Much has been written about the common concerns of the spectral com- posers and their aesthetic priorities, linking Grisey and Dufourt, and Murail and Risset (Moscovich, 1997: 27) The seminal aesthetic statements of the first-generation spectralists constitute a body of writings stemming from the late 1970s and early 1980s (Grisey, 1978, 1998; Dufourt, 1979; Murail,
1980, 1984). There remains a rich discourse on musique spectrale access- ible only to those able to read French; of English-language sources, the double-edition of Contemporary Music Review (Fineberg, 2000) presents translations of articles by Grisey, Murail, and their colleagues, and a later edition of the same journal features Murail’s collected writings, to date, in translation (Fineberg and Michel, 2005). These texts, as well as those of contemporary musicologists and theorists (Goldman, 2010; Drott, 2009; Croft, 2010; Hasegawa, 2009; Nonken, 2008; Pasler, 2007), convey a gen- eral yet functional outline of contemporary spectral attitudes and their his- tory, to which the repertoire clearly speaks. In the present context, building
The Spectral Piano 22
upon these contributions, the spectral attitude is defined as an approach to music composition and performance supported by four related preoccu- pations: timbre (tone color), process (transformation), time (temporality), and perception.
In the 1960s and 1970s, spectral analysis, a computer-assisted mode of acoustic analysis, revealed what Harvey referred to as the “inner life” of sound. Instrumental timbre was reconceptualized as multidimensional, multifaceted material. Each sound’s amplitude envelope revealed the unique characteristics of its onset (in terms of piano, the attack), steady state, and decay, demonstrating the temporal nature of tone color. By pre- senting illustrations of acoustic sound in previously inaccessible detail, digital technology and the analytical methods it fostered prompted com- posers and theorists to rethink what they heard and might create, leading to re-evaluations of different musics and their materials (Wessel, 1979: 45). The rhetoric of the time conveys a sense of wonder and aspiration.
Only now, through a new synthesis of scientific and musical analysis, can we begin to probe the sonic enigma. Photographs of the spectral formation of musical works provide a bridge that makes a new understanding of sound and music, sound in music, possible …
They objectify much that has previously been most elusive, even mystifying, about sounds and the ways they create the design of musical structures. In so doing, they illuminate the very nature of musical structure and expression.
(Cogan, 1984: 1–3) The spectral composers sought to explore a musical art concerned above all with the realization, in real time, of what sound could become. Considered in earlier eras as a compositional component subordinate to pitched or for- mal elements, timbre was recognized in its complexity and richness as a compelling basis for entire musical works. The spectralists’ conception of tone color as a multidimensional factor contributed towards their view of musical sound as a unified whole, rather than a conglomeration of discrete parameters capable of being independently manipulated or perceived.
Research in acoustics and psychoacoustics led spectral composers to explore the sensual, dramatic, and formal potentials of sound itself to a degree unequalled since the Romantic era, engaging with “the relationship between the delight in sound and the delight in structure” (Rosen, 1995: 40). Timbral analysis and synthesis were a dual focus of those involved with developing digital technologies associated with the advent of electronic and computer music. Insights gleaned from advances in this field informed composition for traditional instruments, expanding the possibilities for
instrumental composition with significant implications for notation and performance practice. As first-hand historical accounts of the era attest (Risset, 1992; Chadabe, 1996), the interaction between these overlapping fields influenced the composers of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde in no small way.
Spectral composers conceived of musical sound as a continuum, rather than a series of discrete cellular elements such as pitched and rhyth- mic motives, melodies, and conventional chords in progression. A spec- tral approach to the compositional process might begin with the spectral (computer-assisted) analysis of sounds. Instrumental synthesis, a signature spectral compositional technique, provided a methodology through which acoustic instruments could be deployed to express qualities of the harmonic spectra of sounds both real and imagined. In many spectral compositions, harmonic models and processes were derived from characteristic spectra of instrumental sounds. Yet the goal was never to create a one-to-one map- ping, but rather to explore creatively in an original composition of the proc- esses and transformations suggested by analysis.
The goal of instrumental additive synthesis is never to recreate, but rather to reveal the latent musical potential of pre-existing sonic material.
