Spectral Piano

The Spectral Piano

The most influential compositional movement of the past fifty years, spectralism was informed by digital technology but also extended the aesthetics of pianistcomposers 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. marily n non k en 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.

Music since 1900 G eneral Edi tor  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

Ethan Haimo 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 The Spectral Piano: From Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the Digital Age

The Spectral Piano From Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the Digital Age

Marilyn Nonken With a contributory chapter by Hugues Dufourt

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 © Marilyn Nonken 2014 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.

Contents

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

H ugues D ufourt

Select discography  169 References  171 Index  183

Music examples



4.1 Murail, Territoires de l’oubli, opening. © 1978 Editions Transatlantiques. Reprinted by permission of Alphonse Leduc.  80 4.2 Murail, Territoires de l’oubli, p. 12. © 1978 by Editions Transatlantiques. Reprinted by permission of Alphonse Leduc.  81 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 4.8 Dufourt, Erlkönig, mm. 671–674. © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission.  105 4.9 Dufourt, Erlkönig, “Imprécations.” © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission.  106 4.10 Dufourt, Erlkönig, mm. 701–706. © Editions Henry Lemoine. Reprinted by permission.  107 5.1 Fineberg, Tremors, opening. © 1996 Editions Max Eschig. Reprinted by permission.  119 5.2 Fineberg, Veils, opening. © 2004 Editions Max Eschig. Reprinted by permission.  122 5.3 Fineberg, Veils, mm. 78–87. © 2004 Editions Max Eschig. Reprinted by permission.  123 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 permission of the composer.  137 5.6 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, mm. 449–464. Reprinted by permission of the composer.  138 5.7 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, mm. 530–537. Reprinted by permission of the composer.  139

L ist of musi c exampl e s



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5.8 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, mm. 220–231. Reprinted by permission of the composer.  140 5.9 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, final cadence. Reprinted by permission of the composer.  141 5.10 Harvey, Tombeau de Messiaen, p. 4. © Copyright 1996 Faber Music Ltd. Reprinted by permission.  149 5.11 Harvey, Tombeau de Messiaen, p. 17. © Copyright 1996 Faber Music Ltd. Reprinted by permission.  155

Acknowledgments

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, musicologists, sound technicians, and nonmusicians alike, all of whom contributed 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 enthusiasm 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 experience itself, and their comradeship has made my life immeasurably richer. My work with Jonathan Harvey was similarly inspiring; his passing during the final stages of writing 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 mentors 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

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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 without 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.

Chronological list of works

1826 1837 1841 1851 1855 1858 1874 1881 1883 1885 1886 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906–1920 1907 1909 1909–1910 1910 1911–1912 1913 1914 1923 1924 1925 1928 1928–1929

Liszt, Etude en douze exercices, S.136 Liszt, Douze grandes études, S.137 Liszt, Réminiscences de Don Juan, S.418 Liszt, Douze études d’exécution transcendante, S.139 Liszt, Années de pèlerinage, S.160 (“Première année: Suisse”) Liszt, Années de pèlerinage, S.161 (“Deuxième année: Italie”) Liszt, Die Glocken des Straßburger Münsters, S.6 Liszt, Nuages gris, S.199 Liszt, Années de pèlerinage, S.163 (“Troisième année”) Liszt, Bagatelle sans tonalité, S.216a Liszt, Unstern!, S.208 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Debussy, Estampes Debussy, L’isle joyeuse Busoni, Piano Concerto, Op. 39 Debussy, Images I Debussy, La mer Ravel, La valse Debussy, Images II Schoenberg, Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 Scriabin, Prométhée Debussy, Préludes I Busoni, Fantasia contrappuntistica Scriabin, Poème-nocturne, Op. 61 Scriabin, Sonata no. 6, Op. 62 Debussy, Préludes II Scriabin, Sonata no. 9, Op. 68 Scriabin, Sonata no. 10, Op. 70 Scriabin, Vers la flamme, Op. 72 Scriabin, Etudes, Op. 74 Cowell, Aeolian Harp Viñes, Menuet spectral (à la mémoire de Maurice Ravel) Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue Cowell, The Banshee Ravel, Boléro Messiaen, Préludes

C hronol o g i c a l list of works

1934 1940–1941 1943 1944 1946 1946–1947 1947 1947–1948 1948 1948–1962 1949 1950–1951 1951 1951–1952 1952 1953 1954 1955 1955–1956 1955–1957 1956–1958 1957–1962 1958 1959 1959–1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965–1992 1967 1968 1968–1969

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Varèse, Ecuatorial Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps Messiaen, Visions de l’amen Messiaen, Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus Boulez, Premiére sonate Hába, Suite for Quarter-Tone Piano, Op. 62 Ives, Sonata no. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–1860 Babbitt, Three Compositions for Piano Babbitt, Composition for Four Instruments Boulez, Deuxième sonate Cage, Sonatas and Interludes Messiaen, Cantéyodjayâ Nancarrow, Studies for Player Piano, nos. 1–30 Messiaen, “Mode de valeurs et d’intensités” (Quatre études de rythme) Goeyvaerts, Nummer 1 (Sonata for Two Pianos) Stockhausen, Kreuzspiel Boulez, Structures Ia Fano, Sonate pour deux pianos Messiaen, Réveil des oiseaux Stockhausen, Klavierstücke I–IV Varèse, Déserts Boulez, Le marteau sans maître Messiaen, Oiseaux exotiques Boulez, Troisième sonate Messiaen, Catalogue d’oiseaux Boulez, Pli selon pli Varèse, Poème électronique Scelsi, Quattro pezzi per orchestra (su una nota sola) Messiaen, Chronochromie Xenakis, Herma Ligeti, Atmosphères Johnston, Knocking Piece Messiaen, Sept haïkaï Messiaen, Couleurs de la cité céleste Johnston, Sonata for Microtonal Piano Nancarrow, Studies for Player Piano, nos. 31–51 Murail, Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe … Ligeti, Lontano Stockhausen, Stimmung The Beatles, Revolution no. 9 Ligeti, Ramifications

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C hronol o g i c a l list of works

1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1978–1979 1980 1981 1984

Cage, Cheap Imitation Harvey, Four Images after Yeats Risset, Mutations Davidovsky, Synchronisms no. 6 Lachenmann, Guero Stockhausen, Mantra Tenney, Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety Messiaen, La fauvette des jardins Crumb, Makrokosmos I Curtis-Smith, Rhapsodies Crumb, Makrokosmos II Xenakis, Evryali Babbitt, Reflections Lévinas, Appels Grisey, Périodes (Les espaces acoustiques II) Rzewski, The People United Will Never Be Defeated! Cage, Etudes Australes Grisey, Partiels (Les espaces acoustiques III) Grisey, Prologue (Les espaces acoustiques I) Nono, … sofferte onde serene … Murail, Mémoire/Erosion 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 Adams, Phrygian Gates Murail, Ethers Grisey, Modulations Dufourt, Saturne Lévinas, Ouverture pour une fête étrange Carter, Night Fantasies Harvey, Mortuos plango, vivos voco Murail, Gondwana Grisey, Transitoires (Les espaces acoustiques V) Ferneyhough, Lemma-Icon-Epigram Feldman, Triadic Memories Xenakis, Mists Harvey, Bhakti

C hronol o g i c a l list of works

1985 1986 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1994–1996 1995 1996 1997 1997–1998 1998 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2010

xv

Grisey, Epilogue (Les espaces acoustiques VI) Feldman, For Bunita Marcus Grisey, Talea Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time Fineberg, Lightning Murail, Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire … Lucier, Music for Piano with Slow Sweep, Pure Wave Oscillators Troncin, Seul Murail, La mandragore Troncin, Ciel ouvert Harvey, One Evening Harvey, Tombeau de Messiaen Harvey, Advaya Lindberg, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra Grisey, Vortex temporum Dufourt, An Schwager Kronos Fineberg, Till Human Voices Wake Us Campion, Natural Selection Dufourt, Meeresstille Harvey, Haiku Leroux, M Fineberg, Recueil de pierre et de sable Fineberg, Tremors Harvey, Homage to Cage, à Chopin (und Ligeti ist auch dabei) Dufourt, Rastlose Liebe Lindberg, Jubilees Fineberg, Veils Murail, Les travaux et les jours Harvey, Bird Concerto with Pianosong Dufourt, L’origine du monde Campion, Outside Music Dalbavie, Piano Concerto Dufourt, L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo Dufourt, Soleil de proie Saariaho, Ballade Dufourt, Erlkönig Saariaho, Prelude Hamelin, Etude no. 8, “Erlkönig after Goethe” Dufourt, La ligne gravissant la chute (Hommage à Chopin) Lévinas, Concerto pour un piano-espace no. 2 (revised) Campion, Flow-Debris-Falls

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C hronol o g i c a l list of works

2011 2012

Dufourt, Vent d’automne Murail, Le désenchantement du monde Fineberg, Grisaille Dufourt, On the Wings of the Morning

1 An intimate history

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 spectral and protospectral orchestral, 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 physicality 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 interest 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 JeanClaude Risset (b. 1938) tersely stated, “music is not an arms race” (Risset, 1996b). My role is to reveal the familial resemblances among various attitudes 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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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 yesterday that we sat together. I had never heard anyone speak about music in this fashion, treating sound itself as a material graspable, malleable, manipulable 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 insistence that his students always practice at tempo – even if it meant proceeding 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, rewarding 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 considered “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, 1990: 245–249). I found the differences in our attitudes towards the musical

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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, vertical 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 practices 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 bastions 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 performance 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 abilities 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 antagonism 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 questions continued to haunt me. I only found satisfying answers to them in considering the active musical engagement of listeners and their relationships 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 subjectively (in relation to more personal factors, such as associations, memories, 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 timbralharmonic complexes and elements of rhythm and density, as well as thematic and motivic structures. After developing my own ecological approach to performance and interpretation, it was no small pleasure to discover the work of the spectral composers. 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 promoted as a realization of André Malraux’s conception of the musée imaginaire. 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), MarcAndré 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 presented: 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 unexpectedly 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 festival bringing proponents of the spectral attitude, as well as technologies 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 decade, 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 movement achieves critical mass, effecting changes in both compositional and performance practice. The year 2003 saw another landmark in spectral music’s American reception: 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, stemming from the American invasion of Iraq earlier that year. In February, Dominique de Villepin, the French minister of foreign affairs, had condemned America’s aggression in Iraq at the United Nations, receiving thunderous 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” proceeded 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 something” (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 inherent mutuality between sound and listeners in the musical environment 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 psychological universals, transcend geographical distinctions. Throughout the twentieth century, composers, pianists, and listeners 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 biological metaphor the forces that underlie complex and personal social relations (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 tendencies, 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 irresistible 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 phototropism drawing him to Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), his teacher and mentor (Nonken, 2013). “Phototropic” is a term used to denote the process by which a plant instinctively turns to the sun. Phototropism is a dynamic process 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 suggest 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 ecological 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 interests 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 sensitive treatment of my instrument, particularly in how it was allowed to resonate 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 idiosyncratic notation of their scores, their approach to the performer was both challenging and respectful. In its sonic conception and graphic representation 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 instrument 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 instrument 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 composers who considered these aspects of instrumental reality – the instrumental 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 eccentricities of the instrument. In the nineteenth century, Goethe’s work exploring the subjective and objective aspects of perception and how they theoretically might govern 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 endeavors, 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 construction of airtight theories – presaged the uneasy marriage of art and science, 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, illuminating the kinds of musical projects that could never have been realized without the exchange among those involved in fields of artistic and scientific 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 without the back and forth between creative evolution and scientific or technical 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 composers who have been inspired by the piano’s acoustic potential and, at times, seduced by technology’s promises. I hope to speak to the relationship between art and technology and the challenges faced by all artists who seek to pursue their own visions under the porous umbrella of interdisciplinary 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 repertoire 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 writing 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 listeners 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 electric current into the contemporary compositional world, has enriched the repertoire of the twentieth century and promises to inform the piano music of the future.

2 Itinerary

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 playing the piano changed radically over the course of the twentieth century. Throughout, however, the reader will find references to another instrument 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, traversing 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 potential 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 contemporary 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 historical precedent. In the chapter “Protospectralists at the piano,” the innovations 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 radically 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 character pieces, transcriptions, and tone poems – that redefined how the modern 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 predecessor, 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 perception. 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 associated 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 for the instrument. Yet it was his more experimental works with and for

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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 studied 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 synthesizing 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 analysis not only led to the birth of a new acousmatic repertoire (consisting of works designed to be heard through loudspeakers, without the participation of live instrumentalists) but also revolutionized how works for acoustic 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, 1996). However, situating the technological breakthroughs in computer

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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 coincided, on both sides of the Atlantic, with similarly dramatic aesthetic, cultural, 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 performance practices paralleled shifts taking place in arenas social and political, 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 technology, they adopted a compositional stance more closely attuned to the realities of the human aesthetic experience and the acoustic nature of sound. They sought to create a music deeply informed by recent advances in technology, 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 external reality) and the nature of human perception (the subjective, internal 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 characteristically spectral aesthetic priorities, notational practices, and performance 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 fascinations. 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 virtuosity, 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 musicologist, 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 attitude, he has remained wary of theories evoked to rationalize aesthetic decisions. 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 expressive power of the Romantic era, via an inherently contemporary atonal

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virtuosity. Of the first-generation spectralists, he is also the most ­pianistic, in his engagement with the instrument and its history of pedagogy and performance practice. As will be detailed, his perspectives on the piano and performance aesthetic were formatively influenced by the pianist, composer, and pedagogue Louis Hiltbrand (1916–1983), with whom he studied at the Conservatoire in Geneva. “The spectral effect” considers the work of composers working outside France: Harvey, Fineberg, and Edmund Campion (b. 1957), all of whom developed explicitly spectral attitudes that nonetheless expressed their unique concerns as composers. This section includes explorations of Harvey’s Tombeau de Messiaen for piano and tape, Fineberg’s piano solo Veils (2001), and Campion’s A Complete Wealth of Time (1989–1990) for two pianos, discussing these works in relation to their other compositions for piano and keyboards. These composers’ individual trajectories and perspectives are considered in terms of the aesthetic environments from which they emerged and the subsequent course of their careers. Examination of their work reveals how late-twentieth-century spectral attitudes turned away from the mid-century debates of serialism and sonorism, and chance and determinism, remaining receptive to scientific advances while responding to movements towards aesthetic eclecticism. The compositions and writings of Fineberg, Campion, and Harvey reveal that second- and third-­generation spectral attitudes remained directly connected with the experience of the individual, privileging above all the mutuality or reciprocity between the listener and the sounding musical environment. They also reveal how contemporary composers continued to struggle with issues regarding the integration of concert music into the world of technology and the significance of the piano, in particular, within that world. The “spectral effect” on composition has been international and wideranging. Several spectral “schools” emerged in the late twentieth century, such as the group of slightly older composers associated with Clarence Barlow (b. 1945), Péter Eötvös (b. 1944), Johannes Fritsch (b. 1941), Mesías Maiguascha (b. 1938), and Claude Vivier (1948–1983)  – considered the “German” group  – and the Romanian strain associated with Horațiu Rădulescu (1942–2008), Ştefan Niculescu (b. 1927), and Iancu Dumitrescu (b. 1944). These groups and their contrasting perspectives have been considered in relation to one another elsewhere, as part of a global movement towards spectral attitudes (Reigle and Whitehead, 2008). There is also a related history of iconoclasts, such as the Czech composer Alois Hába (1893–1973), who created microtonal pianos in the 1920s, and the American composer-theorist James Tenney (1934–2006), whose output includes the Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow (1974) and eight works

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entitled Spectrum (1995–2001), each of which is based on the harmonic series of a single pitch. Recognizing that every history is incomplete in its own way, I have chosen to focus on a particular French-American perspective that has influenced composition as well as performance, extending an unbroken lineage uniting Austro-Hungarian, French, and Russian schools of the late nineteenth century. The concluding chapter, “Spectral music and its pianistic expression,” has been graciously contributed by Dufourt. Of the composers associated with the spectral attitude, Dufourt has most eloquently acknowledged and explored his own ties to the music of the past. He writes music and writes about music with an understanding of how technology and musical aesthetics are now, and for the foreseeable future, inextricably linked. I am grateful to him for his commentary and for sharing his insights into what remain, apart from politics, aesthetics, and the machinations of the Culture Industry, personal matters. Many composers were influential on the spectral attitude, and their music, like Feldman’s, resembled that of the spectralists in specific ways. Not all of these composers will be considered in this context, primarily because this is an investigation of the piano repertoire. A comprehensive history of the evolution of the spectral aesthetic, referring to instrumental, chamber, and orchestral music, as well as electronic music, would necessarily include discussion of Xenakis, György Ligeti (1923–2006), Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988), and Stockhausen. Grisey studied with Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis at Darmstadt; he and Murail met Scelsi at the Villa Medici in Rome, and both acknowledged the dramatic impact of their encounters (Murail, 2005c). Any list of twentieth-century piano “classics” would include Ligeti’s three volumes of études, at least ten of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke, Xenakis’s major compositions for piano (Mists, Evryali, and Herma), and Scelsi’s as well. Although these composers’ ideas had formative influence on the development of the spectral attitude, their ideas regarding temporality, harmony, timbre, and structure that most influenced spectralists are not consistently manifested in their writing for piano. Scelsi’s piano works are early; all were written before 1956, and, because of the constraints of the instrument’s tuning, do not express the timbral sophistication of his works for other instrumental forces, such as Quattro pezzi per orchestra (su una nota sola) (1959). While Ligeti’s sound-mass compositions such as Atmosphères (1961), Lontano (1967), and Ramifications (1968–1969) were undisputedly influential and later iconic, his piano études are nostalgic works that do not share their innovative spirit. Their rhythmic language evokes Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997), as well as African traditional musics. In

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describing them, Ligeti expressed a willfully naïve approach to the instrument, stating, “My own impetus was my admittedly inadequate piano technique” (Ligeti, 1996: 7). The piano works of Stockhausen are daring formally and texturally but do not explore the same worlds of timbre and color as, for example, works like Kontakte (1960, for piano, percussion, and electronic tape) or Stimmung (1968). In Stimmung (literally “tuning”), six amplified singers tune to a B flat fundamental, expanding upwards through overtone singing over the fundamental drone, to produce a rich sonority encompassing the second, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, and ninth harmonics. Although Stockhausen had been exploring the overtone series and timbral color since the early 1950s, in electronic works such as Studien I and II, Stimmung is considered by some to be the first work of the western repertoire to use overtones as a primary element (Rose and Emmerson, 1979: 20). Yet I would suggest that Stockhausen retreated in the face of the explosive forces that his earlier piano music had let loose. Certainly, in his late career, he saw the piano as being logically continued by the synthesizer (Stockhausen, 1993: 137), writing his final Klavierstücke XV–XIX for elektronisches Klavier, with and without tape, and not for acoustic piano. I acknowledge that this inquiry dips a metaphorical toe into what is a deep aesthetic current. In a tightly focused inquiry such as this, Ligeti, Xenakis, Stockhausen, and Scelsi cannot be granted the same attention as Messiaen, for example, whose protospectral ideas are central to his writing for the piano.

Common concerns: timbre, time, process, perception Much has been written about the common concerns of the spectral composers and their aesthetic priorities, linking Grisey and Dufourt, and Murail and Risset (Moscovich, 1997: 27) The seminal aesthetic statements of the first-generation spectralists constitute a body of writings stemming from the late 1970s and early 1980s (Grisey, 1978, 1998; Dufourt, 1979; Murail, 1980, 1984). There remains a rich discourse on musique spectrale accessible only to those able to read French; of English-language sources, the double-edition of Contemporary Music Review (Fineberg, 2000) presents translations of articles by Grisey, Murail, and their colleagues, and a later edition of the same journal features Murail’s collected writings, to date, in translation (Fineberg and Michel, 2005). These texts, as well as those of contemporary musicologists and theorists (Goldman, 2010; Drott, 2009; Croft, 2010; Hasegawa, 2009; Nonken, 2008; Pasler, 2007), convey a general yet functional outline of contemporary spectral attitudes and their history, to which the repertoire clearly speaks. In the present context, building

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upon these contributions, the spectral attitude is defined as an approach to music composition and performance supported by four related preoccupations: timbre (tone color), process (transformation), time (temporality), and perception. In the 1960s and 1970s, spectral analysis, a computer-assisted mode of acoustic analysis, revealed what Harvey referred to as the “inner life” of sound. Instrumental timbre was reconceptualized as multidimensional, multifaceted material. Each sound’s amplitude envelope revealed the unique characteristics of its onset (in terms of piano, the attack), steady state, and decay, demonstrating the temporal nature of tone color. By presenting illustrations of acoustic sound in previously inaccessible detail, digital technology and the analytical methods it fostered prompted composers and theorists to rethink what they heard and might create, leading to re-evaluations of different musics and their materials (Wessel, 1979: 45). The rhetoric of the time conveys a sense of wonder and aspiration. Only now, through a new synthesis of scientific and musical analysis, can we begin to probe the sonic enigma. Photographs of the spectral formation of musical works provide a bridge that makes a new understanding of sound and music, sound in music, possible … They objectify much that has previously been most elusive, even mystifying, about sounds and the ways they create the design of musical structures. In so doing, they illuminate the very nature of musical structure and expression. (Cogan, 1984: 1–3)

The spectral composers sought to explore a musical art concerned above all with the realization, in real time, of what sound could become. Considered in earlier eras as a compositional component subordinate to pitched or formal elements, timbre was recognized in its complexity and richness as a compelling basis for entire musical works. The spectralists’ conception of tone color as a multidimensional factor contributed towards their view of musical sound as a unified whole, rather than a conglomeration of discrete parameters capable of being independently manipulated or perceived. Research in acoustics and psychoacoustics led spectral composers to explore the sensual, dramatic, and formal potentials of sound itself to a degree unequalled since the Romantic era, engaging with “the relationship between the delight in sound and the delight in structure” (Rosen, 1995: 40). Timbral analysis and synthesis were a dual focus of those involved with developing digital technologies associated with the advent of electronic and computer music. Insights gleaned from advances in this field informed composition for traditional instruments, expanding the possibilities for

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instrumental composition with significant implications for notation and performance practice. As first-hand historical accounts of the era attest (Risset, 1992; Chadabe, 1996), the interaction between these overlapping fields influenced the composers of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde in no small way. Spectral composers conceived of musical sound as a continuum, rather than a series of discrete cellular elements such as pitched and rhythmic motives, melodies, and conventional chords in progression. A spectral approach to the compositional process might begin with the spectral (computer-assisted) analysis of sounds. Instrumental synthesis, a signature spectral compositional technique, provided a methodology through which acoustic instruments could be deployed to express qualities of the harmonic spectra of sounds both real and imagined. In many spectral compositions, harmonic models and processes were derived from characteristic spectra of instrumental sounds. Yet the goal was never to create a one-to-one mapping, but rather to explore creatively in an original composition of the processes and transformations suggested by analysis. The goal of instrumental additive synthesis is never to recreate, but rather to reveal the latent musical potential of pre-existing sonic material. (Klingbeil, 2009: 80) Instead of basing their music on the manipulation of rows or motives, spectral composers take inspiration from the physical properties of sound itself. Each of these composers defines “spectral” music differently … but as a generalization we could say that the essential characteristic of spectralism is the dissection of sounds into collections of partials or overtones as a major compositional and conceptual device. Spectral composers use the acoustical fingerprints of sounds – their spectra – as basic musical material. (Hasegawa, 2009: 349)

The spectral composer’s imagination would be sparked by the essence of sound, not its representation in musical notation. At the 2013  “Full-Fire Tribute to Tristan Murail” held in Athens, Greece, his former student Keith Moore described Murail’s compositional attitude in the unpublished lecture “Tristan Murail and Spectralism Sighted through ‘Les travaux et les jours.’” What spectral techniques do is allow composers to seize on some aspect of sound itself as an organizing principle; and it is likely that in some corresponding way – large or small – this moves the composer away from handling the traditional elements of musical notation as organizing principles. Tristan, very simply, puts it like this: “Why do we always have to think of music in terms of notes? We work with sounds, for which notes are simply symbols … notes and sounds are not the same thing.”

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In spectral works, structural forms are associated with the listener’s perceptions of continual timbral change. Modulations and transformations from one musical state to another are intended to be perceptually transparent, or psychologically real. The form or scope of spectral compositions is determined by audible processes of transformation featuring the contraction, expansion, mutation, and interpolation of sound materials. In compositions traversing relative states of order and stability, disorder and chaos, psychoacoustically inseparable aspects of rhythm, pitch, texture, harmony, and timbre define environments of sonic transformation and areas of flux between different states of being. The transformation from one state to another provides the basis for musical dramas divorced from conventional formal structures, within which the awareness of the liminal is of paramount importance. The fascination with threshold states – cruxes of ambiguity, in which listeners become disoriented in the act of literally structuring their musical environment – is reflected in the titles of landmark spectral works such as Risset’s Mutations (1969), Grisey’s Modulations (1976), and Murail’s Désintégrations (1982). Ideally, the observation of and sustained engagement with unfolding processes in time direct the listener’s experience of the musical environment. Processes provide the senses of direction, unpredictability, and even inevitability, supporting local events as well as developments of a more global nature. Musical processes spectrally conceived may be seen as descendants of Romantic thematic transformation. In the later nineteenth century, the preordained role of motives and themes within codified forms began to break down, as composers such as Liszt and Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) began to explore how inherently neutral materials could be revitalized and recast. The culture of sound that emerged in the Romantic era revolutionized compositional technique, suggesting a new conception of the musical art and allowing composers, via the exploration of sonorous processes, to bypass the classical imperatives of form. The technologies of spectral analysis and sound synthesis illuminated the temporal aspects of instrumental timbre: distinctive qualities that cannot be instantly comprehended, whose emergence and perception takes time. The spectral focus on the temporal nature of tone color led to an aesthetic interest in processes that demanded certain timespans to fulfill their potential and be perceived as such. Time in spectral music cannot be discussed without reference to timbre and process. Yet the spectral attitude towards temporality in music is worth examining independently, as the notion of sound’s becoming is an integral part thereof and crucially not metaphor. The spectralists echoed Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995): “There is no being beyond becoming” (Deleuze, 1983: 22). For composers seeking to explore

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these timbral-harmonic processes musically and see them convincingly realized in live musical performance, temporal considerations led to new performance aesthetics and notational strategies. The spectral composers embraced a sense of time associated historically with the late-nineteenth-century French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), a contemporary of Debussy. Bergson’s concept of duration (a time as experienced) is defined by perceptions of process and transformation. Duration, the opposite of an absolute and quantifiable “clock time,” is a process by which the flow of time is perceptually determined by how long things seem to take. The flow of music in a Bergsonian sense is a continuum of acoustic change, “a succession of qualitative changes which melt and permeate one another” (Bergson, 1910: 104). Nuanced considerations of duration (Deleuze, 1966; Pasler, 2007) reveal a rich French philosophical tradition leading to the spectral composers, who explored the processes inherent in a single note on levels both local and global, finding affinities on the levels of microstructure (inherent in a single sound) and macrostructure (belonging to the composition as a whole). It is not coincidental that one of Dufourt’s teachers was Deleuze, whose Le bergsonisme (Deleuze, 1966) almost singlehandedly revived interest in the philosopher’s work in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, the rise of the discipline of music perception and cognition paralleled the advent of the spectral aesthetic. Psychologists, psychoacousticians, and music theorists converged to determine the nature and components of human musical engagement, and they proceeded with an eye not necessarily towards how the human psychological apparatus might have evolved, idealistically, in response to musical stimuli, but towards how it might engage with sound realistically, in an active manner. Composertheorists enthusiastically speculated about how the new discourse, uniting art and science, could herald a Zukunftsmusik of unprecedented power and accessibility: “For the ancients, nature may have resided in the music of the spheres, but for us it lies in the musical mind. I think the music of the future will emerge less from twentieth-century progressive aesthetics than from newly acquired knowledge of the structure of musical perception and cognition” (Lerdahl, 1988: 120). As emerging computer-based technologies were making aspects of music and mind more transparent, it became clearer what could and could not be heard, or segregated by the human ear and brain, in a musical stream (Bregman, 1990). Experiments in digital synthesis, furthering decades of research in additive synthesis, brought about heightened awareness of human perceptual mechanisms. And psychoacoustic research, which included the study of timbre perception, became central to the agendas of major institutions devoted to music

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and technology founded in the mid twentieth century. Spectral composers with access to this discourse and these facilities felt an aesthetic imperative to create a music specifically informed by this knowledge of the human capacity for perception. “The computer’s synthesized sound material presents a malleability without precedent,” declared Risset. “It lends itself to new modes of arrangement, to new architectures. But we have to clarify this material in the light of perception” (Risset, 1977). Spectral composers suggested that their desire to write a music reflective of psychological reality – conceived with the biases and tendencies of the human psychological mechanism in mind – distinguished them from composers of integrally serial works, such as Boulez and Babbitt. As Grisey infamously announced, “We are musicians and our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture” (Grisey, 1998: 298). While Babbitt was engaged with early empirical studies of music perception at the CPEMC and wrote for a specific listenership, it can be said that the musical structures that he devised to engage the listener were just that: musically conceived structures, but not structures conceived to reflect the phenomena of acoustic sound. The processes of interest to the spectral composers also differed from the aleatoric procedures employed by Cage and the composers of the New York School, who were also interested in psychological aspects of musical listening. Maintaining that “The nature of listening is in hearing something, and then realizing that you’re no longer hearing it, that you’re hearing something else” (Grimes and Cage, 1986: 49), Cage saw the musical experience as way to shepherd listeners towards a state of heightened sensory awareness. In general, aleatoric processes were designed to lead listeners and performers away from the conception of an autonomous work of art, towards a contemplative state independent of the music at hand. While the spectralists also saw the musical experience as revolving around the affects produced by music in the human mind, their musical works were the locus of those affects. Many sources offer insights into the psychoacoustic research of this era and its relation to studies of music perception (Handel, 1989; Bregman, 1990). In more journalistic fashion, volumes of Computer Music Journal and Music Perception (founded in 1977 and 1983 respectively) reveal the march of technology, in step with the evolving repertoire. Much in this discourse seeks to lay the foundation for a relatively “new” field of academic inquiry, such as empirical studies seeking to demonstrate the existence of psychological universals regarding the perception of pitches, intervals, and scales and shared mental representations of tonal constructs (such as the hierarchy of pitches within the diatonic scale, or the relation between

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specific chords within a tonal pitch space). In the present context, however, we should remind ourselves of psychoacoustics as a discipline with roots in Liszt’s lifetime. Helmholtz’s classic Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music) was published in 1863, preceding Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph by just fourteen years.

