Spectralism

[7/4]

ejschoster wrote:

spectralism is the big thing in a lot of places right now - and with the younger generation "post-spectralism."

spectralism is a way of coming to acoustic writing by working with sounds directly, rather than abstracted concepts like notes and that sort of thing. specifically that usually means making a spectral analysis of a sound, breaking it into harmonic partials, and manipulating those frequencies in a composition. seems like many composers will analyze a sound, transform the analysis somehow (moving partials to impossible positions, transposing things unnaturally to different registers, whatever) to generate pitches or some texture, and then record, analyze and repeat.

early spectralists like Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail would do musical, but very direct sorts of music-from-analysis. like Girsey's "partials" for instance is an exploration of all the stages of an analysis of a trombonist playing a note.

what some call post-spectralists (mostly younger folk) are seperated from the older crowd mostly because they're in general past the "gee look at what we can do!" stage of spectralism, and for the most part are getting more musical with the techniques.

personally, i think the post-spectralist scene seems to already be swerving towards dogmatism and empty technique.

there's tons of exciting stuff going on though - salvatore sciarrino, kaija saariaho, and helmut lachenmann are some of the older folk doing great stuff right now. younger names to check out are maybe jonathon harvey, drew baker, and joshua fineberg.

[7/4]

ejschoster wrote:

drew baker has a bunch of mp3s on his site btw: http://www.drewbakermusic.com/comp.htm

another good guy to check out is Mario Diaz de Leon, who also has a bunch of mp3s on his site: http://www.ikatmethod.com/music.html
Dig the 12k/Doran Sadja connection btw...

[7/4]

ghost trance wrote:

Grisey is one of my favorite composers. The recording, Les espaces acoustiques, is fantastic, though very hard to obtain, unless you use a file-sharing client like Soulseek.

Saariaho is great as well, but I would investigate Horatiu Radulescu first, particularly Clepsydra and his 4th piano sonata.

[7/4]

ross wrote:

I just ordered 'Les espaces acoustiques' from Kairos. Its going to cost me about $50 Canadian but I think it will be worth it.

I havn't heard those two Radulescu records you mention. I have 'Piano Concerto: The Quest', I like about 50% of it. I'm most into the really dense and dissonant moments or the angular, spacious minimal moments. Some of the quotations from Romanian Christmas Carols don't do it for me, although I like the way in which they layer and shift in the 3rd movement, while not being into the melodies.


I'll look into his other, earlier stuff.

[7/4]

ejschoster wrote:

ghost trance wrote:

I would investigate Horatiu Radulescu first, particularly Clepsydra and his 4th piano sonata.

By the way, I know several young composers who are well into spatialisation right now, particularly with digital musique concrète composition.

I haven't checked out Radulescu - I'll try to track down those recordings, awesome - any others you'd recommend? I'd also be really curious to hear who to look for in terms of people working heavily with spatialization - the only dudes that come immediately to mind are roger reynolds and kaffe matthews.

[7/4]

Horatiu Radulescu is the composer who interested me in Spectralism. Inner Time II for an ensemble of clarinets tuned to a section of the harmonic series. Because of this and his other work, I was under the impression that all spectralism was in some way microtonal, but I'm finding out that's not the case.

Spectralism seems to be a slippery term any way.

Xenakias and Stockhausen have been mentioned as being Spectral composers or being an influence on spectral composers.




edit: spell fix.

[7/4]

Here's the Wiki entry:

Spectral music (or spectralism) refers to a musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Computer based sound spectrum analysis using a Fast Fourier transform is one of the more common methods used in generating descriptive data. Using FFT analysis, features of a particular sound spectrum can be visualized using a spectrogram. This particular style of composition originated in France in the early 1970s and the techniques were primarily developed, and later refined, at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Paris, by composers such as Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail. Murail has described Spectral music as an attitude towards composition rather than a set of techniques, an aesthetic rather than style. This attitude being that "music is ultimately sound evolving in time". However, it has been suggested that a number of major practitioners of this compositional method consider the term inappropriate, misleading, and reductive.

