Spectral Resources

Jonathan Cross:

‘The spectral adventure has allowed the renovation, without imitation of the foundations of occidental music, because it is not a closed technique but an attitude.’11 Subsequent composers such as Marc-Andre ́ Dalbavie and Philippe Hurel have also chosen to speak of spectralism more as an attitude than as a set of practices. For others still, such as Georg Friedrich Haas, Fausto Romitelli, and Kaija Saariaho, spectral thinking can inform deeply what they do, whether or not the materials they are working with are actually ‘spectral’ at all.

Many of us in the prespectral mindset had this instinctive sense about the psychology of spectral music – an honest response to dissatisfaction or disaffection, but fundamentally different from another response to same, minimalism. The opening paragraph of Julian Anderson’s paper –

“There is no real school of spectral composers; rather, certain fundamental problems associated with the state of contemporary music, since at least 1965, have repeatedly provoked composers from widely different backgrounds into searching out some common solutions involving the application of acoustics and psycho-acoustics to composition.”

later in the article

“This merits further thought: with certain notable exceptions, spectral composers have had a lot of trouble discovering ways to write melodically, or for that matter polyphonically.”

Painting in broad strokes here – minimalism adhered to many modernist principles without sounding modernistic; spectral music is an entirely different orientation coming from a dissaffection with modernist principles, but neverhteless, there seems to stand a collective committment to that modernist surface. Lack of melody and polyphony was a common complaint about pre-spectral modernism.

Add this to Hasegawa’s “tone representation” –

“American composer James Tenney helpfully proposed tolerance in the perception of interval size, which he defined as a perceptual mechanism by which a certain amount of mistuning will not threaten the perceptual identity.”

Bob Gilmore on Radulescu

Are Hasegawa and Gilmore saying we have 12EDO in our bones? This is welcome by the prespectral modernists, who tend to argue that the game has not changed; microtonal inflections are orchestrational, not structural. At The Village Trip microtonal conference, one of the presenters was happy to stay on the fence about this. Perhaps it is not uncommon in the microtonal community to find those happy to say their focus is on orchestration, not structure.

A reorientation from the particular (contextuality as in Boretz’ Metavariations) to the general (the overtone series)….? –

“He felt, as he wrote in his article ‘Musique de mes univers’ in 1985, that to move forward from the excessively self-referential complexity of much post-war European music ‘it was necessary to “enter into” the sound, to rediscover the ocean of vibrations that Pythagoras scrutinised two thousand years ago’.”

This is more specific than Julian Anderson’s opening paragraph – everyone was tired of the gawdawful mess that modernism had become and looked for *aaaanything else*.

Julan Anderson “A Provisional History of Spectral Music”

Jonathan Cross “Spectral Thinking”

Bob Gilmore on Radulescu

Martin Suckling “Radulescu: The Other Spectralist”