Spectral music (or spectralism) is a musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Computer-based sound spectrum analysis using tools like DFT, FFT, and spectrograms. The spectral approach focuses on manipulating the features identified through this analysis, interconnecting them, and transforming them.
The spectral approach originated in France in the early 1970s, and techniques were developed, and later refined, primarily at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Paris, with the Ensemble l'Itinéraire, by composers such as Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail. Murail has described spectral music as an aesthetic rather than a style, not so much a set of techniques as an attitude – that "music is ultimately sound evolving in time".[1] Julian Anderson indicates that a number of major composers associated with spectralism consider the term inappropriate, misleading, and reductive.[2] More recently (2003) the Istanbul Spectral Music Conference redefined the term "spectral music" to encompass any music that foregrounds timbre as an important element of structure or musical language.[3]
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The term "spectral music" was coined by Hugues Dufourt in an article written in 1979 and first published two years later.[4] Dufourt, a trained philosopher and composer, was the author of several important articles on spectral music.
The term was initially associated with composers of the French Ensemble l'Itinéraire, including Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Michael Levinas, and the German Feedback group, principally Johannes Fritsch, Mesias Maiguashca, Peter Eötvös, Claude Vivier, and Clarence Barlow. Features of spectralism are also seen independently in the contemporary work of Romanian composers Ştefan Niculescu, Horatiu Radulescu, and Iancu Dumitrescu.[5]
Notable composers building on the spectral idea today include Julian Anderson, Ana-Maria Avram, Joshua Fineberg, Fabien Lévy, Magnus Lindberg, and Kaija Saariaho.
Early traces can be found in Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music.[6] Early in the twentieth century, Ferruccio Busoni published in 1907 "Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst" (later translated as "Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music"), describing (amongst other things) microtonal music.[7] Along similar lines, Henry Cowell published in 1930 New Musical Resources, establishing a relation between acoustics, perception and composition.[8]
Proto-spectral composers include Claude Debussy, Edgard Varèse, Giacinto Scelsi, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.[9] Theoretical predecessors include some of the composers mentioned and Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, and Paul Hindemith.[10]
Romanian folk music, as collected by Béla Bartók (1904-1918), with its acoustic scales derived directly from resonance and natural wind instruments like "buciume", "tulnice", and "cimpoi" inspired several spectral composers: Vieru, Stroe, Niculescu, Dumitrescu and Nemescu [11].
This music began to emerge in the 1970s both in France amongst the composers of the Groupe de l'Itinéraire, influenced by work of composers such as Maurice Ravel and Olivier Messiaen, in Germany amongst the members of the Feedback group in Cologne, and in Romania, with composers around Hyperion Ensemble, all 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 represented an alternative to the prestige of the serialists and post-serialists as the vanguard of serious musical composition and compositional technique.[12]
Julian Anderson considers Danish composer Per Nørgård's Voyage into the Golden Screen for chamber orchestra (1968) to be the first "properly instrumental piece of spectral composition".[13]
A further development is the emergence of hyper-spectralism in the work of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram[14][15].
The "panoply of methods and techniques" used are secondary, being only "the means of achieving a sonic end" [1]. 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 (FFT). 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 [16]. These processes most often achieve a smooth transition through interpolation.[17]
The Romanian spectral tradition focuses more on the study of how sound itself behaves in a 'live' environment. Sound work is not restricted to harmonic spectra but includes transitory aspects of timbre and non-harmonic musical components (e.g., rhythm, tempo, dynamics). Furthermore sound is treated phenomenologically, i.e. NOT as an object of scientific study but as a dynamic presence to be encountered in listening. This approach results in a transformational musical language in which continuous change of the material displaces the central role accorded to structure in spectralism of the 'French school'[18].
Characteristic spectral pieces include Gérard Grisey's Partiels, Tristan Murail's Gondwana [19], Stockhausen's Stimmung, and Jean-Claude Risset's Mutations (1969). John Chowning's Stria (1977), and Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco (1980),[20] are examples of electronic pieces that embrace spectral techniques. The timbral and spectral explorations of the Romanian school are represented by Iancu Dumitrescu's Cogito/Trompe l'Oeil, Ioachimescu's Concerto for Trombone, Contrabass, and Orchestra, Horatiu Radulescu's Clepsydra and Octavian Nemescu's Quinde cimor tuoram.