Composers
The term "spectral music" was coined by Hugues Dufourt in an article published in 1979. Dufourt, a trained philosopher as well as composer, was the author of several interesting flagship articles associated with this movement, although the relationship of his own music to this trend has remained ambiguous[citation needed]. In any case, it was the better part of a decade before the term was in very wide circulation. It was initially associated with composers including Dufourt, Horatiu Radulescu, Iancu Dumitrescu, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Michael Levinas, and the late Claude Vivier[citation needed]. Since the mid eighties, the movement has broadened out into one of the most important contemporary compositional trends[citation needed]. Among recent composers building on the spectral idea are Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Phillippe Leroux, Phillippe Hurel, Joshua Fineberg and Julian Anderson

Origins
Early traces can be found in Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. 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. Along similar lines, Henry Cowell published in 1930 New Musical Resources, establishing a relation between acoustics, perception and composition.

Busoni lamented the traditional music "lawgivers", and predicted a future music that included the division of the octave into more than the traditional 12 degrees. His philosophy that "Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny," greatly influenced his students Luigi Russolo, who would take part in the Futurist movement and introduced noise music. Busoni also influenced Edgard Varèse, who played a major role in the twentieth-century opening of music to all sound.

Proto-spectral composers include Varèse, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis, as well as André Jolivet, Friedrich Cerha, Giacinto Scelsi, and, to some degree, La Monte Young. Theoretical predecessors include some of the composers mentioned and Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, and Paul Hindemith.

This music began to emerge in the 1970s both in France amongst the composers of the Groupe de l'Itihe, influenced by work of composers such as Maurice Ravel and Olivier Messiaen, both 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 simply carries this principle much further and with more radical precision, made possible with the aid of computerized FFT analysis. The music of Scelsi, with its concentration on long-held, single tones, continuously mutating in timbre and other parameters, is also another important contribution to spectral music.

Philosophically, the spectralists' attitude of rigorous objectivity in the exploration of sound and the application of their discoveries to composition can be considered a continuation of traditional modernism.[citation needed] Spectral music at the time of its origin was also received as a direct affront to the claim of the serialists and post-serialists (including Boulez himself) to the vanguard of serious musical composition and compositional technique.

Julian Anderson considers Danish composer Per Norgaard's Voyage into the Golden Screen for chamber orchestra (1968) to be the first "properly instrumental piece of spectral composition".

Compositional technique
The "panoply of methods and techniques" used are secondary, being only "the means of achieving a sonic end". 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. 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. These processes most often achieve a smooth transition through interpolation.

Performance
Individual pieces can be written either electronically (by a computer or playback device delivering sound via speakers); on traditional, non-electronic instruments, requiring specially trained human performers; or a combination of the two methods.

In performance, spectral music often involves little or no use of electronic or computer-generated sound, yet it produces an effect that can sound "electronic" to modern ears, because the precisely calibrated deviations from the normal tunings of notes produce uncanny effects that are normally associated with electronic phenomena such as feedback, ring modulation, frequency modulation, etc. In the general field of computer music, then, spectral music is usually considered "computer assisted composition", rather than "computer generated music" or "electronic music". To perform such music on traditional instruments such as cellos or clarinets requires an extraordinarily refined training that arose first in France in response to the innovations born at IRCAM. This high degree of scientific acoustical sophistication in the performance of new music has become fairly standard in Western Europe but is much less to be found in the United States, where the general cultural conservatism during the same period (the last decades of the 20th century) produced a more relaxed, post-modern, eclectic new music repertoire, casually incorporating elements of commercial and popular music, imitations of historical styles, quotations, pastiche, neoromanticism, diatonic minimalism, etc.

Pieces
Characteristic spectral pieces include Gérard Grisey's Partiels, Tristan Murail's Gondwana, Stockhausen's Stimmung, and Jean-Claude Risset's Mutation. John Chowning's Stria (1978) and Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco are examples of electronic pieces that embrace spectral techniques.

