Spectral music

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Spectral music (or spectralism) is a musical genre or movement originating in France in the 1970s and characterized by the use of computer analysis of sound wave components as the basis for composition. Waveforms are broken down, especially using FFT analysis, and then recreated into musical forms. Spectral music can be played either (1) electronically (by a computer or playback device delivering sound via speakers) or (2) on traditional, non-electronic instruments, requiring specially trained human performers. Often these two media are used in combination.

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[edit] Composers

Spectral music was initially associated with composers Hugues Dufourt, Horatiu Radulescu, Gérard Grisey, and Tristan Murail. More recently the movement has broadened out into one of the most important contemporary compositional trends (quite recently in the United States; less recently in France and most of Western Europe, where the work of the spectral school was already widely known and appreciated decades ago). Among recent composers building on the spectral idea, the music of Kaija Saariaho, Phillippe Leroux, Phillippe Hurel, Marco Stroppa, and Joshua Fineberg is of particular note. 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.

[edit] Origins

This music began to emerge in the 1970s and is very much a product of France's IRCAM, a pioneering institution supported by the French government and created primarily by the great composer and conductor Pierre Boulez for the purpose of exploring sound scientifically and musically. 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 inspiration for 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.

[edit] Compositional technique

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.

[edit] Performance

In performance, spectral music often involves little or no use of electronic or computer-generated sound, yet it produces an effect that sounds "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.

[edit] Spectral music and the United States musical scene: a distant echo

Considering the enormous amount and diversity of musical and compositional activity in the United States, with so many well-funded university music schools and departments, myriad computer and electronic music studios, libraries with extensive research capabilities and plenty of scholars and graduate students always hungry for something to write about, there was a remarkable delay between the time of the major musical achievements of the French spectral composers (for example, Grisey's seminal 1975 work, Partiels) and the general awareness of spectral music in U.S. musical academia. It is fair to say that it was virtually ignored for at least a generation.Two examples suffice to make the point.

In 1997, 22 years after the creation of Partiels, Joel Chadabe's "Electric Sound: the Past and Promise of Electronic Music," a book that was supposed to cover the history of computer music as well as electronic music per se, contained no mention of spectral music or any of the composers associated with it. In the late 1990s, this book was on many reading lists as a standard reference on its purported subject. To know its contents was to be considered thoroughly knowledgable.

The second example is also from 1997. That year's edition of David Cope's Techniques of the Contemporary Composer, though it supposedly covered electronic and computer music, also contained no mention of spectral music or any of the composers associated with it. This book, written by a well-published composer and academic, was similarly ubiquitous in American music school bookstores and on composers' reading lists.

But it was in precisely that year, 1997, that Tristan Murail crossed the Atlantic to take up a teaching position at Columbia University, puncturing the strange American innocence of all music spectral.

Nevertheless, even then, a general change in attitude did not happen overnight. The U.S. musical scene is only in the last few years finally beginning to deal with the enormous implications of the spectralists' innovations. Meanwhile, in Europe, even "post-spectralism" is over. What explains this immense time lag is of course beyond the scope of this article; the reader will have to look elsewhere for an answer.

[edit] See also

[edit] Source

  • 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.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

[edit] Articles

  • 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.

[edit] External links

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