Uncommon attitudes The Spectral Piano considers a family of protospectral and spectral attitudes towards composition focused on time, timbre, process, and perception, all of which reflect an ecological perspective on the musical experience itself. This perspective has been influential not only on compositional practice but on pianistic performance as well. It is thus necessary to distinguish those elements that characterize these spectral and, in the same sense, protospectral attitudes. First, there is the attitude of the composer, who conceives the material and structures a musical experience focusing on the acoustic nature of sound and the modulations between different sounds and sonorous environments. The sensual and sensory aspects of the music are primary. This is not to suggest that spectral and protospectral composers entirely discard more conventional musical elements, such as motives and themes, polyphonic constructs, schematic forms, and programmatic elements, but rather to insist that these kinds of elements, the narratives that they engender, and the modes of listening that they encourage are of secondary interest. Harmonic-timbral color and the motion between different musical atmospheres, or states of musical being, are the primary foci of the spectral composer. For this reason, as will be suggested in “Protospectralists at the piano,” Debussy’s work was prescient. He possessed an insatiable curiosity about resonant phenomena and the timbral-harmonic nature of sound. His desire to specify unprecedented nuances of tone color and convey a plastic sense of musical time uniquely defined his works’ notation and performance practice and, ultimately, demanded a more refined technique (defined by articulation, timing, and pedal) from pianists intent on realizing his scores. The reader will find relatively little reference in this volume to Debussy’s contemporary, Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), an acknowledged influence on both Grisey’s Vortex temporum and Murail’s La mandragore. The aesthetic differences that distinguished him from Debussy should be viewed as they themselves saw them: irreconcilable. Ravel was indisputably a master

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orchestrator with a remarkable grasp of acoustics and a savvy understanding of instrumental synthesis. Interested in and aware of acoustic research, he experimented with synthesizing harmonic spectra in works such as “Ondine” (Gaspard de la nuit, 1908), whose opening evokes the C sharp major harmony with the added thirteenth partial. Yet the orchestral work Boléro (1928), rather than a protospectral masterpiece, is more appropriately characterized as a brilliantly scored theme and set of variations. In Boléro, Ravel boldly explores techniques of instrumental synthesis but embraces the standard theme-and-variations procedure just as effusively, if not more so. Timbral transformations are secondary to thematic processes. “Like most French music [up until this time], Ravel’s music is a vertical and, in essence, nondevelopmental language. Themes are subject to harmonization, sequential repetition, fragmentation, and juxtaposition, but their innate profiles are never transformed” (Benjamin, 1994). A similar case is Ravel’s La valse (1920). The work exists in versions scored for orchestra, solo piano, and piano four-hands, and Ravel may have written the orchestral, solo piano, and two-piano versions simultaneously, as the solo piano score, subtitled “poème chorégraphique pour orchestre,” is notated like a short score (with additional lines specifying ultimate orchestration included throughout). While we can say that La valse is brilliantly engineered for the piano and creative in its use of the instrument, the piano’s distinctive acoustic possibilities were neither the composer’s primary focus nor integral to the work’s identity. In all its incarnations, La valse remains an exploration of the variation form and, at its most profound, of the waltz genre itself. Even his most sympathetic biographers suggest that Ravel’s interests in composition were about ingeniously elaborating basic structures, “kicking notes around and seeing what could be made of them” (Nichols, 2011: 302), rather than exploring, in high spectral fashion, what sound itself might become. For his commitment to an inherently vertical, nondevelopmental compositional language ruled by thematic elements resistant to transformation, Ravel is better described as a neoclassicist and not a protospectralist. Secondarily, we must consider the spectral attitude of the listener. Straddling the discipline of music theory, the vast discourse of music perception and cognition offers theories of varied import suggesting how listeners engage with musical works. For examples, one can summon the implication/realization theory (Narmour, 1990, 1992), which considers domain-specific knowledge and how an experienced listener’s expectations are either confirmed or denied in a given musical context; and narrative theories (Levinson, 2004, 2006), which suggest how musical works evoke stories of personae, dramatic action, and emotions in the mind of the listener. While these theories and models have certain validity and can tell us

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something about the range of human musical experience in relation to given repertoire, they reflect essentially nonspectral, nonecological attitudes. A spectral attitude on the part of the listener is not about evaluating, in the course of the experience, how the musical progress denies or satisfies latent expectations regarding the functioning of formal processes and harmonic motions. The spectral attitude towards listening is not about constructing a narrative representation of something else apart from the music, although this analytical approach has been applied (not without some reward) to the music of Dufourt (Pasler, 2011). The spectral attitude spurs the listener to focus on the sound itself and its transformations in real time, actively seeking to perceive sound as an entity beyond metaphor. The spectral perspective does not deny the role of expectations or the attraction of narrative explanation but rather privileges the sensory and sensual aspects of sound and attendant eroticism of the musical experience. Engaging with the musical material itself, in the environment and ambiance established by the work, the listener is directed to observe the evolution of sound over time. We must also consider the spectral attitude of the performer  – in this context, the pianist  – who performs the material attending to color and texture as the main carriers of information and musical drama, and not subsidiary characteristics of the musical environment. The projection of harmonic-timbral states is paramount and distinguishes the performance of spectral music from that of music based on other kinds of materials. For example, in realizing a work written in classical sonata-allegro form, in which the relationships among motivic and thematic materials are crucial to understanding the work’s progress, the pianist might use changes of articulation to enhance the identity of contrasting themes. In the dense, multipart environment of a baroque fugue, the pianist might use color to bring out a vital polyphonic line, distinguishing the subject from its ­counter-subject and thereby illuminating the structure of the composition as it unfolds, directing the listener’s attention. Yet spectral music is about these very changes of harmonic-timbral color deemed secondary in other contexts. It is to these elements that listeners attend, above all else, as carriers of form. The pianist’s choice to voice one particular element of a texture and bring it out in relief, then, is not made with the intent of underscoring something else – a thematic device, a harmonic function, a musical character – but in strict adherence to the score’s indications, and to produce a specific and perceivable acoustic result: resonant phenomena that could not be conveyed were that very voice not so distinguished. Voicing and articulation in protospectral and spectral piano works are never matters of relatively arbitrary or personal “interpretation,” but tasks central to the score’s basic and accurate realization.

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The Spectral Piano explores the development of a compositional attitude in relation to a concise body of what can be considered specifically spectral piano music written over nearly forty years, a timespan roughly bordered by Murail’s prescient miniature Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe … (1967) and Fineberg’s solo Grisaille (2012), as well as piano concerti by Murail and Dufourt (Le désenchantement du monde and On the Wings of the Morning, both premiered in 2013). This body of work is related to a larger repertoire of Liszt, Scriabin, Debussy, and Messiaen. It considers several artistic and scientific eras and milieus, moving from Liszt’s quarters at the Villa Medici in Rome, where he was visited by Debussy, to the urbane Parisian salon of Suzanne Tézenas; from the halls of Bell Laboratories to the sleek subterranean studios of IRCAM; and from the Salle Cortot to Carnegie Hall. The exchange between New York and Paris was one in which composers, performers, and scientists shared ideas, technologies, and performance practices. This modern jetsetting can be contrasted with the ethereal, outof-time exchange among pianists and composers of piano music who never met but shared deep concerns with the nature of their instrument and the art of musical performance. Among these practitioners, we cannot deny elective affinities that transcend place and time. At present, no primary or secondary source considers this material, as either a self-supporting spectral oeuvre or in terms of its relation to the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century repertoire. Burge’s anthology (1990) thoughtfully considers the post-1970s repertoire in relation to historical, cultural, and aesthetic contexts, yet exhibits certain limitations and biases, considering no works of the spectral repertoire and no works at all written after 1987. General surveys of piano music with chapters devoted to twentieth-century music (Gillespie, 1972; Gordon, 1996) tend to group these compositions together in final chapters, with scant descriptions of the music and citations. Those interested in contemporary piano music can find general bibliographic guides (Butler, 1973), often listing thousands of works; providing composer biographies; ranking the works by technical difficulty; and grouping them under headings relating to the nationality, ethnicity, and even gender of the composers. But even more targeted bibliographic surveys (Axford, 1997) include little critical evaluation of a compositional aesthetic and how it is reflected in and transforms a specific repertoire. Also rare are sources that consider, openly and without bias or territorialism, the exchange between American and European new music communities, particularly those engaged with electronic and computer music, which is ongoing and fruitful but fraught with cultural politics and personal rivalries.

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The Spectral Piano offers a context in which to address the rich history and lasting implications of the spectral attitude and its complex relationship to aesthetics, psychology, technology, and politics. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, as well as from sources outside the musical field in areas of ecological psychology and aesthetics, I offer a glimpse of how a contemporary aesthetic has developed and what it might mean, in relation to the musical present, the world of ideas and technologies from which it has emerged, and the repertoire of the past. It is a vast subject and, like all interdisciplinary studies, mine cannot address all concerns from every angle. However, like Risset, I am encouraged by these new frontiers, whose avenues are open and already more than promising.

3 Protospectralists at the piano

The scores of Liszt, Scriabin, Debussy, and Messiaen chart the emergence of a spectral piano. In a progressively intensifying fashion, their works reveal a sophisticated understanding of timbre, temporality, process, and perception, which influenced not only the composition but also the performance of their works. This development is initially traced to Liszt, who “made it possible to give qualities of sound – resonance, texture, contrasts of register – an importance never had before in composition” (Rosen, 1995: 508). By changing the dynamics of pianistic performance itself, Liszt ushered his successors at the keyboard into a new era of acoustic and psychoacoustic exploration. Heir to this Prometheus, Scriabin more aggressively pursued the connections between sound and color, with a personal awareness of developments taking place in psychology and acoustics and a desire to synthesize natural acoustic phenomena from the keyboard. For Debussy, a creative artist more compelled by the sonic possibilities of the instrument than his own abilities at the keyboard, the flow of sound and color in time was his primary aesthetic concern. His manipulation of harmony was directed by a desire to mirror the workings of the overtone series, approximating the microtonal nature of resonance. The scores of all three composers attest to their intuitive grasp of the complexities of the piano’s timbre and a spectral understanding of tone color, resonance, and decay. They exploited these features in their music, creating environments that reflected their distinctive preoccupations. The techniques that they required from their interpreters and their notation evolved with specific acoustic results in mind. Further, all three explored processes of timbral transformation as supplements to and ultimately substitutes for conventional formal structures. Their materials and their transformations defined for listeners novel environments for musical listening, characterized by processes of neutralization, in which musical materials were alternately reduced to their elemental, fundamental states. In many instances, these environments were defined by a resonant stratigraphy, in which resonances, sustained in the pedal, combined over time to create layered timbres of increasing complexity and nuance. The focus on tone color and its transformations as the basis for musical form necessarily led to reconsiderations of time, and the realization of a musical flow ideally liberated, as heard, from the constraints of notation; we witness the

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struggle towards temporal freedom in Scriabin’s own recordings and, with their incessant directives towards a flexible approach to time, in Debussy’s scores. Underlying their concerns with timbre, process, and temporality was an overarching concern with perception. The desire to create psychologically real, relatively accessible works was always located in their sensitive consideration of the subjective and objective characteristics of the musical experience. Following in this tradition was Messiaen, whose personal compositional philosophy was inestimably influential on late-twentieth-century spectral attitudes. In his work, all musical factors were viewed in the service of the harmonic-timbral complex and its development over time. Pitch, dynamic, duration, and articulation were not considered independent parameters but rather elements integrally related in the creation of color. Processes of harmonic-timbral transformation assumed dramatic proportions, literally serving as the basis of a musical form. Crucially, the machinations of harmonic-timbral color were designed to be accessible to the listener. Musical processes and transformations were composed out with a heightened awareness of the listener’s experience, and with the recognition of concrete auditory phenomena to be shared among composer, performer, and listener.

Evolving aesthetics How odd to remind ourselves of the role of sound in music, as if it had been forgotten. It is often taken for granted that music is an art of sound. At the dawning of the Romantic era, however, compositional aesthetics had been dominated by emphases on rhetoric and forms, and on figures and affects (Botstein, 2007: 521–526). Much as the spectralists turned away from precompositional systems derived from mathematical, architectural, and oratorical models, Romantic composers redirected the focus of the listening experience towards music’s sensory quality. They created musical environments in which listeners and performers could rediscover the expressive power of sound. They did so with an awareness of the mutual relationships between performers, their instruments, and their audiences. This delight in tone color and in the physical contact with the instrument must … have existed from the primitive beginnings of music, but it was the Romantic generation that introduced it directly into the initial stages of strict composition … The Romantics cannot be said to have enlarged musical experience except insofar as all originals have done so, but they altered the relationship between the delight in sound and the delight in structure; they gave new importance to aspects of musical experience considered

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until then of secondary interest or relegated entirely to the performer. They permanently enlarged the role of sound in the conception of music. (Rosen, 1995: 40)

Examining the lineage of the spectral composers urges the re-­evaluation of figures pivotal to the emergence of modernism in piano music. Of the piano composers who witnessed the twilight of Romanticism, Liszt, Scriabin, Debussy, and Messiaen were among the most sensitive to how the instrument’s acoustic potentials could be released and controlled. Their piano music is acoustically distinctive in how it explores and exploits the resonating capabilities of the instrument. Their compositional practices and aesthetic statements, as well as the memoirs of those who knew them and witnessed their performances, reveal an intimate understanding of the piano and an expert conception of pianistic technique. This is reflected in their choice and treatment of musical material as well as the translation of that material, and the physical actions required for its realization, into musical notation. A certain fetishism is betrayed in the scores of their piano works. Every notational idiosyncrasy is linked to some action of the hand or the foot, and each marking suggests or represents a calibrated reaction to the sound emerging from the harp. Capturing the spontaneity of performance, their notation acknowledges sonic phenomena and the interplay of bodies and energies in time as scores of earlier eras do not. Highly specific articulations, temporal markings, and poetic texts engage the performer directly in the performative act, rather than merely providing basic indications of dynamic levels and tempi or standard terms for a general mood (appassionato, grave) to be evoked. For these reasons, the practices of these composers are modern and prescient. Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy are pivotal figures in the prehistory of spectral music. Although they came from different national traditions (AustroHungarian, Russian, and French), their work suggests shared aesthetic perspectives, which at times brought them close. In the final year of Liszt’s life, he and Debussy not only met but also performed for each other at the Villa Medici in Rome, an occasion of tremendous import for a young composer whose first attempts at composition reportedly included a Rhapsody in the Style of Liszt (Howat, 2009: 166). Scriabin, notoriously uninterested in the composers of his own era, professed to being enthralled by Liszt’s “magical sonorities” (Bowers, 1970: 44)  and adopted Liszt’s transformational approach to thematic materials, epitomized in single-movement works such as the Poème de l’extase, Op. 54 (1907) and his final five piano sonatas (1911–1913). Although they never met, Debussy and Scriabin were familiar with one another’s work. Scriabin saw Debussy conduct La mer and even purchased a study score of it, which was found on his work table upon

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his death (Martins, 1983: 24–25). Debussy was also a formative influence on Messiaen, who continued to study and teach his works long after receiving the score to Pélleas et Mélisande for his tenth birthday. The American composer Gerald Levinson (b. 1951), who studied with Messiaen between 1974 and 1976, recalled him bringing this very score to class: “One day he brought in the score of Pélleas that had been a gift to him on his tenth birthday. This was a historic, iconic thing. Oh my God, that score was about sixty years old or so, and had tiny handwriting all over it” (Benitez, 2005). Liszt, Scriabin, Debussy, and their spectral descendants shared defining compositional affinities. Terminologically, however, it is inaccurate to describe the spectralists as neo-Romantic. This term is largely reserved for twentieth-century composers who, in the 1960s and 1970s, drew upon the affective manner and tonal grounding of nineteenth-century music, such as George Rochberg (b. 1918), David del Tredici (b. 1937), Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939), Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933), and Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952). The first-generation spectral composers had little use for nineteenth-century expressive and harmonic conventions. Yet the composers of L’Itinéraire shared with Liszt, Scriabin, Debussy, and Messiaen a fascination with timbre and the sensuality of sound, a concern with perception and its relation to acoustics, and a sense of musical temporality closely related to process and transformation. Ultimately, they sought to enlarge to an even greater extent the role of sound in the conception of music.

Liszt the conjuror Pianist, conductor, composer, humanitarian, philosopher, cosmopolitan. Many words describe the multifaceted life and career of Liszt, a familiar figure no less impressive for his ubiquity. To provide a biographical sketch of the composer here is a poor use of space, when authoritative biographers have already risen to the daunting task of documenting Liszt’s peripatetic existence (Walker, 1988, 1993, 1997; Gibbs and Gooley, 2006). In relation to Liszt’s contributions to a modern pianism, it is more relevant to focus on his personal aesthetic, as reflected in the notation and conception of his scores and contemporaneous accounts of his performances. Liszt’s complete works for piano comprise works of absolute music (the Sonata, études, and dance-based works), programmatic compositions (the  three volumes of Années de pèlerinage), reminiscences, paraphrases, and incidental offerings, all supplemented by the transcriptions of various shapes and sizes that preoccupied him, even in his declining years when he began to doubt his own inspiration. They reveal a composer enamored with his instrument. A virtuoso performer from age nine, Liszt was infinitely

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fascinated by the capacity of the piano. A dedicated pedagogue who routinely refused payment for his services, he was intrigued by the elements that distinguished players from each other. Insatiably curious about the piano’s construction, he amassed an impressive collection of instruments, some gifts and others painstakingly acquired. At various times, his stable included a seven-and-a-half octave Bechstein grand; two Chickerings; two Bösendorfers (a concert grand as well as a composing desk with a small, built-in keyboard); a concert harmonium (cabinet organ) made by MasonHamlin; a hybrid, two-manual Erard (the piano-orgue, or organ-piano); a glass piano (piano harmonica) patented by Bachmann; and historic instruments owned by Beethoven and Mozart. While he did not go so far as the young Scriabin, who reportedly constructed miniature instruments as souvenirs for friends and family, he was unquestionably an artist obsessed with exploring the potentials of his instrument on every level: as performer, composer, pedagogue, and connoisseur. This obsessive quality contributed to his legendary, arguably unequaled level of activity and virtuosity. For Liszt, playing the piano was not simply a demonstration of skill or invention. His virtuosity, a form of extreme physicality and expertise, was an integral component of his performance aesthetic. His pianism was a performative act that reveled in the mutual relationship between the performer and instrument. More than l’art de toucher, emphasizing the activities of the fingers upon the keyboard, it was an exchange of energies and forces between two vibrant bodies. Echoing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the “modern Prometheus” of 1818), Liszt articulated the physicality of his performance aesthetic. The virtuoso is not a mason, who, with the chisel in his hand, faithfully and conscientiously cuts his stone after the design of the architect. He is not a passive tool who reproduces feeling and thought … He is not the more or less experienced reader of works … He creates just like the composer himself, for he breathes life into the lethargic body, infuses it with fire, and enlivens it with the pulse of gracefulness and charm. He changes the clay-like form into a living being, penetrating it with the spark which Prometheus snatched from the fire of Jupiter. He must make this form move through transparent ether; he must arm it with a thousand wings; he must unfold scent and blossom and breathe into it the breath of life. (Huneker, 1911: 392–393)

The overt physicality that distinguished Liszt’s performances somewhat baffled his critics, who commonly observed his commanding presence. Critics routinely mentioned that audiences had to witness him in performance to understand the full impact of his persona onstage and comprehend the seemingly irrational, sometimes hysterical reaction he evoked in his audiences (Gibbs and Gooley, 2006: 200–201). During Liszt’s performances,

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audience members were shocked by the sight of a mortal bestowing upon his instrument the “breath of life,” at times overwhelmed by the sense of a transformation inherently physical, as evident in an oft-quoted 1838 review from the Allgemeinische musikalische Zeitung by Moritz Saphir (1795–1858): “After the concert … the listeners look at each other in mute astonishment as after a storm from a clear sky, as after thunder and lightning mingled with a shower of blossoms and buds and dazzling rainbows; and he the Prometheus, who creates a form from every note, a magnetizer who conjures the electric fluid from every key …” (Gibbs and Gooley, 2006: 200). More than his fellow virtuosi Sigismond Thalberg (1812–1871) and Clara Wieck (1819–1896), Liszt defined the potential of the body of the piano in relation to his own. The unusually powerful, subjective force of Liszt’s playing, it has been suggested, was an effect created by the involvement of his body in his performing style: “Many writers, even someone with good ears such as Schumann, asserted that he could not be fully understood until he was seen; the sounds themselves did not communicate what it was that Liszt had to comnunicate …” (Gooley, 2005: 47). Extreme virtuosity drew attention to the undeniable prowess of the performer whose touch rendered the once inert instrument resoundingly alive and pouring forth with previously unimagined colors. The poet Heinrich Heine, who heard Liszt perform at the Théâtre Italien, wrote that his performance touched upon something “which vibrates in almost all of us,” concluding, “I have never encountered these phenomena so distinctly and so frighteningly as in the concert by Liszt” (Kleinertz, 2006: 444). Liszt’s characteristically charged performance led his audiences to perceive the reality of sound in space, and to locate themselves reciprocally and empathetically in an environment defined by the exchange of energies. Liszt continually developed new methods for manipulating pianistic sound through the use of hands and feet alike, extending the range of dramatic piano sound and overhauling the technique of playing in the process. This is most clearly seen in the études he reworked several times: the Etude en douze exercices (1826), Douze grandes études (1837), and Douze études d’exécution transcendante (1851). These studies pioneered techniques for playing unprecedented in their difficulty, such as the deployment of chromatic repeated notes, successions of ever-wider leaps, passages of broken chords, rampant ascending and descending passagework, thunderous octaves, and extensive hand-crossings. Such techniques, coupled with a subtle use of the pedals, made it possible to create great swaths of complex, layered resonances: a vibrant stratigraphy of unprecedented richness and color. His was not virtuosity for the sake of spectacle, but virtuosity deployed as a means towards sound-generation and a dramatic end. One can consider the climactic octaves of “Sposalizio,” from the second volume

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of the Années de pèlerinage (1858), and the ethereal high-register passagework with which “Les jeux d’eau de la villa d’Este” (1877), from the third, begins. “Les jeux d’eau” invites the listener to partake in an aesthetic experience analogous to that of the spray of water in the sunlight, with a shimmering sound as delicate and as ephemeral. “Sposalizio”’s ecstatic and thundering climax evokes the cacophony of bells in all its grandeur and disorganized acoustic profusion. These compositions gain expressive power from their distinct acoustic profiles and the intricate physical choreography required to produce them, which cannot be separated. Their mode of physical presentation and realization is integral to their identity. What renders them relevant and uniquely Lisztian is their definitively holistic disposition. No single element of the sound can be altered (register, tempo, harmony, figuration) without altering entirely what Scriabin called the “sonorous form,” and Messiaen the “harmonic-timbral complex.” From early in his career, Liszt’s unabashed delight in sound and soundmaking was viewed suspiciously by those offended by a “telling destined to exceed the tale” (Samson, 2003: 84). Historical and contemporary critics would identify the virtuosity displayed by his music and in his performances, and the listener’s inevitable awareness of it, as an undesirable distraction and a poor substitute for profound musical meaning. Liszt’s virtuosity was often disparaged, offering the listener a mere frisson and a pleasure devoid of any kind of lasting meaning. Virtuosity … has an evanescent quality, contingent on a particular moment, a precise location (it “takes place”), an instrument, a performer, a style or “manner” of performance, and all of these contribute to a sense of physical presence and immediacy that forces itself upon us, blocking out representation. Virtuosity presents, rather than represents. It encourages us to wonder at the act, rather than to commune with the work and its referents by way of the act. (Samson, 2003: 84)

The immediacy with which Liszt asked listeners to experience “the act” is particularly clear in his transcriptions, which comprise nearly one-third of his compositional oeuvre. In transcribing, Liszt drew upon works large (Beethoven’s symphonies, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, and Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre) and small (songs of Chopin, Eduard Lassen, and Robert Franz). In terms of his commitment to the act of transcription and the wide net he cast in selecting his material, Liszt’s closest parallels are Busoni and, undeniably, Finnissy, a composer associated with the New Complexity, whose subjects of transcription range from Gregorian chant and Verdi’s operas to songs of George Gershwin and the Beatles. In Liszt’s settings, initially distinctive thematic materials are effectively neutralized. Melodies once laden

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with pre-existing musical import are stripped of their original identities, becoming neutral components subjected to processes of transformation. They are returned to a raw state, as one might return a piece of gold jewelry to the smelter. Liszt then asked that the listener engage with this musical material in this pure, neutralized form to discover its potential anew, in relation to a particular moment, place, and performer. Placing radical emphasis on timbre and its transformation in time as the source of musical drama, Liszt encouraged his listeners to revel in musical sound in real time as the basis of their experience. The listener’s perception of dramatic form was linked to a vital sense of the here and now, as Liszt placed added value on the reality of the musical experience. For focusing on elements of tone color long considered subordinate musical parameters in western music, and indeed asserting these elements as the essential determinants of musical form, Liszt has been described as “the most radical musician of his generation.” The supremacy of pitch and rhythm over dynamics was turned upside down by Liszt. Realization now took precedence over the underlying compositional structure. There were many composers before Liszt who wrote with a specific sound in mind, but none for whom this realization in sound is more important than the text behind it. Beautifully sensitive to the nature of his musical material, and deeply indifferent to its quality, all Liszt’s genius was directed towards the realization in sound. (Rosen, 1995: 507)

Liszt’s late piano compositions Nuages gris (1881), Bagatelle sans tonalité (1885), and Unstern! (1886), which court atonality, are often discussed in relation to the twentieth-century avant-garde. These works are undeniably prescient, predating the historic break with tonality associated, at the piano, with Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (1909). Liszt’s greater innovations, however, pertain to his use of the instrument and reconception of the performer’s role. This reflected a modern perspective on performance as an inherently physical act leading to new sounds, forms, and advances in technique. Well into the twenty-first century, his works for piano would continue to inspire spectral works. Murail’s piano concerto, Le désenchantement du monde (2012), would be partly modeled on the Piano Concerto no. 2, S.125, and the Sonata in B minor, S.178 (Bolognesi, 2012).

Scriabin: “dematerialization … incorporeality … disembodiment” Like Liszt, Scriabin was a performer, composer, and charismatic personality whose career has been copiously documented. The discourse is rich

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with historic and contemporary biographies (Bowers, 1970; Macdonald, 1978; Baker, 1986; Leikin, 2011) and the colorful reminiscences of his confidantes (Schloezer, 1987). Musicological and theoretical studies (Baker, 1986; Sabbagh, 2003) have focused on the often fantastic aspects of Scriabin’s personal mysticism and their relationship to his harmonic practice. He is often linked to the Second Viennese School; for his exploration of interval cycles, he has been compared with Alban Berg, and it has been speculated that his experimentation with a post-diatonic harmony, as epitomized in the late Preludes, Op. 74, was leading him towards the twelve-tone world of Schoenberg (Perle, 1984: 119). For his premonitions of human transcendence and liberal sexual statements, he was associated with the counter-culture of the 1960s and its attendant psychedelia. It is now timely to recharacterize Scriabin as an artist interested in creating a music that explored the nature and processes of sonorous forms, and a composer whose attitude towards music perception was as pragmatic as it was forward-looking. Bridging the late-stage developments of the Romantic era with a rising modernism, Scriabin was Liszt’s heir (Perle, 1995: 3–9). He was akin to Liszt in the essentially ecological attitude towards musical listening and performance that they shared, which Scriabin articulated more forcefully. For Scriabin, listening to music was more than a way to transcend reality; it was a way to transform reality. The listening experience provided an environment in which novel perceptions and states of consciousness became possible, offering not fantasy but liberation from daily life (Schloezer, 1987: 96). He was drawn to musical sound as a natural occurrence (an acoustic entity), whose aesthetic perception disclosed to him the different forms of free aesthetic perception described by Seel: “freedom, firstly, from all attributions of meaning; freedom, secondly, to a sensuously-mediated apprehension of one’s own situation; and freedom, finally, to experiment with artistic interpretations of life” (Seel, 1992: 80). In music, Scriabin located the contemplative, corresponsive, and imaginative modes of attraction. He recognized the objective, acoustic properties of sound as well as the subjective nature of their perception and interpretation. He conceived the listener as situated within a chaotic environment such as that described by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) as “one great blooming and buzzing confusion” (James, 1981: 462). From within this chaos, Scriabin, via his musical research, investigated music’s effects on himself and his listeners. Scriabin’s sense of sound as a tangible, physical element may be attributed, in part, to his lifelong experience of synaesthesia – in his case, the simultaneous sense of sound and color. For synaesthetes like Scriabin, and others so endowed, such as Messiaen and the painter Wassily Kandinsky

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(1866–1944), multimodal perceptions of the world are inherently real. Scriabin’s parallel sensations of color and sound would have been experienced directly and accompanied by a feeling of certitude (Cytowic, 1995). His musical experience would not have been metaphorical or poetic, as one might suppose, but noetic (from the Greek noetikos, referring to inner wisdom, direct knowledge, or subjective understanding). As Scriabin reached a level of artistic maturity, he became increasingly curious to understand the physical basis of his condition, keeping himself apprised of research in the new field of psychoacoustics. Considering his lack of university education, over which he agonized (Schloezer, 1987: 70), this goal was remarkable. In 1888, at age sixteen, Scriabin had entered the Moscow Conservatory. Although he came from a musical family – his mother had been a student of legendary piano pedagogue Theodor Leschitizky (1830–1915), and he was raised by his aunt, an amateur pianist – the choice to attend the conservatory had not been automatic. He attended military school first, joining his uncle in the Second Moscow Cadet Corps in 1882. Six years later, only after commencing earnest studies in piano and composition, he entered the conservatory. Once immersed in a fully musical environment, Scriabin excelled as a performer and composer. His gifts were obvious. Alongside his classmate Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), he became a favorite, enthusiastically supported by his peers and teachers, with the notorious exception of Anton Arensky (1861–1906), who failed him in composition. By the 1890s, Scriabin had embarked on a successful career as pianist-composer, embraced by Russian musical cognoscenti including his teachers Nicolai Zverev, Sergei Taneyev, and Vasily Safonov; the composers Nikolai RimskyKorsakov and Alexander Glazunov; and the influential publisher Mitrofan Baleyev, who became his mentor. Established as a virtuoso (ironically, one who incurred an extraordinary injury to his right hand in the course of over-practicing Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan), Scriabin completed his studies at the conservatory in 1892. In February 1904, he left Russia for a grand tour that brought him to western Europe and the United States. This marked the beginning of several turbulent years on the road, directly preceded by the disintegration of his marriage to pianist Vera Ivanovna Isakovich, whom he had married in 1897. At this tumultuous time in his life, when he had reached artistic maturity but was plagued by personal insecurities, Scriabin sought validation for his own powerful musical experiences. To supplement his intuitive sense of musical acoustics and how music appealed to the body as well as the mind, he turned to science and philosophy, seeking those laws that governed his psychological reality. His notebook diaries from 1904 and 1905

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reveal a diet of scientific reading that included writings of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) – a student of Helmholtz and one of the founders of experimental psychology  – and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (The Science of Knowing, 1794)  offered a rigorous and systematic version of transcendental idealism, a branch of philosophy that considered the nature of subjective experience and self-consciousness. He also cultivated scientists and engineers in his inner circle. Alexander Mozer, a professor of electrical engineering, was a close friend of Scriabin’s in the final years of his life; with Mozer, Scriabin discussed the discovery of radioactivity, Max Planck’s quantum theory, Alfred Einstein’s relativity, and Nils Böhr’s theory of atomic structure (Schloezer, 1987: 96). “Scriabin always said that everything in his later compositions was strictly according to ‘law,’” commented the pianist Alexander Goldenweiser, who knew Scriabin from their studies with Zverev. “He said that he could prove this fact” (Schloezer, 1987: 129). While much has made of Scriabin’s dedication to Blavatskian theosophy and mystical leanings, his pragmatic approach to composition is more appropriately related to a quest to reconcile the subjective and objective aspects of musical experience. His brother-in-law asserted that the metaphysical aspects of Scriabin’s personal mysticism were not, as was often and incorrectly assumed, key to his compositional process. Theories that he constructed had no other aim but to coordinate and formulate in rational terms his own musical experience. When Scriabin set to work, he was concerned not with the solution of metaphysical problems, but technical problems; not modeling the world according to his fancy, but manipulating musical sounds. He did what all composers must do; he created sonorous forms. (Schloezer, 1987: 316)

Scriabin sensed the very microstructure of sound. He grasped not only the power and implications of the heard fundamental but also the distinguishing role of sympathetic vibrations, “unheard” sonorities resonating specific partials in the harmonic series responsible for timbral quality. Radically, he attempted to synthesize this timbre from the keyboard. After 1909, informed by self-directed studies in psychoacoustics and psychology, Scriabin began to experiment in his piano music with the concept of a generating entity embodying a kind of musical color. This entity, here and commonly referred to as the “synthetic chord” (also known as the “mystic” or “Prometheus” chord) was a collection of separate parameters (pitch, timbre, dynamic, and register), within which individual elements could not be individually discriminated: a six-tone mode that represents a transposition, necessarily approximate, of the seventh through the fourteenth partials of the natural harmonic series.