[snailed]

To me, although there are obvious differences, I'm not sure if the French and Romanian spectralists as compared the American just-intonationalists should be considered as separate movements at all as much as two variations on one idea. Both are focusing on music derived from the harmonic spectrum, and although the music sounds quite different aesthetically between the two I think there are shared qualities in that work and the Americans could have easily been considered "spectral" as well - and certainly Harry Partch was focusing on this sort of thing before the word spectralism had ever been uttered. Although I will admit, they are pretty obviously two different approaches, with the just intonation composers (Ben Johnston, La Monte Young, Harry Partch, Michael Harrison) working in ratios that are derived from what the harmonic series is based off of, perhaps more abstracted in that it uses the math behind it rather than literally conforming to a spectral analysis, and spectralists using material based immediately on it (like Grisey literally outlining a harmonic spectrum from the first low trombone note in "Partiels") partially due to the use of being able to analyze the spectral content of something with computers.

One problem I have with the spectral stuff as far as ideology is the tendency to round things off to the nearest quarter or eighth tone as mentioned in that wiki entry above. In "Partiels", things are always rounded off to the nearest quarter tone. Look at a Johnston score and he is telling you precisely which note and which harmonic is to be hit - whether that intonational perfection is practically able to be achieved, I'm not sure, but it is always best for the model to at least aspire to that.

I also fail to see how Scelsi can be referred to as a spectralist, or as proto-spectralist moreso than Partch, La Monte Young, maybe even Johnston, et. al. Does anyone else find that completely wrong? Is it just because he's from Europe? As I see it he started his work in this area near his so called 3rd period, around the same time as the beginnings of just intonation stuff was starting up in America - Scelsi seemed to have a MUCH more intuitive use for pitch, and the just intonation stuff just seems so much closer to the spirit of spectralism. Weren't many of his notations based on his improvisations? I just find that composers who were working with ratios were much closer to this sort of thing than Scelsi here, personally, though I love him as a composer.

Anyway, as far as the Romanian end of things, I have been really liking the Iancu Dumitrescu stuff I've found lately - there's a nice wiki on Dumitrescu, anyone have any recommended pieces for him? I've been liking the edition modern CD's, just exploring a few I grabbed from slsk.

Iancu Dumitrescu (born July 15, 1944 in Sibiu, Romania) is a Romanian avant-garde composer.

Dumitrescu received a master's degree in composition in Bucharest; Alfred Mendelsohn was among his teachers. Later, he studied conducting and philosophy with Sergiu Celibidache; Celibidache led Dumitrescu to an engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and an effort to apply the principles of phenomenology to music.

He began composing his mature works in the early 1970's. In 1976 he founded the Hyperion Ensemble, which he describes as "a multimedia group dedicated to experimental music." Several of Dumitrescu's early works for solo contrabass were recorded by the noted avant-garde bassist Fernando Grillo.

Dumitrescu has composed a large body of works for acoustic instruments and ensembles as well as works combining acoustic and electronic sounds and works composed entirely using tape or computer. In its emphasis on long tones that undergo transformations of timbre, Dumitrescu's music can be loosely grouped with that of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi and with the spectral music of fellow Romanian Horatiu Radulescu and the French composers of the spectral school.

Dumitrescu describes his music as "acousmatic" but disclaims a relationship with the Acousmatic music of French musique concrete pioneer Pierre Schaeffer. He accepts the "spectralist" label, though he distinguishes his work from some others in the spectral school in that it is not serial. "I think of myself as a spectralist, but in completely different way from the French."[1]

Dumitrescu is married to fellow composer Ana-Maria Avram (born 1961); they have more than 20 joint CD releases on their Edition Modern label. Recordings of Dumitrescu's works have also been released by Edition RZ, ReR Megacorp, Generations Unlimited, and other record labels. He is represented by Editions Salabert.

edit: I don't mean to say they are the same music, or that even any of these composers sound remotely alike - I just think any discussion of the French and Romanian spectralists should certainly include the American just intonation composers as well as at least some sort of parallel movement and perhaps partially an influence - and I often see them excluded or shown to be of lesser importance than European composers doing things that weren't as close.

