Music research institute in Paris. In 1970 President Georges Pompidou of France invited the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez to establish a centre for research into new music and associated technologies, to be situated in Paris adjacent to the Centre Pompidou. Seven years later IRCAM became fully operational with Boulez as director, a post he held until 1992 when it passed to Laurent Bayle. Boulez conceived IRCAM as a multi-disciplinary centre, and it was initially organized into five distinct areas – electro-acoustics, computer, pedagogy, instruments and voice – each headed by a specialist. This devolved arrangement proved problematic; a reorganization in 1980 and another in 1984 resulted in a more streamlined structure which, while preserving most of the original objectives, has focussed primarily on two areas, computer music production and computer music research.
Because its management has been able to make policies with few external constraints, IRCAM has fostered a strikingly broad range of musical activities. Artistic aims and objectives have predominated in determining the course of technical research. This climate has brought significant dividends in the form of new tools for computer music composition and new works for the genre. Over the years the development of technical resources has progressed from highly specialized hardware tools such as the 4X digital audio processor, built in the first instance to meet the musical requirements of Boulez for his major work Répons (1984), to more generic systems such as the IRCAM Musical Workstation or, more recently, a range of software tools designed for the modern generation of general-purpose personal computers.
La musique en projet (Paris, 1975) [pubn of IRCAM]
Contemporary Music Review, i/1 (1984) [IRCAM issue]
L. Bayle, P. Boulez and others: Recherche et création: vers de nouveaux territoires (Paris, 1992)
G. Born: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, 1995)
PETER MANNING