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For an overtone series based on the fundamental C3, these harmonic tones would be C5, D5, E5, F sharp5, G5, A5, and B flat5. As a harmonic repository, Scriabin stacked the tones in fourths (from bottom to top, for example: C, F sharp, B flat, E, A, and D), as was first recognized in the1910 analysis of Prométhée by the mathematician and musicologist Leonid Sabaneev (1881– 1968). The piano works written after Prométhée (1909–1910), including the Poème-Nocturne, Op.  61, and Piano Sonata no.  6 (both 1911–1912) are based harmonically on this complex. In his last sonatas and late preludes, Scriabin added to this chord-timbre a seventh tone, G, which provided a timbral shadow of the twelfth harmonic partial. This entity presented a synthetic spectrum, which served as a repository of tone color and harmony for all of his late works. For Scriabin, the synthetic chord represented simultaneously something that felt very familiar – akin to a sonority grasped in nature – and compositional terra incognita. The point of departure was a sonorous block that Scriabin heard and conceived as both a chord and a timbre. What brought the composer to an idiom as original as that … was a search for harmonic complexes that would reflect unheard sonorities – in the literal sense of the word – but that he heard and felt in the sounds of bells and gongs. It was these sonorous images that inspired Scriabin to construct the chord of Prométhée and the last sonatas. (Schloezer, 1987: 322)

A bell produces the most acoustically complex vibrating body designed for musical purposes. Its timbre is distinguished by inharmonic partials (partials not related by integer multiples, such as 2:1, or 5:3), each with its own relative amplitude, frequency, and duration. The auditory image of the bell, and the challenge to capture its distinctive essence from the keyboard, were particularly appealing to Scriabin, who referred to bells and gongs in works such as his Sixth Sonata (1911), a work he reportedly could not bear to play in front of listeners. Other composers were tempted to try to synthesize the bell timbre from the piano as well. Albeit in a more programmatic fashion, Liszt’s “Les cloches de Genève,” “Sposalizio,” and the late cantata Die Glocken des Straßburger Münsters (The Bells of Strasburg Cathedral) imaginatively capture the cacophonous sonic environment created by the carillon. Similarly, Debussy was always listening for bells in his piano music. When the pianist Maurice Dumesnil coached “Reflets dans l’eau” with Debussy, the composer was critical, commenting, “I do not hear the bells” (Nichols, 1992: 160). Debussy reminded even professional concert pianists who sought his advice of the “proper” way to approach the keyboard, “striking each note as though it were a bell listening always for the hovering clusters of vibrating overtones above and below it” (Nichols,

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1992: 171). Emile Vuillermoz (1878–1960), the critic and a former student of Fauré, recalled Debussy’s playing with protospectral fervor. All those who have had the privilege of seeing one of Debussy’s works well up from under his fingers know what a miraculously gifted pianist he is. Personally, I have never heard more supple, elegant, or velvety playing. He obtained sonorities from the piano which softened the angles and asperities generated by his forward-looking inspiration … And no one else had his gift of transforming a dissonant chord into a little bell made of bronze or silver, scattering its harmonics to the four winds. (Nichols, 1992: 156)

In the pianistic imaginations of Liszt, Debussy, and Scriabin, the resonant sonority of the bell, with its distinctive timbral profile, found vital musical analogies. The bell timbres that so captivated the early-modern pianist-composers also played a major role in the acoustic research of JeanClaude Risset at Bell Labs. Risset’s analyses from the 1960s inspired spectral compositions such as Harvey’s Mortuos plango, vivos voco (1980), a computer-generated composition featuring the bells of Winchester Cathedral, and Murail’s piano solo Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire … (1992). (The latter, a farewell to Messiaen, includes a poignant cadential reference to the sixth of his early preludes, “Cloches d’angoisses et larmes d’adieu.”) It was his radical approach to a newly conceived and not conventionally pianistic sound that influenced Scriabin’s use of the pedal. Like Liszt’s and Debussy’s, his pedal indications are largely unnotated, and vague when they do appear. There are many similarities in how the three composerpianists reportedly used the pedal, conceiving it as a mechanism by which the piano, as an organism, could “breathe.” Breathing and respiration are constant references in the memoirs of those who heard them play and teach, from Debussy’s recollection of Liszt’s playing to Safonov’s observations of Scriabin’s pedaling techniques. Safonov reportedly exclaimed to his students, in awe of Scriabin’s virtuosity after witnessing him in recital, “What are you looking at his hands for? Look at his feet!” (Neuhaus, 1973: 166). Their conception of the piano’s natural, unpedaled decay and how it might be prolonged and manipulated via the use of the pedals underscores their idiomatic writing for the instrument and their notation. More so than Liszt, Scriabin explored the use of the pedals to create layered sonorities comprising individual tones resonating at different intensities. He used full, half, and quarter-pedalings to create a resonant stratigraphy: a multidimensional layering of sound, rich with harmonics bell-like in their variation, dissonance, and decay. In the resonance, an acoustic shadow or after-image is perceived, a continuation of the sound that is at least as important as, if not more important than, its initial attacks.

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Scriabin likened the piano’s resonance to beautiful clothes, draped around the body of the sound, gracefully extending the lines of its movements (Sukhina, 2012: 32). Contemporaneous reviewers of Scriabin’s performances often noted his pedaling technique and the novel effects it produced. Of the composer’s farewell performance, the critic Grigori Prokofiev reminded his readers, “The tone is marvelous … He achieves extraordinary effects. Don’t forget he is a wizard with the pedal” (Bowers, 1973: 197). Looking at Scriabin’s compositions, we see at every turn how he worked for non-piano effects, to make the piano a kind of celestial orchestra of unearthly sounds. His first task was, invariably, how to defy the piano’s laws – how to keep its evanescent tone for dissipating into the air, how to give the impression that piano strings can hold a note at the same intensity with which it starts, how to make the resonance last, and last, and last. The pedal sustains only the initial impact, the first of a series of rapidly diminishing decibels of sounds. Scriabin constantly devised extended figurations to prevent this – trills, reiterated arpeggios, repeated chords, and melodic lines intensified by clusters of notes which flicker like fires to radiate steady heat. (Bowers, 1973: 204)

How Scriabin used the pedal to play into the sound of the piano is best exemplified in his later works, such as the Sonata no. 9, Op. 68 (1912–1913) and the poem for piano, Vers la flamme, Op. 72 (1914). In these compositions, one hears an obsessive focus on particular registers, whose resonance is caught and sustained in the pedal. Scriabin establishes independent planes of timbral color continually refreshed, at times one layered upon the next. At the poem’s luminous conclusion, for example, the highest tessitura is saturated as the pianist repeatedly attacks the shortest strings, creating a distinctive acoustic aura and noisy atmosphere. With the pedal depressed, adjacent chromatic tones and their overtones create a friction in the ear, charting the work’s spectral journey from pitch to noise, and harmon­icity to inharmonicity. Scriabin’s skillful manipulation of instrumental timbre distinguished his compositions and his performances of them. Leikin, who has analyzed Scriabin’s piano-roll recordings and written extensively on his personal performance aesthetic, concurs that Scriabin’s attention to harmony and timbre, which distinguished his sound and technique, was the most radical aspect of his playing. “Scriabin’s pianistic fame was based on his inimitable spectrum of tone colors. Fragile, mysterious, yet electrifyingly intense, they often did not even resemble a piano sound” (Leikin, 1996: 104). In the late sonatas, Scriabin uses the pedal to create a different kind of resonant stratigraphy, emphasizing and maintaining different layers of resonance, with bell-tones in the lower registers juxtaposed with trills and

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flourishes in the upper registers. Lower fundamentals are allowed to ring, above which one hears coloristic tones – “real” members of the overtone series and imagined resonances – resonating above them. Both sonata and poem demonstrate Scriabin’s concept of a dematerialized sound. The piano is no longer a vehicle for conveying thematic or motivic information, or a narrative based on a conventional musical “form.” The piano is used to evoke the full spectrum, mimicking the inner lives of sounds from the keyboard and capturing, via the sonorous entity of the synthetic chord, the essence of the fundamental and the activities of its harmonics. Scriabin’s stratigraphic use of the pedal defines his piano compositions as not simply written “for” the piano – theoretically capable of being transcribed for another instrument without losing their essence – but about the instrument itself and its capacity for unprecedented resonance and color. Scriabin’s obsession with timbre and transformation as the basis for his piano works is clearest as one sees the progression of his ten sonatas. Throughout the sonatas, the musical progress hinges on the transformation of raw material perceived without metaphor, in terms of its own acoustic becoming. The sonata form is as if dissolved, and the role of perceived harmonic motion minimized. Changes of texture and timbral color become more important than the return to given key areas or the recurrence of thematic materials. Continuing the path of Liszt, Scriabin’s sonatas led their listeners on journeys through different musical environments. Conventional forms and expressive clichés were rejected by a protospectralist ever more intent on modulating from one sonorous state to the next: “The music becomes more ‘decompositional’ or ‘self-transforming,’ rather as a cigarette progresses to being consumed by fire from phosphorus to flame to embers to extinction and silence. Scriabin in his later music turned away from the use of music to express psychological or emotional states and wanted to achieve what he called ‘dematerialization … incorporeality … disembodiment’” (Bowers, 1970: 178). Scriabin’s concept of dematerialization foreshadowed advances in musique acousmatique, a genre that rose to prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century (Windsor, 1995; Bauer, 2004; Landy, 2007; Emmerson, 2007). Acousmatic works, entirely comprising prerecorded materials, synthetic sounds, and, later, processed sounds, were created using synthesizers and computer-assisted technologies. Originating in the musique concrète of Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) and the electroacoustic compositions of Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995), acousmatic music relied on loudspeakers and not live instrumental performers for its realization; in 1960, Schaeffer and Jérôme Peignot first used the term “musique acousmatique” to describe this new genre, based on the perception of sounds divorced from the gestures and rituals of traditional concert performance (Peignot, 1960). Yet Scriabin had

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hinted at the possibility of this kind of music decades earlier. He advocated for a music that could be listened to on its own terms, allowing the listener to transcend the constraints he associated with late-nineteenth-century conventions of composition and performance. In this sense, he sought to create piano music that could be much more than just that. It has been suggested that Scriabin may have appropriated the term “dematerialization” from the writings of the religious philosopher and historian Lev Karsavin (1882–1952) and the Marxist theoretician Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), a close friend of his and, not coincidentally, Lenin’s (1870–1924). “It was unusual in those days for any musician to link creativity with revolution, and Scriabin did” (Bowers, 1970: 93). However, Scriabin’s contemporaries deemed the composer’s use of the term apolitical, and, ultimately, nowhere near as dedicated as his approach to sound itself. Composers such as Philippe Hurel, who worked briefly with Murail, have suggested that no truly spectral music can be written for the piano, owing to the rigidity of its tuning and its inability to produce microtones. Grisey, however, discussed the conception of a spectral piano with Campion, an American who studied with him in the late 1980s. Campion’s notes from this period reflect an attitude towards the instrument that parallels Scriabin’s. Grisey emphasized that idealized scientific rigor was never the arbiter of any spectral attitude towards composition or performance. He maintained, “if the ear gets close enough to the spectrum, it will ‘hear’ the spectrum, so [it is] not a problem that the piano is not really capable of playing the spectra …” (Campion, personal correspondence, 2003). Grisey’s most extensive writing for piano appears in Vortex temporum (1996), a work scored for piano, flute, clarinet, and string trio and written shortly before his death. Notably, Vortex temporum explores these very issues associated with spectralism and the piano’s “real-world departures from ideal harmonicity”: the realities and consequences of its idiosyncratic tuning in practice (Hasegawa, 2009: 352–354). In Vortex temporum, Grisey exaggerates the piano’s idiosyncrasies via a modest scordatura, lowering four notes on the piano microtonally and using the larger ensemble to articulate three kinds of spectra (harmonic, stretched, and compressed), distorted and unnatural coloristic worlds inspired by the piano’s resonance. Vortex temporum thus illustrates spectral music’s dual inspirations of science and nature and the attitude of a composer seeking not so much to strictly reproduce “real” acoustic phenomena as to expand creatively upon them. This is one way in that nature enters Grisey’s music: as the reproduction through instrumental synthesis of the acoustical spectra of real-world sounds, with their characteristic distortions maintained or even exaggerated. When we listen to later works such as Vortex temporum it is often impossible to hear

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Grisey’s harmonies as versions of the natural spectra from which they were derived. After the harmonies have been subjected to extensive compositional manipulation – exaggerated stretching or compression, approximation to a quarter-tone grid and omission of many partials – their natural acoustic source is no longer recognizable. (Hasegawa, 2009: 354)

Acknowledging the realities of acoustic performance, the idiosyncrasies of instruments, and the vagaries of human players, Grisey conceded that approximations were necessary and inevitable when asking instrumentalists to make subtly nuanced harmonic and timbral adjustments in real time, and with real instruments. Evocations of the spectra could not always be articulated with scientific precision but would be, as described by Grisey in his preface to Les espaces acoustiques, “blurred, like our heart, like our walking … with that margin of fluctuation that is the source of all the interest.” Grisey’s music is no less “spectral” for its exploration of exaggerated, distorted spectra, even when the natural derivation of the material collapses or is inconceivable to the listener in those same terms. Spectral music is an interplay between musical observation and musical transformation. Therefore … nature can only be called an initial point, and technique only a secondary tool for composing. (Haselböck, 2007: 8) Composers like Grisey knew about these tensions. In his music, the so-called spectral music, the spectrum itself has only a minor importance … Grisey has transformed the temporality of a spectrum into the structure of a whole composition only once in his life (in the famous piece Partiels, 1975). In all the other cases, the relationship of the spectrum to the whole, of microcosm to macrocosm, is an artificial one. (Wilson, 1988: 41, italics added)

In this very sense, Scriabin’s piano compositions are protospectral, based on his approximations of the harmonic spectrum via the synthetic chord, regardless of the precision with which the spectra are presented. Like the composers associated with L’Itinéraire, he was fascinated by acoustics and the human psychological mechanism, and strove to create a music whose experience could be intrinsically related to a kind of universal psychological reality. “I find more chords and harmonies by intuition,” he commented in response to Baleyev’s analysis, “It pleases me when scientific facts coincide with my intuition, and, in the end, that cannot be avoided. Intuition has always been my priority. Of course, the principle of unity demands that science and intuition coincide” (Sabbagh, 2003: 8). Like the first-generation spectral composers, Scriabin attempted to transform the temporality of a spectrum, in all its detail, into the structure of a composition, and to see

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that composition translated into sounding reality via virtuoso performance. Compelled to explore the rich and ragged margins of what was possible from the keyboard, Scriabin did not find the piano’s tuning system prohibitive. Rather, he developed an idiosyncratic compositional and performance practice that enabled him to achieve a captivating mimesis of the nature of sound. He embraced the idiosyncrasies of the piano’s temperament, evoking what he could of the full spectrum from the keyboard.

Debussy and modern virtuosity Every era sees trends in the treatment, conception, performance, and notation of temporal elements. Since the 1980s, a large and varied discourse has evolved that considers the area of expressive timing in music from a host of disciplinary perspectives. Seeking the interstices among aspects of human psychology, performance practice, and musical structure, curious readers will find empirical studies and models of human performance, as well as discussions oriented specifically towards aesthetics, music theory, and historical practice (Todd, 1985; Clarke, 1989; Epstein, 1995; Honing and Ladinig, 2009; Dodson, 2011). Generalizing, it can be suggested that the materials of classical music are closely tied to the concept of clock-time, as related to the metronome and a steady pulse. The formal structures of classical and early Romantic music rely on the periodicity and predictability of a stable metric framework for their rhetorical and constructive power; as a result, this music benefits from performance that reflects the awareness of proportional relationships between metric and temporal elements. In the Romantic era, composers and performers began to stretch this framework, playing with temporal expectation and implication via rubato, taking greater proportional liberties in realizing the music as notated on the page. Nineteenth-century performance practice came to encompass forms of conventionalized and sometimes mannered expressive timing, often associated with Chopin, Liszt, and a freer approach to rhythm, such as the “incessant changeability of tempo” demonstrated in Scriabin’s Welte-Mignon recordings (Leikin, 1996: 111). Continuing this trend, composers such as Debussy and his contemporary Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) wrote music to suggest a freely flowing cascade of sound and color, a music that could be perceived as the essence of color and time made rhythmic (“de couleurs et de temps rythmés”) (Debussy, 1927: 55). Even more so than his approach to harmony and timbre, Debussy’s attitude towards the temporal aspects of acoustic sound is what distinguishes his work as protospectral. His compositions realize a new conception of musical time, and offer an experience focusing on the complexity of the acoustic instant as part of a continuous sonorous evolution (Moscovich, 1997: 22).

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Debussy’s conception of temporality mirrors that of his contemporary, Henri-Louis Bergson. In the late 1880s, just a few years after the death of Liszt, Bergson described a subjective experience of time characterized by the interpenetration and interaction of heterogeneous elements dynamically unfolding. He recognized the personal experience of time as a continuous flow defined by perceived events and processes and asserted the quality of duration as the fundamental essence of immediate experience (Bergson, 1910). He distinguished this from the experience of clock-time, in which technology artificially and mechanistically divides time into homogeneous elements, such as seconds, minutes, and hours. The Bergsonian conception of temporal perception recognizes the flow of time. Time here does not refer to the discrete units of seconds, minutes, or hours; time as apportioned into discrete units of time is conceptual, not perceptual. Time in that sense is an abstraction or intellectualization of the immediate duration of experience … Immediate experience, unlike time, is not doled out in discrete droplets; it is a continuous passage of events or experiences that possess duration. It goes on. (Heft, 2001: 52)

Sympathetic to Bergson’s ideas, Debussy explored the concept of duration in his music. In 1914, when Bergson was reigning philosopher in France and Debussy considered the musician par excellence, Louis Laloy (1874–1944), the composer’s close friend and biographer, went so far as to claim that Debussy’s music could not have been produced except in the same environment as such a philosophy (Pasler, 2007: 90). The concept of time and color articulated temporally is manifested in Debussy’s distinctively sectional works, in which each successive part is defined by its timbral and textural character. Each part of a work establishes a musical state or environment, defined by characteristics readily discriminated by the ear (such as tessitura, articulation, and dynamic) and more complicated, multidimensional factors, such as relative densities and rates of transformation. These states are not defined primarily by the development of thematic or harmonic materials or any conventional formal function, but by their sound, color, and texture: elements that cannot be independently discriminated. “This is a form based solely on the demands of its material – a form in which nothing is fixed but which evolves itself by the continual morphology of its own self, constantly dissolving and re-creating its own being” (Smalley, 1968: 131). In terms of perception, musical structure or dramatic shape is determined by the listener’s evaluation of different musical states and their interrelations. It is unlikely that Debussy would have denied the existence of basic binary forms in his compositions, or suggested that the appearances

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and recurrences of familiar thematic materials were without consequence. However, in his music, perceptions of drama and musical progress are based even more significantly on the listener’s engagement with a musical environment evolving in time: the processes of timbral transformation and moments of rupture that distinguish one from the other. The post-Lisztian act of playing was newly focused on the physical bodies of performer, instrument, and sound, as well as the listener’s immediate experience of their mutual engagement. The responsibility of the written page had also changed. Now, its role was to cultivate the performer’s ability to respond, in real time, to the potential of the instrument at hand. To encourage the perception of radically differentiated sonorous states and establish a sense of musical temporality that could transcend the metric framework, pianists were asked to bring out the elements that most clearly contributed to the variable flow of music in time, establishing a continuum of sound demonstrating unprecedented plasticity and nuance. The idiosyncratic notation of Debussy’s scores heralds a modern virtuosity: the ability to manipulate the piano, recognizing the physical potentials and variables of different instruments. His scores are dense with indications suggesting momentary fluctuations of tempo, changing rates of musical flow, and shifting densities. No tempo is absolute. Debussy’s practice is to establish and then veer from an initial tempo interrupted again and again by infinite variations of pressez and cédez, push and pull. Musical states are differentiated by how the notated figures are to be articulated in relation to sounding resonance and textural precedent: rhythmé and décidé (rhythmically, decisively), souple et ondoyant (supple and flowing), librement (freely), and volubile (as if speaking animatedly). Observing the aspects of practice privileged in the notation, it becomes clear that how the music flows in time is critical to the perceived identity of any musical passage and the listener’s experience of form. Apart from the finger on the key itself, the damper pedal is the mechanism by which decay and sustain are controlled. In real-time performance, pedal technique is crucial. Pedal shrouds rhythmic attack, tempers resonance, and can create the illusion of an unbroken wave of sound. Carefully sustained pedal allows the listener to hear, as if in slow motion, not only the exquisite decay of a single sonority but also the transformation of accumulated sonorities over time. While Debussy as a rule does not indicate individual pedalings explicitly, his notational markings are extremely specific about how notes are to be articulated into a depressed pedal, implying a liberal but judicious use of the pedal. Debussy employs standard markings of staccato, tenuto, and legato divorced from their original connotations of sounding value, in tandem with suggestions of en dehors or pas en dehors

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(emphatically or without emphasis), lointain or pénétrant (as if from afar, or penetrating), and léger or marquée (lightly, or marked). Responding to the implications of these markings and attending to the ever-present decay, the pianist establishes strata of sonorities, a web of intercrossing strings vibrating at different rates and frequencies. Like Scriabin’s music from the same period, Debussy’s works establish a resonant stratigraphy. A superposition of layers of resonance is established, with sonorities suspended in various states of decay. Debussy’s increasingly refined conception of resonance as a temporal phenomenon resulted in a notation of unprecedented specificity. In this context, the relative dearth of pedal indications in his scores does not reflect a disinterest in the mechanism. Rather, it reveals his recognition of its variability and the evanescence of sound at a particular moment in a given space. In Debussy’s scores, one commonly finds the directive ­laissez-vibrer (let vibrate), open-ended ties, and commas. These inherently vague markings reveal the composer’s acknowledgment of resonant factors beyond notation and a desire to let the instrument breathe. They offer the performer a certain freedom to accommodate the piano’s natural decay and subtly finesse it, with regard to musical context. Con pedale is assumed. Anecdotally, Debussy criticized the playing of his champion Ricardo Viñes, for being too dry; from the reports of Viñes’s students such as François Poulenc, however, we know that he pedaled liberally (Howat, 2009: 279). And one almost never finds pedal indications suggesting an exact moment to raise the damper pedal. (A rare instance can be found in the final bar of the prelude Voiles.) In the omission of concrete directives with regard to the pedal, Debussy’s awareness of and willingness to accommodate the temporal variable of pianistic resonance are apparent. He conveyed this to Maurice Dumesnil, who studied his works with him. “‘Pedalling cannot be written down,’ he explained. ‘It varies from one instrument to another, from one room, or one hall, to another.’ So he left it to his interpreters to trust their ears: Faites confidence à votre oreille …” (Nichols, 1992: 163). Attuned to the spontaneity of performance, Debussy understood that pianists make personal, contextual decisions regarding pedaling to accommodate the constraints imposed by individual instruments and spaces. For him, as for Liszt, the negotiation of the physical aspects of sound in itself was a form of virtuosity. The significance of the pedal may have been revealed to Debussy by Liszt. During Debussy’s Prix de Rome year (1886), the two composers became acquainted and played for each other at the Villa Medici, in an informal, after-dinner recital (Howat, 2009: 166). The elderly Liszt performed three works, including “Au bord d’une source” (from Années de pèlerinage I)

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and his transcription of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Despite the brevity of his informal program (and the unfortunate fact that Liszt fell asleep during the younger composer’s performance), Liszt’s playing remained vivid in Debussy’s memory. “I’ve heard only two fine pianists,” Debussy recalled years later, “my old piano teacher … [and] the second pianist was Liszt, whom I heard in Rome” (Nichols, 1992: 148–149). In particular, Liszt’s use of the pedal made an indelible impression. The younger composer described how Liszt used the pedal as a kind of “respiration.” The sense of breath is crucial. His terminology reveals a conception of the piano as an organism with its own patterns of resonance and a recognition of timbre in continual evolution, inextricably tied to the temporal element. Years later, perhaps struggling to represent this aspect of sound using traditional notation, Debussy mused, “Theoretically it ought to be possible to find some graphic way of showing this ‘breathing’ …” (Howat, 2009: 282). Throughout the piano’s history, its practitioners were encouraged to mimic vocal phrasing. Pianists were encouraged to breathe, or phrase, as a singer might: between melodic phrases, before registral leaps, and other places a vocalist might pause for technical necessity or dramatic effect. Such an approach makes some sense when applied to a repertoire itself so mimetic, such as Mozart’s opera-infused sonatas or the bel canto nocturnes of Chopin. Contemporary pedagogical guides continue to stress the singing style and “imperatives of cantabile, the sine qua non of musical expression and piano playing” (Sherman, 1996: 22). Debussy’s revelation – of the piano’s idiomatic capacity for sustained resonance, and of a compositional aesthetic and pianistic performance practice taking into account the temporal nature of the instrument’s sound – distinguished his own playing and writing for the instrument from that of his contemporaries, even Ravel. One need only see the specificity of Ravel’s pedal markings in La valse to grasp the inherent differences in their attitude towards the piano. In Debussy’s music, knowledge of the instrument’s capacity for resonance and its natural decay in context informed both the pacing of the works themselves in real-time performance and their notation on the page. Debussy’s modern conceptualization of respiration and resonance was not only decisive in the development of his of way of writing for the piano but also uncanny in foreshadowing postmodern developments, Saariaho’s “breathing music” (Service, 2012), and theories regarding the aesthetic significance of resonating (Seel, 2005). Considering how elements of the overtone series could be manipulated to determine harmony and timbre, Debussy wrote for a spectral piano. Like his contemporary Scriabin, Debussy aspired to evoke a knowingly “blurred” representation of the harmonic series from the keyboard. In L’isle

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joyeuse (1904), the melodic and harmonic materials are based directly on the first sixteen partials of the overtone series, with an emphasis on the eighth through sixteenth partials. In La cathédrale engloutie (Préludes I, 1910), bass notes in the center section correspond to the lower partials of the series. The role of the overtone series in directing harmony, as well as Debussy’s inclinations towards just intonation and desire to buck the rigid temperament of the piano, have also been explored in relation to “Pagodes” (Estampes, 1903) and Danseuses de Delphes (Préludes I); similar compositional techniques have been identified in “Cloches à travers les feuilles” (Images II, 1907), as well as the earlier orchestral works Prélude à l’aprèsmidi d’un faune (1894) and La mer (1905) (Don, 2001: 64–66). The American microtonalist Ben Johnston (b. 1926) attributed to Debussy the creation of a “radical” harmonic language that approximated “as well as can be in equal temperament” a movement from overtone series to overtone series, with an emphasis on the higher fundamentals and subsets of the upper partials (Johnston, 1988: 236–237). Debussy’s evocation of the overtone series from the keyboard, and particularly his attention to distinctive subsets therein, reveals yet another way in which he was sensitive to the nature of sound (Platt, 1995). He grasped not only the psychological reality of musical listening in time as subjectively experienced, but the physical reality of sound and its objective characteristics. Just as contemporary physics informed new ideas about painting, Helmholtz’s acoustics and developments in the spectral analysis of sound fed composers’ interest in musical resonance and the dissolution of form by vibrations. In much of Debussy’s music … the composer arrests movement on ninth and other added note chords, not to produce dissonant tension but, as Dukas put it, to “make multiple resonances vibrate.” This attention to distant overtones, particularly generated by gong-like lower bass notes, produces a greater sense of the physical reality of sound. (Pasler, 2007: 91)

Debussy’s approach to time, harmony, process, and timbre reveal decidedly ecological and protospectral attitudes towards the instrument. He viewed the piano as not a machine but, empathetically, an organism; the environment as a sounding board for pianistic resonance; and timbre as the result of additive processes leading to perceptions of color. Composers, theorists, and musicologists have related Debussy’s harmonic innovations to Helmholtz’s discoveries relating to resonance and sympathetic vibration, with which he may have been familiar (Johnston, 1988; Don, 2001). Debussy’s explorations in the realm of harmony, as relating to timbre and resonance, are commonly associated with his interest in

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the shimmering microtonal sonorities of the Balinese gamelan, which he heard for the first time at the 1899 Exposition Universelle in Paris. “Debussy regarded the piano as Balinese musicians regard their gamelan orchestras,” recalled the pianist E. Robert Schmitz. “He was interested not so much in the single tone … as in the patterns of resonance which that tone set up around itself.” Debussy insisted that the key be struck in a “peculiar way … otherwise the sympathetic vibrations of the other notes will not be heard quivering distinctly in the air” (Schmitz, 1937: 781–782). Eager to explore the nature of timbre and resonance in the confines of his own home, Debussy kept a Blüthner grand piano custom-outfitted with extra aliquot strings in the upper register (a fourth string for each note in the top three octaves, strung slightly higher so as to be just out of reach of the hammer itself), which offered intensified harmonic resonance (Howat, 2009: 335). His sensitivity to the individual components of timbre may also be traced to his studies in organ at the Conservatoire. In the late 1870s, Debussy attended the organ class of César Franck (1822–1890), and he also worked with the organist Auguste-Ernest Bazille (1828–1891) (Lockspeiser, 1962: 33). This phase of his study is relevant, as the twentieth-century techniques of additive synthesis so influential on the spectralists were direct descendants of the processes that distinguish the various organ stops. Since the medieval era, organists have created different timbres  – distinct complex tones  – by processes of summation, which variously combine simpler tones (the virtual sine tones associated with individual pipes). In a process literally the reverse of additive synthesis, organ stops are “pulled out” (literally, taken out of play). From a giant repository of available pipes, only certain ones are activated simultaneously; in concert, the pipes remaining “in play” contribute to a specific timbre. The highly specific combinations of simple tones then produce the complex timbres associated, for example, with evocatively titled stops such as chimney flute, night horn, and vox céleste. Thus, as the first-generation spectralist’s knowledge of the piano would be enriched by that of the computer, Debussy’s ideas regarding the multidimensional nature of timbre may have been inspired by his time, not at the piano, but at the organ.