[joe grimm]

To me, although there are obvious differences, I'm not sure if the French and Romanian spectralists as compared the American just-intonationalists should be considered as separate movements at all as much as two variations on one idea. Both are focusing on music derived from the harmonic spectrum, and although the music sounds quite different aesthetically between the two I think there are shared qualities in that work and the Americans could have easily been considered "spectral" as well

This is a good point. The Americans interested in spectral techniques and the overtone series (I'd add Charlemagne Palestine and Glenn Branca to your list) were mostly operating outside of the establishment/academy, which gives the music a different vibe. More crude, but more direct and, for me, more fun. But there is certainly a shared interest at the heart of it.

I've been working on spectrally-motivated music for a little while, and it's really fascinating to me. I feel as though there's a lot of room for experimentation. I have an album of roughly spectral music coming out next month on spekk (http://spekk.net/catalog/braincloud.html -- there are some extracts posted). Please forgive me for mentioning my own music, but there are so few people out there who give a shit about this stuff, and i was just psyched to see this thread.

[Chromosome]

Would Phil Niblock fall under this category of composers?

[Dan Warburton]

No.

[snailed]

Niblock is just making little microtonal adjustments, he's mostly concerned with slow bending of pitches and the beating that occurs when pitches are in between consonant notes, as in Lucier's sine wave pieces but using many extended pitches against one another instead of just two. Spectral analysis would show you the internal makeup of any sound, you'd see that a pure, pitched musical sound is made up of many pitches organized by the harmonic series - so this analysis is sort of the equivalent of an aural microscope, to use a loose metaphor. Niblock is not at all concerned with using the spectral makeup of sound as an organizing factor in any way, even on a pitch level, so yeah- what Dan W. said, but that's why imo.

[snailed]

To me, although there are obvious differences, I'm not sure if the French and Romanian spectralists as compared the American just-intonationalists should be considered as separate movements at all as much as two variations on one idea. Both are focusing on music derived from the harmonic spectrum, and although the music sounds quite different aesthetically between the two I think there are shared qualities in that work and the Americans could have easily been considered "spectral" as well

This is a good point. The Americans interested in spectral techniques and the overtone series (I'd add Charlemagne Palestine and Glenn Branca to your list) were mostly operating outside of the establishment/academy, which gives the music a different vibe. More crude, but more direct and, for me, more fun. But there is certainly a shared interest at the heart of it.

I've been working on spectrally-motivated music for a little while, and it's really fascinating to me. I feel as though there's a lot of room for experimentation. I have an album of roughly spectral music coming out next month on spekk (http://spekk.net/catalog/braincloud.html -- there are some extracts posted). Please forgive me for mentioning my own music, but there are so few people out there who give a shit about this stuff, and i was just psyched to see this thread.

Joe, very nice to see you here on IHM. Really liking these samples of the work you mentioned. I actually hosted a show you played once, at Fort Sunshine in New Haven, a snowy Valentine's Day about a year 1/2 ago -- and I remember you doing vocal work that night that I can certainly see paving the way for a full blown piece exploring spectral ideas. Excited to hear the final result, the samples sound very promising.

That's a good point about a lot of the Americans coming to this outside of academia and the like. Besides someone like Ben Johnston, most are unconcerned about keeping forms from the past - which might have something to do with the disconnect here. I can see the Americans considered the "noble savages" because of this unfortunately, and their importance diminished due to a lack of formalism (which Grisey and Murail can claim). But I think they were really getting at the essence of it, and allowed the form to be dictated by the material.

[joe grimm]

Joe, very nice to see you here on IHM. Really liking these samples of the work you mentioned. I actually hosted a show you played once, at Fort Sunshine in New Haven, a snowy Valentine's Day about a year 1/2 ago -- and I remember you doing vocal work that night that I can certainly see paving the way for a full blown piece exploring spectral ideas. Excited to hear the final result, the samples sound very promising.

