From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Spectral music (or spectralism) is a musical genre or movement originating in France in the 1970s featuring the use of sound, including timbre, pitch, and rhythm of individual sounds, as a model for composition, most often using computer analysis of sound wave components and their evolution over time, especially using FFT analysis. While other forms of computer-assisted composition predated this music, for example in Germany, it is this approach to timbre, primarily developed at IRCAM in Paris, that specifically characterizes spectral music. Tristan Murail has described Spectral music as an attitude towards composition rather than a set of techniques, an aesthetic rather than style. This attitude being that "music is ultimately sound evolving in time" ^[1]. However, almost every major practitioner considers the term inappropriate, misleading, and reductive ^[2].

Contents 1 Composers 2 Origins 3 Compositional technique 4 Performance 5 Pieces 6 References 7 See also 8 Sources 9 Bibliography 9.1 Books 9.2 Articles 10 External links

The term "spectral music" was coined by Hugues Dufourt (Fineberg 2000, p.2) in an article published in 1979. Dufourt, a trained philosopher as well as eminent composer, was the author of several interesting flagship articles associated with this movement, although the relationship of his own music to this trend has remained ambiguous. In any case, it was the better part of a decade before the term was in very wide circulation. It was initially associated with composers including Hugues Dufourt, Horatiu Radulescu, Iancu Dumitrescu, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Michael Levinas, and the late Claude Vivier. Since the mid eighties, the movement has broadened out into one of the most important contemporary compositional trends. Among recent composers building on the spectral idea are Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Phillippe Leroux, Phillippe Hurel, Joshua Fineberg and Julian Anderson. As was the case with impressionism and many other labels for musical style, those composers whose music has been called "spectral" do not generally accept the label.

Early traces can be found in Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863). In the beginning of the 20th century, Ferruccio Busoni wrote in 1907 Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, describing electronic based microtonal music. In the same line, Henry Cowell published in 1930 New Musical Resources, establishing a relation between acoustics, perception and composition.

Busoni lamented the traditional music "lawgivers", and predicted a future music that included the division of the octave into more than the traditional 12 degrees. His philosophy that "Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny," greatly influenced his students Luigi Russolo, who would take part in the Futurist movement and introduced noise music, and Edgar Varèse, who played a major role in the 20th century opening of music to all sound.

Proto-spectral composers include Varèse, Olivier Messiaen, Giacinto Scelsi, Gyorgy Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, André Jolivet, Friedrich Cerha, and to some degree, La Monte Young. Theoretical predecessors include the composers mentioned and Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, and Paul Hindemith ^[3]

This music began to emerge in the 1970s both in France amongst the composers of the Groupe de l'Itinéraire of which Murail, Grisey, Levinas and Dufourt were founding members, and in Germany amongst composers of the Oeldorf and Feedback Groups such as Johannes Fritsch, Claude Vivier, David C. Johnson, Peter Eötvös, Mesías Maiguashca, Gaby Schumacher and Joachim Krist. Influences on these two groups were diverse. The Feedback group were mostly pupils of Stockhausen, whose pioneering vocal piece Stimmung of 1968 was an early attempt to create a piece entirely from harmonic spectra. Stockhausen's work Mantra for two pianos and ring modulation was another crucial influence on the German group's music - the striking combination in Mantra of a new melodic directness together with a thorough and clearly systematised employment of ring modulation to amplify and colour the work's harmony was clearly something which affected Eotvos's early piece Sequences of the Wind (1975, which simulates ring modulation spectra purely instrumentally). The disarming melodic simplicity of Claude Vivier is likewise combined with a sophisticated use of both harmonic and non-harmonic spectra in all his music after 1979. Stockhausen's influence can be very clearly felt on all Vivier's mature work.

From the French perspective the idea of spectral music can be seen as an outgrowth of the work of composers such as Maurice Ravel and Olivier Messiaen, both of whom created harmonies and orchestrations based on the harmonic and inharmonic partials contained in complex sounds, such as multiple-stop organ tones, bell sounds, and bird song. Spectral music simply carries this principle much further and with more radical precision, made possible with the aid of computerized FFT analysis. The music of Scelsi, with its concentration on long-held, single tones, continuously mutating in timbre and other parameters, is also another important contribution to spectral music.