Messiaen: the new thinking In the past fifty years, much has been written about Messiaen’s life and music. Rarely has a contemporary composer inspired such curiosity. Since his death, a series of valuable studies have been published, drawing upon materials heretofore unavailable (Hill and Simeone, 2005, 2007; Dingle, 2007; Dingle and Fallon, 2013). Today, Messiaen is recognized as a composer whose aesthetic development was crucially influenced by Debussy, Liszt, and the Russian

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school (Griffiths, 1994: 122). As Scriabin bridged the Romantic and modern eras, Messian bridged the modern and postmodern. In this context, it is appropriate to examine his career as it had been established by the mid 1960s, as his activities brought him in touch with the young composers who established L’Itinéraire. In so doing, it is necessary to bear in mind that Messiaen’s compositional evolution in the 1960s was closely tied to his work of the previous decade, most notably the composition of the Catalogue d’oiseaux. In 1966, Messiaen was appointed Professor of Composition at the Paris Conservatoire, an appointment that symbolized a historic change of status. Hired in 1941 as Professor of Harmony, he subsequently had been assigned an additional course in aesthetics and analysis, yet he had taught composition only privately, hosting informal seminars at the homes of colleagues and friends and occasionally at the Conservatoire on Saturdays. As he was not a full professor, his position contradicted his stature as composer, which had soared following World War II and continued to grow upon the publication of Technique de mon langage musical (1944 and, in English translation, 1956). Finally, at sixty years of age, his position was professionally acknowledged. A year later, Messiaen was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France, further reinforcing his status as a member of the musical establishment. Messiaen’s appointment was what drew Murail and Grisey to the Conservatoire, the former in 1967 and the latter the following year. Grisey, who had studied composition at the Staatliche Musikhochschule in Trossingen, Germany, and also worked with Dutilleux at the Ecole Normale de Musique, was attracted to Messiaen’s highly individual “sense of color and harmony and translucence” (Grisey, 1996). Prior to this point, Murail had not studied composition formally. He had attended the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, where he had concentrated on economics and Arab languages. Trained as a pianist and organist, Murail was intrigued by Messiaen’s music, particularly the Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine (1943–1944), Messe de la Pentecôte (1949–1950), and Oiseaux exotiques (1955–1956); he sensed that Messiaen was for him, as a composition teacher, “the only option” (private communication, 2008). It is no coincidence that the two young musicians who became known as the fathers of the spectral movement were drawn to Messiaen. Years earlier, reviewing the premiere of the Trois petites liturgies, Roland-Manuel identified what he termed “the true secret” of Messiaen’s power, using language that now seems prescient: “His ear has an acuteness which is second to none. It is the ear of an acoustician, and it guides him in the art of capturing and arranging the fleeting sounds of partials, directing them towards their poles of attraction (Hill and Simeone, 2007: 148).

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Enhancing Messiaen’s status as a sought-after pedagogue was the fact that many of his students from the 1950s were now among Europe’s most influential composers and new music impresarios. In 1961, the critic André Hodeir crowned Messiaen’s students Boulez and Jean Barraqué (1928–1973) heirs to the compositional legacy of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. He predicted Messiaen’s “ultimate failure” as a composer while describing his pedagogy as “the most glorious side of his musical activities”: “It is through this second aspect of his career, his pupils, none of whom, save the very weakest, can actually be called his disciple, that posterity will remember the name of this great musician …” (Hodeir, 1961: 115–121). Boulez’s place in the postwar avant-garde had been secured by his three piano sonatas (1946–1963), Le marteau sans maître (1955), and Pli selon pli (1957–1962); recognized as a conductor for his work with the Domaine Musical, his collaboration with Wieland Wagner (Parsifal, 1966) was bringing him notoriety in the classical music world as well. More than a decade after writing Metastaseis (1953–1954) and Pithoprakta (1956), Xenakis produced Musiques formelles, a treatise examining the relationship between music and mathematics (Xenakis, 1971); four years before the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) opened, he founded the Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicale (CEMAMu)  – and its sister center at Indiana University, the Center for Electronic and Computer Music (CECM) – providing theoretical and practical training in electronic music and multimedia composition. Having worked with Messiaen briefly in the early 1950s, Stockhausen spent the decade involved with massive works including Momente (1962–1964/1969), Mixtur (1964–1967), and Hymnen (1966–1967); following years of teaching in Europe and America, he founded the Cologne Courses for New Music. Other pupils from the period who became prominent included Gilbert Amy (b. 1936), Alexander Goehr (b. 1932), and Betsy Jolas (b. 1926). As mentor to the avant-garde, Messiaen’s record was unsurpassed. “Everybody wanted to study with him,” Murail recalled, “and so did I” (Murail, 2003). Messiaen’s pedagogical career lasted nearly forty years, during which time he taught primarily at the Conservatoire and also at summer courses such as Darmstadt, Tanglewood, and the Centre Acanthes (Avignon). Prior to the publication of his Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1994–2004), his idiosyncratic pedagogical methodology was mainly known anecdotally, via the memoirs of la classe de Messiaen (Johnson, 1975; Halbreich, 1980; Hill, 1995; Boivin, 1995; Samuel, 2003). His students recalled Messiaen at the keyboard, playing freely from his own scores as well as those of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Berg, and summoning examples

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from memory. He selected for analysis works distinguished by their exotic modalities, harmonic richness, imaginative and colorful orchestration, and rhythmic and melodic resourcefulness. His students’ notes reveal that he consistently focused on local details, rather than global formal constructs; Messiaen the analyst expressed little concern with how the vocabulary of a work contributed to any larger, rule-based system or syntax. Messiaen focused on the vocabulary rather than on the syntax, on typology … rather than on the organic, dialectical working out of these elements … The unheard-of dimensions of the posthumous Traité could have easily permitted a comprehensive and complete view of musical forms; yet we find in it much more attention given to details … than to formal function, larger structures, and proportions. (Boivin, 2007: 140)

Discussing harmony, Messiaen explored the etymology of a given chord through its use over several centuries – by tracing the lineage of a chord in a work of Debussy back to Monteverdi and Mozart, then projecting its influence on composers such as Boulez and Murail (Dingle, 2007: 176). His affinity for certain composers’ work transcended imposed distinctions of nationality, era, and style. Unlike his colleagues at the Conservatoire, he analyzed classical and contemporary works in the same breath. A passage from a Mozart concerto would remind him of a harpsichord piece by Rameau or some piano writing dear to Ravel. The combination of a peculiar harmony, voicing and choice of instrumentation would create a sound effect that foresaw Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète … The so-called “Golaud chord” in Pelléas et Mélisande would reappear, in an almost exact inversion, in the Bacchanale of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. Transposed and with some added notes, it would quite suddenly become Stravinsky’s famous horn-accentuated dissonant aggregate in The Rite of Spring. (Boivin, 2007: 142)

His was a fascination not with harmony in and of itself but always in context, and with how the same harmonic entity could be distinguished and defined in different timbral environments. Messiaen approached the efforts of his students with an open mind, seeking to minimize his own biases and predilections in guiding them towards the realization of their musical visions. “My role,” he recalled, “… was to step aside, to forget what I liked myself to try to discover what they would like and to help them find their own voice” (Dingle, 2007: 175) Messiaen enjoyed engaging with students. By the 1960s, he was in demand as a teacher, with a class that attracted serious students and international visitors, such as Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934) and Robert Sherlaw Johnson (1920–1998).

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If the 1960s saw Messiaen fully established professionally, the decade also saw him repositioning himself creatively. He flourished creatively during and just after World War II. Today’s listeners often come to know Messiaen through the works from this era that have become classics: the Quatuor pour le fin du temps (1940–1941), Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus (1944), and Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946–1948). These compositions brought him, at scarcely forty, to the world’s attention. Then, in the 1950s, as his students embraced modernism and expanded on Schoenbergian serialism, Messiaen entered a period of experimentation. To some, it seemed as though he had turned inward and chosen “to enter a kind of monastic retirement, far from the mainstreams of both classical and contemporary music” (Hodeir, 1961: 117). Yet far from retired, Messiaen cultivated a relationship with the ornithologist Jacques Delmain and worked to integrate birdsong more comprehensively into his idiosyncratic compositional language. During this decade, he was productive, writing works such as Réveil des oiseaux with its vital piano part, the piano concerto Oiseaux exotiques, and the cycle for solo piano Catalogue d’oiseaux. Following his first wife’s death in 1959 and his marriage to Yvonne Loriod, his longtime muse, in1961, Messiaen underwent a profound artistic reawakening. After years of experimentation, in many ways influenced by the innovations of his students, he had come to see the notion of harmony as an independent variable as irrelevant. While Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and their disciples were refining serial and stochastic techniques, all of which manipulated pitch as a musical parameter independent of timbre, Messiaen had ceased to find personal relevance in the notion of harmony as a discrete variable. He had come to recognize harmony and timbre as contingent parts of a single, multidimensional whole: a harmonic-timbral complex akin to Scriabin’s sonorous form, from which neither component could be extracted or distilled; indeed, Scriabin’s synthetic chord has been identified as the starting point for Messiaen’s harmonic explorations (Eberle, 1978). His preoccupation with harmonic-timbral complexes is evidenced by his compositions from the early 1960s. Dating from the period directly preceding Murail’s study with him, Chronochromie for orchestra (1959–1960); Sept haïkaï for piano and large ensemble (1962); and Couleurs de la cité céleste for piano and orchestra with large percussion battery (1963) demonstrate his radically changed focus. Messiaen’s first mention of specific colors as connected to harmonic-timbral complexes appears in the fourth book of the Catalogue d’oiseaux, in “La rousserolle effarvatte” (The Reed Warbler). Just a few years after its publication, he was open in his acknowledgment of its significance. “I don’t think I’ve ever gone so far with the sound–colour relationship,” Messiaen wrote with regard to Couleurs (Samuel, 2003: 139).

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To be absolutely clear, Messiaen wrote in the work’s preface, “The form of the work depends entirely on colours. The melodic and rhythmic themes, the complexes of sounds and timbres evolve in the manner of colours.” “Plainsong Alleluias, Greek and Hindu rhythms, permutations of notevalues, birdsong of different countries: all these accumulated materials are placed at the service of colour and the combinations of sounds that represent it” (Crossley, 1988). That a musical work could be based on progressions of harmonic-timbral complexes (based on colors, and not primarily defined by pitch relationships) was an idea far removed from the aesthetic debates then taking place at centers for new music. At Darmstadt and Cologne (as well as in Parisian circles), controversies surrounding compositional technique were dominated by two approaches. One was the systematic approach of the serialists, a group dominated by Boulez that also included other former students of Messiaen such as Stockhausen, Amy, and Barraqué. Even prior to the opening of IRCAM, these figures were powerful advocates for a post­Schoenbergian serial aesthetic. The other approach, which presented itself as the antithesis to serialism and other formalized compositional techniques, was that of chance music, the aleatoricism associated with Cage; in Paris, its foremost advocate was André Boucourechliev (1925–1997), who had spent six months in America (1963–1964) becoming familiar with the philosophies of Cage and Earle Brown (1926–2002). Although the ideological bases underlying postwar serialism and aleatoricism were in many ways oppositional, the compositional methodologies of the serialists and chance composers were based on common assumptions of music as systematically organized information constructed of independent musical parameters. The serialists focused on the permutations of pitched, rhythmic, dynamic, registral, and timbral elements. The aleatoric composers similarly isolated these parameters, specifying in their scores, for example, absolute durations but not pitches, or specific pitches but neither their registers nor dynamics. In this way, both approaches assumed the inherent discreteness, or singularity, of each element. In contrast, Messiaen embraced musical color as a hybrid of timbre and harmony and as a component of multidimensional complexity. His musical color was an unmeasurable, unnotatable variable, and one not easily reconciled with compositional methodologies  – the “permutational orthodoxies of the avant-garde” (Croft, 2010: 195)  – that demanded parametric discreteness. “Demand” is an apt word to use. Integrally serial and aleatoric methods can be described as techniques that explore different degrees to which the composer controls the nature of the work and performance. At one extreme, Boulez desired something approaching absolute control. His stated goal

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was to reduce music to its elementary particles, then to reassemble them. By unraveling and then reweaving the musical fabric fiber by fiber, he sought to create music free of stylistic reference and historical association: “I wanted to eradicate from my vocabulary absolutely every trace of the conventional, whether it concerned figures and phrases, or development and form; I then wanted gradually, element after element, to win back the various stages of the compositional process …” (Boulez, 1986: 61). As Boulez sought absolute control, Cage renounced it, “giving up control so that sounds can be sounds” (Drott, 2009; Cage, 1961: 72). His Cheap Imitation for two pianos (1969), for example, is based on his 1947 two-piano adaptation of Erik Satie’s Socrate (1918). Manipulating the earlier work’s variables independently, Cage maintained the original phrase structure and rhythms but transposed some of the notes and also varied the dynamic scheme. Unlike Boulez, Cage sought no specific result. However, he similarly based his procedures (operations directed by the I-ching) on abstracted musical elements, treated independently. Yet Messiaen could not conceive musical fundamentals in this manner. He desired control of certain elements, such as rhythm and the development of temporal values, but treated other musical elements, such as color, more intuitively. He saw himself as treading the nebulous ground between the oppositions of freedom and rigor, aesthetic polarities that, in retrospect, can be equated with the aleatoric and the integrally serial. Messiaen’s compositional attitude reflected his own experience. As the debates regarding compositional systems and the role of the composer intensified, he focused ever more tightly on musical perception and the experience of the listener. As a listener incapable of perceptually segregating harmony from timbre, and as a mature artist reconciled with his own perceptual abilities, he now allowed his own experience of musical color more fully to inform his evolving compositional technique (Bernard, 1986: 41–68). By the 1960s, his synaesthetic experience and attitude towards composition became a primary topic of his lectures and interviews (Dingle, 2007: 164). A particularly relevant statement followed Chronochromie’s Paris premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, at which the audience’s extraordinarily negative response provoked the critic René Dumesnil to liken its reception to that of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, whose French premiere had taken place nearly fifty years earlier in the same hall. Responding to harsh criticisms of form and content (all now “at the service of colour”), Messiaen justified his compositional methods by appealing to the concept of a psychological universal. Neoclassicists expect clear tonal cadences, while old-fashioned dodecaphonists miss the greyness of the “series.” And when I speak quite straightforwardly of resonant harmonies being “purple flecked with orange

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and red and surrounded with violet,” they look at me smilingly as if this were a dangerous illusion. However, these connections between sound and colour are not a purely subjective phenomenon: I myself feel them intensely – and I know, having had the experience, that others also feel them. (Hill and Simeone, 2007: 244)

Messiaen’s appeal to a shared psychological reality granted his aesthetic argument special authority. It reflected the noetic nature of his synaesthesia, which compelled him as it did Scriabin. Conveniently, his highly personal stance also enabled him to avoid becoming entangled in skirmishes over compositional systems. Messiaen believed passionately that this relationship between sound and colour was one that could be seen and heard by everyone. However, there was an additional benefit, for by referring to chords in terms of colours, Messiaen put all harmonies, from common triads to twelve-note complexes, on an equal footing that made their common musical labels redundant. He was thus able to side-step the entire dogmatic debate of the time about what was and was not appropriate material for a composer; he was composing neither tonally, nor atonally, nor modally, but using different areas of colours. (Dingle, 2007: 163–164)

Messiaen had developed a personal approach to composition emphasizing musical color. This dominated every aspect of his musical vision, from the most immediate perception of individual works to his conception of the musical art itself. Professionally, he discussed musical color largely with regard to his own compositions, his creative process, and the reception of his work, and generally refrained from openly criticizing his contemporaries. Yet his compositional innovations held weighty implications for other composers. Young composers in particular sensed that Messiaen’s work heralded “the new thinking, spectralism in music: the art of composing with harmonic and inharmonic series, fused conglomerates of sound” (Harvey, 1999: 39). Messiaen’s use of the harmonic series is most clearly seen in his “chord of resonance,” one of the many harmonic constructs introduced in his Technique de mon langage musical and further clarified in the final volume of his Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie. In the chords of resonance, Messiaen depicted the uppermost partials of the harmonic series over a given acoustic fundamental. In the Traité, the chord of resonance is illustrated as a voicing of the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, and fifteenth harmonics of the overtone series, set one atop the other over a sounding fundamental. Not introducing this construct as an abstraction or mental representation, Messiaen maintained its relevance to his own hearing and immediate experience.

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If I play very loudly a low C on the piano, after a few seconds I will hear, successively and very distinctly layered, the first sounds that are called the “natural resonance of sounding objects.” If I possess a normal ear, I will hear another C, higher than the first (at the octave), then a G (the fifth). If I have a sharp ear, I hear beyond that an E (the third); finally, a very musical ear hears B-flat and D (the seventh and the ninth). Personally, I hear additionally an F-sharp (augmented fourth), quite strongly, and an A-flat (minor sixth), very weak. Then come a multitude of higher harmonics, inaudible to the unaided ear, but of which we may get some idea when we hear the complex resonance of a tamtam or a great cathedral bell. (Pople, 1998: 33)

As early as the 1950s, Messiaen had developed a distinctively spectral attitude towards listening and performance. He passed his conception of vraie harmonie (true harmony) on to his students Murail and Grisey (Fineberg, 2006: 124–125), encouraging them, above all, to look more deeply into the very nature of sound and the interconnected realms of harmony, timbre, and color.

4 The first generation

Spectral analysis was not the first attempt to represent sound graphically. The earliest twentieth-century efforts were motivated by scholars in the nascent field of ethnomusicology, often viewed as “academic oddballs involved in an arcane subject of no interest outside the academy (or even inside)” (Nettl, 1983: 9), who collected samples of melodies and songs, then transcribed and catalogued them with an eye towards publication and preservation. Early ethnomusicologists struggled to organize their collections. They faced the problematic act of categorizing their materials, which necessitated transcribing samples of non-western music into western notation and somehow comparing them; hence the early term for the discipline, “comparative musicology.” But how to transcribe the microtonal intervals of melodies whose pitches sat awkwardly at best on the five-line staff? How to transcribe the idiosyncratic glissandi, subtle rhythms, and sophisticated forms of articulation and intonation that characterized the AfricanAmerican, Hindustani, Indo-Chinese, eastern European, and East Indian melodies, for which western notation had no symbols? How to chart the flow of music in time, for musics not based on the western notational system with its metric frameworks and attendant rhythmic values? Early folklorists suspected that a great deal was being lost in their attempts at transcription, and some turned to the new technologies of the phonograph, microphone, and oscilloscope, which suggested ways objectively to preserve, represent, and analyze musical pitch and intensity in time (Gjerdingen, 1988). These methods were of interest not only to pathbreaking ethnomusicologists such as Curt Sachs (1881–1959) and Alan Lomax (1915–2002), but also to composers fascinated with folk traditions, such as Bartók and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967). The first scholar to develop a tool for producing visual depictions of musical sound was an ethnomusicologist at the University of Iowa, Milton F. Metfessel (1901–1969). Metfessel photographed a stroboscope’s oscillations in response to sung melodies and superimposed a timeline over the resultant images, producing a rough graph of frequency and time. His Phonophotography in Folk Music (1928) demonstrated the technology’s utility: to provide a method that objectively quantified and provided a basis of comparison for singing styles from different cultures. At first, the technology was assumed to be of undeniable appeal and infallibility, providing an

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“incredibly useful device, one that would drive away human error and cultural bias and save labor to boot” (Nettl, 1983: 88). Idealistically, Metfessel hoped that his methodology would excise some of the cultural biases and prejudices that marred many ostensibly scholarly studies of oral traditions. (Not altogether coincidentally, the song of the “American negro” was his area of specialization.) For him, the new technology suggested a way to observe more neutrally the nuances of sound, as captured in live performance. At UCLA in the 1950s, the ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger (1886– 1979) produced his Instantaneous Musical Notator, known now as the “Seeger melograph” (Seeger, 1951, 1957). The apparatus produced a dual output to inputted musical sound: two lines displayed in parallel, the first charting the frequencies of a given melodic line and the second their intensities. Seeger maintained that his melograph, the result of two decades of experimentation, would usher in a new era of ethnomusicology. An international movement afoot at the same time saw other folklorists similarly motivated to develop electroacoustic machines for the purposes of automatic, highly specific transcription: notably Karl Dahlback and Olav Gurvin at the University of Oslo, co-authors of New Methods of Vocal Folk Music Research, and Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who for nearly forty years used a melograph to document the vocal practices of Palestinian Arabs. The latter part of the century witnessed efforts further to develop the utility of the melograph (Gjerdingen, 1988). Yet it was widely assumed that the editorial duties of the transcriber, while fraught with bias and inconsistency, could not be relegated to a machine. There was a certain mistrust of the technology, as musicians tend to dissociate themselves from their machines. “The editor’s essential task is organization, analysis, interpretation of the raw materials …,” Sachs concluded. “This is, beyond the gadget’s power of precision, the musician’s chore” (Sachs, 1962). The melograph, melodiograph, and similar devices were never enthusiastically embraced by the profession as practical or versatile tools for musical analysis. While the technology languished, however, the melograph had begun to suggest how musical sound itself could be seen in a new light (Nettl, 1983: 87–88).

From theory to practice As the melograph was being developed on three continents for use in the field and academy, scientists at Bell Laboratories, the research and development wing of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (founded in 1925), were developing methodologies for creating highly detailed graphic representations of the acoustic spectra – the arrays of components in sound

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emissions or waves, including frequency, intensity, and energy – of different sound sources. Sound was presented to a spectrum analyzer, a fast Fourier transform instrument that analyzed and segregated its components simultaneously in five registers. Samples generated by the spectrum analyzer showed successive details regarding the evolution of an acoustic sound in time (approximately fifteen “frames” per second), charting information relating to relative frequency; the presence and activity of partials; the amplitude of the sound; and acoustic traits such as inharmonicity, or the degree of noise heard within a sound. What resulted was a graph showing peaking spikes, and bands or swaths of varying consistencies: a graphic representation of music as heard, arguably liberated from any kind of notational bias. This technology could be used to analyze extant sounds. It also suggested as-of-yet undeveloped techniques of sound synthesis: the recreation or imitation of known sounds and the invention of new ones. Today, it is difficult to imagine the presynthesis world. The electroacoustic frontier had first opened to composers and acousticians in the 1920s. Early experimental electronic instruments included the ondes Martenot and theremin, patented and invented in 1928 by their namesakes, the Paris-based cellist-radio technician Maurice Martenot (1898– 1980) and the inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen (1896–1993), who emigrated to New York in 1927 where he was known as Léon Theremin. A few pioneering composers merged the worlds of classical composition with the new electronic resources. Historic entrées into this brave new world included the experiments of Schaeffer, the composer, engineer, and broadcaster who in 1936 began exploring electronic resources and specifically musique concrète (works made of pre-existing recorded sounds) at the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF) (Schaeffer, 1952; Reydellet, 1996). Schaeffer founded the historic Studio d’Essai there in 1942 and was joined in 1949 by Pierre Henry, a student of Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979). Ten years later, Schaeffer and Henry had a serious falling out, after which Schaeffer refocused his attention on the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), and Henry founded France’s first private electronic music studio, the Studio APSOME (Applications de Procédés Sonores en Musique Electroacoustique). In New York, the French-born Varèse, who had come to America in 1915, was writing works for electronic and acoustic instruments such as Ecuatorial (1934) and Déserts (1954). (A first-cousin of Alfred Cortot who studied at the Schola Cantorum and Conservatoire and knew both Debussy and Busoni, Varèse would maintain strong ties to Paris; indeed, it was Henry who assisted in the world premiere of Déserts at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées.) In the early decades of electronic music, there were no musical

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works made from sounds created ex nihilo. In the absence of synthesizers as we know them today, the concept of musical sound itself was inextricably linked to physical instruments and just as surely limited by the capacities of human players. Yet there was a sense that these limitations were about to be exploded: “I am not yet sure I understand the exact significance of the sudden appearance of stereophony in music, but I do know that it may well have revolutionary consequences … It represents a new dimension added to the auditory compass, one capable of setting up new types of structures” (Hodeir, 1961: 142–143). The mid-century was a time of exploding international research in computer music, which had now been gathering momentum for decades. As early as the 1950s, plans were laid for a studio for electronic music at the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) in Cologne. Inspired by the work of the German acoustician and theorist Werner Meyer-Eppler (1913–1960) and his vision of an entirely synthetic electronic music, articulated in his thesis Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und synthetische Sprache (Electronic Sound Generation: Electronic Music and Synthetic Language, 1949), the studios of the NWDR opened their doors in 1953. In 1957 the installation took place at the new CPEMC in New York of the first programmable music synthesizer, the RCA Mark II, which represented the collaborative efforts of a team including the composer Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911–1990) and engineer Peter Mauzey of Bell Labs. In those same studios, forty test oscillators were installed for exploring diverse methods of additive synthesis and conducting early empirical studies in music perception, some overseen by Babbitt. In 1964, Robert Moog (1934–2005), a onetime student of Mauzey, developed the first voltage-controlled synthesizer to be controlled by a keyboard. Three years later, John Chowning (b. 1934) discovered the algorithms for frequency modulation (FM) synthesis, by which the timbre of a simple waveform could be transformed to another, producing a different-sounding tone and more complex waveform. Using these tools, composers began to design soundscapes that could morph between states of musical color, exploring harmonic-timbral complexes conceived as such and not as the conglomeration of independently perceivable musical parameters. This technology was central to the development of popular personal synthesizers, such as the Yamaha DX7, which brought synthesis and sampling technologies to the lay public in the 1980s. In these decades, successive breakthroughs in computer technology and its practical applications led to the growth of electronic music as a field in its own right and the founding of vital centers for computer music research, including the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford, and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the

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University of California at Berkeley, as well as the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). The research of Max Mathews is the focus of the present discussion, owing to his direct ties to Risset and IRCAM. In the 1950s, the technology of sound synthesis held great promise but was, in practice, clunky. Attempts to put theory into practice quickly revealed that the sheer number of components needed for the convincing or effective recreation of any given instrumental timbre was tremendous, far exceeding the capacity of technological tools or manpower. A single sound might have roughly 200 to 400 components. Frustratingly, the sounds produced via early synthesis techniques were “often dull, certainly not as varied and exciting as one could have hoped from a process that theoretically had no limits” (Risset, 1992: 593). A musician as well as an engineer, Mathews identified the issues at stake: “The two fundamental problems in sound synthesis are (1) the vast amount of data needed to specify a pressure function – hence the necessity of a very fast program – and (2) the need for a simple, powerful language in which to describe a complex sequence of sounds” (Mathews, 1969). The rise of the computer suggested possibilities for digital synthesis and a practical way to realize the promise of additive synthesis (Smith, 1991). The role of solving digital synthesis fell to Mathews. Working closely at Bell Labs with an interdisciplinary team of researchers whose areas of specialization included physical acoustics, speech communication, visual communication, and psychology, Mathews developed the first software program for music composition: MUSIC I (1957). Over the next decade, he produced influential writings, such as “The Digital Computer as a Musical Instrument” (1963) and The Technology of Computer Music (1969). His later research led to more sophisticated methods of digital synthesis and technologies fostering late-twentieth-century computer-interactive real-time performance. Mathews’s experiments in digital synthesis and the tools he designed provided a user-friendly method by which to explore the interrelations among pitched sounds (harmonic spectra) and noise (non-harmonic spectra), the behavior of partials over the fundamental in time (the spectral envelope), and the distinguishing characteristics of articulation (attack transients): all elements that contribute to the perception of distinctive instrumental timbres and colors. His theory of digital synthesis and its computer-assisted applications proposed new tools capable of creating infinite kinds of sounds and offered a relatively intuitive means by which to do so. The development of digital synthesis allowed comparatively unfettered access to a new level of microtime and acoustic specificity  – not only a glimpse into the rich internal structure of sound (as revealed by spectral analysis) but also a practical way for composers to explore it (Vaggione, 1996: 34). “With the aid

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of suitable output equipment,” Mathews announced, “the numbers which a modern digital computer generates can be directly converted to sound waves. The process is completely general, and any perceivable sound can be so produced” (Mathews, 1963: 553, italics added). The theory behind the technology was inspiring, but the possibility of a methodology theoretically capable of producing any sound was conceptually jawdropping. Composers were struck by the promise of “great and, indeed, ridiculously great freedom” (Pierce, 1995). “Before the microscope,” recalled Harvey, “we never knew what the microworld looked like – and now, because of the tremendous precision in being able to look into sounds and work with them, the whole world of microsound has opened up and we can compose with it” (Chadabe, 1996: 42). Experimental musical exploration had long taken place at Bell Labs  – in the 1940s, for example, using high fidelity recordings made of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. Yet Mathews’s musical research was not part of Bell Labs’ official agenda. It was an extracurricular activity permitted by John R. Pierce (1910–2002), the executive director of the communication sciences division, who early in his career had headed the team that created (and named) the transistor radio. “Management tolerated music as part of research, but on the whole, Bell Labs wanted to downplay it, at least in terms of its cost and whatever commercial possibilities it had,” Mathews recalled, “because they weren’t supposed to be in that business” (Chadabe, 1996). Serious research was pursued during the day, with nighttimes reserved for this sideline, reportedly with ongoing musical experiments ambiently piped throughout the facility. In this guardedly permissive environment, more akin to a think tank than an artists’ colony, Mathews became an iconic figure. “The Digital Computer as a Musical Instrument” drew international attention and attracted innovative thinkers to his lab. These included the young French composer and pianist Risset, who arrived in 1964 to write his thesis on Mathews’s work. His work at Bell Labs occurred in two phases (1964–1965 and 1967–1969). In Paris, Risset had studied with André Jolivet (1905–1974) at the Conservatoire while pursuing physics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Transplanted to Murray Hill, New Jersey, he became a principal pioneer of computer sound synthesis. He made digital recordings of trumpets and studied them using the tools of spectral analysis. Hours were spent charting the amplitude envelopes of trombone- and bell-tones in an attempt to come to terms with the microstructure of sound and what analytical data were actually showing: a kind of information not necessarily apparent to the human ear, or conceived by the musical mind in that form. In particular, Risset’s research revealed how instrumental harmonics differed, sometimes dramatically,

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depending on a tone’s pitch, intensity (musical dynamic), and duration. It showed how distinctions among musical parameters often conceived as independent, particularly by the integral serialists, were in fact inseparable, and how the nature of timbre itself was continually in flux over time. Risset developed software to recreate the sounds of brass instruments and produced several landmark publications. Particularly relevant to the present discussion is An Introductory Catalogue of Computer Synthesized Sounds (1969), which appeared the year he returned to France (Risset, 1996a). Designed as a primer for a course given by Mathews at Stanford University, the catalogue was the first collection of sounds completely known in terms of their physical structure, “by construction, so to say – yet complex enough to have potential musical interest” (Risset, 1992: 89). The unveiling of the inner structure of specific instrumental timbres can be seen as an event analogous to the identification and mapping of the human DNA sequence, announced in 2003; if this is an exaggeration, it is only slight, in terms of the consequences of Risset’s research. Certainly, his was no compositional manifesto. Without glamour or rhetoric, it presented the “recipes” for creating twenty-five sounds, referred to variously as “flute like” (no. 100), “reedy and plucked” (no. 250), and “piano like” (no. 301). Yet it led composers to reconsider the stuff of which music was made: how perceived instrumental timbres were defined by temporal components; how the “same” sounds on different instruments were inherently different owing to their interior composition; and how it might be possible, in compositional practice, to generate, interpolate between, and modulate from one timbral world to another. The sound catalogue explicated techniques for sound analysis and synthesis. Risset’s research clarified the nature of spectral technology and its implications for the composition of electronic and acoustic music. For the first-generation spectral composers, the breakthrough was not only technical but conceptual, with profound aesthetic implications: “The great and enduring advantage of this technique is conceptual. It provides the clearest, most intuitive way for us to conceive of hearing and creating sounds. By listening closely to any sound, it becomes possible to hear the separate components and, by adding sounds together it is easy to hear the global sound color, or timbre, emerge and evolve” (Fineberg, 2000: 85). Data generated by computer-assisted analysis and synthesis techniques inspired the composers of L’Itinéraire, in whose musical laboratory the emerging technologies informed and transformed compositional and performance practice. They further enabled them to understand instrumental timbre as ideally dematerialized, in the sense to which Scriabin appealed, and musical sound, to paraphrase Liszt, as a living being. Harmonic-timbral complexes could be analyzed and, as the technology developed further, synthesized and

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modeled. The spectralists’ reconceptualization of sound and musical temporality distinguished them from many of their peers, whose approaches to composition and performance were less ecological in spirit and less concerned with what Claude Vivier, the enigmatic student of Grisey and Stockhausen, simply referred to as les couleurs (Gilmore, 2007).

