Spectral Piano

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The most influential compositional movement of the past fifty years, spectralism was informed by digital technology but also extended the aesthetics of pianist-composers such as Franz Liszt, Alexander Scriabin, and Claude Debussy. Students of Olivier Messiaen such as Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey sought to create a cooperative committed to exploring the evolution of timbre in time as a basis for the musical experience. In The Spectral Piano, Marilyn Nonken shows how the spectral attitude was influenced by developments in technology but also continued a tradition of performative and compositional virtuosity. Nonken explores shared fascinations with the musical experience, which united spectralists with their Romantic and early modern predecessors. Examining Murail’s Territioires de l’oubli, Jonathan Harvey’s Tombeau de Messiaen, Joshua Fineberg’s Veils, and Edmund Campion’s A Complete Wealth of Time, she reveals how spectral concerns relate not only to the past but also to contemporary developments in philosophical aesthetics.

MARILyN NONkEN is an international concertizing pianist, Associate Professor of Music and Music Education, and Director of Piano Studies at New york University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her recordings and performances have been internationally reviewed, and her publications include chapters in Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music and Messiaen Perspectives. A highly regarded musician, she has recorded the complete piano music of Tristan Murail – Complete Piano Music, and Voix Voilees: Spectral Piano Music – and piano music of Olivier Messiaen, Hugues Dufourt, and Joshua Fineberg, and worked closely with Murail, Dufourt, Fineberg, and Harvey.

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Music since 1900

General Editor Arnold Whittall

This series – formerly Music in the Twentieth Century – offers a wide perspective on music and musical life since the end of the nineteenth century. Books included range from historical and biographical studies concentrating particularly on the context and circumstances in which composers were writing, to analytical and critical studies concerned with the nature of musical language and questions of compositional process. The importance given to context will also be reflected in studies dealing with, for example, the patronage, publishing, and promotion of new music, and in accounts of the musical life of particular countries.

Titles in the series

Jonathan Cross

The Stravinsky Legacy

Michael Nyman

Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond

Jennifer Doctor

The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936

Robert Adlington

The Music of Harrison Birtwistle

Keith Potter

Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass

Carlo Caballero

Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics

Peter Burt

The Music of Tōru Takemitsu

David Clarke

The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics

M. J. Grant

Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe

Philip Rupprecht

Britten’s Musical Language

Mark Carroll

Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe

Adrian Thomas

Polish Music since Szymanowski

J. P. E. Harper-Scott

Edward Elgar, Modernist

Yayoi Uno Everett

The Music of Louis Andriessen

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Schoenberg’s Transformation of Musical Language

Rachel Beckles Willson

Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War

Michael Cherlin

Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination

Joseph N. Straus

Twelve-Tone Music in America

David Metzer

Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Edward Campbell

Boulez, Music and Philosophy

Jonathan Goldman

The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez: Writings and Compositions

Pieter C. van den Toorn and John McGinness

Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom

David Beard

Harrison Birtwistle’s Operas and Music Theatre

Heather Wiebe

Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction

Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton

Music and Protest in 1968

Graham Griffiths

Stravinsky’s Piano: Genesis of a Musical Language

Martin Iddon

John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance

Martin Iddon

New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez

Alastair Williams

Music in Germany since 1968

Ben Earle

Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy

Jack Boss

Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea

Thomas Schuttenhelm

The Orchestral Music of Michael Tippett: Creative Development and the Compositional Process

Marilyn Nonken

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The Spectral Piano

From Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the

Digital Age

Marilyn Nonken

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United kingdom

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New york Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107018549

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2014

Printed in the United kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Nonken, Marilyn, author.

The spectral piano : from Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the digital age / Marilyn Nonken; with a contributory chapter by Hugues Dufort.

pages cm. – (Music since 1900) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-01854-9 (hardback)

1. Piano music – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Spectral music – History and criticism. I. Dufort, Hugues. II. Title.

ML707.N66 2014 786.209′04–dc23 2013039680

ISBN 978-1-107-01854-9 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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List of music examples viii

Acknowledgments x

Chronological list of works xii

1 An intimate history 1

2 Itinerary 13

3 Protospectralists at the piano 32

4 The first generation 64

5 The spectral effect 111

6 Spectral music and its pianistic expression 160

Translated from the French by Joshua Cody

HUGUES DUFOURT

Select discography 169

References 171

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Music examples

4.3 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, I. © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission. 87

4.4 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, III. © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission. 87

4.5 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, V. © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission. 88

4.6 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, VII. © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission. 89

4.7 Dufourt, Erlkönig, mm. 344–347. © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission. 105

4.9 Dufourt, Erlkönig, “Imprécations.” © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission. 106

5.4 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, opening. Reprinted by permission of the composer. 135

5.5 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, mm. 262–266. Reprinted by per-mission of the composer. 137

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5.9 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, final cadence. Reprinted by permis-sion of the composer. 141

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The Spectral Piano explores an attitude towards the piano that evolved over

the course of the twentieth century, has transformed the repertoire, and continues to influence those who engage with it. In writing this book, I have benefited from the insights of performers, composers, theorists, musi-cologists, sound technicians, and nonmusicians alike, all of whom contrib-uted their time and knowledge with an unusual generosity of spirit. The passion with which they joined me in my work and voiced their concerns both challenged me and encouraged me to take heart. Their shared enthusi-asm continually renewed my belief that this topic will continue to captivate musicians well into the twenty-first century.

Above all, I thank Hugues Dufourt, Joshua Fineberg, Tristan Murail, and Edmund Campion, whose music has entranced me. Their works led me to reconsider all I thought I knew about the piano and the musical experi-ence itself, and their comradeship has made my life immeasurably richer. My work with Jonathan Harvey was similarly inspiring; his passing dur-ing the final stages of writdur-ing this book saddened me, as I became aware how quickly the contemporary becomes historical. Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Charles Rosen, and David Burge were figures whose work cast a shadow over my own, whose recent deaths brought a new sense of urgency to my project.

