Music: The Night the Walls Moved

Beaubourg and Boulez show off a bold new concert hall

Beyond the fire-eater, the buskers and the tent circus on the cobblestone plaza of Paris' skeletal-modern Pompidou arts center, there is what looks like a subway entrance marked IRCAM. It leads down, four levels below, to the world's newest, most sophisticated center for musical experiment and composition, officially titled Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique. IRCAM is a hushed place that fairly radiates energy and cerebration. Here the ordinateur, as the French call a computer, reigns. In one lab, a group is seeking its aid in constructing a new, futuristic flute. In another, a composer is using it to produce a sound heard so far only in his own head.

Music came late in the plans for the Pompidou, better known as the Beaubourg for the Paris locale where it looms. But when the French government decided in 1972 to enter the field of music research, it moved boldly to dominate it. In the U.S. there are a number of centers for computer music, with Stanford the dominant one. In Europe, Germany has been a focus for innovation ever since the postwar years, when Darmstadt became an explosive forum for young composers. IRCAM clearly means to be the new Darmstadt: it has the facilities provided by a huge 59.2 million franc allocation, and in Pierre Boulez, 53, it has the catalyst to at tract the top talent.

Boulez is a formidable force in modern music as composer, conductor and theorist. After two decades spent largely in Germany and the U.S., he has returned to France as virtually sole programmer of his country's musical future. Says Composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen: "IRCAM is the only place in the world where there is free enterprise for the development of new music. Pierre Boulez is the most lucid and brilliant of directors."

The various operations at IRCAM have started up over the past four years. There are always several composers working with computer scientists on expanding the horizons of sound. An ensemble of musicians who play conventional instruments is now complete. The final step was taken this month when Espace de Projection, the hall for public concerts, was opened with the works of two young composers. There were earnest speeches about exploring the limits of limitlessness, some exhilarating sounds as well The as menacing booms from the void, "You but it was the hall that stole the show.