danel Quartet, who worked closely with the creators throughout the process. Baschet, along with Lemouton and Bevilacqua, explained that the engineers continuously modified the tracking and gesture recognition devices during the experimental process with the quartet.7 The electronic cues, triggered by the bow strokes, were marked by Baschet on a score teeming with quarter tones.
In the second “cycle” of the piece, gestural tracking is applied to only one of the four instruments, allowing it to transform the sound of the others. At measure 213 (the eighth sequence, “Gesture-Timbre”), two violins and the viola hold a pianissimo sustained tone while the cello mimes silent gestures (tonlos), subtly changing the sound of the chord. Baschet recalled that this creative use of the system impressed Pierre Boulez.8
Baschet and Lemouton worked together again at IRCAM in 2011 to further develop a tool they had been working on since 2005. One result, La Muette (2011), a piece for voice, instrumental ensemble, and real-time electronics, is pivotal in Baschet’s catalogue. Their audio-tracking program recognizes the contours of the voice and instruments without relying on sensors; instead, it uses “audio descriptors” that model the entire panel of sound parameters. This creates a highly interactive experience where the singer (Donatienne Michel-Dansac) and the instrumentalists (Ensemble TM+ conducted by Laurent Cuniot) not only play the written score, but also skillfully respond to the electroacoustic sounds coming from the speakers. This technological achievement marked another pioneering moment in the history of real-time audio manipulation.
Thanks to their malleable nature, strings provide a rich terrain for Baschet’s study of timbre, with or without electronics. Notable among her acoustic chamber music works are Cinq Études pour quatuor à cordes (2009), Doppia for two violins (2013), Streicher #2 for string quartet (2016), and Manfred, a cycle for string quartet composed in 2017 for the thirtieth anniversary of the Quatuor Manfred. This composition, inspired by Byron’s drama, emphasizes gesture, with specific playing techniques central to its writing.
Si par un jour... (2020), for string quartet and piano, is the most recent instrumental piece in Baschet’s catalogue. She based it on Italo Calvino’s novel Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1979). “I wanted the five instrumentalists to follow the thread of a dramaturgy where the musical ideas would be heard as a vibration or energy, sometimes concentrated (preserved without loss), sometimes dispersed,” Baschet wrote in her program note. The approach embodies a poetics of sound on the fringes of silence, inviting listeners to engage with the alterations and fluctuations of space and time.
Voice and text are central to Baschet’s vision, used in about a third of her catalogue, or ten pieces. Her passion for literature is evident in her deep interest in language and the relationship between sound and semantics. Joyce, the master of ambiguity in this domain, is called upon twice in her works: in Alma Luvia and in the mixed-media piece Spira Manes (The Spiral of Departed Souls, 1995, based on Ulysses), which expands on the previous piece. In Spira Manes, Baschet employs seven voices and as many instruments to capture the polyphony of Joyce’s interior monologue, where languages intertwine. Both voices and instruments are transformed via electronics. In this work, “past, present, and future time are combined on a non-linear mode and superimposed.”9
To avoid French — “at the risk of falling into Debussy-like declamation,” she confides — Baschet draws on other languages, including English, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and others, as her raw material. Traditional techniques intersect with contemporary writing in Filastrocca (2002), where she sets a Sardinian poem by the Italian poet Marcello Fois, written specifically for the piece. Baschet is fascinated by Sardinian liturgical chant, where a male vocal quartet can sing a cappella in such a way that it creates the emergence of a fifth pitch, understood as a fifth voice called la quintina. Her piece features two voices, six instruments, and an electroacoustic installation integrating sound samples of the Confraternità of Castelsardo recorded in situ. The piece should be performed in a reverberating space.
In 2006, she composed Berechit for the baritone-bass Nicholas Isherwood, setting the first five verses of Genesis, which she calls “the poem we are all made of.” “I wanted to reveal the harmonics of the Hebrew words,” she explains. She focused on the vowels and required the soloist to use overtone singing techniques.10 The voice is amplified, and the electronics combine electronically-produced sounds (a bass choir) with real-time sound processing.
Baschet has repeatedly drawn from authors who give voice to women: Mahmoud Darwish and Yitzhak Laor in Femmes, Virginia Woolf (The Waves), Chahdortt Djavann (La Muette), and Lydie Salvayre (La compagnie des spectres). She undertakes detailed phonological research on each text and its language to understand its essence and shape the composition according to her artistic vision.
Articulation and pronunciation are terms often used to describe the way to speak or sing a text in order to best project both a language and its meaning. Arnold Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang, introduced in Pierrot lunaire, is part of this movement where words and the sung line are efficiently linked together with an expressionist inner tension. Baschet’s work goes beyond Sprechgesang, as she puts forward the notion of enunciation, which she associates with semantics. She cites the examples of Antonin Artaud and Carmelo Bene, both theater practitioners who bring texts to life through constant variations of intensity, accent, register, timbre, and duration, from breathing to screaming, whisper to eruption. With this in mind, she composed Femmes in 200111, focusing on the phenomena of accentuation and intonation of the voice: percussive consonants, syllables full of noise, variations of duration, intensity, attack and decay.