(Klingbeil, 2009: 80) Instead of basing their music on the manipulation of rows or motives, spectral composers take inspiration from the physical properties of sound itself. Each of these composers defines “spectral” music differently … but as a generalization we could say that the essential characteristic of spectralism is the dissection of sounds into collections of partials or overtones as a major compositional and conceptual device. Spectral composers use the acoustical fingerprints of sounds – their spectra – as basic musical material.
(Hasegawa, 2009: 349) The spectral composer’s imagination would be sparked by the essence of sound, not its representation in musical notation. At the 2013 “Full-Fire Tribute to Tristan Murail” held in Athens, Greece, his former student Keith Moore described Murail’s compositional attitude in the unpublished lecture “Tristan Murail and Spectralism Sighted through ‘Les travaux et les jours.’”
What spectral techniques do is allow composers to seize on some aspect of sound itself as an organizing principle; and it is likely that in some corresponding way – large or small – this moves the composer away from handling the traditional elements of musical notation as organizing principles. Tristan, very simply, puts it like this: “Why do we always have to think of music in terms of notes? We work with sounds, for which notes are simply symbols … notes and sounds are not the same thing.”
The Spectral Piano 24
In spectral works, structural forms are associated with the listener’s percep- tions of continual timbral change. Modulations and transformations from one musical state to another are intended to be perceptually transparent, or psychologically real. The form or scope of spectral compositions is deter- mined by audible processes of transformation featuring the contraction, expansion, mutation, and interpolation of sound materials. In composi- tions traversing relative states of order and stability, disorder and chaos, psychoacoustically inseparable aspects of rhythm, pitch, texture, harmony, and timbre define environments of sonic transformation and areas of flux between different states of being. The transformation from one state to another provides the basis for musical dramas divorced from conventional formal structures, within which the awareness of the liminal is of paramount importance. The fascination with threshold states – cruxes of ambiguity, in which listeners become disoriented in the act of literally structuring their musical environment – is reflected in the titles of landmark spectral works such as Risset’s Mutations (1969), Grisey’s Modulations (1976), and Murail’s
Désintégrations (1982). Ideally, the observation of and sustained engage-
ment with unfolding processes in time direct the listener’s experience of the musical environment.
Processes provide the senses of direction, unpredictability, and even inevitability, supporting local events as well as developments of a more glo- bal nature. Musical processes spectrally conceived may be seen as descend- ants of Romantic thematic transformation. In the later nineteenth century, the preordained role of motives and themes within codified forms began to break down, as composers such as Liszt and Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) began to explore how inherently neutral materials could be revitalized and recast. The culture of sound that emerged in the Romantic era revolution- ized compositional technique, suggesting a new conception of the musical art and allowing composers, via the exploration of sonorous processes, to bypass the classical imperatives of form.
The technologies of spectral analysis and sound synthesis illuminated the temporal aspects of instrumental timbre: distinctive qualities that cannot be instantly comprehended, whose emergence and perception takes time. The spectral focus on the temporal nature of tone color led to an aesthetic interest in processes that demanded certain timespans to fulfill their poten- tial and be perceived as such. Time in spectral music cannot be discussed without reference to timbre and process. Yet the spectral attitude towards temporality in music is worth examining independently, as the notion of sound’s becoming is an integral part thereof and crucially not metaphor. The spectralists echoed Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995): “There is no being beyond becoming” (Deleuze, 1983: 22). For composers seeking to explore
these timbral-harmonic processes musically and see them convincingly realized in live musical performance, temporal considerations led to new performance aesthetics and notational strategies.
The spectral composers embraced a sense of time associated historically with the late-nineteenth-century French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), a contemporary of Debussy. Bergson’s concept of duration (a time as experienced) is defined by perceptions of process and transform- ation. Duration, the opposite of an absolute and quantifiable “clock time,” is a process by which the flow of time is perceptually determined by how long things seem to take. The flow of music in a Bergsonian sense is a con- tinuum of acoustic change, “a succession of qualitative changes which melt and permeate one another” (Bergson, 1910: 104). Nuanced considerations of duration (Deleuze, 1966; Pasler, 2007) reveal a rich French philosoph- ical tradition leading to the spectral composers, who explored the processes inherent in a single note on levels both local and global, finding affinities on the levels of microstructure (inherent in a single sound) and macro- structure (belonging to the composition as a whole). It is not coincidental that one of Dufourt’s teachers was Deleuze, whose Le bergsonisme (Deleuze,
1966) almost singlehandedly revived interest in the philosopher’s work in the late 1960s.
