ABSTRACT
Today, the word 'immersion' tends to designate virtual reality. But its meaning can be expanded to include thoughts and discourses that sometimes accompany the refocussing on sound. Following Varèse, numerous composers of instrumental music and, even more, of electroacoustic music, evoke the existence of an inner life of sound. Unlike the music theory notion of note, reducible to a point, a sound is endowed with a 'thickness'. Several types of sound immersion are analysed: 'sound-spaces' in the literal sense (musical-architectural projects such as the auditorium of the German pavilion at the Osaka World's Fair in 1970 used by Stockhausen) or the figurative (static music of the 1960s and 1970s: Ligeti, minimalism, psychedelic rock etc.); immersion generating a sort of oceanic, intensely close feeling, which characterises, for example, ambient music; the Dionysian type of immersion that a Xenakis convokes in the Diatopes. The chapter continues with the analysis of the project of one of the purest musicians of sound, Scelsi, a project that evokes the idea of a sphericity of sound. Then a few famous 'mystical' trends are examined with sound musicians: Scriabin, La Monte Young, Coltrane, Grisey, Harvey, Branca etc.