From the earliest stages, my efforts were thoughtfully guided by my men-tors at New york University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development: Mary Brabeck, Robert Rowe, Lawrence Ferrara, and Ronald Sadoff, for whose encouragement I am grateful. I also benefited from the generous support of The Humanities Initiative at New york University. For their commentary and thoughtful, provocative critique of my material in all the stages of its development, I thank Neely Bruce, Richard Carrick, Joel Chadabe, Roderick Chadwick, Christopher Dingle, Robert Fallon, Graeme Fullerton, Philippe Hurel, Scott McCarrey, and Barry Rigal. Special thanks are due to Joshua Cody, for his elegant translation, and Mikel kuehn, for sharing his tremendous knowledge of computer and electronic music and penetrating criticisms, always in the most affable manner. At Cambridge University Press, thanks to Arnold Whittall, Vicki Cooper, and Fleur Jones for helping me to realize my vision. I am grateful to Fred Lerdahl, who first

Acknowledgments

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directed me towards the work of James J. Gibson; his direction convinced me to see my own work, both as a scholar and as a performer, as an ongoing experiment in the ecological perception of music. I would be nowhere with-out my students, whose valuable role has been that of my sounding board: Jade Conlee, Tina DiMonda, Jeff Lankov, Mario Antonio Marra, Andrew Malilay White, and especially Manuel Laufer. Words are insufficient to express my sincerest thanks to my husband George Hunka, a true writer and artist, and our daughters Goldie Celeste and Billie Swift, from whom I have learned so much in such a short time.

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1826 Liszt, Etude en douze exercices, S.136 1837 Liszt, Douze grandes études, S.137 1841 Liszt, Réminiscences de Don Juan, S.418

1851 Liszt, Douze études d’exécution transcendante, S.139

1855 Liszt, Années de pèlerinage, S.160 (“Première année: Suisse”) 1858 Liszt, Années de pèlerinage, S.161 (“Deuxième année: Italie”) 1874 Liszt, Die Glocken des Straßburger Münsters, S.6

1881 Liszt, Nuages gris, S.199

1883 Liszt, Années de pèlerinage, S.163 (“Troisième année”) 1885 Liszt, Bagatelle sans tonalité, S.216a

1886 Liszt, Unstern!, S.208 1902 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande 1903 Debussy, Estampes

1904 Debussy, L’isle joyeuse

Busoni, Piano Concerto, Op. 39 1905 Debussy, Images I

Debussy, La mer 1906–1920 Ravel, La valse 1907 Debussy, Images II

1909 Schoenberg, Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 1909–1910 Scriabin, Prométhée

1910 Debussy, Préludes I

Busoni, Fantasia contrappuntistica 1911–1912 Scriabin, Poème-nocturne, Op. 61

Scriabin, Sonata no. 6, Op. 62 1913 Debussy, Préludes II

Scriabin, Sonata no. 9, Op. 68 Scriabin, Sonata no. 10, Op. 70 1914 Scriabin, Vers la flamme, Op. 72

Scriabin, Etudes, Op. 74 1923 Cowell, Aeolian Harp

1924 Viñes, Menuet spectral (à la mémoire de Maurice Ravel) Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue

1925 Cowell, The Banshee 1928 Ravel, Boléro 1928–1929 Messiaen, Préludes

Chronological list of works

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1934 Varèse, Ecuatorial

1940–1941 Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps 1943 Messiaen, Visions de l’amen

1944 Messiaen, Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus 1946 Boulez, Premiére sonate

1946–1947 Hába, Suite for Quarter-Tone Piano, Op. 62 1947 Ives, Sonata no. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–1860

Babbitt, Three Compositions for Piano 1947–1948 Babbitt, Composition for Four Instruments 1948 Boulez, Deuxième sonate

Cage, Sonatas and Interludes Messiaen, Cantéyodjayâ

1948–1962 Nancarrow, Studies for Player Piano, nos. 1–30

1949 Messiaen, “Mode de valeurs et d’intensités” (Quatre études de

rythme)

1950–1951 Goeyvaerts, Nummer 1 (Sonata for Two Pianos) 1951 Stockhausen, Kreuzspiel

1951–1952 Boulez, Structures Ia

1952 Fano, Sonate pour deux pianos 1953 Messiaen, Réveil des oiseaux

Stockhausen, Klavierstücke I–IV 1954 Varèse, Déserts

1955 Boulez, Le marteau sans maître 1955–1956 Messiaen, Oiseaux exotiques 1955–1957 Boulez, Troisième sonate 1956–1958 Messiaen, Catalogue d’oiseaux 1957–1962 Boulez, Pli selon pli

1958 Varèse, Poème électronique

1959 Scelsi, Quattro pezzi per orchestra (su una nota sola) 1959–1960 Messiaen, Chronochromie

1961 Xenakis, Herma Ligeti, Atmosphères 1962 Johnston, Knocking Piece

Messiaen, Sept haïkaï

1963 Messiaen, Couleurs de la cité céleste 1964 Johnston, Sonata for Microtonal Piano

1965–1992 Nancarrow, Studies for Player Piano, nos. 31–51 1967 Murail, Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe …

Ligeti, Lontano

1968 Stockhausen, Stimmung The Beatles, Revolution no. 9 1968–1969 Ligeti, Ramifications

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Chronological list of works xiv

1969 Cage, Cheap Imitation

Harvey, Four Images after Yeats Risset, Mutations

1970 Davidovsky, Synchronisms no. 6 Lachenmann, Guero

Stockhausen, Mantra

Tenney, Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety 1971 Messiaen, La fauvette des jardins

1972 Crumb, Makrokosmos I Curtis-Smith, Rhapsodies 1973 Crumb, Makrokosmos II Xenakis, Evryali 1974 Babbitt, Reflections Lévinas, Appels

Grisey, Périodes (Les espaces acoustiques II) 1975 Rzewski, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!

Cage, Etudes Australes

Grisey, Partiels (Les espaces acoustiques III) 1976 Grisey, Prologue (Les espaces acoustiques I)

Nono, … sofferte onde serene … Murail, Mémoire/Erosion 1977 Chowning, Stria

Feldman, Piano

Finnissy, English Country Tunes

Grisey, Modulations (Les espaces acoustiques IV) Lévinas, Voix dans un vaisseau d’airain

Murail, Territoires de l’oubli Vivier, Shiraz

1978 Adams, Phrygian Gates Murail, Ethers

Grisey, Modulations 1978–1979 Dufourt, Saturne

Lévinas, Ouverture pour une fête étrange 1980 Carter, Night Fantasies

Harvey, Mortuos plango, vivos voco Murail, Gondwana

Grisey, Transitoires (Les espaces acoustiques V) 1981 Ferneyhough, Lemma-Icon-Epigram

Feldman, Triadic Memories Xenakis, Mists

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1985 Grisey, Epilogue (Les espaces acoustiques VI) Feldman, For Bunita Marcus

1986 Grisey, Talea

1990 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time 1991 Fineberg, Lightning

1992 Murail, Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire …

Lucier, Music for Piano with Slow Sweep, Pure Wave Oscillators Troncin, Seul

1993 Murail, La mandragore Troncin, Ciel ouvert Harvey, One Evening

1994 Harvey, Tombeau de Messiaen Harvey, Advaya

Lindberg, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra 1994–1996 Grisey, Vortex temporum

