11.1 The origin of spectral music

11.1 THE ORIGIN OF SPECTRAL MUSIC At the most important centre for theoretical studies of Young Music, Darmstadt, an academic spirit had been gaining ground in the 1960s (Morton Feldman: ‘a hardening of the categories’). Central to the thinking in Darmstadt had been Pierre Boulez’ extremely formal Structures 1 and many composers were no longer comfortable with that.

During the 1970s, it gradually became possible to make a recorded sound truly visual with spectrum analysis equipment. The computers that could do this were at IRCAM in Paris. These analyses revealed that a sound was infinitely more complex than could be realised by seriality, with its relatively simple row-like distribution and combining of musical parameters. With a series of spectrum analyses, called partials, the evolution of a sound can be visualised. Gérard Grisey, for example, recorded the sound of a trombone, made partials of the time frequency representation and instrumentalised the results for other instruments.

Meanwhile computers have become incomparably much faster and more powerful. Today, an average composition student’s laptop is easily twice as powerful as the most advanced computer at IRCAM, established in 1970 at the time of the birth of spectral music.182 Spectralism owes its success partly to this: nowadays, electronic music can be produced at home on a laptop by any student. The familiarity with algorithms, the user-friendliness of programs such as Max msp. - developed at IRCAM to make electronic music accessible to anyone and not just to tech wizards - the general availability of sound equipment, and the possibility of presenting one’s own compositions to one’s own group of interested individuals without any outside mediation, revolutionised electronic music.This turned out to be a huge incentive for the younger generation of composers to become involved with spectralism. Spectral music has a strongly developed electronic side, both in the analysis of the spectra and in the realisation of sounds that do not belong to the chromatic row. Applying electronics live on stage is also no longer an obstacle thanks to fast computers. A laptop can do the job. In 1969 French composer Jean-Claude Risset wrote a compendium of computer music instruments, entitled: Introductory Catalogue of Computer Synthesized Sounds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXDaBA3aggI).

182The road towards IRCAM was a long one. In 1970 President Georges Pompidou asked Pierre Boulez to found an institution for research in music. In 1973 the section of the building underneath Place Igor Stravinsky was finished, and

IRCAM opened in 1977.

The study of Risset would prove influential on the spectral composers, since his primary goal was the exploration of timbre (The book is ap parently out of print. However, John-Phillip Gather’s Amsterdam Catalogue of Csound Computer Instruments (1995) replicated the described sounds into Csound). The following principles were leading the early stages of spectral music: - The theories of Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), a French mathematician and physicist. He discovered that all sounds can be reduced to series or listing of simple oscillating functions. The result of this he called the ‘spectrum’. The most suitable graphic representation of sound he named time/frequency representation. - Spectral composers and their theorists devised their own past history, in analogy with the composers of serial music. In the spectralists’ case they start with Richard Wagner’s Prelude of Parsifal and then from Debussy to Messiaen (this makes sense, as Messiaen’s coloured melody and chord of resonance have much in common with the spectral colouring of tones) and Varèse (liberation of the sound, rather than that of timbre) and Scelci (a composer who studied the colour of a single tone). - Expansion of the number of pitches seems logical.Traditional notation limits us to 12 or at most 24 pitches in one octave. But there are infinitely more steps between the two tones of a minor second. Basically, sound is a continuum, but because composers need to write pitches down, we are forced to arrange them in scales. Therefore, we are also confined to the limits of these scales. It is one of the reasons why spectral music and micro-tonality seem natural partners.

In microtonal music all aural references holding together melody and harmony are dissolved. The result is a coloured, moving sound field.183

- The oscillator cannot display the difference between a tone and a chord. The spectralists’ conclusion therefore is that there is no difference between pitch and spectrum, or between harmony and timbre.

183Listen for instance to the Carrillio piano on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEnlgXFAfd4

Why do we perceive the tone on a violin as one tone and not as a collection of harmonic parts? This is due to evolution. Our brain asks itself: what comes from a single source and what comes from multiple sources? The brain’s aim is to determine the location of the source. Our hearing, and eventually our brain, will always try to structure sound in the form of memory (real memories and associations). By creating in our brain a structured representation of the soundscape we are perceiving we are capable of understanding the environment we live in. A pleasant side effect is that we perceive music as more than a sequence of impressions.

- IRCAM’s influence on the technical development of spectral music cannot be overestimated. Giuseppe di Giugno184 developed a computer that was especially designed for producing and manipulating synthesised sounds. It enabled Boulez to compose Répons. The biggest influence however came from the U.S.A. Most of the early technical work was done at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, for example with the program Music N Languages, which would later be the basis for Cmusic, which was developed at University of California

San Diego. Cmix was developed at Princeton and Csound, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the later standard synthesis language. All of these developments in the USA had a major influence on those at IRCAM. But IRCAM had one precious advantage: an extensive ensemble for new music and showpiece of

French Young Music: the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

- Today, spectral music is one of the most influential concepts within Young Music. Composers such as Jonathan Harvey, Luc Brewaeys,

Kaija Saariaho, Claude Vivier and Peter Eötvös, Georg Friedrich Haas and jazz composer Steve Lehman have used spectral techniques.

They function as an inspirational source for many composers of the younger generation.

184From 1961 until 1975, Di Giugno was a researcher in the field of matterantimatter interactions at the National Laboratory of Nuclear Physics at Frascati and at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. He was actively involved in the design and realization of ADA, the first electronpositronstorage ring. In the 1970s he worked for IRCAM.