L’Itinéraire: a new path With Sept haïkaï (1962) and Couleurs de la cité céleste (1963), Messiaen asserted that the form of a musical composition could be based on progressions of harmonic-timbral complexes and did not have to be defined primarily by pitch. He had developed his compositional techniques over years of experimentation, mainly by responding to his intuition, creating distinctive timbral colors by conceiving a spectrum for each note he orchestrated: “a chord, not a classified chord but a complex of sounds … designed to give the note its timbre” (Samuel, 2003: 102). His approach sparked an epiphany for young composers at the time, engaged with a Parisian musical avant-garde seemingly dominated by the post-serial agenda of Boulez. To young composers in Messiaen’s class, the maître’s assertion that there were other ways to write music, and his faith that these musics would find their audiences, offered a sense of relief. “He gave the laissez-passer for all those who were intent on starting over with music” (Campion, private correspondence, 2012). I had musical ideas, sound images that I wanted to express, and I could not do that with the serial or twelve-tone technique … Messiaen’s classes … [were] kind of a shock for most of us, because we saw that there were possibilities other than serialism. You didn’t have to think about music in terms of accompanied melody or counterpoint … [but rather] the importance given to timbre, as a way of structuring the form. (Murail, 2003)

Seeking expression through the material itself and the creation of a music freed from the trappings of historical reference, the goal of Messiaen’s aesthetic descendants was perhaps not so different from Boulez’s (Goldman, 2010). However, they opted not to construct a fully determined music from nothing via a comprehensive compositional system (to “win back” what had been lost), but rather to explore more fully the potential inherent in sound itself, in all its unnotatable and previously inaccessible sonic complexity. Murail came to work with Messiaen at the Conservatoire in 1967 and continued to study with him until 1972. Grisey joined Messiaen’s class in 1968 and worked with him for six years, during which time he and Murail visited

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the Villa Medici as Prix de Rome winners, nearly a century after Debussy’s and Liszt’s salon evening. In 1972, upon returning to Paris, Murail joined with the composer-cellist Roger Tessier, another student of Messiaen whom he had met the previous year, and others in their class – the pianist-composer Alain Abbott (b. 1938)  and composer-musicologist Jean-Paul Holstein (b. 1939) – to produce two concerts at the Salle Cortot entitled “MATH 72.” In January 1973, hoping to expand their presenting activities as a way of realizing their own works as well as the music of those who inspired them, Tessier and Murail, with Grisey, Dufourt, and Michaël Lévinas (composer, pianist, and son of the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas), formed the group L’Itinéraire (The Path) (Nicolas, 1997; Smith and Murail, 2000). In its first season, L’Itinéraire’s performers included the composer-pianist Monic Cecconi-Botella (b. 1936), flutist Pierre-Yves Artaud (b. 1946), the violist Geneviève Renon (later McLaughlin), and the percussionist-conductor Boris de Vinogradov. (Many of their performances are preserved on recordings of works such as Murail’s Mémoire/Erosion, C’est un jardin secret, and Ethers, and Grisey’s Partiels.) Their programs featured works for acoustic instruments and live electronics, and for the latter they often used equipment that they built themselves specifically for the occasion, referred to as the EIEI (ensemble d’instruments electroniques de L’Itinéraire). Concerts presented the works of its founders and their mentors, such as the April 1973 performance of Messiaen’s Fête de belles eaux for six ondes Martenots, featuring Murail and Jeanne Loriod, for which Messiaen wrote program notes (Hill and Simeone, 2005: 299). The ensemble premiered works by emerging composers including Solange Ancona (b. 1943: a student of Messiaen and Scelsi) and Philippe Hersant (b. 1948: a student of Jolivet later supported by Dutilleux), and those slightly older, such as Claude Ballif (1924–2004) and François Bousch (b. 1926: a student of Messiaen, Ballif, and Jolas). (The ensemble, still in existence, maintains an online archive with a detailed programming history.) L’Itinéraire’s programs were prefaced by promises of a new era: “L’Itinéraire gathers many composers and instrumentalists of the new generation … To create a place in which new musics will emerge, welcoming to new personalities, a place with a future above all open, and ever animated by the spirit of adventure … Our initial goal: to focus on ‘the young music in France’” (Nicolas, 1997: 83, my translation). The group’s programming strategy met with a mixed reception. Maurice Florent of the Nouvel observateur criticized the ensemble’s aesthetic agenda as overly vague, and detected in its programming the “faint stench of nationalism” (Nicolas, 1997: 83). Over the next few years, L’Itinéraire’s programs would attempt to clarify the themes and ideas at play; for example, the four concerts of the 1976–1977 season were entitled “Les instruments et

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les formes” (Instruments and Forms), “Le son et les architectures du temps” (Sound and Architectures of Time), “Les modèles musicaux” (Musical Models), and “La lutherie électronique” (The Electronic Luthier). The ensemble’s repertoire expanded as well, to include works by international figures rarely heard in Paris who shared their fascination with sound color, such as George Crumb (b. 1929), whose Black Angels received its French premiere in L’Itinéraire’s second season, and Scelsi (Khoom, Pranam I and II, Anahit, and Manto) (Murail, 2005b: 181). From its inception, L’Itinéraire’s rhetoric emphasized the unity of technique and technology, as well as the equality of composers and their interpreters. Ensemble members were dedicated to exploring how technology could transform composition, performance, and musical perception. Boldly asking, “Has the spirit of creation deserted Paris?” (Nicolas, 1997: 83), L’Itinéraire tantalizingly promised an alternative to the programming and performance practices of the Domaine Musical, the long-reigning institution of the Parisian avant-garde. The Domaine Musical, modeled on Schoenberg’s Verein für musikalische Privataufführung (Society for Private Musical Performance), was founded in 1954 by Boulez. Supported by wealthy socialites, intellectuals, and artists, the Domaine became the primary ensemble for the performance of avant-garde music in postwar France. Ensconced in the prestigious Théâtre de la Ville, the ensemble was embraced by the cultural and intellectual elite as well as the haute bourgeoisie. A vital patron was Suzanne Tézenas, who drew celebrities, politicians, and members of the intelligentsia to her salons; her public endorsement of the Domaine Musical conferred on Boulez and his selected concert repertoire a powerful cultural currency. As an arbiter of musical taste, the Domaine Musical introduced the Parisian public to the modern repertoire of the Second Viennese School, classics of Varèse and Stravinsky, and new works by younger composers whose music adhered to Boulez’s aesthetic criteria. The ensemble, directed by Boulez until 1967, successfully asserted a canon of twentieth-century masterworks and established a hierarchy of emerging composers – so much so that “once a composer had been played there, they became somebody.” [T]he Domaine became a gateway to success for other composers, an arena in which careers were made or broken, since a successful debut bestowed legitimation and recognition … [T]he Domaine programs included older works selected by Boulez to represent the classics of the modern era. But this selection did not reflect extant judgments … so much as construct them, creating a canon of great modern works and composers in the postwar vacuum in which none yet existed. (Born, 1999: 79–80)

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Were the Domaine Musical the door to fame, Boulez would be the keymaster. Even after leaving his directorship in 1967, he further cultivated his image as a man of international cultural import and political connection. This image was reinforced on a Wagnerian scale when, in 1970, Georges Pompidou granted him carte blanche to design what would become the foremost international center for new music research, IRCAM. Twenty years younger than Boulez, the composers of L’Itinéraire cast themselves as anti-institutional and rebellious socially and politically. With vivid rhetoric suggesting utopian aspirations and aesthetic revolution, spectral music was portrayed as the successor to serial music, “implicitly positioned as the cultural expression proper to post-industrial society, the emergent social formation of the 1970s (and beyond)” (Drott, 2009: 51). In “Musique spectrale” (1981) and “Pierre Boulez: Musicien de l’ère industrielle” (1986), Dufourt characterized the spectral movement as emblematic of a changing of the guard. Distancing himself and his group from the Domaine, Murail explained to reporters from Le monde that L’Itinéraire was “a sort of cooperative where young composers could express themselves in complete liberty” (Drott, 2009: 41). That spectralism was introduced not as a school or technique but as an attitude indicates how its founders sought not to articulate the tenets of a monolithic style but to establish an environment for artistic and scientific inquiry and exchange. Further, the definition of L’Itinéraire as a democratic group in which all members stood on equal footing was a striking contrast to the dictatorship of the Domaine and the heavily bureaucratic nature of Boulez’s next venture, the governmentsubsidized Ensemble Intercontemporain. Indeed, the “bipolar” opposition that existed between the serialist establishment and the young composers of L’Itinéraire was a cornerstone of spectral music’s development (Fineberg, 2006: 130). While some have repudiated the impression of a Manichean opposition between Boulez’s approach and that of Grisey, Murail, and Dufourt (Goldman, 2010), it is clear that the spectral composers saw their compositional attitudes as distinguished by irreconcilable aesthetic and methodological conflicts, quite possibly aggravated by personal and political factors. Working methodically, the composers of L’Itinéraire became involved with advanced research in acoustics and psychoacoustics, fertile fields renewed by the emerging technologies of digital recording and data processing. Many of them participated in workshops on computer-assisted composition at IRCAM, yet they would continue to distance themselves from Boulez and his agenda. “In a telling irony, the very musicians who founded their musical language on a coordination between acoustics and music were little involved in an institution which had this very goal as its

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mission” (Goldman, 2010: 209). Meanwhile, the spectral composers’ explorations into the theory of sound, combined with their dedication towards refining the western notational system to meet their needs, began in a very real way to direct performance practice. The highly specific acoustic detail revealed in spectral analysis was reflected in highly specific and detailed notational strategies. Their scores required from performers the extreme control of timbre, dynamic, timing, and pitch that could support the realization of instrumental synthesis and timbral fusion. The spectral attitude towards composition and sound motivated a new attitude towards instrumental playing, demanding from performers playing techniques of unprecedented precision and sensitivity (Grisey, 1978; Murail, 2005c: 178).

Notation and realization: Murail, Territoires de l’oubli (1977) For contemporary music in America and Europe, the 1970s were a time in which the old order was changing, giving place to a new avant-garde. In Germany, the summer courses at Darmstadt were stagnating under the inept leadership of Ernst Thomas, savaged by the press and ridden with inner squabbling and politics. For twenty-five years a bastion of musical innovation and experimentation, Darmstadt now seemed little more than “the crumbling edifice of the avant-garde’s chief fortress” (Iddon, 2006: 274), disparaged as “an excellent Academy, [in which] problems like Notation and Electronic Sound are competently handled in a rather academic way” (Cardew, 1964). In 1977, after nearly a decade of planning, IRCAM opened beneath the Centre Georges Pompidou. Boulez selected an international group of advisors to direct its individual divisions, which included Science (Mathews), Computer Music (Risset), Electronic Music (Luciano Berio, 1925–2003), and Instrumental Performance (Vinko Globokar, b. 1934). The composer-conductor Michel Decoust (b. 1936), who studied in Cologne with Boulez and Stockhausen and at the Conservatoire with Darius Milhaud (1892–1972), was appointed to oversee pedagogical programs, and Gerald Bennett (b. 1942), an American composer based in Switzerland, acted as a coordinator, to ensure that the divisions operated in harmony. The stated mission of IRCAM was to reunite science and music and create new modes of performance. In step with the French president’s vision, it was to establish a leading role for French culture in the global community. In the English-speaking world, things were altogether less organized, although similarly reflecting seismic changes. Across the Channel, the composers of the New Complexity, including Ferneyhough, Finnissy, and James Dillon (b. 1950), were redefining performance practice, focusing not on technology but on notation and its implications for virtuosity. In

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America, different schools of musical thought were colliding in the streets and the academy. Leonard Bernstein delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, then presented his “unanswered question” (“Whither music in our time?”) on American television in 1976. Different veins of electronic music research were pursued on the West Coast (at CCRMA and CNMAT) and East, and “uptown” and “downtown” composers were ensconced, with Babbitt and Feldman appointed to the faculties at The Juilliard School and the State University of New York at Buffalo, respectively, and with practitioners on opposing sides holding court variously in Greenwich Village lofts and the brownstones of the Upper West Side. On both sides of the Atlantic, seminal artistic statements were being made, heralding the unruly adolescence of a disparate avant-garde no longer directly connected to World War II. This vibrant decade produced a repertoire of piano works expressing its ideals and philosophies. These compositions testify to the rise of movements, some later labeled as minimalism, spectralism, and postmodernism, and others that would resist categorization. They include Helmut Lachenmann’s Guero (1970), Crumb’s Makrokosmos I and II (1972–1973), Cage’s Etudes Australes (1975), Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975), Finnissy’s English Country Tunes (1977), Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli (1977), John Adams’s Phrygian Gates (1978), Carter’s Night Fantasies (1980), and Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram (1981). Among these works, Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli stands as an epic study in resonance and a spectral masterwork. Written when Murail was barely thirty, Territoires de l’oubli marks a crucial stage in his evolving relationship to the piano. His first solo work for the instrument, Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe (1967), was written before he had begun his formal studies in composition. Harmonically, formally, and gesturally, it is heavily indebted to Messiaen; its lush homophonies, non-retrogradable and additive rhythmic schemas, and stark sectional plan are just a few of the characteristics that link this work of inspired juvenilia to le maître des maîtres (Nonken, 2013). His second piano solo, Estuaire (1972), is a transitional piece, in which Murail’s incorporation of serial elements into his compositional language resulted in harmonic muddiness and a general sense of unease. Formally conservative, and later held at arm’s length by the composer, Estuaire comprises two short programmatic movements. Territoires de l’oubli may be considered Murail’s first significant opus for the instrument. It predates his association with IRCAM, which began in 1981, but reflects his engagement with electronic music. Like contemporaneous ensemble pieces Mémoire/Erosion (1976) and Ethers (1978), its processes and structures were inspired by his research in sound

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synthesis. Territoires de l’oubli bears witness to Murail’s growing fascination with the microstructure of sound and the relationships among the components of a sound’s overtone structure as they develop in time. Focusing on sonic transformation, Murail was rethinking the piano, composing out his conception of the instrument as “above all a collection of vibrating strings, a vast reverberant chamber” (Murail, 2005a). In this work, one hears the piano of Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy transformed, and its harmonic-timbral potential mined to unprecedented, fantastic ends. The damper pedal is depressed from the first measure to the last. Over nearly thirty minutes, a body of resonance is created, sustained, and manipulated through an astonishing array of pianistic techniques: intricate passagework, batteries of chords, repeated notes, arpeggiations, trills, looping figures, tremolandi, and ostinati. Alone and in dazzling combination, these techniques trigger acoustic phenomena rarely heard from the instrument. Notes never struck emerge from the texture, resulting not from attacks but from sympathetic vibrations. Pitches that exceed the piano’s tessitura hover, canopy-like, over the resonance: phantom pitches produced through the interaction of harmonics. Despite the instrument’s inflexible temperament, its harmonies exhibit a microtonal cast, revealing Murail’s canny exploitation of complex low-register sonorities. Territoires de l’oubli leads listeners into unknown, or at least unfamiliar, realms of auditory illusion and pianistic possibility. Pianists who perform on a variety of instruments and in acoustically diverse spaces learn to project the sound they desire within given conditions. They adjust to the eccentricities of instrument and space, accommodating an extremely resonant hall by withholding the pedal for enhanced clarity, or revoicing chords to counter unevenness in the instrument’s tessiturae. The pianist responds to how pitches speak and ring, which varies according to the instrument’s construction, tuning, and the space in which it sits. According to the performer’s interpretation, elements deemed to be contextually salient or expressive are “plucked” from the texture, to be heard in relief. In performances of common practice works and more contemporary compositions referring to that repertoire (such as Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! and Finnissy’s English Country Tunes, both of which explode conventions of nineteenth-century pianistic virtuosity), the performer chooses how to articulate the harmonies, motives, and simultaneous levels of activity, at times bending the temporal flow of the music, generally for the purposes of emphasizing elements of formal interest and conveying a dramatic structure. In Territoires de l’oubli, drama and form are moored to the physical properties of the sound itself. The pianist must play with and within the body

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of resonance, articulating each gesture in relation to the resonant decay. Adjustments are made not so much with an ear towards projecting a personal interpretation as towards generating a succession of sonic phenomena that define the resonant stratigraphy. In the act of creating and sustaining detailed sonorities and projecting subtle timbral transformations, the basic articulation of figures – their speed, rhythmic identity, and dynamic quality – has little to do with common-practice conventions of expression and interpretation. In contrast, how the materials are presented has everything to with the understanding, ideally shared between composer and performer, of what is required under certain conditions to create specific sonorous states and environments. As the pianist’s focus centers on the animation of an acoustic ideal, the physical plays a determining role. The score is prefaced by several paragraphs articulating the composer’s view of the instrument, as well as a dedication to Lévinas, who premiered the work in 1978. This is followed by a glossary of notational symbols, indicating the use of the pedals (how they should be depressed, held, and released), variations in tempo and duration (in relation to metronomic tempi as well as clock-time durations, shown in seconds), and the notation of rhythms (traditional, proportional, and wholly graphic). A third introductory page offers detailed performance notes, drawing attention to points in the score (marked by capital letters and exclamation points) and indicating the onset and arrival points of transformations. Murail articulates at length which pitches should emerge from the resonance, how crescendi and decrescendi should interact, and how the pianist might construct in real time a “pyramid” of sounding pitches, a resonant stratigraphy of overlaid sonorities in various states of decay. Playing into the sound and navigating the decaying sonic landscape are far more important, to the performer, than the actual attacks, although all pitches must be articulated with their ultimate capacity for resonance in mind. Territoires de l’oubli exhibits an idiosyncratic notation conveying descriptive and prescriptive information regarding the effects desired and how they might be achieved. Each page abounds with instructions: notational symbols, familiar and novel, and no shortage of words. Its standard and graphic elements are unprecedented in their specificity. For example, the tempo throughout the work is unstable, apart from recurrences of a semi-periodic “heart-beat” rhythm. The rate at which the music proceeds is indicated via metronome markings identifying an underlying, fluctuating pulse; indications of rallentando and accelerando; graphic figures depicting the musical progress spatially; and verbal descriptions. Referring to a transitional passage in which the dissipation of the sound in time must be rendered clearly, with carefully calibrated dynamics, Murail writes, “Repeat this fragment

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(constantly diminishing and slowing down) until all resonances – except those of the notes of the fragment – have disappeared.” Later, in the work’s cadenza, he suggests, “The diminuendo and trill … may last for a rather long time, so that a feeling of suspense is created before the explosion of the second system.” In concert, these elements suggest a plastic, Bergsonian conception of musical temporality. Hinging on context, dynamic levels and modes of articulation are notated with standard markings (fff, ppp) and modified markings (f/ff, p/pp) adjustable according to the prevailing resonance. Accents and tenuti are used, as are novel symbols such as R, indicating a barely audible attack lost in the resonance; >R, an attack sounding just above the resonance; fmax, as loud as possible; and qf, a quasi-forte articulation, loud but without brutality (sans brutalité). Murail’s notation is meticulous, written and overwritten, to steer the performer towards realizing specific acoustic effects. Carefully etched directives communicate the specificity of his musical vision and the intelligible form that, via optimal performance, transforms into a sensible object. He takes care to recognize, in his notation, the variables at play: the instrument, the space, and the body of the performer. We see in Territoires a composer seeking a higher form of écriture. In other parts of Territoires de l’oubli, the pianist is given an unusual amount of freedom as to how to achieve the effects desired. The composition’s first measures (Example 4.1) designate pitches but only suggest their rhythmic articulation. This gesture, an oscillating, accelerating ninth (B–C), reappears in the first minutes of the piece, each time with variation. Upon its every recurrence, Murail specifies the length of time of the accelerando and the degree to which the figure intensifies in dynamic. He specifies neither the number of oscillations between the pitches, their rhythm, nor their rate of acceleration. Other passages are even more vague. The exclamation point on the third system of the score’s twelfth page marks the beginning of an aleatoric passage in which the hands, unsynchronized, enact different gestural, dynamic, and temporal transformations (Example 4.2). The left hand begins with a series of low-register attacks, to be played like a string of unsteady triplets. The rhythms gradually become steadier, coinciding with the appearance of breath marks (slight pauses, which become progressively longer and more frequent). With time, the left hand’s once continuous material fragments. The left hand’s activities are carefully notated. However, Murail almost entirely forgoes notating those of the right. A succession of related gestures, variations of the short motive presented at the beginning of the third system on the twelfth page, are connected by arrows. During the time represented by the arrow, the fragments are repeated a variable number of times, with

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Example 4.1 Murail, Territoires de l’oubli, opening.

heightened emphasis or de-emphasis of a given note. The right hand’s gestures are repeated periodically, at a rate that does not coincide with the left hand’s tempo. The left hand’s tempo remains steady, but the right hand fluctuates, speeding up and slowing down, until both hands rendezvous at the same tempo. The notation does not explicitly depict the hands’ temporal and spatial relationships to one another, in note-against-note fashion. Neither

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Example 4.2 Murail, Territoires de l’oubli, p. 12.

the vertical relation (where the two hands are relative to each another, at a given moment) nor the horizontal (how the transformations articulated in each hand play out, against each other, in time) is specified. In learning to play this passage, the pianist must develop a gestural vocabulary to match Murail’s verbal description and visual cues, approaching a choreography that provides an aural match for the notation. It entails a quasi-improvisatory activity, which may seem incongruous in light of Murail’s explicit demands. Groping for a way compellingly to align the right and left hands in real time, so that the processes of each are articulated independently yet clearly projected in tandem, can feel inefficient. The pianist will try many unsatisfying versions. Yet the activity of working through unsuccessful versions, and diagnosing the factors responsible for their failure, sensitizes the pianist to the materials. As the score forgoes its instructional role, the pianist must focus on the abstract ideal that the score represents, then chart a course towards it, instead of imposing an external “meaning” or “significance” on the work. In this sense, the performer is reawakened to the neutrality of the material, in and of itself, and the complexities of its sheer physical realization. This brings to light a fundamental difference between a score like Territoires de l’oubli and a New Complexity score from the same period. When a pianist plays Finnissy’s English Country Tunes, the primary task is to navigate the complexities of the notation. The notation is, without

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question, physically impossible to perform as written. There is no one “ideal” musical realization, as every performance can only approximate what the score demands. What renders a performance authentic or convincing is the degree to which it reflects the pianist’s conscientious, heroic attempt at performance itself; the exact sonic result may vary among several, equally “successful” performances. Murail’s music also demands a virtuoso performance. Like Finnissy, he is attuned to how players respond to the score’s demands. However, in Murail’s music, the result is prescribed. Some of the means are left to chance, but the ends are predetermined to a greater extent. Crucially, there is an ideal performance, which achieves extremely specific acoustic goals in relation to the realization of particular harmonic-timbral processes. In the case of Territoires de l’oubli, composer and performer share a conception of a musical sound-ideal achievable, theoretically, under a certain set of conditions. The performer’s task is to realize the sound itself, establishing a particular harmonic-timbral environment and setting in motion a world of interconnecting musical processes. A revealing parallel may be drawn between Murail and, surprisingly, Cage. Murail has expressed distaste for Cage’s work. He has described Cage’s innovations in negative terms. He has characterized his own work in composition as “an attempt to rebuild a coherent sound world, which was destroyed due to many destructive experiences, such as … the aleatory experiments of John Cage” (Rovner, 2002). However, both Cage’s and Murail’s works reveal composers with similar affinities: for sounds that become musical through our perception of them; for process, which animates the work and directs the evolution of its discrete elements; and for discipline, required of the musician who attempts to realize the potentialities of the score. Moreover, Cage and Murail recognize the inherent potential of aleatoric processes, elementally defined for the Darmstadt generation as “processes which have been fixed in their outline but the details of which are left to chance” (Meyer-Eppler, 1955: 22). Murail, like Cage, saw chance as a way to access a richer world of performance possibilities. This was not always so. In the early years of the spectral aesthetic, its proponents in L’Itinéraire had been driven by their desire to create a liberally nuanced music. To achieve the finest possible degrees of timbral and harmonic change and subtlety, they sought total control over the performance. Yet the quest for absolute control, over real acoustic materials and real performers, in real time, was leading to dissatisfaction. It was cumbersome to derive works directly from spectral analyses, as Grisey had done in composing Partiels (1975), a work scored for eighteen musicians painstakingly constructed from a sonogram analysis of a single tone on the trombone.

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And the attempt to coax from live, human performers the wealth of acoustic detail inherent in the microstructure of sound was often frustrating; human frailty, elegantly excised from acousmatic music, was something of a recurring and troublesome element. Even dynamic processes themselves, once set in motion, were not always sufficient to sustain the composer’s own musical interests. The relationship of the inspiring technology to the compositional practice, and composers’ individual aesthetic goals, was changing: “We began to feel that the music had perhaps become too directional and predictable; we then had to find a way to re-introduce surprise, contrast and rupture … passing of thresholds, reversing of the direction of motion, triggering of ‘catastrophic’ changes, abbreviated processes where only some of the steps in a process are present …” (Murail, 2000: 7). Murail’s incorporation of chance elements into his music can be seen as one way of guiding the performer towards instability and to those moments of rupture, away from the rigorously controlled environment and into one of transcendence and liberation. By doing so, he broadened the spectrum of chaos and order, extending the extremes. When order gives way to chaos, there are inevitable changes in atmosphere. When the content of the notation and the directive shifts, there is a palpable shift in the nature of the musical materials and the tenor of the performance. When the compositional ideal is animated without ever being explicitly represented on the page, the pianist’s decisions are more fully informed by and attuned to the responses of instrument and space. Heretofore untapped resources of timbral and dynamic subtlety are unleashed. In the section described earlier, in which the hands’ dynamic, gestural, and temporal processes literally play against one another, the complexity and malleability of their interaction defies notation. The focus in performance centers on the physical gesture and its acoustic consequence – the position, appearance, and movements of the performer’s hands and body influence and represent sonic transformations projected, as they emerge and evolve. The embrace of chance elements cannot be equated with a total relinquishment of control. Murail’s use of aleatoricism is disciplined. In opening the door to chance, he deliberately laid the foundation for another kind of evolving process. In Territoires de l’oubli, as in Cage’s One5 and even 4′33″, the initial and terminal points of the process are indicated, and the nature of the process is described. As processes unfold over time, every action at the keyboard is rich with implication. Each gesture determines the next; with the damper pedal depressed throughout, the pianist’s every utterance reverberates for tens of seconds. Under such circumstances, the pianist, whose actions are heavily consequenced, must be equally disciplined.

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Cage’s writings emphasize that aleatoric music, and music that incorporates chance elements in a limited fashion, is not only about liberation. They are also about discipline. “I’m not saying, ‘Do whatever you like,’” Cage maintained, “the freedoms I’ve given have not been given to permit just anything that one wants to do, but have been invitations for people to free themselves from their likes and dislikes, and to discipline themselves” (Gagne and Caras, 1976). Discipline – a component integral to the temporal, performative arts (dance, theater, and music) – may be defined as a heightened awareness of physical and psychological factors. Cage conceived the “disciplined action” in music as an act involving sharpened focus and concentration, performed with an awareness of the sound’s genesis, duration, end, and acoustic and perceptual consequences. 4′33″ was first conceived as a disciplined action. While this landmark nonspectral composition offers the player unusual liberties, it offers only the degree of freedom recognized by the composer as necessary to realize the processes described in the score. The relation between process and disciplined action was described by the dancer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), with whom Cage began collaborating in the 1940s. An art process is not essentially a natural process … essentially, man invents the process. And from or for that process he derives a discipline to make and keep the process functioning. That discipline too is not a natural process … The dancer strives for complete and tempered body-skill, for complete identification with the movement in as devastatingly impersonal a fashion as possible. Not to show off, but to show; not to exhibit but to transmit … through the disciplined action of a human body. (Cunningham, 1951)

The performance of spectral music is a disciplined action. The performance of spectral music is unique in its demands for a heightened awareness of sound color. It requires exquisite control over the sound’s evolution in time, in terms of the sensitive calibration of keyboard- and pedalwork. In Cunningham’s sense, its performance is impersonal, as any interpretation of the material is secondary to its realization. The pianist must be vigilant in the act of performance, attending to the sound and continually aware and in command of physical factors. Tremendous discipline is necessary to show, transmit, and keep the processes functioning. Is it possible to reconcile the two Murails seemingly present in Territoires de l’oubli, one who aims for maximum notational specificity, and the other content to leave entire systems blank with a brief annotation? To understand this seeming contradiction, we can consider a performance indication that appears on the sixth page of Territoires de l’oubli, preceded by the

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phrase “la notation ne peut rendre compte du fait” (even though the notation cannot show this). Murail reached a point at which he realized – and was compelled to announce – that his notation was failing him. He understood the utility of the system but was wary of notational extremes, such as those explored by the New Complexity composers. The aleatoric mantle seems an ill fit for a composer disdainful of Cage’s innovations. Yet Murail was led towards limited aleatoricism for its promises of disciplined freedom, ordered chaos, and controlled spontaneity. He feared, possibly, that were the aleatoric passages in Territoires de l’oubli written using the complex notations associated with Finnissy and Ferneyhough, the pianist would focus unnecessarily on the intricacies of the score itself, losing sight of, or never even glimpsing, the ideal musical result. A more heavily notated score might tempt the performer to confuse the sound with its representation, something Murail later decried as a danger and misconception: “Sound has been confused with its representation. There is a conceptual error from the very beginning: The composer does not work with 12 notes, x rhythmic figures, x dynamic markings, all infinitely permutable – he works with sound and timbre” (Murail, 1984: 158). Ultimately, Murail settled upon a hybrid notational system, at times meticulous, at times quite loose. More specific rhythmic notation could not be guaranteed to produce the desired acoustic phenomena, each and every time, on all pianos in divergent spaces, in the hands of different pianists. Fearing that excessive notation would obscure his compositional ideal, he opted instead for a few well-chosen words and a small disclaimer, leaving the rest to the performer, and to chance. Following Debussy’s credo “Faites confidence à votre oreille …,” Murail acknowledged things better, for now, left unsaid. In the coming decades, his notational strategies continued to incorporate a limited aleatoric component, but always with the intent of bringing the interpreter closer to the sonic ideal.

