![]() In Paris, Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail were the most prominent pioneers of spectral techniques Grisey's Espaces Acoustiques and Murail's Gondwana were two influential works of this period. Early spectral composers were centered in the cities of Paris and Cologne and associated with the composers of the Ensemble l'Itinéraire and the Feedback group, respectively. Spectralism as a recognizable and unified movement, however, arose during the early 1970s, in part as a reaction against and alternative to the primarily pitch focused aesthetics of the serialism and post-serialism which was ascendant at the time. 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". Also crucial to the origins of spectralism was the development of techniques of sound analysis and synthesis in computer music and acoustics during this period, especially focused around IRCAM in France and Darmstadt in Germany. Other composers who anticipated spectralist ideas in their theoretical writings include Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, and Paul Hindemith. Proto-spectral composers include Claude Debussy, Edgard Varèse, Giacinto Scelsi, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, La Monte Young, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. While spectralism as a historical movement is generally considered to have begun in France and Germany in the 1970s, precursors to the philosophy and techniques of spectralism, as prizing the nature and properties of sound above all else as an organizing principle for music, go back at least to the early twentieth century. The Istanbul Spectral Music Conference of 2003 suggested a redefinition of the term "spectral music" to encompass any music that foregrounds timbre as an important element of structure or language. Julian Anderson indicates that a number of major composers associated with spectralism consider the term inappropriate, misleading, and reductive. Murail has described spectral music as an aesthetic rather than a style, not so much a set of techniques as an attitude as Joshua Fineberg puts it, a recognition that "music is ultimately sound evolving in time". Hugues Dufourt is commonly credited for introducing the term musique spectrale (spectral music) in an article published in 1979. The (acoustic-composition) spectral approach originated in France in the early 1970s, and techniques were developed, and later refined, primarily at IRCAM, Paris, with the Ensemble l'Itinéraire, by composers such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. ![]() In this formulation, computer-based sound analysis and representations of audio signals are treated as being analogous to a timbral representation of sound. The spectral approach focuses on manipulating the spectral features, interconnecting them, and transforming them. Definition ĭefined in technical language, spectral music is an acoustic musical practice where compositional decisions are often informed by sonographic representations and mathematical analysis of sound spectra, or by mathematically generated spectra. ![]() Spectral music uses the acoustic properties of sound – or sound spectra – as a basis for composition. Inharmonic spectrum of a bell (dashed gray lines indicate harmonic overtones) ![]()
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