1995 Dufourt, An Schwager Kronos Fineberg, Till Human Voices Wake Us 1996 Campion, Natural Selection

1997 Dufourt, Meeresstille Harvey, Haiku Leroux, M

1997–1998 Fineberg, Recueil de pierre et de sable Fineberg, Tremors

1998 Harvey, Homage to Cage, à Chopin (und Ligeti ist auch dabei) 2000 Dufourt, Rastlose Liebe

Lindberg, Jubilees 2001 Fineberg, Veils

2002 Murail, Les travaux et les jours 2003 Harvey, Bird Concerto with Pianosong 2004 Dufourt, L’origine du monde

2005 Campion, Outside Music Dalbavie, Piano Concerto Dufourt, L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo Dufourt, Soleil de proie

Saariaho, Ballade 2006 Dufourt, Erlkönig 2007 Saariaho, Prelude

Hamelin, Etude no. 8, “Erlkönig after Goethe”

2008 Dufourt, La ligne gravissant la chute (Hommage à Chopin) 2010 Lévinas, Concerto pour un piano-espace no. 2 (revised)

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Chronological list of works xvi

2011 Dufourt, Vent d’automne

2012 Murail, Le désenchantement du monde Fineberg, Grisaille

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The Spectral Piano explores the relationship of theory and technology to

compositional and performance practices. It is an admittedly biased history of spectral music written from the perspective of an American pianist, in response to the repertoire I have explored and the composers with whom I have been fortunate to work. A larger, comprehensive history of the spectral attitude; its composers and their predecessors; and the repertoire of spec-tral and protospecspec-tral orchesspec-tral, electroacoustic, and instrumental music remains to be written. But an examination of the piano and the composers compelled to write for it offers a frame within which to contextualize the spectral attitude as both a contemporary phenomenon and a compositional approach rooted in the cultural, technological, and scientific developments of the past 200 years. A thoughtful appreciation of this history will in turn foster an appreciation of the attitudes towards sound, nature, and physical-ity that define spectralism in relation to the aesthetics of the late-Romantic and early-modern composers.

This is a story of transformation: how the conception of an instrument and its practice evolves and what inspires that evolution. It is an intimate history that tells, above all, a story of individuals and affinities, not eras. I will delineate the aesthetic trajectories of composers who shared an inter-est in specific aspects of the musical experience and explored them in their music, conscious, to paraphrase the composer Tristan Murail (b. 1947), of both the weight of history and the trivialities of fashion.

Although it is said that “history is written by the winners,” my purpose in writing this book is not to single out particular composers as “the winners.” As a pianist committed to the performance of works representative of many styles, I have never seen it as my role to identify any Zukunftsmusik or the “best” piece among a given group of pieces. Besides, I’m not certain what, if anything, is to be won: as composer and computer-music pioneer Jean-Claude Risset (b. 1938) tersely stated, “music is not an arms race” (Risset,

1996b). My role is to reveal the familial resemblances among various atti-tudes towards the craft of composition in general and to examine them in relation to the art of keyboard performance in particular.

The summer before attending conservatory, when I was seventeen years old, I studied with the pianist Armand Basile (b. 1922). In the 1950s and 1960s, then at the height of his powers, Basile was an acclaimed soloist and

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The Spectral Piano 2

chamber musician. Hailed as “a pianist of exceptional talents and terrific promise … [whose] varied tone colors … were more than enough to reveal a gifted pianist” (Steinfirst, 1943), Basile was appointed to the guest faculty at the Eastman School of Music and toured widely with violinist Abram Loft. By the time I came to work with him, his career had long since ended badly. He was almost entirely blind, plagued by poor health, and mournful of a life in music crippled by his own erratic performances and a form of self-sabotage, what his closest collaborators called a fatal “unwillingness to recognize that promotion of a concert career … takes significant investment in printing and publicity” (Loft, 2003: 135). While his professional career had been a disappointment, he was still passionate about the repertoire and obsessed with the pursuit of different pianistic colors and harmonic-timbral transformations. I recall his fascination with sound as though it were yester-day that we sat together. I had never heard anyone speak about music in this fashion, treating sound itself as a material graspable, malleable, manipu-lable in time. My strongest memory is of our work together on Scriabin’s tenth sonata. In lessons, we would play all the notes in a measure at tempo, then catch their resonance in the pedal and simply wait, sitting silently and listening to their decay. In retrospect, I see that he was far more interested in teaching me how to listen to the piano than how to play the instrument in any traditional sense. Neely Bruce (b. 1944), an American composer who studied piano with Basile at Eastman in the 1960s, recalled Basile’s insist-ence that his students always practice at tempo – even if it meant proceed-ing only a few measures at a time – to learn to hear the distinctive sound of each phrase and grasp specific acoustic phenomena relating to tone color observable only in real time. As I became versed in a broader repertoire, I became aware that there were certain composers, like Scriabin, Liszt, and Debussy, whose music was particularly suited to Basile’s approach, reward-ing the pianist intrigued by the temporal nature of timbral color. Other composers’ music, approached from this perspective, offered no rewards. Their music was “about” other things, not the sonorous world unique to the piano and the environment it offered for musical exploration.

Anecdotally, Bruce recalled rumors that Basile’s prodigious technique and sensitivity to touch and its timbral consequence came from untold hours in which he was forced, as a young pianist, to practice on a Virgil Practice Clavier – an early-twentieth-century silent keyboard with no strings and weighted keys, which clicked in response to the pianist’s touch and could be adjusted to various degrees of tension. Basile’s obsession with tone color may have been linked to traumatic experiences at the keyboard: initially, those of a prodigy allowed to play but not hear his instrument, and, later, to those of an artist who could imagine brilliant colors but only produce

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them through the hands of another pianist. His fascination with pianistic resonance may also be traced to his later studies in New York. As a young man, he studied at The Juilliard School with Olga Samaroff (1880–1948), an American student (born Lucy Mary Agnes Hickenlooper) of Debussy’s teacher Antoine-François Marmontel (1816–1898); and with Eduard Steuermann (1892–1964), who had worked in Berlin with Ferruccio Busoni (1886–1924), the virtuoso pianist, composer, and editor of several volumes of the Franz Liszt-Stiftung’s complete edition of the composer’s works.

But I am skeptical of pianists who tout their pedagogical lineages. Certain pianists always seem ready to trace their heritage, teacher by teacher, back to Liszt, Czerny, and Beethoven, as if to indicate something more than a highly rarified form of “Chinese whispers” – often evoking a veritable Reinheitsgebot for what seems the sole purpose of rationalizing a narrow approach to repertoire selection and performance practice. Instead, I connect Basile to Debussy, Liszt, and Busoni to suggest the opposite: an outward-looking, adventurous attitude towards the instrument shared by a diverse array of composers and performers similarly enamored with the sheer sonic possibility and physicality of pianistic sound. Their attitude underlies a certain philosophy towards playing, writing for, and thinking about the piano that has led not to aesthetic paralysis and stylistic atrophy but to radical changes in compositional and performance practice.