Oh yeah! Small world. What a crazy night that was! Music sounded great with a blizzard outside.

[7/4]

One problem I have with the spectral stuff as far as ideology is the tendency to round things off to the nearest quarter or eighth tone as mentioned in that wiki entry above. In "Partiels", things are always rounded off to the nearest quarter tone. Look at a Johnston score and he is telling you precisely which note and which harmonic is to be hit - whether that intonational perfection is practically able to be achieved, I'm not sure, but it is always best for the model to at least aspire to that.

Rounding a Just/Harmonic interval off to an interval from equal division of the octave is jive. The sum and difference tones will not be the same.

[joe grimm]

Rounding a Just/Harmonic interval off to an interval from equal division of the octave is jive. The sum and difference tones will not be the same.

Sure, but for the Grisey pieces (for example), quarter-tone notation was used for pragmatic reasons. For musicians used to reading conventional notation, it's much easier to read half-flats and half-sharps than to read an entirely alien notation like fractional notation. The hope is that the players' inner pitch sense will naturally adjust to just intervals, as they attempt to play quarter-tones that sound in tune.

I understand your complaint, but I also respect the pragmatic utility of quarter tones. With tuning systems it becomes too easy to let the ideal be the enemy of the good.

Some of my absolute favorite overtone/difference-tone based music is charlemagne palestine's organ pieces like schlingen-blangen. These are completely 12-tone and equal-tempered, but they use those imperfections as a feature that enriches the music! Compared to this, some just-intonation stuff sounds still, dead, flat.

[7/4]

I didn't say this practice is jive because I don't understand the application. I said it's wrong because I know better.

If the tuning isn't really harmonics, then it's music inspired by the harmonic series and nothing more.

[joe grimm]

I'm in the process of discovering Dumitrescu. To me, his music sounds less structurally rigorous than Grisey's or Murail's; instead of using timbre and the harmonic series as a systemic basis for the pitch choices to be played on classical instruments (played with a clear, "normal" tone), he seems to be listening deeply to timbre and using it directly in a freer, more intuitive way... His music is about complex sounds, not about facsimiles of complex sounds, if that makes sense. It sounds like music that could have come about through improvisation.

Nevertheless he says this:

"ID: The interpreter has no freedom! When listening to my music, you might believe otherwise, you could see a certain degree of improvisation. In fact, it is not the case. The phenomenological concept determines the sound evolution, the bow's movement, the change in harmonics.... The musician finds himself chained inside an obligatory role, always in proportion, always logical. If thing suddenly intervenes, you can feel it immediately. I perceive freedom to be synonymous with error. Paradoxically, the way inside is the discovery of a superior freedom. It's the intrinsic spirit of my music. The adventure. The scorching ands frenetic research. It has in its core the primordial mystery of sound. The interest in my music is created by a fresh opening that doesn't belong to freedom in the first degree. It's a directed freedom going toward one goal: the mystery of music's life. "

I wish I could look at his scores.

[7/4]

For musicians used to reading conventional notation, it's much easier to read half-flats and half-sharps than to read an entirely alien notation like fractional notation. The hope is that the players' inner pitch sense will naturally adjust to just intervals, as they attempt to play quarter-tones that sound in tune.

I can see the classically trained musician throwing a tantrum because 11/8 and 33/32 is notated with ratios instead of pointing to the closest quarter tone.

I can't work with a musician that's going to be that inflexible. Sorry, they loose the gig man.

[7/4]

Some of my absolute favorite overtone/difference-tone based music is charlemagne palestine's organ pieces like schlingen-blangen. These are completely 12-tone and equal-tempered, but they use those imperfections as a feature that enriches the music! Compared to this, some just-intonation stuff sounds still, dead, flat.

That's a broad comparison that's pretty useless.

How do you feel when you compare an 12 tone equal temperament major third to a Just 5/4? Or a 12 tone equal temperament perfect fifth to a Just 3/2?