Theory in practice: Murail, Les travaux et les jours (2002) After Territoires de l’oubli, Murail wrote two shorter works, sibling-like in their notational and gestural language: Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire… (1992), a tribute to Messiaen, and La mandragore (1993), which in part takes inspiration from Ravel’s “Le gibet” (Gaspard de la nuit). Following these compositions, after a decade away from the instrument, Murail composed the elegiac nine-part cycle Les travaux et les jours (2002). This thirty-minute odyssey is connected in many ways to Territoires de l’oubli, most notably in its revolution around a B–C tremolo, supported by a low F, which plays an important role in defining the harmonic environment of

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both compositions. Les travaux et les jours’s individual movements examine elemental components of the pianist’s gestural vocabulary – single tones, arpeggios of different velocities, grace notes, chords, rhythmic patterns, and filigree – from different perspectives: a view glimpsed through a window at different times of day. The movements constitute a series not unlike Claude Monet’s “Haystack” paintings (c. 1890) or the “Helga Pictures” by the American realist Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). Although it was written just after the turn of the twenty-first century, Les travaux et les jours should still be considered a high spectral work. In it, we see a composer uncompromising in his commitment to the evolution of harmonic-timbral color in time and the exploration of liminal states. Each movement in Les travaux et les jours explores a sonorous environment, an ambience evoked using a limited repository of acoustic materials and performance techniques. There is sure neutrality to the opening material (Example 4.3). The first movement begins with a barely audible, glacially ascending harmonic spectrum. The initial harmonic arch, restated and extended, becomes a rainbow that rises and falls slowly, which in turn becomes a series of rainbows rising and falling in sequence. Their resonances, caught in a single depressed pedal, overlap, and initially amorphous, ethereal arpeggiations presented in isolation become interwoven simultaneities. Intervals and notated rhythms begin to emerge, and the environment is soon characterized by ever-increasing horizontal and vertical densities. In the movement’s climactic passage, chords and rhythms cascade vertiginously, after which, from their combined resonances, quieter streams of harmonies are heard to re-emerge. The movement ends in decay, with a fading tremolo of the signature minor ninth, heard within the residue of the initial harmonic spectrum. Other movements explore these same “simple” components and the “complex” transformations by which one musical element becomes another. In the third movement (Example 4.4) these transformations are effected in slow motion; there is a sense of languorous stasis and placidity, a Messiaenlike timelessness. The movement begins with rich mezzo piano harmonies in the piano’s upper registers ringing like chimes, echoed by pianissimo sonorities distinguished by tessitura (occurring in a higher register, emulating harmonics) and separated temporally by deep chasms of resonance. At a crucial moment of rupture, an indistinct gesture falling harp-like in the piano’s lowest octaves heralds a kind of chaos: rhythmic erraticism and chromatic saturation. Just after the gesture speaks, brilliant yet unpredictable figurations are unleashed in the highest treble register, like a flock of seagulls whose flight is triggered by a wave crashing upon the shore. Gradually, as if assailed by gravity, these figurations lose their momentum and begin to discolor. Weightless and fluid passagework becomes a series of

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Example 4.3 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, I.

Example 4.4 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, III.

jagged grace-note figures, which are transformed into dotted rhythms and, finally, into the chordal simultaneities of the movement’s opening. Les travaux et les jours abounds with unprecedented techniques of ­harmonic-timbral manipulation, requiring a highly controlled approach to both keyboard and pedals, in performance revealing a virtuoso performer

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Example 4.5 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, V.

as well as composer. The fifth movement juxtaposes fortissimo high-treble chords played just before pianissimo chords in the lower register; instantly, with a change of pedal, the latter are revealed like a shadow resonance, produced seemingly without attack (Example 4.5). In the sixth movement (the shortest, yet in some ways the most difficult in terms of performance realization), descending arpeggiations overlap at different rates and intensities, contributing over time to a polyphony of attacks and resonances: a virtual canon in which polyphonic lines are articulated from the keyboard in delicate counterpoint to the resonances held in the damper pedals. It is a play of voices and their shadows. In a manner almost reminiscent of the études of Liszt and Scriabin, the seventh movement (Example 4.6) seems to defy the reality of the piano’s decay. Unlike its predecessor, it is animated by a variety of agile figures and techniques: trills and tremolandi, intensifying figurations involving single notes, hocketing dyads, and arpeggios, broadly characterized by loud dynamics (fff) and near secco textures. As a culmination of the work, the two final movements offer the listener memories of all that has gone before. The eighth movement is a thematic (if the adjective can be applied loosely) retrospective, revisiting the distinctive materials of the previous movements, albeit in fragmented form; in contrast, the ninth is an elegiac sonic

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Example 4.6 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, VII.

essay on the bare elements, stripped of thematic significance. Elemental, the B–C oscillating ninth and slowly ascending spectral return. The final movement offers an environment for meditation, with quiet, lushly pedaled events separated by increasingly large rests – resonant spaces of up to seven seconds in duration. In the penultimate movement, material is fragmented and compressed. In the ensuing coda, all materials are neutralized, returned to the repository of purest harmonic sound. The movements are without titles, and Les travaux et les jours features no text-based instructions or performance indications. Murail’s sole extramusical reference is the work’s enigmatic title – a nod to Works and Days, an 800-verse compendium by the Greek poet Hesiod (active c. 700 BC). At first, this seems an odd reference. Hesiod’s text is an instructional work, offering assorted moral and practical advice for the living of an honest life. “Best of all is the man who perceives everything himself, taking account

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of what will be better in the long run and in the end,” is, in its content and stilted manner, a typical statement. “Good is he, too, who follows good advice”; “Point out to your labourers while it is still midsummer: ‘It will not always be summer. Build your huts’” (Hesiod, 1988: 45, 52). Detailed explications of cosmology and cosmogony are interspersed with practical, seemingly hard-earned insights. Marry a virgin so that you may teach her good ways; and for preference marry her who lives near you, with all circumspection, in case your marriage is a joke to your neighbors. For a man acquires nothing better than the good wife, and nothing worse than the bad one … who singes a man without a brand, strong though he be, and consigns him to premature old age. (Hesiod, 1988: 58)

Works and Days touches upon topics such as politics, agriculture, religion, the merits of labor, and the intrigues of the gods as well as practical aspects of seafaring (although Hesiod admitted that he was no sailor). It is a disorderly text, something of a hodgepodge, intentionally didactic yet indisputably poetic. It is not considered a “masterpiece” so much as an “important work.” Yet in his own day, Hesiod was critically acclaimed. A breed apart from his contemporary Homer, he was recognized as a poet who celebrated peace, not war, and whose poems, while rambling and erratic, were among the first literary works to convey the personality of their author. It is a curious work, very different in nature than the writings of Max Weber (Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, 1921), which were influential on the first-generation spectralists and would reflect something of the thought processes behind Murail’s concerto Le désenchantement du monde. In conversation, Murail attested that it was the spirit, and not the content or structure, of Works and Days that informed his compositional act: the daily work of sitting with the material, alone at his desk, viewing it honestly and attempting to craft it with industry. One senses a similar melding of the sacred and the profane, in an essayistic musical composition that considers both the inspired and the practical aspects of artistic creation. Murail wrote Les travaux et les jours in somewhat reclusive fashion, reflective of both his professional circumstance and personal deportment. At the time, he had moved to the United States and was teaching at Columbia University, appointed to the post left vacant by Varèse’s former assistant, Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934). He chose to live upstate from the city, remaining geographically separated from the ideological battles that continued to rage across Manhattan. Some of his students sensed a desire to remove himself from the rhetorical and political quagmires of the musical arena. (Whether or not his own personal attitude can be traced to

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the death of his close friend Grisey a few years earlier cannot be said with certainty.) As an interpreter who worked with him at this time, I sensed a sincere wish on his part not to do battle with his work but instead to grapple with his chosen materials, in a creative process more akin to that of an artisan than an artiste; he had written, just a few years earlier, “I imagine myself as a sculptor in front of a stone block, which conceals a hidden form …” (Murail, 1989: 154). “It seems to me,” he commented in his program notes to Les travaux, “that it is best to adopt a completely naïve attitude, to make believe as though this were the first piece that I wrote for the piano.” For all the complexities of its realization and conception, Les travaux et les jours is boldly direct in its goals and processes – reflecting the mindset of a composer not oblivious to past and present but seeking to hear the musical elements at hand anew, with fresh ears. It reveals a composer at the height of his powers. Everything necessary for the realization of his music is inherent in the notation itself. Each articulation, dynamic marking, and graphic indication is fully functional in a score that, unlike the heavily annotated Territoires de l’oubli, is devoid of written text. Hesiod’s Works and Days is regarded as one of the earliest works in which a poet asserts his identity as an artist and, more so, his authority as a teller of truth. In the text itself, he directly attributes this authority to his masterful handling and understanding of poetic material and form. Hesiod acknowledges his debt to the muses who, he famously states, “have taught me to make sound without limit,” and crucially asserts the power of the poetic forms with which he has chosen to communicate (Hunter, 2008: 167). It is in this same sense, playing Les travaux et les jours, that one senses a mature composer, inspired and in full command of his chosen tools. The written page and its sonic counterpart reveal a disciplined approach to the material and the identity, and authority, of a composer reconciled with his craft.

About the sounds themselves Little admiration was expressed among the composers of L’Itinéraire for those of the New York School: Cage, Feldman, Brown, and David Tudor (1926–2006). Yet as consideration of Cage and Finnissy sheds light on the work of Murail, examining certain aspects of the aesthetics of Feldman helps to situate the work of the first-generation spectralists, in terms of a shared heritage. It reveals how attitudes towards pianistic performance practice were evolving as well, to reflect a stronger emphasis on the sound itself. Early in his career, the Brooklyn-born Feldman studied composition with Wallingford Riegger (1885–1961) and Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972),

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students of Schoenberg and Webern, respectively. These composers most strongly influenced his harmonic language, and Feldman had little interest in psychoacoustics. This is not to say that he was not fascinated with the psychological aspects of the musical experience, but rather that he sought in his music a meandering, aimless quality, at which he arrived intuitively. In his expansive compositions, he attempted to formalize a “disorientation of memory” (Feldman, 1981). For his commitment to the aesthetic implications of Cage’s aleatoric experiments and desire to avoid musical drama, obvious virtuosity, and directionality, Feldman cannot be considered even a pseudo-spectral composer. Examining his ideas in relation to those of the spectralists, however, reveals a swift aesthetic current leading from the late nineteenth century directly into the rough seas of the post-1968, postWoodstock avant-garde. More than the other composers of the New York School, with the possible exception of Alvin Lucier, he recognized the vital role of resonance as a dramatic and psychologically real element in the listening process. Performers of Feldman’s piano works, notably the larger, later compositions  – Piano (1977), For Bunita Marcus (1985), and Triadic Memories (1981) – will find indisputable parallels between the intended sourcelessness of his resonances and the spectralists’ idealized dematerialization of timbre. It’s not the simple matter of the pedal being depressed throughout the work that feeds comparisons of Territoires de l’oubli and Feldman’s Piano. Both works belie a desire to reposition resonance and evolving timbral color as the focus of the listening experience. Both composers wrote for the resonances, not for the attacks: “In my own music, I am so involved with the decay of each sound and try to make its attack sourceless. The attack of a sound is not its character … Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing – leaving us rather than coming toward us” (Feldman, 1973). Feldman’s aesthetic pronouncements, interviews, and lectures echo certain key concerns of the spectralists, albeit voiced with a distinctly American swagger (Feldman, 2006, 2000). He was a vociferous critic of Boulez, and statements made with typical candor  –“Boulez, who is everything I don’t want art to be … he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made” (Feldman, 1985) – mirror contemporaneous anti-formalist critiques of Boulez by Murail, Dufourt, and Grisey, the last of whom dismissed Boulez as “a conductor bereft of any phenomenological awareness” (Grisey, 1987: 240). Feldman similarly characterized Boulez as a “maker of objects,” contrasting this “industrial” approach towards sound as product with his own attitude towards sound as a process, and music as offering an environment defined by the listeners’ perceptions of resonance and decay (Massi, 1989).

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In describing his compositional evolution, Feldman was clear. “Before, my pieces were like objects; now, they’re like evolving things” (Rockwell, 1999). Piecing together Feldman’s own words in rhapsodic style, evoking his unique solipsism, something crucial is conveyed about his attitude towards sound. About Feldman’s desire for sounds “more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that existed heretofore.” About “the sounds themselves.” Ah, yes. “The sounds themselves.” It was a fantastic idea. That if the composer were careful, careful about how he or she put the sounds into the composition, we might hear those sounds just as we would hear them if they were not in the composition. We might hear, in other words, “the sounds themselves.” If the composer were careful, as Feldman once put it, to “free” those sounds from “compositional rhetoric” … Or, as Feldman described it, such a “mysterious” effect “whereby each sound as if almost erases in one’s memory what happened before,” whereby the listener is “very fresh into the moment and does not relate it.” (Hirata, 1996:€6)

In the 1970s, on both sides of the Atlantic, composers of various strains were rebelling against an aesthetic agenda symbolically, if not actually, helmed by Boulez. In America, Feldman was not the only one. He is mentioned in this context as his attitudes towards acoustic sound in general and pianistic resonance in particular uncannily resemble those of the spectralists, as the physiognomy of a distant relative might mirror a sibling’s face. Feldman also represents that vital tie to the world of nineteenth-century keyboard virtuosity. His views were definitively influenced by Vera Maurina Press, his first piano teacher. A Russian émigré, Press was an acquaintance of Scriabin and a student of both Busoni and Emil von Sauer (1862–1942), considered by some “the legitimate heir of Liszt” (Heliotes, 1995). In the United States, Press became a respected pedagogue, teaching, among others, Morton Estrin (b. 1923), the first to record Scriabin’s Etudes, Op.€8. Feldman, whose own family had immigrated from Kiev, began working with Press at age eleven; indeed, he was the same age, when he studied Scriabin and Busoni at her side, that Messiaen had been when Jean de Gibon introduced him to Debussy’s Pelléas. In articles and lectures, Feldman reminisced about Press’s remarkable touch, recounting how she was able to create seemingly infinite worlds of color playing a single note. Feldman acknowledged Press’s transformative effect on his musicality, paying homage to her in his quiet elegy Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety (1970). That his ideas of pianistic resonance mirror in key ways those of the spectralists confirms this shared part of their lineage. It attests to a family of late-twentieth-century avant-garde attitudes towards the piano that shared strong ties to the Russian and Austro-Hungarian schools of the nineteenth century.

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An ecological approach to music perception Throughout the twentieth century, a growing concern with music perception fostered a lively and sometimes acrimonious discourse. This exploded in the 1980s, with input from specialists in the relatively new fields of the cognitive psychology of music and, in America, institutionalized music theory. As spectralism came to international visibility and serialism fell into critical disfavor, music theorists pondered the possible mismatch between avant-garde “compositional grammars” and psychological “listening grammars,” or the potential gap between compositional systems (such as integral serialism) and what could be considered innate cognitive constraints (McAdams, 1989; Lerdahl, 1992). In this environment, within which empirical research in music perception was central to the agendas of all major computer music centers, the spectralists distinguished themselves by taking into account, in the very processes of composition, the psychological reality of the listener. Looking back, Murail remained critical of “certain composers who believed they were the avant-garde” who refused “to make even the slightest concession to the phenomena of auditory perception” (Murail, 2000: 6). Grisey maintained that his role as a spectral composer was “to find a better equation between concept and perception – between the concept of the score and the perception the audience might have of it” (Grisey, 1996). Seeking that “perfectly parallel relation between the perceiving body and the conceiving spirit,” the spectral composers were motivated to acknowledge in music the complexities of human perception and their relation to the sound itself in time and space as experienced (Grisey, 2000). From its inception, theirs was a strongly ecological attitude, considering the mutual relation between the listening perceiver and the affordances of the musical environment. There are indisputable parallels to Scriabin, in his quest to relate the subjective and objective aspects of music perception, and Debussy, in his explorations of the qualitative, not quantitative, aspects of musical temporality. The rise of the spectral attitude coincided with the advent, in America, of ecological psychology, a small movement drawing on the work of James J. Gibson. In the 1970s, Gibson, a psychologist at Cornell University, proposed an ecological model of perception. Radical at the time, his psychological model depicted the experience of the perceiver in direct relation to the environment, emphasizing the reality of experience and the active nature of perception (Reed, 1988). Gibson suggested that perceivers (listeners, tasters, and seers alike) approach the world with goals and desires that direct not only what they seek in the environment (the information gathered through the senses) but also how they interpret it, as it relates to them in a personal, contextual way. Perception in this sense is directed and active,

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and less dependent than many cognitive psychologists suggest on mental representations abstracted from experience and the processes of memory and learning (Mace, 2005; Heft, 2001; Pastore, 1989). In The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), Gibson introduced the concept of the affordance. The affordance became key to his theory, as a property of the environment – a basic characteristic – with objective (quantifiable) and subjective qualities, determined from the perspective of the perceiver. I have coined this word as a substitute for values, a term which carries an old burden of philosophical meaning. I mean simply what things furnish, for good or ill. What they afford the observer, after all, depends on their properties … [T]he human observer learns to detect what have been called the values or meanings of things, perceiving their distinctive features, putting them into categories and subcategories, noticing their similarities and differences and even studying them for their own sakes, apart from learning what to do about them. (Gibson, 1966: 285)

Gibson maintained that perceivers negotiate their environment by determining its affordances, or functional properties. His concept of the affordance was developed to explain visual perception, his area of specialization, and how organisms are able to orient themselves to landscapes in continual states of flux. Yet he maintained that there was no sharp distinction between perception of the “natural” world and that of the nonmaterial, “cultural” world. This is a seriously misleading distinction, for it seems to imply that language, tradition, art, music, law, and religion are immaterial, insubstantial, or intangible … Let us be clear about this. There have to be modes of stimulation, or ways of conveying information, for any individual to perceive anything, however abstract. He must be sensitive to stimuli no matter how universal or finespun the thing he apprehends. (Gibson, 1966: 26)

The concept of affordance translates well into the realm of musical perception, where perceptual learning may be seen as resulting from the listener becoming attuned to the affordances of the music, oriented to the musical environment and attentive to the interplay of its characteristic components. The significance of Gibson’s ideas was not fully recognized during his lifetime, but they have more recently been applied to musical perception by scholars such as Stephen Handel and Eric F. Clarke, the latter of whom distinguishes the ecological attitude from attitudes towards the cognitive psychology of music that remain more common. Ecological theory differs from “mainstream” psychology of music in a number of ways: in emphasizing the mutualism of organism and

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environment it offers an alternative to the mentalism of the cognitive tradition; it adopts a more embodied outlook through the central relationship between perception and action; it resists the idea that perception should be understood in terms of internal representations; and it eschews rigid adherence to hierarchical structures and processing stages. (Clarke, 2005: 195)

This ecological spirit underlies spectral attitudes towards composition. From an ecological perspective, music is closely tied to the corporeal. Musical perception is born in the body. Sound is both a part of and interacts with the physical world. Music does not create a dreamworld in the mind, as psychedelic drugs do, for example. As Scriabin realized, the power of music lies in its reality, not its fantasy. It is the fantasy made real, offering a sounding environment perceived with eyes and ears open. Listeners choose to partake of the aesthetic experience, deliberately and voluntarily interacting with the musical environment, which is made of acoustically real, physical elements. They do not only respond involuntarily to stimuli set before them but also engage in and direct their experiences consciously towards them, becoming attuned to and exploring the affordances – the materials and processes – of the musical environment. Sound itself, neutral and dematerialized, is the stuff of that experience, which demands no other rationale or metaphorical representation. “Artworks, insofar and so long as they unleash the energy of resonating, are what they reveal and reveal what they are” (Seel, 2005: 152). After all, one could say, it is precisely in states of resonating that the energetic moment of the work gains the upper hand over the forms forged by these energies. The work presents itself as something forming, not as something formed … Artistic resonating is indeed an overflowing of the work’s energies beyond the play of its parts and shapes, but it is an overflowing of the energies of a work that created that play and its figures and … brings them again to light out of every disappearance. (Seel, 2005: 153)

Conceiving sound ecologically, as a physical force connecting the breathing bodies of performer, instrument, and listener, defines spectral attitudes towards composition, listening, and performance. Recently, it has been suggested that the use of ecological terminology was politically attractive for the artists associated with L’Itinéraire. Grisey’s appeal to an “ecology of sound,” for example, has been characterized as evidence of his falling prey to the “enticements of social and political homologies” and depicted as a knowing if not opportunistic use of charged terminology associated with leftist ideologies. [I]n addition to marking an imaginative boundary between their aesthetic and that of other composers, the spectralists’ use of the ecological metaphor

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places their aesthetic above that of serialism, in a position of moral or political superiority. It is here that the power of the homology becomes evident: that is, ecology is not just useful to the spectralists because it offers a new way of conceptualizing relationships, one modeled on the natural world, but it also implies a form of political engagement, and thus invests their position with additional ethical force. (Heile, 2009: 49–50)

In their seminal writings, Grisey, Murail, and Dufourt used language shared with leftist groups, such as the Gauche proletarienne, Ligue ­communiste révolutionnaire, and Mouvement de libération des femmes. Taken at face value, their rhetoric evokes the politically charged terminology of their time, much as Scriabin’s poetic use of the term “dematerialization” evokes the philosophies of Lenin. The present context seems a good one in which to abandon debates as to whether or not one kind of music can be morally or politically superior to another, and whether charged terminology was used by the first-generation spectralists in a particularly opportunistic fashion. I suggest instead that their use of political reference continued a tradition of engagement dating back to Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) and Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931), which colored the careers of mid-century figures such as Charles Koechlin (1867–1950) and Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), as well as Messiaen and Jolivet (Julliard and Winock, 1996; Fulcher, 2005). All of these composers maintained a critical affiliation with their national culture, which influenced but did not dictate their aesthetic agendas and rhetoric. [I]mportant French composers, acting as “intellectuals,” did attempt to respond stylistically, within the framework of current meanings, to the major ideological issues of their period. The universal or the national, how to “defend” French culture from its “enemies,” within and without, and how to reimbue culture with a spiritual dimension were issues that all French intellectuals successively faced. The ideas and values with which they responded were indeed factors in their artistic endeavors, as were the symbols and meanings to which they reacted, those defined in the political realm. Yet composers … did not just mirror the ideology expressed in the discourse: there was no clear alignment of ideas or a specific ideology with “the notes” themselves … In these compositions, then, we find several modes of reasoning interacting in an eloquent “space” – the discursive or intellectual, and the aesthetic, as well as that of the unique language of the art. It was in this evocative gap between discursive articulation and artistic “enunciation” that French composers created a new symbolic register through which they could express new possibilities. (Fulcher, 2005: 321–322)

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It may be more insightful to consider Grisey’s appeal to an ecology of sound as one without metaphor or hidden agenda – a cigar that is just a cigar. When Grisey evoked “energy” and “environment,” his terms were not used in the spirit of analogy, but, like Seel’s, in the recognition of an essential physical and psychological reality (Seel, 1996). This is why the terminology has proved itself durable, long after the events of May 1968. By the early 1990s, second- and third-generation spectralists and those not associated with L’Itinéraire were using this same language. They articulated their aesthetics for the global audience, liberating these terms from their original historical connotations, and did so with the intent of clarifying their agenda, not distinguishing themselves from Boulez and the serialists or aligning themselves with a political faction. The reference to ecology in the writings of the spectralists must be recognized as more than a rhetorical ploy. Their use of this vocabulary reflected more these words’ significance in the disciplines of psychoacoustics and psychology than in the political arena, which has a far more explicitly ideological orientation. “Ecology” will have differing implications to a psychoacoustician than to a political radical, and it was to this first definition that the early spectralists appealed.

Of rupture and ecstatic violence: Dufourt, Erlkönig (2006) Born in 1943 in Lyon, Dufourt was trained as a pianist, a composer, and a philosopher. From a young age, he had wanted to write music. In an interview for the documentary series “Papier à musique: 5 lignes pour écrire le temps,” he recalled: “When you are a child, you make a wish, each time you see a shooting star. My only wish, since my early childhood, was to become a composer.” Between 1961 and 1968, he studied piano at the Conservatoire de Genève with Louis Hiltbrand, the assistant, close friend, and ultimate successor at the Conservatoire to Dinu Lipatti (1917–1950). He studied acoustic and electroacoustic composition with Jacques Guyonnet (b. 1933), a student of Boulez. At the same time, he took courses in philosophy with François Dagognet and Deleuze, participating in additional seminars with Georges Canguilhem and Suzanne Bachelard. Upon the conferral of his degree (Agrégé de philosophie, 1967), he was appointed as Professor of Philosophy at the Université Jean-Moulin Lyon III, where he taught while acting as director of artistic programming at the Théâtre de la Cité de Villeurbanne, just northeast of the city. Into his seventies, Dufourt continued to teach philosophy at the Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). Unlike his slightly younger colleagues Murail and Grisey, Dufourt established a career path wearing the hats of philosopher, theorist, and musicologist as well as composer. In 1973, he left his post in Lyon to accept a scholarly appointment at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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(CNRS), the government-supported institution dedicated to interdisciplinary scientific research. In Paris, he joined with Murail, Grisey, Tessier, and Lévinas to form L’Itinéraire. He co-directed the ensemble between 1976 and 1981, during which time he founded, with Murail and composer-cellist Alain Bancquart (b. 1934), the Collectif de Recherche Instrumentale et de Synthèse Sonore (Collective for Research and Instrumental Sound Synthesis, 1977). From 1982 to 1998, he headed a musicological division based at the CNRS, which became a unit for research uniting the CNRS, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and IRCAM. In 1989, he created a doctoral program in musicology, supported by the same institutions, dedicated to the study of twentieth-century music (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). His essays “Musique spectrale” (1979) and “Pierre Boulez: Musicien de l’ère industrielle” (1986) were essential in defining the movement towards spectralism in the context of postwar aesthetics and theories, and his later writings evidence an ongoing quest to situate his music and the musical developments of his lifetime in relation to centuries of compositional, critical, and theoretical endeavor. His writings exist in two compendia, Musique, pouvoir, écriture (Music, Power, Writing, 1991) and Mathesis et subjectivité: Des conditions historiques de possibilité de la musique occidentale (Mathesis and Subjectivity: On the Historical Conditions Underlying the Scope of Western Music, 2007). His current concerns, as well as the breadth of his frame of reference, are exposed in his summary of music’s historical development in relation to scientific advances, “The Principles of Music and the Rationalization of Theory” (2010). While Dufourt is a formidable writer, his compositional output is also large, although better known in Europe than in the United States. Important works include Saturne, for chamber ensemble with electronics and written for L’Itinéraire (1978–1979), seminal with Murail’s Gondwana and Grisey’s Partiels in establishing the spectral aesthetic; Surgir, for orchestra (1984); and the opera Dédale (1995). He is also known for compositions drawing upon the works of visual artists, including La tempesta d’après Giorgione, for chamber ensemble (1976–1977); the flute concerto La maison du sourd (1996–1999), after Goya; Lucifer d’après Pollock, for orchestra (2001); L’origine du monde, after Courbet (2004); and Les hivers, a chamber cycle of works drawing from Rembrandt, Brueghel, Poussin, and Guardi (1992–2001). In the context of the present inquiry, Dufourt is notable as the most pianistic of the first-generation spectral composers, as a former pianist and composer who continues to work at the piano (Pasler, 2011: 225). He has created a significant body of music for piano solo, including An Schwager Kronos (1994), Rastlose Liebe (2000), Meeresstille (2001), and Erlkönig (2006) (all inspired by Schubert’s settings of Goethe); La ligne gravissant la chute (Hommage à Chopin) (2008); and Vent d’automne (2011);

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as well as compositions for duo (Soleil de proie, 2005) and concerto soloist (L’origine du monde, 2004; L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo, 2005; and On the Wings of the Morning, 2012). Dufourt has explicitly acknowledged the challenges of writing for the instrument in the context of historical precedents. Messiaen pedagogically drew from the historical repertoire, freely establishing parallels between works from diverse eras to construct a practical typology of compositional techniques (Boivin, 2007). A composer as well as a pianist, Hiltbrand similarly saw the exploration of the historical repertoire as a way to become versed in a typology of pianistic gestures and sonorities and the techniques required to produce them. With Dufourt, he traced a narrative characterizing the development of pianistic performance practice since the mid nineteenth century, charting a hypothetical path leading from a focus on form to a focus on sound, to the point where their aesthetic positions could be seen as reversed. In this narrative of aesthetic renewal, in which sound and the sensual aspects of musical apprehension ultimately bypassed the formal preoccupations of the classicists and early Romantics, Liszt and Debussy were identified as cathartic figures. Yet just as Schoenberg saw atonality as a natural extension of earlier forays into chromaticism, Hiltbrand understood this evolution as a logical development of pianistic technique, as the advancement of past practices. The reversal of trends taking place during the nineteenth century and the radical aesthetic turns of the turn of the twentieth century did not … signify an absolute break … The poetics of sonic evocation did not suppress time; it simply inaugurated a new type of breath. It also reflected to some degree the preeminence of craft and not, as one might have been led to believe, a sensual adherence to nature: for in the instrumental domain, technique remains the supreme law of poetics. (Personal correspondence, 2013)

For Hiltbrand and other mid-century pianists who shared his affinity for “sonic evocation,” such as Alfred Cortot (1877–1962), Artur Schnabel (1882–1951), Walter Gieseking (1895–1956), Wilhelm Kempff (1895–1991), Nikita Magaloff (1912–1992), Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920–1995), and Sviatoslav Richter (1915–1997), pianistic performance was a physical discipline, Lisztian in its elevation of technique yet modern in its pursuit not of perfection but of the control of tone and color. His philosophy of piano playing models a quintessentially protospectral approach to pianistic performance, for which technique and, indeed, virtuosity were defined as the mastery of producing sonorities. He urged his students to consider pianistic performance as a form of sonic synthesis, in which aspects of timbre, dynamics, resonance, tessitura, texture, articulation, rhythm, voicing,

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touch, and pedal were combined to create harmonic-timbral complexes of infinite variety and nuance. Interpretation was closely linked to technical realization. Less about conveying a composition’s syntax or form, the act of interpreting a musical text was more about projecting the very essence of its sound. It was about unearthing correspondences and bridges between various structures within the work itself and projecting these to the listener. The pianist’s role was to learn how physically to articulate these structures in real time, so that the sound itself would be unveiled to the listener as a phenomenon of emergence, perceived not as a product but as a process of spontaneous becoming, and experienced not as an artwork created by the performer for the listener but as a musical environment inhabited by both. For him, the interpreter’s art never had to do with explicitly transcribing meaning nor, inversely, to bring tangible content back up to latent, abstract thought. Nor was it a question of reviving some kind of miraculous fecundity, oblivious to its processes and its aims. It was a question of learning how to chisel away without mannerism, to declare without ostentation, to breathe life into a text without entreating it in an artificial or forced manner. (Personal correspondence, 2013)

At the 2008 conference “Milano Musica,” Dufourt presented the address “Raptus et mélancolie: Deux dimensions du piano contemporaine” (Rapture and Melancholy: Two Dimensions of the Contemporary Piano, unpublished). Referring to his recent compositions for the instrument, he discussed the “strangeness and blackness” that he sensed in the music of Schubert and the German Romantics, an expressive force that he felt remained vibrant and compelling. Dufourt discussed a desire to reclaim in his own music that expression, which seemed tied to a specific form of nineteenth-century virtuosity: not just the ability to play fast and loud but also to draw forth and project from the instrument a timbral depth and dimensionality. In the nuance and color of sound, Dufourt located the basis for a musical expressivity largely absent from the late-twentieth-century repertoire, and particularly from the works of composers seduced by the promises of technology and theories that (sometimes) effectively severed the emotional and psycho-physiological aspects of the musical art from its physical and numerical, or mathematical, foundations (Dufourt, 2010: 46). He was critical of composers such as Boulez, Barraqué, Berio, Stockhausen, and Xenakis, who used the piano in their compositions but did not take full advantage of, or continue to develop, its potential for timbral and acousticexpressive nuance – as if uninterested in the capacity of the instrument and the skills of its practitioners, as passed down over the centuries. After World

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War II, many composers of the avant-garde had been interested in wiping the slate clean. Balancing physical and aesthetic concerns, Dufourt asked whether it might be possible to develop a gestural vocabulary that would fit under the hand (“pianistic” in the traditional sense) while articulating an original compositional language. He sought to recapture the expressive power and extreme timbral refinement associated with the performance of nineteenth-century music. While resisting nostalgia, he aspired to a new form of virtuosity, spectral in attitude and somewhat Romantic in spirit, specifically pianistic in conception and atonal in its harmonic orientation. Dufourt’s piano works establish musical environments defined by distinctive atmospheres and processes, connected by seams often bared, sometimes gaping. Textures evolve incrementally, with gestures repeating to the point of obsession, often giving the impression of sonic stasis and a petrified soundworld frozen in time. Unexpectedly, processes spiral seemingly out of control, leading to passages of frenzy and near-chaos. His environments are rich with ambiguity. Attack and decay, motion and stasis, pitch and noise, and direction and indifference are not binary oppositions readily or objectively grasped as points of reference, but relative states interpreted subjectively, variously implied, established, and imploded. In the form of a peripeteia, every action and atmosphere seems to veer around to its opposite: “The sound’s substance has its own dynamism that polarizes and rhythmicizes the space even before it becomes the object of the composition. Composing consists in suggesting dynamic impressions with movements without actually shifting them. The new dimensions are depth, transparency, fluidity, and luminosity” (Dufourt, 2010: 13). Dufourt asks that the listener not contemplate any kind of formal process per se, but rather engage with the sound in space, grasping at a sonorous structure that is not rigid but, as described in relation to L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo, “a mold made of masses and empty spaces, forces and qualities in flux” (Dufourt, 2010: 21). Color is the subject and sonority the medium of his music. “Sonority, which takes attention away from the dialectic of consequence, does not push forward to something else. It invites immersion” (Pasler, 2011: 215). Even in the most beautiful, seemingly calm passages, the listener attuned to the affordances of the environment senses the precariousness, a state of being on the threshold of something else; ever aware of the continuity that inevitably leads to breakage; the sudden, oftentimes traumatic reversal of circumstances. Dufourt leads his listener again and again to this breaking point, which is both psychological and, particularly but not only for the performer, physical. “The piano music of our time,” he asserted, “expresses an irreducible amalgamation of indifferent attitudes, rupture, and ecstatic violence” (Dufourt, unpublished, 2008).