In my early twenties, I specialized in the performance of music consid-ered “difficult” (by myself, and other performers and listeners as well): the works of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Milton Babbitt (1916–2012), Pierre Boulez (b. 1925), Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943), and Michael Finnissy (b. 1946), as well as their American protégés such as Jason Eckardt (b. 1971). I was drawn to their music’s complexity and saw it as an aesthetic strength. I was also curious to know what attracted listeners and performers like myself to this repertoire, and what distinguished us from others who found the same music needlessly opaque and ungratifying, even punishing. By that time, I had studied at the Eastman School with David Burge (1930–2013), a student of the reclusive virtuoso, Pietro Scarpini (1911–1997) known for his performances of Busoni and Scriabin. Compared to his colleagues and contemporaries in the world of the conservatory, Burge was remarkably open-minded when it came to the music of his own time. Yet he dismissed the music of Ferneyhough and Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952) as “self-indulgent complexity and sonic violence carried to an unnecessarily cruel level of intensity,” and the piano music of Babbitt as “the product of intellectual tabulations rather than the expression of human feelings … One begins to think of these pieces as calculations in sound rather than as music” (Burge,

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experience – how we perceived what the same musical environment might afford us, in terms of sensory, emotional, and intellectual stimulation – profound. In the 1990s, as a doctoral student at Columbia University, I investigated the psychological processes of listeners engaged with what I defined as “the Complexity repertoire” (Nonken, 1999). This body of music included works exhibiting extremes of dissonance, metric ambiguity, verti-cal and horizontal density, and other characteristics that could be shown, in the parlance of cognitive psychology, to render their events and processes relatively challenging to identify, define, and recall.

In my doctoral dissertation, I asked:

Can specific factors be identified as responsible for our perceptions of certain musical works as more complex than others? If these factors can be identified, can they be shown to render the perception of these works different in kind from the perception of tonal works? Finally, if the perception of these more complex works can be shown to possess distinguishing characteristics, can the musical experience … be modeled in a precise manner reflective of psychological reality and the aesthetic experience?

(Nonken, 1999: 1) In the 1990s, still pursuing research in music perception, I began to perform works by composers of the New York School, such as John Cage (1912–1992), Morton Feldman (1926–1987), Alvin Lucier (b. 1931), and Christian Wolff (b. 1934). This repertoire demanded performance prac-tices different in kind from those required by that of the Second Viennese School and New Complexity composers. Cage, Feldman, Lucier, and Wolff were associated with the “downtown” aesthetic, an umbrella term that referred to the movements that emerged from lower Manhattan in the 1960s: a self-described “alternative” scene that saw itself as carrying on the American experimental tradition of Carl Ruggles (1876–1971) and Henry Cowell (1897–1965), while embracing elements of conceptualism, minimalism, and performance art (Gann, 2006). I toured with this music while continuing to perform that of Boulez, Babbitt, and Schoenberg, all associated with the “uptown” style – “uptown” referring not just to the bas-tions of classical and contemporary music located above 57th Street such as Columbia University and The Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, but also to the American development of European musical traditions, specifically the legacy of Schoenberg and his students. At the time, it was unusual for a pianist to perform works representing both “uptown” and “downtown” aesthetics. In the 1980s, new music per-formance in New York was dominated by pianists associated with the “uptown” scene, such as Ursula Oppens, Marc Ponthus, Chris Oldfather, and Alan Feinberg, and those more committed to “downtown” composers,

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such as Joseph Kubera, Kathleen Supové, Lisa Moore, and Anthony de Mare. I learned a great deal from all these players, whose tastes and abil-ities far exceed the way they have sometimes been characterized by critics and peers. Labels of “uptown” and “downtown” and the prejudices they carried were used across the country alternately to praise and disparage performers as well as composers, even in areas where the geographical distinctions were meaningless. As performers often in the press, we were stereotyped in terms of our apparent allegiance to one aesthetic or another, and not only in New York. In 2001, I was caricatured by a midwestern critic in a manner reflecting the mindset of the time: “She is a specialist, she doesn’t play the classics in public, and she doesn’t seek out Downtown Manhattan composers influenced by rock, ethnic music, Minimalism, or performance art. Nonken is an Uptown practitioner of big-brain music in a Western classical tradition tracing from Schoenberg to Webern to Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and their students” (Strini,

2001). Influential critics fueled the perception of an irreconcilable antag-onism between “uptown” and “downtown” performers, composers, and audiences. A Village Voice reviewer went so far as to equate aesthetic and stylistic differences with aspects of morality, associating aspects of “real evil” with the “uptown” aesthetic (Gann, 1998). Yet I found the depiction of the musical-aesthetic experience as somehow revolving around these two poles needlessly restrictive and not reflective of my own psychological reality. It seemed that all musics had the potential to offer, to any listener, invaluable experiences of liberation: freedom from the clock-time that governs our daily life, freedom from attributions of meaning, freedom to experiment with artistic interpretation, and freedom to experience the environment in terms of the “unfathomable particularity of a sensuously given” (Seel, 2005: xi). By experiencing this form of personal liberation in musical contexts – in all musical contexts – we learn to think and feel in new ways, gaining insight into our own existence.

Regardless of the repertoire that I performed, I found the same ques-tions continued to haunt me. I only found satisfying answers to them in considering the active musical engagement of listeners and their relation-ships to different musical environments along ecological lines. Whether we are discussing Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram; Cage’s 4′33″; Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux; or the piano études of Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy, we can describe all of these works as offering the listener a sonorous environment for exploration. How any listener navigates the environment depends on how that listener perceives its affordances and interprets them, objectively (in terms of sounding reality) and subject-ively (in relation to more personal factors, such as associations, memor-ies, and inferences). Ecologically conceived, the pianist’s role is to create

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that environment for the listener and beckon towards possible paths of exploration by defining those affordances, which may comprise timbral-harmonic complexes and elements of rhythm and density, as well as the-matic and motivic structures.