Two women, one in Hebrew language, the other in Arabic, sing their belonging to the same land. A history of women, a land of history and two separate languages. These women are separated by what could unite them, communication power, language,
writes Baschet.12 With their backs to the audience, the women sing into the hollow of two “voice plates” created by the Baschet brothers — sculpted and folded metal sheets over two meters high, which create reverberation with spectral distortion rich in harmonics.
The piece moved the critics, solidifying Baschet’s reputation and leading to an increase in commissions. One such invitation came in 2003 from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), for which she composed Bobok, the third part of a cycle for chamber orchestra including Sinopia (1994) and Aïponis (1998). “Using Pierre Schaeffer’s approach, I work with percussion sounds, particularly with large gongs whose sonorities I shape, deform, and filter.” Bobok13 was for an ensemble of thirteen musicians and electroacoustics, recorded in the GRM studios and projected through the group’s Acousmonium.14
Her attention to enunciation and its notation became more clear in La Muette, where electronics are independently powered by an “audio tracking” system. La Muette is a monodrama based on a French text by the poet Chahdortt Djavann (born in Iran in 1967), which Baschet had translated into Persian. Through intense study of the phonological material, Baschet used the Persian language to sculpt the words and uncover their meaning. Breathing, whispering, inhaling–exhaling, untuned singing, calls, screams, declamations, spitting, chanting, humming, and stammering are among the enunciations specified in the score. These required ad hoc notation such as notes with cross heads, off the staff or pitched (as for Sprechgesang), and blackened note-heads with pitches.
In the prisons of the mullahs, a young fifteen-year-old girl named Fatemeh has been condemned to death by hanging. While in jail, she writes the story of her aunt and the fusional love she felt for this “scandalously different” free woman, with her scarf-less head and cigarette at her lips, who became mute to avoid betraying her cause. Fascinated by this character, “who knew how to make her silence heard like no other,” as is written in Djavann’s text, Baschet uses all of her compositional resources to make this inaudible voice present through music.
Baschet’s commitment to raising awareness about current events resonates through her works. La Muette presents the case of a woman publicly hanged for having exercised her freedom, while it also confronts and joins together Arabic and Hebrew in a poetic language celebrating the marriage between freedom and peace. Elsewhere, Baschet summoned the acerbic plume of Lydie Salvayre and her Compagnie des spectres (2021), clearly reflecting her desire to echo this contemporary reality.
In 2004, with the visual artist and videographer known as Pietrantonio, Baschet composed a video-opera, Piranhas, for two voices (mezzo-soprano and sopranist), saxophone quartet, instrumental ensemble, and real-time electronics. The text, written in Italian by Massimo Carlotto specifically for the opera, also has a German translation. It is sung, spoken, and whispered in both languages and by the two voices, provoking a confrontation — an ambiguity — of the words’ sounds and meanings, which Baschet enjoys exploring. She and Pietrantonio intentionally sought to immerse the spectator in an interactive universe of images and sounds. The large-scale installation explodes the spatial boundaries of the stage. The instrumental ensemble is at the center, surrounded by four screens eight meters long and four and a half meters high. The musicians of the saxophone quartet are positioned at the four corners of the installation.
“My dreams of pieces of flesh stuck between your teeth / My flesh, my blood, the pain and broken memories”: the opening words of Carlotto’s text set the tone for the opera. A piranha, a predator well-known for its voracity, is center stage, filmed in a giant aquarium where the word “LIBERTÉ” (freedom) is written upon the central glass panel with bits of torn flesh. The word is carefully and greedily devoured by the fish throughout the forty-minute performance. “Libertà, libertà, libertà ... senti come suona pura nella lingua degli uomini” (Freedom, freedom, freedom … hear how it sounds in the language of men).15 The piranha is the only living presence in the video. Otherwise, richly colored images are projected onto the screens, metaphors of the destruction of liberty, inspired by 1960s icons reworked in paintings by Pietrantonio. In section III, a speech by Stalin is played through the loudspeakers, accompanied by the piano and vibraphone. At the beginning of section II, the voices fall silent and Baschet introduces a 1/16th-tone keyboard, played by the pianist on a Clavinova. This sound, supported by the other instruments and the electronics, weaves through the opera alongside the changing images, putting the senses on alert. Piranhas is both a perceptual experience and a militant performance, a political statement reflecting the climate of the past fifty years. It is Baschet’s way to feel present in the world and live her contemporaneity.
In 2022, Baschet participated in the Musiques-Fictions project organized by IRCAM, which provided an immersive and collective listening experience of music with literary themes, heard under an ambisonic dome.16 From the texts by female authors proposed to her, Baschet chose La Compagnie des Spectres by Salvayre, a 200-page novel with a powerful political message. Anne-Laure Liégois adapted it for the forty-minute Musiques-Fictions format. The piece uses three actors and a female vocalist who sings in French for the first time in Baschet’s oeuvre. The vocalist uses Baschet’s enunciative method of breathing, whistling, exhaling, stretching, and babbling “in a poetic transformation from speaking to singing.” The piano, often played inside on the strings, is a resonating instrument, whereas the entirely fixed electronic sounds sculpt the space and contribute to the dramatic effect.