In the 1970s, the rise of the discipline of music perception and cogni- tion paralleled the advent of the spectral aesthetic. Psychologists, psycho- acousticians, and music theorists converged to determine the nature and components of human musical engagement, and they proceeded with an eye not necessarily towards how the human psychological apparatus might have evolved, idealistically, in response to musical stimuli, but towards how it might engage with sound realistically, in an active manner. Composer- theorists enthusiastically speculated about how the new discourse, unit- ing art and science, could herald a Zukunftsmusik of unprecedented power and accessibility: “For the ancients, nature may have resided in the music of the spheres, but for us it lies in the musical mind. I think the music of the future will emerge less from twentieth-century progressive aesthetics than from newly acquired knowledge of the structure of musical percep- tion and cognition” (Lerdahl, 1988: 120). As emerging computer-based technologies were making aspects of music and mind more transparent, it became clearer what could and could not be heard, or segregated by the human ear and brain, in a musical stream (Bregman, 1990). Experiments in digital synthesis, furthering decades of research in additive synthesis, brought about heightened awareness of human perceptual mechanisms. And psychoacoustic research, which included the study of timbre percep- tion, became central to the agendas of major institutions devoted to music
The Spectral Piano 26
and technology founded in the mid twentieth century. Spectral composers with access to this discourse and these facilities felt an aesthetic imperative to create a music specifically informed by this knowledge of the human cap- acity for perception. “The computer’s synthesized sound material presents a malleability without precedent,” declared Risset. “It lends itself to new modes of arrangement, to new architectures. But we have to clarify this material in the light of perception” (Risset, 1977).
Spectral composers suggested that their desire to write a music reflect- ive of psychological reality – conceived with the biases and tendencies of the human psychological mechanism in mind – distinguished them from composers of integrally serial works, such as Boulez and Babbitt. As Grisey infamously announced, “We are musicians and our model is sound not lit- erature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture” (Grisey, 1998: 298). While Babbitt was engaged with early empirical studies of music perception at the CPEMC and wrote for a specific listenership, it can be said that the musical structures that he devised to engage the listener were just that: musically conceived structures, but not structures conceived to reflect the phenom- ena of acoustic sound. The processes of interest to the spectral composers also differed from the aleatoric procedures employed by Cage and the com- posers of the New York School, who were also interested in psychological aspects of musical listening. Maintaining that “The nature of listening is in hearing something, and then realizing that you’re no longer hearing it, that you’re hearing something else” (Grimes and Cage, 1986: 49), Cage saw the musical experience as way to shepherd listeners towards a state of height- ened sensory awareness. In general, aleatoric processes were designed to lead listeners and performers away from the conception of an autonomous work of art, towards a contemplative state independent of the music at hand. While the spectralists also saw the musical experience as revolving around the affects produced by music in the human mind, their musical works were the locus of those affects.
Many sources offer insights into the psychoacoustic research of this era and its relation to studies of music perception (Handel, 1989; Bregman,
1990). In more journalistic fashion, volumes of Computer Music Journal and Music Perception (founded in 1977 and 1983 respectively) reveal the march of technology, in step with the evolving repertoire. Much in this dis- course seeks to lay the foundation for a relatively “new” field of academic inquiry, such as empirical studies seeking to demonstrate the existence of psychological universals regarding the perception of pitches, intervals, and scales and shared mental representations of tonal constructs (such as the hierarchy of pitches within the diatonic scale, or the relation between
specific chords within a tonal pitch space). In the present context, however, we should remind ourselves of psychoacoustics as a discipline with roots in Liszt’s lifetime. Helmholtz’s classic Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen
als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music) was published in 1863,
preceding Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph by just fourteen years.