After developing my own ecological approach to performance and inter-pretation, it was no small pleasure to discover the work of the spectral com-posers. In 1998, New York was witness to “Rendezvous: Masterpieces from the Centre Georges Pompidou and Guggenheim Museums,” an exhibition made possible by the temporary shuttering of the Pompidou Center for renovation. The exhibit, held in the main galleries of the Guggenheim, was grand even by New York standards, featuring works by Picasso, Brancusi, Chagall, Duchamp, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Matisse, and others never before seen together. As a once-in-a-lifetime event, “Rendezvous” was pro-moted as a realization of André Malraux’s conception of the musée

imagi-naire. Supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the

Association Française d’Action Artistique, the exhibition was accompanied by cultural events designed to offer a glimpse of the contemporary French musical scene. These included the first concerts in America dedicated to music of the spectralists, featuring national premieres of works by Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey (1946–1998), Hugues Dufourt (b. 1943), Marc-André Dalbavie (b. 1961), Philippe Fenelon (b. 1952), and Jacques Lenot (b. 1945). French performers imported for the occasion included the pianist Dominique My and Ensemble Fa, the soprano Donatienne Michel-Dansac, and the clarinetist Pierre Dutrieu, accompanied by, as the Guggenheim’s press office announced, “two sound engineers of the internationally acclaimed IRCAM [Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique] Institute of Paris.” Two New York-based ensembles were also pre-sented: Ensemble Sospeso, directed by composers Joshua Cody and Kirk Noreen, and Ensemble 21, the group of which I was pianist and Artistic Director. Ensemble 21’s program featured music of Grisey, Murail, Philippe Hurel (b. 1955), and Philippe Leroux (b. 1959). Our performance of Grisey’s

Talea was the final performance of his music in his lifetime. He died

unex-pectedly a few days later.

For the next five years, it seemed that wave upon wave of French new music came crashing into the New York harbor. The year following the success of “Rendezvous” witnessed “IRCAM@Columbia,” a second fes-tival bringing proponents of the spectral attitude, as well as technolo-gies associated with IRCAM, to New York. The opening night offered Ensemble 21’s portrait of the British composer Jonathan Harvey (1939– 2012), featuring the piano solo Tombeau de Messiaen (1994); chamber works with piano, such as Nataraja (1983), Song Offerings (1985), and

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The Riot (1993); and the electroacoustic classic Mortuos plango, vivos voco

(1980). The next evening, Ensemble Sospeso presented works of Murail and Magnus Lindberg (b. 1958), the Finnish composer and pianist who had worked with Grisey. As part of the festival, local composers were invited to take part in free workshops devoted to cultural programming, compositional technique, and software, which offered a chance to mingle with Boulez and members of IRCAM’s administrative wing: Laurent Bayle, Eric De Visscher, and Andrew Gerzso. Mikhail Malt and Manuel Poletti, IRCAM technicians, presented workshops at historic Prentis Hall, the site of the former Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC). The week-long session ended with an all-Boulez program presented by the Ensemble Intercontemporain at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall. All the composers were present. It was apparent to many of us in the new music community that the spectral attitude had “arrived.” Over the next dec-ade, the composers strongly influenced by spectralism became constant presences in the city, with Lindberg as composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic; Murail as Professor of Music Emeritus at Columbia University; and Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952), a composer strongly influenced by Murail and Grisey, as Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. During the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, the exchange between performers and composers of spectral music spanned the Atlantic, with particular resonance in New York. A brief history of this era, as well as the personnel engaged in this exchange, reveals how a contemporary move-ment achieves critical mass, effecting changes in both compositional and performance practice.

The year 2003 saw another landmark in spectral music’s American recep-tion: the month-long “Sounds French,” a second festival organized with support from the Association Française d’Action Artistique. The Festival coincided with a low point in French–American political relations, stem-ming from the American invasion of Iraq earlier that year. In February, Dominique de Villepin, the French minister of foreign affairs, had con-demned America’s aggression in Iraq at the United Nations, receiving thun-derous applause, and anti-French sentiment was now reaching a critical level in the States and touching upon concert life. Stars of the Metropolitan Opera Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna canceled performances because of concerns about the war and terrorism, and there were worries about the timing of the Festival itself. Despite negative press, “Sounds French” pro-ceeded as planned, featuring performances of works by Dufourt, Grisey, Hurel, Leroux, Philippe Manoury (b. 1952), Gérard Pesson (b. 1958), Jean-Louis Florenz (1947–2004), Thierry Escaich (b. 1965), and Bruno Mantovani (b. 1974); a retrospective of French electronic music focusing on

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the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), Luc Ferrari (1929–2005), and Pierre Henry (b. 1927); the world premiere of Timbre, Espace, Mouvement by Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013), with the New York Philharmonic led by Mstislav Rostropovich; Boulez and the Ensemble Intercontemporain at Carnegie Hall; and the premiere of the chamber opera on texts of Gertrude Stein, To Be Sung, by Pascal Dusapin (b. 1955). As part of “Sounds French,” I presented a recital of Murail’s complete piano music at Miller Theatre, featuring the premieres of Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe … and Les travaux et les jours, the latter of which I had commissioned with the support of the Fromm Music Foundation.

At the time, promoting a nationalist vision of what music was and could be, De Visscher summarized the French perspective: “Our interest is in the logic of sound itself, in sound as an object, not as an expression of some-thing” (Kriesberg, 2003). De Visscher might have liked to claim that the sense of sound as an object, a breathing organism and not the musical representation of something else, was a uniquely contemporary Gallic delicacy. But the conception of sound as neutral material and the inher-ent mutuality between sound and listeners in the musical environminher-ent can be traced to the nineteenth century, to protospectral attitudes shared by representatives of the French, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian traditions. Aesthetic preferences, particularly those that appeal to the existence of psy-chological universals, transcend geographical distinctions.

Throughout the twentieth century, composers, pianists, and listen-ers sharing certain priorities have been drawn to the piano and to one another’s work, much as I was drawn to the spectralists. One sees in their interactions the kinds of elective affinities discussed by Goethe in Die

Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities; 1809). Goethe’s novel, written at

the same time as his Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Color), explored via a bio-logical metaphor the forces that underlie complex and personal social rela-tions (Goethe, 1960: 34–39; Brodsky, 1982). Like many of the composers discussed in The Spectral Piano, Goethe was an artist fascinated by science. Borrowed from the sciences, the term “elective affinity” refers to the tenden-cies, or preferences, of certain chemicals to bond with some chemicals and not others. Goethe applied this concept to the relationships forged between his characters, who found their interactions directed by a seemingly irre-sistible inner gravity. “The first that we notice about all living creatures is that they have connections with one another,” explains his character, The Captain. “It certainly sounds curious when one says something which is taken for granted anyway: but it’s only when we are fully clear about what is known that we can step forward to the unknown” (Goethe, 1960: 33). A few pages later, The Captain clarifies.

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Those natures, which on meeting, grasp each other quickly and affect each other mutually, are known as related. This relation is striking enough in the case of the alkalis and acids which, although they are in opposition to one another and perhaps just for that reason, seek and seize each other, modify each other, and form a new body together in the most decisive manner … Thus a separation and a new combination have taken place, and one now believes that it is justifiable to apply the word elective affinity, because it really does look as if one kinship was preferred to the other and chosen before it.