“Our spirit never can be downed, / Our striving to be free. / The sateless one will never plow / The bottom of the sea. / The vital spirit he can’t chain, / Or jail the living truth.”17 Baschet recently turned her attention to the great Ukrainian painter and poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), a national hero revered by the Ukrainian community but little known in France. She focused on a French poem from his collection Kobzar, and had excerpts translated into Ukrainian. Her resulting piece was commissioned by Radio France for the Creation Mondiale program on France Musique, broadcast in January 2024.
“Composing,” says Baschet, “is listening, but also getting involved, an involvement of oneself and of one’s relation to the world: listening to what is around us because we are all witnesses. Yes, composing means being part of and embracing our times.”
1. An acoustic instrument with a glass keyboard connected to resonating metallic rods. It owes its name, Cristal, to its pure high notes. ↩
2. Luigi Nono, Prometeo – conversation entre Luigi Nono et Massimo Cacciari, Festival d’Automne à Paris 1987, éditions Contrechamps, p. 132-146. ↩
3. Baschet’s program notes for StreicherKreis (2008), performed 16 November 2008 at the Théâtre de la Photographie et de l’Image, Nice. https://www.cirm-manca.org/video/programmedanel.pdf ↩
4. Florence Baschet, “Instrumental Gesture in StreicherKreis,” in Contemporary Music Review, vol. 23, no. 1 (2013): 17-28 (quote here from page 18). ↩
5. Frédéric Bevilacqua, Nicolas Rasamimanana, Emmanuel Fléty, Serge Lemouton, and Florence Baschet, “The Augmented Violin Project: Research, Composition and Performance Report,” in 6th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 06), Paris, 2006 (p. 402-406). http://articles.ircam.fr/textes/Bevilacqua06a/index.pdf. ↩
6. Florence Baschet, “La recherche en art, Ou comment penser la dialectique acoustique/électroacoustique au sein du geste compositionnel,” florencebaschet.com, http://www.florencebaschet.com/site/P3-Baschet-CR-Article.html. ↩
7. Frédéric Bevilacqua, Florence Baschet, and Serge Lemouton, “The Augmented String Quartet: Experiments and Gesture Following,” in Journal of New Music Research, vol. 41, no. 1 (2012): 103-119, http://www.florencebaschet.com/site/P3-BevilacquaSK-Article.html / https://shs.hal.science/hal-01161437v1. ↩
8. Florence Baschet, “Instrumental Gesture in StreicherKreis,” op. cit. (note 4). In French, 2007 (unedited): http://www.florencebaschet.com/site/P3-Baschet-GI-Article.html. ↩
9. Program note for the premiere of Spiral Manes at the IRCAM Espace de projection in 1995. ↩
10. The singer uses the mouth as a resonator to produce the harmonics of the fundamental. ↩
11. Femmes (1998-2001) for two female voices and instrumental ensemble with two Baschet brothers sound structures. There is also a version for two female voices and five instruments (2001) dedicated to Michaël Levinas, who commissioned the piece. ↩
12. Florence Baschet, “Notice” for Femmes, florencebaschet.com, https://www.florencebaschet.com/website/fiche18-Femmes.html ↩
13. The title is borrowed from a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky published in 1873. ↩
14. As described on INA’s website, “The Acousmonium is an orchestra of loudspeakers arranged in front of, around and within the concert audience. It has been designed to be directed by a performer who projects a sound work or music into the auditorium space via a diffusion console. The Acousmonium can take many forms, changing at will to adapt to the type of work and to circumstances. It was designed and introduced by François Bayle in 1974, and is still mainly used for the performance of acousmatic works. But it is also used by artists performing mixed musical forms, improvised music and multimedia.” https://inagrm.com/en/showcase/news/202/lacousmonium. ↩
15. “Freedom, freedom, freedom … listen to how purely it sounds in the language of Men”. In French: Liberté, liberté, liberté ... entendez comme cela sonne pur dans le langage des hommes. ↩
16. In this case, the ambisonic dome was a nine-meter-diameter installation with sixty-six loudspeakers mounted on a semi-spherical structure allowing an immersive 3D collective listening experience. ↩
17. Taras Shevchenko, verses excerpted from the poem The Caucasus, 1845, translated by John Weir. https://shevchenko.ca/taras-shevchenko/poem.cfm?poem=30. Published in French: Notre âme ne peut pas mourir, éditions Seghers, Paris, 2022. In French: Notre âme ne peut pas mourir, / La liberté ne meurt jamais. / Même l'insatiable ne peut pas labourer le fond des mers, / Pas enchaîner l'âme vivante, / Non plus la parole vivante [...]. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?