Philosophically, the spectralists' attitude of rigorous objectivity in the exploration of sound and the application of their discoveries to composition can be considered a continuation of traditional modernism. Spectral music at the time of its origin was also received as a direct affront to the claim of the serialists and post-serialists (including Boulez himself) to the vanguard of serious musical composition and compositional technique.

Julian Anderson considers Danish composer Per Norgaard's Voyage into the Golden Screen for chamber orchestra (1968) to be the first "properly instrumental piece of spectral composition" ^[4].

The "panoply of methods and techniques" used are secondary, being only "the means of achieving a sonic end" ^[5]. The composition of spectral music is concerned with timbral structures, especially when decisions about timbre are informed by a mathematical analysis known as a Fast Fourier Transform. FFTs can be used to provide graphs that illustrate details about the timbral structure of a sound, which might not be initially apparent to the ear. FFTs can also be used in creating sounds with computers, in order to transform the timbre of a sound in various ways, such as creating hybrid timbres through a collection of processes known as cross-synthesis, or applying a room reverberation to a sound through a process known as convolution. If the music is to be performed by live musicians (as opposed to being played electronically via computer through speakers), then these novel effects must be translated into an extended traditional notation that can be read and executed by a human being with some additional training. The fine gradations of pitch are usually rounded off to the nearest quarter-tone or even eighth-tone - dividing the octave into 24 or 48 discrete pitches, instead of the usual twelve for Western music. Temporal aspects and dynamics are subject to similarly fine controls, creating additional notational hurdles.

Formal concepts important in spectral music include process, though "significantly different from those of minimalist music" in that all musical parameters may be affected ^[6]. These processes most often achieve a smooth transition through interpolation ^[7].

Individual pieces can be written either electronically (by a computer or playback device delivering sound via speakers); on traditional, non-electronic instruments, requiring specially trained human performers; or a combination of the two methods.

In performance, spectral music often involves little or no use of electronic or computer-generated sound, yet it produces an effect that can sound "electronic" to modern ears, because the precisely calibrated deviations from the normal tunings of notes produce uncanny effects that are normally associated with electronic phenomena such as feedback, ring modulation, frequency modulation, etc. In the general field of computer music, then, spectral music is usually considered "computer assisted composition", rather than "computer generated music" or "electronic music". To perform such music on traditional instruments such as cellos or clarinets requires an extraordinarily refined training that arose first in France in response to the innovations born at IRCAM. This high degree of scientific acoustical sophistication in the performance of new music has become fairly standard in Western Europe but is much less to be found in the United States, where the general cultural conservatism during the same period (the last decades of the 20th century) produced a more relaxed, post-modern, eclectic new music repertoire, casually incorporating elements of commercial and popular music, imitations of historical styles, quotations, pastiche, neoromanticism, diatonic minimalism, etc.

Characteristic spectral pieces include Gérard Grisey's Partiels, Tristan Murail's Gondwana ^[8], Stockhausen's Stimmung, and Jean-Claude Risset's Mutation. John Chowning's Stria (1978) and Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco are examples of electronic pieces that embrace spectral techniques.

• Computer music
• Computer-assisted composition
• Electronic music
• IRCAM

• Fineberg, Joshua, ed. (). Spectral Music History and Techniques. Contemporary Music Review.
• Fineberg, Joshua (2006). Classical Music, Why Bother?: Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears. Routledge. ISBN-10: 0415971748, ISBN-13: 978-0415971744. Contains much of the same text as the above.

• Cohen-Lévinas, Danielle; Création musicale et analyse aujourd'hui (Paris : Eska, 1996) ISBN 2-86911-510-5
• Fineberg, Joshua; Spectral music : history and techniques (Overseas Publishers Association, published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, ©2000) OCLC: 48862556

• Grisey, Gérard. 1987. "Tempus ex machina: a Composer's Reflections on Musical Time." Contemporary Music Review 2, no. 1:238–75.
• Rose, François. 1996. "Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music." Perspectives of New Music 34, no. 2 (Summer): 6–39.

• French Wikipedia article on Spectral music (or the "Spectral school", as they tend to call it)
• IRCAM page on Dufourt
• IRCAM page on Philippe Hurel
• IRCAM page on Philippe Leroux
• IRCAM page on Marco Stroppa