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Dufourt’s Erlkönig is an ecstatic, violent, and exultant work in this sense. Commissioned by the 2006 Festival d’Automne and 2007 Festival Archipel, and written for François-Frédéric Guy, Erlkönig functions as a finale to Dufourt’s Schubert cycle, the four piano solos based on settings of Goethe. To convey how Dufourt uses virtuosity and sound in a dramatic and inherently spectral manner, we can compare his composition to a contemporaneous work, the Etude no. 8 in B flat minor, “Erlkönig after Goethe” by the pianist Marc-André Hamelin (b. 1961). The two works were written within just a few years of one another, but their treatment of Goethe’s material and conception of the act of performance could not be more different. Hamelin described his showpiece as “basically a faithful setting of this poem, adhering to it as closely as any vocal setting” (Hamelin, 2009). In a language harmonically and texturally derivative of the Romantic era, he gives different “voices” to the characters in the poem (the Father, the Child, and the Erlking, harbinger of Death). The pianist acts out the drama as a play of melodies over a tumultuous accompaniment. The interpretation is figural: a literal mapping of the poem. The performer is of course expected to know Goethe’s poem; familiarity with it is absolutely essential to a successful performance, especially in order to give a different tone to all the characters in the story. I have attempted to paint a picture in sound of the poem’s many facets. For example, at the end of the child’s second Erlking hallucination, he can be felt trying to say “Mein Vater, mein Vater” before he fully wakes up and actually says it, and this is reflected in the different dynamics given to each hand. (Hamelin, 2009)

Dufourt’s Erlkönig, on the other hand, maps neither Goethe’s poem nor Schubert’s song but channels the energy and resonance of both. While Hamelin’s four-minute trifle demonstrates the prowess of the pianist more than any aspect of the original text (excluding the plot), Dufourt describes his thirty-minute Erlkönig as part of a “song of experiment” and a composition “whose fantastic dimension translates the aspiration to transcend the inexorability of time.” While the work’s sections are clearly distinguished by texture and activity, they do not correspond to specific stanzas or strophes. Similarly, the distinctive materials from which processes are spun (widely spaced chords played in isolation with and without ornamentation, a recurring triplet motive, and swirling passagework) do not represent the poem’s main characters. Dufourt refers to neither the signature repeated octaves (in Schubert’s song, the pounding of the horse’s hooves) nor the closing recitative, which announces the death of the child in his father’s arms. What Dufourt’s epic shares with Schubert’s miniature, however, is a heightened espressivity and an emotional pitch directly tied to the physical strain of performance.

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In writing Erlkönig, Dufourt contemplated his own relationship to the piano. As if conducting a dialogue with himself from the bench, he re-­ evaluated the essence of the instrument, its tradition and aesthetics, its performance practices as they had evolved over the course of the twentieth century, and his conflicted feelings towards the piano writing of his contemporaries. The work confronts precedent, immediate and distant, merging nineteenth- and twenty-first-century practices and expressive devices and inviting the listener to explore technical and centripetal correspondences. In terms of the work’s gestural language, the rate at which processes and transformations unfold temporally, and the sheer aggression with which the pianist is asked to attack the keyboard, many parts sound very contemporary, and the work’s realization requires a particularly modern kind of controlled ferocity. Yet there is also a sense of the Romantic expression, captured, not through the use of neo-Lisztian textures and expressive clichés, but in the wholly physical manner in which the pianist engages with the instrument. It brings to mind Hiltbrand’s aphorism, which recalls Liszt: “To live an art-work is to breathe life into it, to rouse that which it possesses in essence, the vital energy enclosed in its form, to a personal existence” (Hiltbrand, 1990: 106). Erlkönig’s score demands overt athleticism from the performer. The specificity of its notation belies the fact that it was written by a pianist. In a score with relatively few text indications, Dufourt uses evocative phrases that hearken to the world of the Romantics and also to the landscapes of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux. Passages are to be articulated as if “drowning in fog” (noyé dans une brume de pédale, Example 4.7) and “sounding with the virulence and stridency of the dentist’s drill” (sonner avec la stridence et la virulence d’une roulette de dentiste, Example 4.8). Unlike his first-generation colleagues, Dufourt exploits traditional expressive markings and their connotations, such as dolce, pesante, and even legato and non legato. (In Rastlose Liebe, one finds a marking inconceivable in the context of a score by any other spectral composer: Expressif et rubato, m. 211). It is also not uncommon to find literal instructions on how to play, indicating the use of the arm’s full weight in the service of different timbral colors. These indications are detailed: mf dolce with the weight of the arm (avec le poids du bras, m. 344); a crushing fortissimo (ff, écraser avec le poids du bras, m. 10); pianissimo yet still with weight (pp, et néanmoins avec tout le poids du bras, m. 71); and even pianissimo, but massive and like the sound of a bell (pp, mais massif, comme un son de cloche avec le poids du bras, mm. 248–249). The inclusion of fingerings in the score further indicates an intricate choreography, a gestural vocabulary inseparable from the composer’s desired timbral result. While Murail retains a certain chance element, even

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Example 4.7 Dufourt, Erlkönig, mm. 344–347.

Example 4.8 Dufourt, Erlkönig, mm. 671–674.

in mature works like Les travaux et les jours, Dufourt manipulates the arms and fingers of his pianist like a puppeteer. One may sense a possible influence of Hiltbrand, who was vigilant about specificity and expressive detail in performance. Plagued by physical illnesses his entire life, Hiltbrand described musical sound as a drug to be carefully controlled and dispensed. He cautioned his students to be aware of the “sonorous dosage” (le dosage sonore), which, like a stimulant, hallucinogenic, or depressant, could impart powerful effects: “Extreme care must be taken of the quality of the sonority, the respirations, the phrasing, the start of a run, in short that which gives life to a performance. Nothing must be left to chance, no detail must be neglected, the sonorous dosage is very important” (Hiltbrand, 1990: 96).

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Example 4.9 Dufourt, Erlkönig, “Imprécations.”

Dufourt would be similarly particular regarding the use of the pedals. At times, he specifies textures entirely secco, as in the surprising section labeled “Imprécations” (Curses, Example 4.9). Here, the score indicates extremely fast chromatic figuration in parallel sixty-fourth notes. The section initially begins at forte, with crescendi within measures building to fortissimo. The projection of such swells would clearly be facilitated by the use of the pedal. By depriving the pianist of the use of the damper pedal, a specifically brittle texture is projected and, with it, a peculiar expressive component. The listener senses the effort of the pianist seeking to seed and nourish the sound, a task made more challenging with the instrument’s resonating capabilities effectively muted. The use of the pedal is similarly prohibited for the last three pages of the work (but for the final bars), in which the pianist must maintain the initial dynamic (triple forte) and crescendo to ffff through

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Example 4.10 Dufourt, Erlkönig, mm. 701–706.

the use of fingers and rapid-fire figuration alone. It is a Herculean effort to project this virulence and stridency without the use of the pedal – the pianist’s natural amplifier – particularly after nearly a half hour of performing at fever pitch. The realization of the score requires strength and stamina for the continual production of the accents of ever-increasing intensity (fffz, sfffz, rfffz); relentless crescendi within bars and between bars (such as those that begin at a double fortissimo); and vast spans of uninterrupted forte passagework, trills, and thunderously accented chords (presented in isolation and in concert). The longest of these spans – twenty pages of the forty-three-page score – leads to the ultimate decrescendo and the double bar (Example 4.10). In its breathlessness, frenzy, desperation, and ultimate futility, the pianist’s physical journey evokes the final ride of Goethe’s Father and Child. Through the agon of the performer, the listener empathizes with the exhaustion of the Father reaching the yard. The listener similarly senses something profoundly metaphorical in the ruthless termination of the piano’s resonance: the death of the Child in the death of the sound. Like Schubert, Dufourt leads his listeners and performers to approach states of raptus – the transformation of those overwhelmed by love, awe, and terror – and melancholy. The resultant work is strange and black, exhilarating in its celebration of virtuosity but sobering in its revelation of the frailty of the performer and the instrument, as well as that of the empathetic listener. Susan Sontag suggested that art’s material nature is itself is a “trap.” In her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” she portrayed the physicality of the artist’s tools as the enemy: “[T]he artist’s activity is cursed with mediacy. Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization – the transcendence – he desires” (Sontag, 1966: 5) One suspects that Dufourt would disagree vehemently with this statement. As a composer engaged with the

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“will of the body itself,” he conceives the body’s role, in performance, as the vessel within which the work is internalized and from which its energy is released. The physical is the dramatic. Every sound and sonorous nuance is tied to a physical gesture; it is not coincidental that Dufourt is fascinated by historical precedent, such as Immanuel Kant’s attempts to inventory all possible movements of the human body, and René Thom’s catalogue of physical gestures and their corresponding muscular sensations. “He understands performance gestures as particularly important in shaping the sound and how we perceive it” (Pasler, 2011: 222). In Dufourt’s act of performance, there is no “cursed mediacy”  – a term first coined by philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) to describe language’s inherent tendency to obscure what it seeks to reveal, and later appropriated by Sontag among others to suggest the inadequate nature of artistic media. Instead, Dufourt describes mutuality of the bodies that both make and receive the music. He even describes his own act of composition as a specifically physical activity, in which psychic and emotional efforts are felt in the body. [I]f you want to compose, you have to reposition yourself each and every day in this dimension of time, reconquer all the conditions of time; this almost amounts to a spiritual exercise and, at the same time, it requires a physical preparation similar to an athlete. Composing music implies a power of projection and a muscular effort, a tension of the whole body taking its roots in the soles of your feet. (Dufourt, n.d.)

This physical quality of aesthetic experience is embodied first in the composer, in the act of writing. It is transferred to the performer, in the act of realizing the score, and, empathetically, felt by the listener. Throughout Erlkönig, sonorous states and processes proceed in counterpoint to an intricate choreography of fundamental physical gestures. These gestures are rich with implication and, in the sense of Gibson’s affordances, subjective and objective meaning. For my part, I wanted to reduce my piano writing to primordial ideas of technique: breaking, cutting, assembling. From this point, one can move on to imagine representations of more complicated gestures, like elastic deformations, flexing, twisting. These actions are all tied to configurations of the attack. I therefore attempted a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic procedure of writing for the piano. (Chapter 6 below, p. 167)

More like a dance than a song, Dufourt’s Erlkönig is a disciplined action, more about movement and sound than technical display or dramatic acting. In its radical virtuosity, the pianist does not show off but demonstrates the desire to continue in the face of fatigue. There is virtuosity in the continued

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attempt to defy, or disguise, the limitations of the instrument. The pianist does not exhibit herself, but expresses and transmits, conveying through the disciplined action of the body “the tenderness of the human spirit” (Cunningham, 1951). In his willingness to embrace rather than divorce himself from the weight of history, through the use of evocative language, extramusical reference, and philosophical and theoretical speculation, Dufourt stands out among the first-generation spectralists. In his compositions, he has neither aspired to the self-possessed neutrality of Murail and Grisey nor become absorbed with computer music composition and the emerging technologies of interactive performance. He has found his greatest musical inspirations not in the inner workings of sound itself, the harmonic series, and the acoustic microworld, but in contemplating the dialectic between art and science: the rationalization of musical theories and their relation to musical culture’s ongoing search for sonic illusion and aesthetic gratification. Like Tessier, Dufourt rarely uses the analysis of pre-existing acoustic objects as the basis or primary inspiration for his work. Largely avoiding the use of microtones in his music, he has never specifically attempted to approximate the spectra in his compositions in the manner of Murail and Grisey. As a result, some writers have characterized Dufourt as a “faux spectralist” (Castanet, 2003: 31) and “not really a spectral composer” (Fineberg, 2006: 156). These characterizations may be misleading and unnecessarily limiting. As Fineberg suggests, Dufourt was a fellow traveler with Grisey and Murail in the early days of the spectral movement. He shares the spectral and protospectral fascinations with timbre, process, time, and perception, which dominate his creative endeavors. Owing to this, his aesthetic preferences, and his significant contributions to the repertoire, he must be considered in relation to the late-twentieth-century development of the spectral piano. The question, however, raises an interesting point regarding the boundaries between eras and aesthetics that are often arbitrarily established, as they pertain to the trajectories of individual artists. Some never tire of debating whether Schubert is the last classicist or the first Romantic, or whether Brahms was ever as progressive or reactionary as once thought. Certainly, the music of Schoenberg variously expresses the perspectives of a Romantic, a modernist, and a neo-classicist, and it does so to the extent that characterizing him as one or another minimizes the complexities that render him most compelling as a composer. In placing Dufourt in the history of the spectral piano, I find it helpful to evoke again Goethe, an artist for whom Dufourt has expressed a certain affinity, who represents a Germanic tradition to which Dufourt feels close. Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774)  foreshadowed the rise of

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Romanticism, yet his aesthetic innovations were articulated decades before the movement reached critical mass. Like Dufourt, Goethe was engaged in divergent fields of inquiry, inspired by both past and present. Neither artist is easily categorized. Yet both proceeded in their inquiries, driven to question quantitative, materialist, and scientific approaches to the natural world, always searching for a more personal, intimate encounter with the environment.

5 The spectral effect

The pianist’s very act of striking the key sets in motion a series of events over which the performer has relatively little control. Their instrument, which works in machine-like fashion  – more like a computer than the human voice – distinguishes pianists from string players, who can direct the tone after applying bow to string through bow speed and pressure and the activities of the left hand; and from wind players, who manipulate tone through adjustments in fingering, embouchure, and breath. Winds and strings traverse continua of tone colors extending from pure pitch to noise. The timbral continuum accessed by the flutist is bounded at one end by harmonic tones and by the sound of pure breath at the other, while the violinist explores modes of articulation ranging from col legno battuto and sul ponticello to molto vibrato. Pianists have devised ingenious ways to control sound production. Yet the greater part of pianism, arguably, is devoted to how the pianist deals tactically in real time with the consequences of those gestures that initiate the sound.

How does one write for the piano today? Because of the piano’s basic mechanism (the action) and its historically fixed temperament, some composers have found the instrument inherently limited. As early as the 1920s, composers were seeking to expand the soundworld of the piano by exploring preparations to the strings; extended techniques for playing inside the piano and at the keyboard; and altered temperaments, such as just intonation. Major American figures in this mid-century evolution include Cowell, among the first to explore sounds from inside the piano, with works like Aeolian Harp (1923) and The Banshee (1925); Charles Ives, whose Sonata no. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–1860 (c. 1920–1947) applied a wooden board to the keyboard to create large clusters that could be sensitively controlled; and Cage, whose Sonatas and Interludes (1948) is the first major work to propose preparations to the strings themselves (Burge, 1990; Gann, 1997). Extended techniques continued to emerge well into the 1970s. In Rhapsodies (1972), Curtis Curtis-Smith (b. 1941) introduced the technique of bowing the piano strings with rosined fishing line, which offered pianists a means by which to sustain and manipulate held sonorities.

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Crumb’s Makrokosmos (1972–1973), a two-volume homage to Debussy’s Preludes, demonstrated extended inside-the-piano techniques (glissandi; pizzicati; harmonics; and percussion on muted strings, crossbars, and the soundboard) and preparations of glass tumblers, metal thimbles, chains, and pieces of paper, complemented by dramatic vocalizations. Ben Johnston, a student of Cage and instrument creator Harry Partch (1901–1974), explored new tuning strategies in his Sonata for Microtonal Piano (1964) and Suite for Microtonal Piano (1978). The piano’s timbral and harmonic potentials were further enhanced via forays into electroacoustic music and interactive performance, in landmark American and European works from the 1970s such as Davidovsky’s Synchronisms no. 6 (1970), Stockhausen’s Mantra for two pianos (1970), Babbitt’s Reflections (1974), and Luigi Nono’s … sofferte onde serene … (1976). After this, Tristan Murail asked: Can one still write for the piano today? Through the nineteenth century and to the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the emblematic instrument, the composer’s confidante; but has it survived the array of tortures inflicted upon it by the end of the twentieth century? After the clusters of Henry Cowell, the preparations of John Cage, the ornithological percussions of Messiaen, the electrified mantras of Stockhausen, and the various scrapings and pinchings of strings, what space is left to the imagination? I think that my response, at first subconscious but gradually more and more clearly articulated, has been to return to the true essence of the piano, to its acoustic realities, and to ignore the trivialities of fashion as well as the weight of history. (Murail, 2005a)

The first-generation spectral composers and their students appealed to a newly refined sense of the piano’s sound-producing capabilities and an understanding of how timbral processes, in their creation and perception in real time, related to elements such as harmony, register, dynamic, and articulation. Their dynamically unfolding processes explored not only states of varying densities and rates of activity but also the continua between silence and resonance, and pitch and noise. Different noises can be created from inside the instrument, by knocking on the instrument’s wooden case and inner beams; these kinds of effects have been explored for nearly half a century, in works ranging from Johnston’s Knocking Piece for two pianists and “piano interior” (1962) to Lachenmann’s Guero (1990). Yet noiseto-sound continua can be evoked from the keyboard via the vibrating strings. Through the accumulation of single notes in the depressed pedal, a close-register harmony can be established that gradually encapsulates an

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ever-widening register. Over time, the accrued sound becomes something akin to an acoustic wall, dense enough to be perceived as noise, within which no single tone or harmony can be discriminated. Conversely, an acoustically dense, harmonically saturated, and registrally broad sonority sustained in the pedal can also be allowed to decay; in the process of its decomposition, individual frequencies become audible again, emerging from within the once-impenetrable wall, as if advancing forwards from a receding landscape. At the micro-level, there is noise in the attack, as hammer hits string; with resonance in time comes our perception of pitch and harmony. Elements of pitch also contribute to the perception of a harmonic continuum bounded at one end by intervals related by lower-order ratios heard as possessing a certain clarity, such as the octave (2:1) and the perfect fifth (3:2), and at the other by intervals related by more complex ratios, perceived as noisier and inharmonic, such as the major third (81:64) or minor second (256:243). Different tone colors are created by the pianist, who, by emphasizing individual pitches within a harmonic texture, effects subtle transitions between frequencies and timbres akin to frequency modulation (FM) and ring modulations. From a spectral viewpoint, a work’s perceived narrative or structure is directly related to the resonant phenomena produced by the instrument in relation to the noise– sound continuum. A spectral attitude towards the piano asserts that the most compelling acoustic phenomena producible by the instrument are not those generated by increasingly eclectic forms of attack but those associated with the piano’s defining attribute: the decay of sound. The emphasis on the piano’s primarily percussive qualities, exemplified by works such as Boulez’s Deuxième sonate (1947–1948) and Adams’s Phrygian Gates (1977–1978), was replaced by a radical focus on resonant phenomena and sympathetic vibration. Murail wrote Territoires de l’oubli for the resonances and not for the attacks, the latter of which he described in its preface as “scars” (cicatrices) on the sonic continuum. His attitude, and that of those who adopted and were influenced by it, heralded a return to a keyboard-based virtuosity.

The evolution of sounds in time: Fineberg, Veils (2001) In the early years of the twenty-first century, the spectral attitude was influential not only in Europe but across the Atlantic, rivaled in the past century only by the insatiable appetite for serial methods that followed World War II (Ferguson, 2007). As an attitude, neither compositional dogma nor stylistic diktat, it evolved. In “Spectral Music: Long Term … Perspectives,” Hurel,

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who worked with Murail in the early 1980s, considered how the attitude had changed. More than the harmonic problems of the spectra, the “stretched” or “contracted” time, the problem of microphony or macrophony, or the “threshold” that were all Grisey’s hallmarks, I think it’s the melodic, rhythmic and formal consequence of the spectral adventure that excites the young composers today. The music of young composers … is full of pregnant materials … both varied and heterogeneous, and this is where they fundamentally diverge from Griseyan spectralism … Today the aim is to build the coherence with many different or contradictory elements. The problem is no longer how to organize the passage from microphony to macrophony, from timbre to melody, for example, but rather from a culturally recognisable element to a more global structure, or from a quotation from the existing repertoire to a personal argument, to constrain the “impure” element, neutralising it by the strategies of the composition, and allowing it to cohabit with the other elements of the score. (Hurel, 2001)

The spectral composers of the first generation had based their works on neutral and highly flexible sound materials, sonic archetypes from which complex processes could be generated. In seeking to create a music free of conventional reference, in which the listener could focus on the affordances of the sounding environment, they based their works on “fundamental” materials intentionally devoid of extramusical signification. Simple chords, arpeggiations, and fragments of scalar passagework were developed in myriad ways. Direct attempts were made to translate and synthesize information discovered via spectral analysis, with the primary goal of exploring novel acoustic environments, acknowledging the concrete nature of acoustic sound and its relation to psychological reality. Two decades later, spectrally influenced composers changed course, concerned that writing with such basic materials would lead them to be seen as pale imitations of Murail and Grisey. The constraints of the spectral attitude were felt. Hurel was not alone as a composer who had studied with the original members of L’Itinéraire but freely incorporated elements of dodecaphony, minimalism, and jazz into his music. Kaija Saariaho, a student of Ferneyhough, had been disillusioned with the New Complexity, asking, “All of that complexity, and for what aural result?” (Service, 2012). After coming to study at IRCAM in 1983, her personal aesthetic was transformed via exposure and interaction with the spectralists; even as her music became more focused on the sensual exploration of timbre and instrumental color, however, her style became overtly lyrical and melodically driven, as demonstrated in the solo piano Ballade (2005) and Prelude (2007) (Howell, 2011). Saariaho was not polemical in her

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adherence to any kind of spectral tenets. In this way, she can be likened to her compatriot Magnus Lindberg. Having come to Paris a year before Saariaho to work with Grisey and Globokar, Lindberg embraced certain ideas of the spectralists. Yet his work openly acknowledged the other composers with whom he worked and whom he continued to admire, such as Ferneyhough, Lachenmann, and Franco Donatoni (1927–2000). This is seen in his piano works; Jubilees (2000) exhibits something of a spectral, post-Debussyian approach to the instrument; but, in a decidedly nonspectral manner, Twine (1988) explores an environment characterized by twelve-tone harmony, with dodecaphonic chords systematically arranged within the archaic formal context of the chaconne, (Martin, 2010). A similarly eclectic approach is seen in the work of Marc-André Dalbavie, who came to IRCAM in 1985 to study spectral analysis, digital synthesis, and composition. Dalbavie’s Piano Concerto (2005) juxtaposes spectral techniques with post-minimalist textures evocative of Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Philip Glass (b. 1937). While Dalbavie’s concern with transformations of harmonic-timbral color is borne out in his orchestration, his work, much like Ravel’s, is essentially directed by the more conventional development of thematic-motivic materials. For composers like Hurel, Saariaho, Lindberg, and Dalbavie, the becoming of sound itself in time was not their raison d’être. They cast a wide net, seeking to capture what Murail himself had desired – musical elements of surprise, contrast, and rupture – but in doing so liberally drew elements from musical styles seen just a decade earlier as diametrically opposed. In response to this growing eclecticism, younger composers like Joshua Fineberg, who became in many ways a spokesman for the third generation of spectralists, endeavored to recover and preserve something of the original attitude. Ironically, Fineberg faced a situation diametrically opposed to that of Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy. While the late Romantics were motivated to discover and distill the essence of a relatively new instrument whose potential had not yet been fulfilled by its repertoire, Fineberg charged himself with the task of unveiling the piano’s essence, in so doing critiquing contemporary practices of composition and performance. Born in Boston in 1969, Fineberg experienced a childhood of intense musical activity, including study of piano, violin, guitar, harpsichord, and conducting. A pianist as well as a composer, he attended the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied composition with Morris Moshe Cotel (1943–2008), the prodigy composer-pianist turned rabbi. By his third year of study, Fineberg had begun to receive critical acclaim and awards for his works, which were written in an angular and atonal modernist style largely influenced by Carter and Babbitt. At the time, it was not unusual for a young American composer to be writing in this vein. Since

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the late 1960s, an aesthetic rivalry had been established in America, pitting high modernists at one end against minimalists at the other. The “uptown” extreme was represented by post-Schoenbergian compositional approaches accepting of dissonance and angularity, which courted a small but passionate listenership that found pleasure in the sense of musical challenge. The critic and new-music advocate William Glock described this niche group as “instilled with the conviction that more was to be gained from works that were challenging and formidable than those that yielded their secrets after a performance or two” (Porter, 1991: 78). The “downtown” camp was defined by neo-tonal, neo-Romantic, and postminimalist styles boasting a more traditional emotional appeal and accessibility, and an agenda to secure audiences allegedly driven from concert halls by atonal, modernist music. To win back audiences, the new music had to be not only well-written but seductive. It had to provide listeners with points of access. These took two forms, one associated with the New Romanticism, the other with minimalism: either you had to refer to some musical convention that listeners would already be familiar with – that’s the New Romanticism – or you had to define your musical terms so simply that listeners could figure out what was going on on first listening – that was minimalism. “Accessibility” became the controversial buzzword of the 1980s. (Gann, 2012)

Between these two aesthetic fronts lay something of a no-man’s land. Young composers were pressured to align themselves with one camp or the other, if not for aesthetic reasons than for tactical purposes of professional survival. John Adams (b. 1947), who attended Harvard University in the mid 1960s, recalled feeling stifled by the sense of a forced choice: “Nevertheless, by the time I was finishing college, I did find myself in a kind of cul-de-sac. It seemed that there were only two possible routes (this is roughly 1967, when I was a junior in college): the Boulez paradigm or the John Cage paradigm” (May, 2006: 9). Twenty years later, at exactly the same point in his compositional career, Fineberg felt similarly lost. I was not sure what to write or why I was writing. The prevailing schools of composition either regarded music as the structured combination of musical symbols (notes, rhythms, dynamics, etc.), with an emphasis on the interest or complexity of these structures; or as a vehicle for conceptual ideas … New trends … emerged that referred back to a more romantic notion that regards music as being essentially a vehicle for emotional content – usually produced through references (literal or evocative) to past works already possessing cultural associations. (Fineberg, 2006: 136, 113)

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One can always summon exceptions to generalizations about the aesthetic and cultural-political debates of the period, which differed between East Coast and West, and among academic institutions. However one chooses to describe the American contemporary music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is safe to say that the spectral aesthetic was underrepresented to the extent of being nonexistent, in academia and concert hall presentation. Aware of the music of neither Murail nor Grisey nor the activities of L’Itinéraire, Fineberg had come to an impasse. He sought a way of composing that would imbue his music with a narrative of energy and a means for creating musical forms and textures possessing, within themselves, the potential for directionality. “There were sounds I wanted to make and sounds I wanted to hear. No structural principles or intellectual frameworks had motivated my initial love of music, only a sensual fascination with sound,” he recalled (Fineberg, 2006: 136). Looking for alternatives to the crude extremes polarizing and politicizing the American compositional landscape, he began to explore the repertoire of Europeans such as Ligeti, Xenakis, and Friedrich Cerha (b. 1926). The turning point came in 1990, when Fineberg received a scholarship to attend the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. At the peak of his creative crisis, he met Murail. Their compositional affinities were obvious. Fineberg found his concerns with the sound itself mirrored in the music of the spectralists, and Murail sensed that Fineberg had independently arrived at many of the same ideas that he and Grisey had formulated twenty years earlier (Lelong and Réby, 2008). Murail became his mentor and Fineberg, following his graduation, moved to Paris in 1991 to work with him. Like Messiaen had been for him, Murail was Fineberg’s only option. During his seven years in Paris, Fineberg studied primarily with Murail, attended the IRCAM/Ensemble Intercontemporain course in composition and musical technologies, and collaborated with many French ensembles. He forged close relationships with Grisey, Murail, and their colleagues, and championed their work upon his return to the United States, where he completed a doctorate at Columbia University and joined the faculties at Harvard and Boston universities. As a vital part of his activities, Fineberg played a pivotal role in bringing ideas related to spectralism to the United States as editor for multiple issues of the Contemporary Music Review, which remain seminal English-language sources. Three of Fineberg’s piano works date from his formative years in Paris: Lightning (1991), Till Human Voices Wake Us (1995), and Tremors (1997). These works are explicitly process-based and proceed as studies of resonance, with the pedal depressed almost continually throughout. They are classically spectral in their exploration of strongly directed transformations

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of neutral materials in states of constant flux. Each work establishes an environment whose affordances are clearly defined from the start. Lightning presents fourteen phrases, all of which form like storm clouds, gradually gathering energy, intensifying, and ultimately destabilizing, bursting like lightning bolts into silence. The writing is pointillistic. Single notes accumulate in accordance with gradual crescendi, outlining a continuum from pitch to noise, and the pedal is lifted only to offer catch-breaths between phrases. Taking its title from T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Till Human Voices Wake Us was written in memory of the composer Dominique Troncin (1961–1994), whose premature death from AIDS prompted tributes from those engaged in the Parisian musical scene, including Grisey, Murail, Manoury, and Pesson. A pianist who had studied with Dominique Merlet (b. 1938, also a student of Hiltbrand) and Claude Helffer (1922–2004), Troncin wrote two exquisite piano works shortly before his death that reveal the influence of his time with Murail: Seul (1992) and Ciel ouvert (1993). Fineberg’s Till Human Voices Wake Us is a haunting tribute to his peer. The two-page miniature presents a single musical exhalation, a slow decrescendo punctuated by harshly articulated dyads, taking single notes, chords, and occasional flurries of sound as its basic elements. It moves methodically and inexorably from sound to silence. Like Lightning, Tremors adopts an ecological analogy, that of an earthquake and the shifting tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface. The smoothness of the surface is continually ruptured by violent eruptions of sound; the ensuing resonances taper off like a molten flow becoming less effusive as it cools. “All of this activity can be seen as a series of surface tremors on the underlying resonance (color), where the heart of the music lies” (Fineberg, personal correspondence, 2012). A jagged work, Tremors leaves the listener with a sense of continual heat fomenting beneath the coolness of the musical surface – what Bowers sensed in the music of Scriabin. Tremors also illustrates how computer-assisted techniques, associated in mid-century exclusively with electronic music and with works for acoustic instruments and live electronics, influenced the way that spectral composers wrote for the acoustic piano. In the 1960s and early 1970s, techniques such as ring modulation and FM synthesis gave rise to a repertoire of electroacoustic works exploring timbral mixture and transformation, including Stockhausen’s Mixtur (1964), for five orchestral groups, four sine-wave generators, and four ring modulators; Mikrophonie II (1965), for chorus, Hammond organ, and four ring modulators; and Mantra (1970), for two pianos and ring modulators. Twenty years later, spectral composers evoked similar timbral effects and transformations on acoustic instruments, without electronic means. As it became possible effectively to model and manipulate different musical parameters in computer-assisted compositional

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Example 5.1 Fineberg, Tremors, opening.

environments, Fineberg’s writing for the piano exhibited increased complexity and richness, in terms of the nature and variety of sonorities and textures to be produced from the keyboard, as well as the highly specific techniques of articulation and pedaling required to achieve them. This can be seen in the opening phrases of Tremors (Example 5.1).