(Goethe, 1960: 35–36) Goethe’s biological metaphor mirrors Murail’s evocation of a phototrop-ism drawing him to Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), his teacher and men-tor (Nonken, 2013). “Phototropic” is a term used to denote the process by which a plant instinctively turns to the sun. Phototropism is a dynamic pro-cess of stimulation and sustenance; in a mutual relationship, the sun directs the plant’s growth, and the organism grows in response to the light. I sug-gest that Debussy oriented himself towards Liszt, Messiaen and Scriabin towards Debussy, Murail towards Messiaen – and in my own time, Fineberg towards Murail, Campion towards Grisey, even Murail towards Liszt – in an unbroken chain of artists, like organisms to the light, seeking nourishment. Biological metaphors seem to blossom in describing a self-professed eco-logical attitude towards music. Examining these elective affinities, described by Dufourt as “mysterious bridges,” I will suggest how compositional and performance traditions evolve.

To a great extent, the history of composers and performers has been determined by elective affinities, drawing composers to their materials, and performers and listeners to the particular experiences that they offer. What drew me to the music of the spectral composers, or to see my own inter-ests mirrored within it? Certainly, I was entranced by the kinds of musical processes and transformations they explored, which seemed immediately accessible yet neither obvious nor pedantic. I sensed their extremely sensi-tive treatment of my instrument, particularly in how it was allowed to res-onate and breathe in a manner that reflected a profound understanding of its mechanism and the temporal nature of its timbral color. In terms of how the piano’s registers and pedals were deployed, their use of the instrument was artful. Even more so, in terms of the specific and sometimes idiosyn-cratic notation of their scores, their approach to the performer was both challenging and respectful. In its sonic conception and graphic represen-tation on the page, the music elegantly confronted the temporal issues of resonance with which pianists grapple every moment at the keyboard. All pianists deal with the uncertainties and disorders that come from the nature of our instrument: its legendary decay, its unstable and idiosyncratic

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tuning, how different registers speak in various ways, and how every instru-ment seems to resonate somewhat curiously, amplifying certain frequencies and muting others, in relation to its own inherently flawed construct and the peculiarities of the space in which it resides. We live with an instru-ment scarcely improved over the course of the twentieth century, and we often lament its idiosyncrasies – and the daily reactions of wood, felt, and metal to heat and humidity that variously impede the best efforts to make music. Upon reading Grisey and Dufourt and exploring the work of those who followed the first generation, I was heartened to find a group of com-posers who considered these aspects of instrumental reality – the instru-mental body, and the physical reality of how sound works – as defining aesthetic concerns. They engaged with the phenomena of the piano in real time, demanding from the performer spontaneity and the ability to respond with alacrity to the instrument in time and space. For me, their works were transcendent in performance because of, and not in spite of, the eccentrici-ties of the instrument.

In the nineteenth century, Goethe’s work exploring the subjective and objective aspects of perception and how they theoretically might gov-ern human behavior and experience provoked many scientists, not least Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894). In his papers “On the Scientific Researches of Goethe” and “Goethe’s Anticipation of Subsequent Scientific Ideas” (1853 and 1892, respectively), Helmholtz took issue with Goethe’s mistrust of causal relations and inability to articulate a precise or definite theory. Like others at the time critical of Goethe’s interdisciplinary endeav-ors, Helmholtz characterized him as a dilettante and located an ominous “threat of subjectivity” in his work (Hallet, 2009: 191). His hostility to Goethe’s fundamental perspective – that of an artist inspired by scientific discovery yet not wholly committed to the empirical endeavor and the con-struction of airtight theories – presaged the uneasy marriage of art and sci-ence, and the tensions to be faced by those conducting interdisciplinary research from inherently artistic perspectives.

I have sensed these tensions. In The Spectral Piano, I attempt to show the positive benefits of the interaction between art and science, illumin-ating the kinds of musical projects that could never have been realized without the exchange among those involved in fields of artistic and sci-entific inquiry historically nonaligned. Like Eric Daubresse and Gérard Assayag, I seek to demonstrate how independent artists, “each through his own preoccupations, has caused advances in research and has succeeded in constructing a musical project which could not have been realized with-out the back and forth between creative evolution and scientific or tech-nical research” (Daubresse and Assayag, 2000: 64). I proceed as a pianist

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trained as a music theorist, neither a computer scientist nor psychologist nor composer. I embark on this journey with an affinity for those com-posers who have been inspired by the piano’s acoustic potential and, at times, seduced by technology’s promises. I hope to speak to the relation-ship between art and technology and the challenges faced by all artists who seek to pursue their own visions under the porous umbrella of interdiscip-linary research.

After touring with the complete piano music of Boulez and a portrait recital of the compositions of Finnissy, I was shocked to discover a reper-toire that so organically considered the physical processes of the performer and instrument, as well as the psychological processes of the performer and listener. In my liner notes for Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli, one of the most astonishing piano works of the twentieth century, I wrote that this music was not written for the piano, but about the piano. I have since come to understand that this music was also written, in a deeply spectral sense, for the body of the pianist and the mind of the listener.

In the late 1990s, this all seemed quite new to me. The more time that I have spent with this music, however, the more I have come to see its ties to the past increasingly apparent. While I was working on Territoires de l’oubli with Murail shortly before the recording session, he commented that, apart from electronic music, the strongest compositional influence on his writ-ing for piano were the compositions of Liszt. At the time, I did not perceive the relationship. Yet the longer I explored the music of the past and present with the concept of a spectral piano in mind, a certain aesthetic trajectory became clear. It is impossible to express how my knowledge of my own instrument so radically changed after learning Murail’s La mandragore, and how my experiences with the piano music of Murail, Harvey, Dufourt, and Joshua Fineberg (b. 1969) led me to not only a higher understanding of technique but also a more intimate understanding and appreciation of the contributions of protospectral composers like Debussy, Scriabin, and Liszt. This lineage is hinted at in the work of the musicologist and pianist Charles Rosen (1927–2012), himself a student of Liszt’s pupil Moriz Rosenthal (1862–1946): “Liszt made it possible to give qualities of sound – resonance, texture, contrasts of register – an importance they had never had before in composition. Tone color is even more important in his music than in that of Berlioz, and his combinations of invented sound are often as astonishing as those in electronic music” (Rosen, 1995: 508). My work continues to explore this vital tradition, which unites a family of composers, performers, and lis-teners concerned with timbral color and the experience of musical forms, around which, to paraphrase Dufourt, the dust of our senses settles. This heritage is one of independent artists sharing the conviction that evolving

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technologies and performance practices will lead to aesthetic experiences of unprecedented richness. This spectral attitude, which feeds like an elec-tric current into the contemporary compositional world, has enriched the repertoire of the twentieth century and promises to inform the piano music of the future.

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Many people fear the intrusion of the computer in our lives, since it appears as a fearful instrument of normalization. Yet it does not have to be so. Art music has been and should continue to be a strong resisting force against the temptations of triviality and mercantilism, against the appeal of stereotyped and quickly exhausted gadgets. In the domain of musical sound, the refinement of digital synthesis and processing opens wide new territories, offering different points of view, suggesting novel thoughts. It shows that the computer can be – and should be – a tool of liberation and personalization. Only a tiny part of these new territories has been explored so far; most of it is still unknown, “terra ignota ubi sunt leones,” as in the ancient and incomplete maps of the earth. But the avenues open are already more than promising.

(Risset, 1992: 615–616) This book presents a story about how composing for, listening to, and play-ing the piano changed radically over the course of the twentieth century. Throughout, however, the reader will find references to another instru-ment of inestimable import: the computer. It, not the piano, is the defining instrument of our age. The computer has changed how we listen to music. It has changed how composers write music. Spectral analysis and digital synthesis, a computer-assisted technology for making musical sounds, have altered what is known about the piano’s unique tone color and the myriad elements that contribute to our perceptions of instrumental timbre. The technology of the computer has changed how we conceive of sound in an aesthetic sense almost as dramatically as it has altered what is known about human musical perception and performance.

The story begins in the late nineteenth century, long before the dawn of the digital age, with the work of three pioneering composers whose work heralded the rise of the modern piano repertoire: Franz Liszt (1811–1886), Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), and Claude Debussy (1862–1918). It traces their compositional and aesthetic lineage through Olivier Messiaen, peerless in the twentieth century as an influential composer, performer, and pedagogue, to a group of composers associated with what is now called the “spectral attitude.” It takes us on a journey through space and time, tra-versing the Atlantic and shuttling between centuries. In so doing, it asks the reader to reconsider how performance practices and compositional practices evolve amid musical, cultural, socio-political, and technological

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developments, and in relation to individual artists and their personal yet interconnected aesthetic goals. The story offers a provisional history of the piano in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, considering the viewpoints and activities of composers, performers, and listeners separated by geography and time but united in their urges both to celebrate the poten-tial of the piano and to transcend its limitations. First and foremost, this is a book about the emergence of a modern conception of the piano. It is also about an inherently ecological attitude towards the musical experience itself, which has manifested itself in various guises over the past century in relation to contemporaneous developments in philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics.

In the 1970s, the ideas of the spectralists shook the world of contempor-ary composition, a field that was, in the United States and Europe, shaped by debates regarding serialism and neo-tonality, the New Complexity and minimalism, sonorism, chance, and the growing acousmatic repertoire. Informed by research in psychoacoustics and developments in electronic music and digital technology, the spectral attitude brought something quite new to the table (Pressnitzer and McAdams, 2000). Yet spectral attitudes towards the conception and perception of sound were not without histor-ical precedent. In the chapter “Protospectralists at the piano,” the innova-tions of Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy are considered with an eye towards their spectral descendants. These late Romantics and early modernists were still coming to terms with the timbral potentials of their instrument. Their pianos were much like the pianos we know today, far from standardized but replete with double-escapement actions, sostenuto pedals, and single-piece, full cast-iron frames. Their sonic potential, however, was largely untapped. Throughout the lifetime of Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), the piano remained a largely mimetic instrument aspiring to the model of the human voice. Considered as a whole, the oeuvre of dedicated pianist- composers Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy moves away from this model, revealing a rad-ically expanded conception not only of the sounds and textures that the piano could produce but also of the physical technique required to create novel sonic environments. These three historical figures in particular are notable for their intuitive understanding of the physicality of sound and the expertise required to produce that sound: inextricable components of compositional aesthetics. Together, Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy created a massive, progressive body of work – études, preludes, sonatas, sets of char-acter pieces, transcriptions, and tone poems – that redefined how the mod-ern piano could sound and be played. How they conceived the piano from an acoustic standpoint and envisioned the psychological aspects of musical listening influenced their notational strategies and personal performance

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aesthetics. In their music, and, to various extents, their own performances, the piano came into its own as an instrument capable of speaking for itself.

This Romantic provenance leads to the work of Messiaen, the direct heir to Debussy. Debussy’s influence on Messiaen is well documented. Messiaen referred to the years of World War I (1914–1918) as a formative period in which he realized his calling as a composer (Hill and Simeone, 2007: 12). During this time, while he was just a child, he pored over the operas of Gluck, Mozart, Berlioz, and Wagner. Yet the music of Debussy held the greatest significance for him. He treasured his scores for Estampes (Samuel,

1967: 123) and Pelléas et Mélisande, the latter given to him by his piano teacher Jean de Gibon (1873–1952). Upon his former teacher’s death, Messiaen recalled receiving the score to Debussy’s opera, written just six years before he was born.

What did the teacher give to the child … a classic work, a harmony treatise? No: he gave him a score which at the time was the height of daring (rather like serial music, or musique concrète, or a sonata by Boulez nowadays). He gave him Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy! This present served to confirm the young pupil’s direction, and point him in the direction he wanted.

(Hill and Simeone, 2007: 15) Virtually his first opus, Messiaen’s Préludes (1929) were written less than twenty years after Debussy’s, whose two volumes were completed in 1910 and 1913. Messiaen’s preludes are something of a love letter to his prede-cessor, revealing a youthful passion that endured. He continued to teach Debussy’s piano music in his composition and analysis courses throughout his career, and to study Debussy’s works privately as well (Boivin, 2007; Benitez, 2005). On a trip to Italy in the early 1970s, during the period in which he composed La fauvette des jardins – a sprawling piano solo which suggests a protospectral frame of mind – Messiaen’s luggage held the scores for Debussy’s preludes and études (Chadwick, 2013; Hill and Simeone, 2007: 284). As will be detailed, Messiaen extended Debussy’s harmonic language, developing a way of writing for the piano that simultaneously addressed his personal concerns with timbral color, temporality, virtuosity, and percep-tion. He asserted these elements as primary to his pianistic compositional aesthetic, and this assertion carried particular salience uttered in the wake of the postwar avant-garde and the rising post-serial Darmstadt School asso-ciated with his students Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), and Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001). Messiaen’s piano works such as the Visions

de l’Amen (1943), Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus (1944), and Quatre études de rythme (1949–1950) may well have established him as a major composer

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piano from the 1950s and 1960s (Réveil des oiseaux, Oiseaux exotiques, and the seven-volume Catalogue d’oiseaux) that inspired those who stud-ied with him at the Conservatoire, notably Murail and Grisey. Messiaen’s thought and writing encouraged his students to consider the piano not as an instrument whose Golden Age – associated with virtuosi such as Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860–1941), Josef Hofman (1876–1957), Artur Rubinstein (1887–1982), Vladimir Horowitz (1903–1989), and Claudio Arrau (1903– 1991) – had passed, but rather as an instrument of unrealized potential, which could become again the composer’s confidant.

A theme throughout The Spectral Piano is how technology, as it evolved in the early twentieth century, led composers to reconceive musical sound in general and the piano’s capacities in particular. Early forays into the world of electronic instruments were motivated by goals of analyzing musical sounds in a neutral manner, recreating extant sounds, and syn-thesizing new sounds. Today, these goals may seem simple, even quaint. Research in sound technology, however, led to a radical re-evaluation of the stuff of music itself. In the mid twentieth century, the technologies of spectral analysis and digital synthesis offered composers newly plastic, accessible methods by which to explore their curiosity about the nature of harmony and instrumental timbre, and provided increasingly practical tools to realize their most elusive musical imaginings. The rise of ever more versatile tools for sound synthesis and methods of computer-assisted ana-lysis not only led to the birth of a new acousmatic repertoire (consisting of works designed to be heard through loudspeakers, without the participa-tion of live instrumentalists) but also revoluparticipa-tionized how works for acous-tic instruments were composed. Developing technologies raised the bar for composers and performers alike, who, in comparison with the musicians of previous eras, brought to bear on their artistic endeavors a knowledge of their materials arguably more sophisticated and different in kind. At the same time, a greater knowledge of acoustics and psychological reality enabled late-twentieth-century composers to further the inquiries of their predecessors, seeking new answers to the same questions that had obsessed Liszt, Scriabin, Debussy, and Messiaen regarding the acoustic nature of the piano’s sound, the temporal aspects of harmonic-timbral color, and the objective and subjective dimensions of musical perception.

The development of sound technology after World War II resulted from the collaborative efforts of scholars, researchers, and composers working internationally. The Spectral Piano is not the appropriate context in which to provide a rigorously nuanced history of the genesis of computer music, which already exists elsewhere (Hugill, 2008; Chadabe, 1996, 1997; Roads,

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music and computer-assisted acoustic research that occurred at this time in relation to the emergence of spectralism enables us better to understand the overall atmosphere – one of seismic technological changes that coin-cided, on both sides of the Atlantic, with similarly dramatic aesthetic, cul-tural, social, and political developments. The present investigation focuses on a line of research pursued at Bell Laboratories associated with the work of Max V. Mathews (1926–2011) and Risset, and the ensuing transatlantic dialogue for which their work was a catalyst. Theirs was but one thread of research in acoustics and psychoacoustics ongoing at many academic institutions, including the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) in New York, the studios of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) in Cologne, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan, and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. Acknowledging that the work of Mathews and Risset is just one piece of a much larger and complex mosaic, “The first generation” offers a discussion of these technological developments, specifically focusing on Mathews’s solving of digital synthesis at Bell Labs and the activities of Risset, who brought this technology to France in the early 1970s.

In France, contemporaneous changes in artistic perspectives and per-formance practices paralleled shifts taking place in arenas social and pol-itical, in cultural shorthand now associated with the events of May 1968. That spring saw riots, protests, general strikes, and student occupations involving nearly a quarter of the population that threatened to upset the regime of Charles de Gaulle. Seizing upon the cultural and political mood, Messiaen’s students Murail, Grisey, Roger Tessier (b. 1939), and Michaël Lévinas (b. 1949) formed L’Itinéraire, a group of performers and composers dedicated not to a style but to an attitude. Vowing to unite art and technol-ogy, they adopted a compositional stance more closely attuned to the real-ities of the human aesthetic experience and the acoustic nature of sound. They sought to create a music deeply informed by recent advances in tech-nology, psychology, and psychoacoustics, and to create an inclusive artistic environment dedicated to a freer exchange, or mutuality, among composers, performers, and listeners. First-generation spectral attitudes – the plural is used intentionally, as the “spectral” label was never intended to describe a monolithic style so much as to indicate a set of affinities – were inherently ecological in their acknowledgment, in the processes of composition and performance, of the nature of sound (the objective, physical nature of exter-nal reality) and the nature of human perception (the subjective, interexter-nal nature of aural perception) (Hasegawa, 2009). “The first generation” relates

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spectral perspectives to those central to Gibsonian ecological psychology (Gibson, 1966, 1979; Clarke, 2005) and the philosophical aesthetics of nature (Seel, 1992, 2005; Haselböck, 2007).

“The first generation” includes examinations of Murail’s Territoires de

l’oubli (1977) and Les travaux et les jours (2002), and Dufourt’s Erlkönig

(2006). On paper and in performance, these solo piano works exhibit char-acteristically spectral aesthetic priorities, notational practices, and perform-ance aesthetics. Certainly, Murail’s contributions and influence on spectral compositional and performance practices cannot be overestimated. His complete piano works span nearly half a century (1967–2012). In them, we sense both the twilight of Romanticism and the dawn of the digital age. They evidence the emergence of a pianistic aesthetic influenced equally by Lisztian virtuosity and techniques of computer-assisted composition, and uniquely document the developing conception of a spectral piano from the Ground Zero of the first generation.

Murail’s compositional practice is related to that of Cage, Feldman, and Finnissy, composers for whom Murail expressed little affinity. One might question why the New York School and the New Complexity are brought to bear on the present discussion, when the composers associated with these groups expressed attitudes that were, in most instances, diametrically opposed to those of the spectralists. Yet these composers can be defined not only by their irrefutable differences but also by their shared fascina-tions. There are aleatoric (chance) elements in the music of Murail. There are spectral aspects to the music of Feldman. All confronted compositional challenges involving the nature of sound, temporality, perception, and vir-tuosity, for which each devised singularly distinctive solutions. Considering spectralism in relation to opposing aesthetic perspectives provides crucial insights into the spirit of the time. As one who has had the good fortune to perform the music of these composers and to work closely with them, I have found that deeper knowledge of one repertoire has without exception led to a more subtle understanding and appreciation of the others.

Of all the first-generation spectral composers, Dufourt may be the most engaged with the music of the past, as a philosopher, a theorist, a music-ologist, and a once practicing pianist who remains passionate about the nineteenth-century repertoire. Despite the fact that many of his writings were seminal in the dissemination and early explication of the spectral atti-tude, he has remained wary of theories evoked to rationalize aesthetic deci-sions. His compositional activity is best described as more of a personal, rather than polemical, exercise. Works like Erlkönig illustrate Dufourt’s dual fascinations: to experiment with sound in time and to recapture the expres-sive power of the Romantic era, via an inherently contemporary atonal