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In Tremors, every pitch in each chord is distinguished dynamically. At first glance, this highly specific notation may seem reminiscent of the integrally serial piano scores, such as Boulez’s Structures I for two pianos (1952), Babbitt’s Partitions (1964), or even Messiaen’s “Mode de valeurs et d’intensités,” from the Quatre études de rythme (1949). In these kinds of integrally serial scores, however, dynamic markings are assigned to particular pitches as part of a precompositional scheme: a twelve-tone framework underlying all harmonic and contrapuntal development and, at a fundamental level, designed to ensure coherence. In Fineberg’s piano works, the deployment of dynamics can be traced to the composer’s use of modulations (either FM or ring modulations), which model dynamics, frequencies, and transformations of instrumental color, and even sympathetic resonances (for example Grisaille, 2012). The dynamics are strategically used to direct and redirect the ensuing resonance. The goal is to explore the kinds of nuanced timbral states first achieved in the environment of electroacoustic music. Playing into the resonance, the pianist establishes what may be described metaphorically as a canopy of sound. As certain pitches are reinforced, those parts of the canopy darken; other pitches, left to fade away, leave holes, like windows, in their wake. Fineberg’s Veils (2001) was another attempt to get closer to the heart of the music, while playing with the metaphor of the veil from spiritual, philosophical, literary, and musical perspectives. The work’s title refers to the Tibetan Buddhist belief that true reality, for the unenlightened, is obscured by a series of veils. A spectral attitude suggests that the piano is an instrument whose true reality – its capacity for resonance and its inherent acoustic characteristics – has been historically shrouded by many veils and obstructions. These might include common-practice conventions of thematic writing; formal structures imposed from architecture, mathematics, and rhetoric; webs of extramusical and symbolic reference; the myriad generic tropes and clichés of stereotypical keyboard figuration; and even the demands of cantabile and legato. All of these factors can be seen as distracting the listener’s attention from the quality of the piano’s sound itself. Like Murail, Fineberg was drawn to the resonant qualities of the instrument as an unknown territory for exploration. Perhaps to a greater extent than his teacher, Fineberg sought to tear apart the veils of traditional pianism to rediscover the piano’s essence and engage with its sound in a deeper sense. He did so with the sure grasp of a once-practicing pianist. Veils offers the listener a psychological experience similar to that of Buddhist ritual, imbued with the same sense of immediacy, gravity, and propulsion. In the work’s precompositional stage, Fineberg analyzed a field recording of a Tibetan ritual he discovered in Harvard’s anthropological

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archives. Lasting over three hours, this ritual framework provided the model for Veils’s overall structure, as Fineberg mapped its formal proportions, and from these determined the composition’s pacing, proportions, and transitions. Lasting just over ten minutes, Veils embodies a sense of the ritual juxtapositions in miniature (Hasegawa, 2007). Each individual section exists as a self-contained environment defined by its own atmosphere and rate of activity; in sudden shifts between sections, as one kind of textural tension is heard giving way to the next, the listener experiences moments of recognition, climax, and catharsis. In its dramatic form as experienced, contrasting soundworlds collide without warning, occurrences that are both surprising and, contextually, inevitable. On a literal level, the listener experiences the evanescence of the moment and the ephemerality of the sound. The listener is encouraged to contemplate the acoustic object and engage with it imaginatively. This experience leads to a metaphorical level of interpretation, which invites recognitions of permanence and transience. From its initial measures, Veils presents a piano that does not sound quite like a piano (Example 5.2). It is not “played” like a piano, as in Territoires de l’oubli, whose opening features a breed of Lisztian passagework only found in piano music. In the opening bars of Veils, the pianist is asked to produce just a few specific attacks. Most of the measures, on the page, are dominated by rests. Yet these rests represent neither silence nor empty, “negative” space. They denote a positive space filled with resonance, a plane of auditory reality beyond representation in the score. The blankness of the written page contradicts the richness of the music as heard. Veils makes the pianist aware of the changing nature of notation and its limitations in representing the most salient components of both the piano’s sound and the listener’s perception of the musical environment. The most vivid and defining aspects of the musical environment as experienced do not appear on the written page. The notation is prescriptive, not descriptive, in showing what the pianist must do and, not to any meaningful degree, what the listener will hear. The opening of Veils rings with a gesture reminiscent of a grand belltone, which returns like a beacon throughout, heralding points of dramatic transition as well as the final cadence. From its first measures, two uninterrupted planes of activity are established to which the pianist must attend. The resonance, caught in dampers never lowered, is overlaid with the notes, chords, and figurations articulated from the keyboard. One hears a foreground dominated by attacks and cloud-like rhythmic events, sounding over a backdrop in continual flux, a shadow essence alternately hidden by the activities of the surface and revealed when those activities cease. The polyphony of textures suggests two realms of existence, never entirely

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Example 5.2 Fineberg, Veils, opening.

separate but never entirely belonging to each other. The use of the pedal to support these two acoustic planes, as well as the inherent metaphor of the work, is showcased in Veils’s extended center section, which begins on the score’s ninth page (Example 5.3). Exhibiting Fineberg’s most virtuosic writing, the ensuing passage begins with aggressive, rumbling low-register playing. Attacks marked with accents and played triple forte, trapped in the pedal, appear to pool and thicken. Accelerating figures notated graphically

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Example 5.3 Fineberg, Veils, mm. 78–87.

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against a stable yet silent pulse, swelling tremolandi, and trills at the far reaches of the keyboard contribute to a swirling texture that unleashes a haze of sympathetic vibrations from the upper strings. Like a dense black wave, the sound pours forth. Over this turbulent sea of resonance, attacks in the higher register are heard, like shrieks that echo into the harp. The environment’s acoustic stratosphere is filled with unstable, noisy elements – half-step dyads, dissonant tremolos (tritones, sevenths, and ninths), and dense chromatic figures  – which intensify as the resonance of the lower register fades beneath them. Unexpectedly, a recurrence of the initial belltone resounds. Haunting as the foghorn calling from the darkness (sirène du phare, dans la nuit) that concludes Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, the bell declares the storm cleared and the wave passed. The full range of the keyboard has been attacked, every register exploited, and every dynamic level from ppp to fff explored. At this cathartic moment, the listener confronts the instrumental decay. Pitch emerges from noise, is revealed, and is returned to the abyss of silence. The veil is lifted. Fineberg has not mentioned the writing of Samuel Beckett in relation to any of his works and has no strong ties to the dramatist. Yet Veils’s title brings to mind one of Beckett’s most oft-quoted comments. In personal correspondence dating from 1937, the playwright confessed his dissatisfaction with language as an inherently referential medium. Language’s semantic and symbolic nature continually thwarted him as he sought to project its musical, lyric qualities. Beckett’s letter conveys the frustration of an artist critical of his chosen medium. It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write in official English. And more and more my own language seems to me like a veil that must be torn apart to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it … To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal of a writer today. (Beckett, 1984: 171–172)

Beckett then asks: “Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses … so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence?” (Beckett, 1984: 172). Fineberg’s music poses a similar question. How to dissolve the materiality of the musical surface, to liberate and engage with the path of sounds beneath? How to bridge the continuum between silence and sound, through a music referencing nothing but itself? And how to do so in a manner accessible and engaging to the attentive listener?

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During the course of Fineberg’s early career, the task of creating a music with materials that could be perceived as neutral had become more difficult. It is not possible to say with any certainty that musical sound itself can be perceived in an absolute manner, as an acoustic element divorced from the cultural (musical and extramusical) milieu from which it emerges. Debates regarding the nature of musical perception and experience, and those elements that render any listening experience rich or impoverished, have raged for centuries  – almost always in relation to the claims of the avant-garde – and will not be resolved in this context. Yet perennial questions regarding the objective and subjective nature of musical perception take on new implications when considering a spectral attitude that took sound, and the perception of it in and of itself, as the most precious and sustaining component of aesthetic contemplation. Composers who adopted this attitude, in the late twentieth century, faced certain challenges in an environment in which sound itself, as a commodity, had been cheapened. The ubiquity of different kinds of musics, available via digital download, brought an easy access to sound unimagined by composers even fifteen years earlier. The digital technology that inspired the first-generation spectral composers and held such promise in the 1960s had become commonplace and even user-friendly thirty years later. And while not essentially compromised, the activity of composition had been popularized by the development of software and portable synthesizers and, through the spread of personal computing, brought to larger and less specialized or skilled populations. This situation confronted young composers, particularly those in America’s market-driven musical economy, with difficult questions regarding the identity of the serious, classical composer and the audience for that composer’s work. In this context, Fineberg identified himself as a thirdgeneration spectral composer committed to the attitudes of Grisey and Murail, now associated with a historical avant-garde, “without constraint” (Fineberg, 2006: 135). Grouping himself with students of Grisey such as Jean-Luc Hervé (b. 1960) and François Paris (b. 1961), he defined himself as dedicated to the original spectral attitudes and techniques, as a practitioner seeking to continue their evolution, albeit in new directions. He stood apart from second-generation composers whose approaches, while influenced by the spectral attitude, were more eclectic (Fineberg, 2006: 134). Fineberg was committed to the idea of a music whose processes and transformations could be perceived as such by the listener impartially, in and of themselves, and could not exist primarily as formulae on pieces of paper, as one might describe the all-partition arrays of Babbitt or the matrices of Schoenberg. Fineberg’s monograph, Classical Music: Why Bother?, is, in part, a reaction against Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?” (1958), an article read by most young American composers as part of their basic training.

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Originally titled “The Composer as Specialist,” Babbitt’s essay attempted “not to present a picture of a virtuous music in a sinful world, but to point up the problems of a special music in an alien and inapposite world” (Babbitt, 1958). He argued for classical music’s place in the ivory tower of academia, where serious composition could be protected, preserved, and nurtured in a community of connoisseurs and conservators. While his argument was misconstrued as radically elitist, and he himself popularly caricatured (like Boulez) as a kind of bully, his argument suggested a frustrated composer’s sense of alienation, the recognition of a poor fit, and a wish to withdraw. For this, Babbitt was alternately adored and vilified. Composers like Fineberg, however, took issue with what they saw as Babbitt’s false distinctions between “naïve” and “experienced” listeners, for whom composers could alternately write. Fineberg wanted to write a contemporary classical music that was neither special nor alien. Rejecting the perspective that contemporary classical music must be either of the academy or of the streets, he adopted a spectral attitude towards writing a music that was deeply considered (as written) but also profoundly intuitive (as heard). In this way, his mature approach veered away from thinking purely in terms of musical objects and materials, and more towards how musical objects and materials could be seen to influence the listener’s psychological reality. Every day when I sit down to compose I think about this question, and every day I have to feel sure that I have found some kind of answer in order to continue … I … try to create musical structures that are both novel and “comprehensible” to human listeners as the “spectral approach.” This approach is built around the idea that writing music is not just pushing around notes, intervals, numbers, or harmonies; it is designing evolutions of sound in time to be processed by human beings listening attentively. (Fineberg, 2006: 109)

In its title, Veils nods to Debussy’s second prelude, Voiles (1909). Although the work is not intended as a literal homage, Veils bears more in common notationally, formally, and philosophically with the work of Debussy than that of many of Fineberg’s American contemporaries, such as Derek Bermel (b. 1967), Paul D. Miller (“DJ Spooky,” b. 1970), Jason Eckardt (b. 1971), Michael Hersh (b. 1971), and Keeril Makan (b. 1972). Most similar are Fineberg’s and Debussy’s attitudes towards the presentation of material and rhythms, and the flow of rhythms and colors liberated from clock-time. As Debussy indicates in Voiles, the articulation of rhythmic figures is always caressing and without aggression (dans un rythme sans rigueur et caressant). Cultivated by those who perform his music, the finesse of touch required by Debussy’s piano music is appropriate for the performance of Fineberg’s

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as well. Similarly, Debussy regarded the single note articulated from the keyboard as an organic entity replete with resonance and color, always aware of “the patterns of resonance which that tone set up around itself.” In Veils, with its spare attacks nested in dense thickets of rest, the pianist can aspire to create a richer, more nuanced environment with the addition of every single tone. Additionally, in the works of both composers, there is a similar treatment of time. In a Bergsonian sense, both compositions play with the elasticity of perceived time, momentum, and flow. Time seems to waver – the temporal rate of presentation changes consistently, with fluctuations defined by cédez and retenu in Debussy’s scores, and by fermatas and notated tempo changes in Fineberg’s – reinforcing the listener’s awareness of the heterogeneity of the environment and the liminal crises that connote the thresholds among different states of musical being. Voiles, more aphoristic in nature, is highly restricted in terms of register and dynamic; the low B flat pedal tone that rings from the fifth bar to the final cadence is marked toujours pp, and the composition exists almost entirely in a netherworld of extreme quiet, interrupted only momentarily by a few bars of mezzo forte and a brief climax. Fineberg’s work is more extensive, texturally ambitious, and formally complex. Yet the later work can be seen as extending Debussy’s language, as an offering from a composer with similar compositional priorities who, as a piano student, grappled with Debussy’s preludes. In the late 1990s, prior to writing Veils, Fineberg composed Recueil de pierre et de sable (Collection of Rock and Sand), a work for two harps and chamber ensemble. Recueil de pierre et de sable explored an analogy drawn from the piano. Using the ensemble’s forces (from which the piano is noticeably absent), Fineberg attempted to project the essence of the piano’s two defining characteristics: its percussive attack and idiosyncratic sustain. As in Grisey’s Vortex temporum, the chamber ensemble, via instrumental synthesis, evokes the harmonic-timbral environment unique to the piano, inspired by its distinctive resonant phenomena. The members of the performance group thus became “piano-like” in an environment Fineberg likened to a Zen garden; the instrumentalists’ attacks of sound were conceived like the tines of a rake upon the sand, and the resulting resonances like the patterns left behind. The focus on what would be left behind was paramount. “All of this leads to the point where the raking, or playing of new attacks, becomes less important and interesting than the design that has been created” (Fineberg, 2006: 123). This same kind of process is seen in Veils. In Veils’s resonant stratigraphy, two interacting, inextricable layers of sound engage the listener’s attention. One plane is defined by the sounds of gestures initiating the resonance, and the other by sounds perceived as the consequences of those initial

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actions. Often, the listener’s most meaningful musical perceptions are of the complex repercussions of the sound-producing actions, not those actions themselves. In its calculated exploration of primary and secondary musical perceptions, which stem but cannot be entirely disconnected from one another (such as those of a musical surface and its sonic shadow), Veils is epiphenomic. Between its two musical planes, one can assert a causal interrelationship. Yet each level, defined by distinctive characteristics and processes, evolves at its own rate and can be conceived (if not actually perceived) as an independent entity. In characterizing Fineberg as a spectral composer, it is crucial to note that all of his mature works, including the most recent piano solo, Grisaille, deal with these kinds of epiphenomena. The phenomena and textures that Fineberg explores in his piano works are not exclusive to the piano. The very nature of the instrument’s construct and capacities, however, renders the situation more acute.

Consequences of the spectral attitude: Campion and the piano The story of Edmund Campion, born in Dallas, complements that of Fineberg by providing both parallels and counter-examples. Like Fineberg, Campion is a rare American who studied with the first-generation spectral composers in Paris, participated in the early courses for composition and technology at IRCAM, and developed a decidedly spectral attitude that, upon his return to the States, distinguished him from his contemporaries, who included John Zorn (b. 1953), Larry Polansky (b. 1954), Paul Moravec (b. 1957), and the Bang on a Can composers Michael Gordon (b. 1956) and Julia Wolfe (b. 1958). Both Fineberg and Campion were appointed to positions at important centers for new music and technology: Fineberg at Boston University’s electronic music studios and newly established Center for New Music, and Campion at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley. Yet Campion’s work more overtly focuses on technology and its ramifications for performers and listeners, exploring the challenges faced by composers seeking to create meaningful music in a medium and performance arena dramatically altered by technological advances. As a child, Campion was interested in music yet found no satisfying outlet or release in the traditional repertoire. He was given standard music lessons and acquired basic skills at the piano but was more familiar with rock music. He had some knowledge of electronic music, acquired primarily through casual exposure to experimental cross-over works such as the Beatles’ Revolution no. 9 (1968). Early on, he was aware that his interests in musical sound did not connect with the repertoire available to him. “I was

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into sound and had no idea how that intersected with traditional music,” he recalled. “I was terrible at what people called music, and I could not fit my notions of sound into that mold …” (Campion, personal correspondence, 2012). In 1969, Campion’s relationship to music was forever altered when he received a curious package in the mail. Sent by his older brother, then serving in the Vietnam War, it held a high-quality AKAI tape recorder. Campion began to experiment with the machine, which was capable of shifting speeds and multi-tracking, creating his own electronic and concrète works. The tape recorder (and, later, the computer) became his instrument, his playground, and his teacher. As a passionate amateur composer and hobbyist, he composed tape pieces throughout his teenage years, spending his savings on high-end audio equipment and developing a personal conception of sound mediated by neither the constraints of live performers nor the limitations of traditional western notation. Working with sound in the way that Schaeffer and other electronic music pioneers did in 40’s and 50’s was my childhood musical experience – all the music coming to me as I entered my teens (the 70’s) confirmed for me what music was about – it was audio and everything you do with it! … It was frequency material and timbre, it was noise, it was semiotic associations. (Campion, personal correspondence, 2012)

In high school, hoping to secure the reported benefits of a more traditional musical education, Campion sought out the pianist David Heimer. A former prodigy and student of Moriz Rosenthal, Heimer represented a tie to the classical tradition, Lisztian virtuosity, and aesthetic legitimacy. By the time he came to work with him, Heimer had turned away from classical musical performance, finding regional success as a jazz pianist; Heimer had also begun to suffer delusions, harbingers of a clinical insanity (not unlike Hugo Wolf ’s) from which he never recovered. Yet even in his diminished state, he recognized something in Campion’s raw musicality and instilled in him the belief that music was a special calling, a mission. He encouraged Campion to seek out other mentors. After minoring in piano performance at the University of Texas while exploring the connections between composition and electronics, Campion moved to New York to study with Davidovsky at Columbia University. In 1960, Davidovsky, a student of Babbitt and Aaron Copland, as well as Varèse’s personal technician, had been appointed director of the CPEMC. His Synchronisms no. 6 (1970), for piano and tape, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning interactive composition, and his work over the next decade had established him as a pioneer in electroacoustic performance. In a roundabout way, Campion’s

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idiosyncratic self-education had brought him to apprentice with a forefather of American computer music. Davidovsky was a charismatic, brilliant teacher. Considered by many of his colleagues “the most elegant of all the electronic music composers,” his electroacoustic compositions reflected a “truly messianic feeling concerning the promise of this new medium” and represented those “euphoric days of intense experimentation, [in which] some composers felt that electronic music, because of its seemingly unlimited possibilities, would eventually replace conventional music” (Crumb, 1980). He and Campion, however, had inherently different, irreconcilable views of music. At Columbia, viewed as a bastion of the “uptown” avant-garde, Campion was grounded in post-tonal theory, the set-theoretical methodologies of Allen Forte (b. 1926), and the post-Bergian repertoire. His teachers, devoted to the craft of atonal composition, conveyed to him a valuable sense of artistic discipline and the love of a modernist heritage, which they considered in danger of being forgotten, or at least supplanted in the cultural consciousness by the forces of neo-tonality and minimalism. Like Fineberg, Campion was frustrated by the pessimistic attitude and cultural isolation they seemed to share, and even cherish. “The many brilliant, academically-housed composers I worked with and learned from,” he recalled, “saw themselves as musical masters existing in a cultural space that did not comprehend their musical practices” (Campion, personal correspondence, 2012). Unable to see his own creative work as that “special music in an alien and inapposite world,” Campion refused to believe that composers must choose either to create serious music and forfeit an audience, or to bow to the buzzword of accessibility and cater to the masses. He felt that there were more interesting musical issues to explore. When and how to pursue these issues became clear in 1988, when the thirty-one-year-old composer attended a concert at New York’s Symphony Space. There, in a struggling theater on the city’s then ungentrified, drug-addled Upper West Side, he heard Grisey’s music  – the quintet Talea (1986) – for the first time. Immediately, Campion felt an affinity for this composer. He recognized something of his own compositional concerns in the aesthetic of renewal and change that Grisey proposed. To Campion, it was irresistible; the following day, he wrote to Grisey and begged him to accept him as a student. The next year, he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship to study with Grisey at the Conservatoire. Acclimating himself to the various factions and camps of the new music scene in 1980s Paris, Campion discovered an ideological drama far removed from the cabals of uptown and downtown Manhattan. He was witness to

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an aesthetic revolution-in-progress, precipitated by the collision of four schools of thought, each associated with an institution: the Conservatoire; the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, which had stood as the model of a center for new music and technology from its founding in 1958 until the rise of IRCAM; IRCAM itself; and the Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu), established by Xenakis as an interdisciplinary research center at the Sorbonne in 1966. Each of the four approaches prioritized different aspects of the processes of composers and performers; each of the four proposed a unique way of conceiving the nature of sound itself, the role of the score, and the responsibilities of those who created the musical experience. The Conservatoire was committed to preserving the art of écriture: a craft closely tied to the language of notation, wed to a compositional and pedagogical system that embraced a tradition of symbolic reasoning. The Conservatoire composers were trained to think of music in terms of the elegant play of abstract and discrete symbols (Bonnet, 1987: 209), and their écriture-based attitude distinguished them from the composers who adopted the stance of the GRM, dedicated to the tenets of musique concrète and a conception of sound uncolored by the constraints of western notation. Associated with Xenakis, a third approach was exemplified by Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC). Developed in 1977, UPIC was a tool for computer-assisted composition that allowed composers to manipulate waveforms on a tablet, “drawing” compositions based on images of sound itself: images of sound that could be created and manipulated, stretched in duration, transposed, inverted, transformed through the use of algorithms, and, stunningly, performed in real time without requiring any conversion to symbolic notation. A fourth approach was represented by IRCAM, which, in the 1980s, was undergoing its greatest period of technological and cultural change. Increased work with commercial microcomputers was leading to creative projects designed with greater public appeal and profitability in mind. The research agenda of IRCAM was being driven forwards, as never before, with an eye towards the music industry. Unlike the GRM, UPIC, and the Conservatoire, IRCAM was becoming more of a corporation, its artistic agenda swayed by “the seductions of the market” (Born, 1999: 330). In 1988, for example, the software program Max was developed at IRCAM by American Miller Puckett. Designed for the Macintosh computer, Max’s user-friendly, prêt-à-porter software package offered a first authoring program for designing interactive works, using a clear graphic interface familiar to and easily grasped by most computer users. (The first composition written using Max was Manoury’s Pluton, scored for computer and piano.) David Wessel recalls the horror with which some of his colleagues viewed the Macintosh 512s,

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referring to them as “vulgar machines coming in, machines that people might have access to” (Taylor, 2005). Relations among the institutions were cool. Composers at IRCAM were “reputed to snipe at Henry and Schaeffer like they were doddering old tinkerers … [and] for their part, Henry and Schaeffer take any opportunity to lampoon the high-tech computer music of IRCAM” (Dilberto, 1986). The tools with which composers chose to create their works – of which UPIC, Max, and the five-line staff were only a few options – were not only indicative of aesthetic leanings but also emblematic of paradigmatic shift. While many American composers felt the need to endorse “uptown” or “downtown” platforms to gain legitimacy and court tactical alliances, many composers in Paris aligned themselves with one position or another for purposes relating to professional identity and self-preservation. Campion, as an outsider, felt freer to move among the various camps, recognizing their strengths as well as their shortcomings. Rue de Madrid was écriture and GRM was concrète and the two were in divorce … one based in the tradition of instrumental writing and one based in the 20th-century tape recorder. For rue de Madrid, the GRM people did not “know” music, and, for the GRM folks, the rue de Madridites did not “know” sound. How amazing it was for me to be in Paris at that particular moment – I arrived there with a lifetime pedigree in the area of electronic music combined with a post-teen quality education in traditional conservatory-style education. I was not hindered by traditional training because it came after I was already formed in the domain of musique concrète and audio culture. I was the figure that very naturally crossed through these borders, existed in all these realms … For most French, and most visitors, it was not the case, as you either belonged to one side or the other. (Campion, personal correspondence, 2012)

Campion explored the communities of the Conservatoire, GRM, IRCAM, and Les Ateliers UPIC, trying to grasp technology’s implications for composition, computer music, and real-time acoustic performance, while relating these to the history and valuation of écriture. He understood the conflicting perspectives these institutions represented and ultimately described the spectral attitude of L’Itinéraire as resulting from the efforts of the Conservatoire composers to confront and reconcile the ascendancy of GRM, UPIC, and IRCAM. In his eyes, the spectralism of the first-generation composers was an attempt to recapture and reclaim those musical investigations  – trying to account for the frequency domain, as well as aspects of noise and time – from the point of view of an inherently écriture-based tradition. The spectralists sought to learn and borrow from technology

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while continuing to explore the intricate, multivalent semiotic webs spun among composer, performer, and listener, to which much of the depth and dimensionality of the “traditional” musical experience could be attributed. To Campion, a nuanced exploration of computer-assisted composition and real-time interactive performance could still be meaningfully related to the acts of reading and realizing a musical script, in the context of a disciplined musical action richly conceived to unite both art and science. Four years later, Campion was selected to work at IRCAM as part of the newly established composition courses. In 1996, he joined the composition faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a director of CNMAT and, in 2011, founded the Eco-Ensemble. Salient aspects of his approach to the piano, which he developed during his time with Grisey and which continues to evolve, are revealed in his four keyboardbased works: the duo-piano work A Complete Wealth of Time (1989–1990); Natural Selection (1996), for interactive electronics and MIDI grand piano; Flow-Debris-Falls (2010), a piano concerto that reworks ideas first explored in Natural Selection; and Outside Music (2012), for keyboard and chamber ensemble. Works like these reveal some of the melodic, rhythmic, and formal consequences of the spectral adventure. Campion worked on A Complete Wealth of Time with Grisey during his Fulbright year. At the time, Grisey was formulating his ideas about the piano, manifested a few years later in Vortex temporum, which exhibits his most sophisticated, virtuosic writing for the instrument. There are connections between Campion’s writing for the piano in A Complete Wealth of Time and Grisey’s later work. While it is not desirable to assert anything too specific regarding the mutual influence of the composers, we can note telling similarities: specifically, the use of archetypal neutral elements and the simultaneous exploitation of the piano as an instrument whose distinctive timbre itself remains undeniably rich with historical reference. Basic compositional elements upon which Grisey drew in Vortex temporum include the four tones of the diminished seventh chord, simple arpeggiations and modulations thereof (in his notes to the work, Grisey described it as “a history of the arpeggio in time and space”), pure tones (sine waves), attacks articulated without resonance, and held sounds sustained with or without crescendo. As discussed earlier, Grisey composed with three spectra (harmonic, stretched, and compressed) and three different tempi, and he manipulated these basic elements to construct an intricate universe, growing the larger environment from the interaction of the smallest musical organisms. But Grisey was aware of how the sound itself gestured beyond the work, and that even the most neutral materials trigger associations, inferences, and memories in the mind of the listener: “I

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personally start more with the physical aspect of things, the physical aspect of sounds, of different spectrums, the quality of spectrums. And I leave the rest – it might be most important – but I leave the cultural aspect to the audience. To the listener” (Grisey, 1996). A contradiction is inherent in the desire to conceive the piano both as an instrument acoustically confined to the present instant and as a historical object, like a time capsule, carrying the potential of its past within it. The contradiction is not exclusive to the spectral attitude but unique when viewed in relation to the history and ideals of the spectral composers. Those dedicated like Grisey to the exploration of le devenir des sons acknowledged this conflict. How could one perceive the musical environment in all its multidimensional acoustic richness, ex nihilo, but also acknowledge the profound significance of certain timbres and their historical weight and meaning? For even when one seeks to eliminate all traces of stylistic referentiality, it seems that the piano’s distinctive harmonic-timbral profile evokes something of its storied past. Campion’s piano concerto Flow-Debris-Falls (2010), scored for AvantGrand electronic keyboard and nineteen musicians, confronted this issue head-on. The work evokes various acoustic clichés as a means of reimagining the repertoire of historical pianisms, styles, and affections. In so doing, Campion establishes a “spectral” piano-space in the paranormal sense: a ghost space of the piano resounding with the echoes of performances past. Eerie in performance, Flow-Debris-Falls features a playerless grand piano at center stage, which responds to notes played by a live pianist within the larger ensemble. Outside Music (2005), a concerto for sample-based keyboard instrument and chamber ensemble, similarly mines the totality of the instrument, not just for its acoustic potential but for its living legacy, and that scent of a fabled yesteryear only released in live performance. Campion based A Complete Wealth of Time, like Grisey’s Vortex temporum, on a four-note motive (D–G–F–C), which reappears in different guises throughout. The motive serves as a skeletal feature, an essentially harmonic element that remains without specific character or distinctive presentation. The metaphor of a skeleton is apt, as the work was inspired in part by the botanical garden at Paris’s Museum of Natural History, whose “Grande Galerie de l’Evolution” (Great Hall of Time) features a parade of skeletons charting the course of human evolution. A Complete Wealth of Time metaphorically presents a sonic evolution, over the course of which we hear Campion’s attempt to reconcile his American, post-serial harmonic training with Grisey’s ideas on harmonic spectra and timbral color.

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Example 5.4 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, opening.

The work begins furiously (Example 5.4). Both pianists attack the instrument with fiercely rhythmic, aggressive chordal playing. All is fortissimo. Immediately, the listener senses the chromatic field saturated and the full registral domain of the piano conquered. The onslaught of the opening measures only accelerates and intensifies in the first minutes of the work, until both pianists arrive at a quadruple fortissimo chord on the score’s third page (m. 40). The work comes to a standstill, with a dense sonority allowed to vibrate under a fermata. In absorbing the decay, the listener is resensitized to the instrument’s capacity for resonance. As the sound fades, individual frequencies seem to approach the ear and, as the brief yet violent exposition comes to an end, noise is heard becoming sound, then becoming silence. This first cadential moment defines the extremes of the work, suggesting the peaks and valleys of a sonic landscape to be traversed and bridging the note-to-noise continuum.

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After this point, A Complete Wealth of Time begins anew with single notes quietly released into a depressed pedal. Gradually, over the course of calm minutes, new pitches are introduced. Through flurries of fleeting ornamental figures, grace-notes, and arpeggiations, added tones delicately coalesce into what are heard as suspended harmonies or harmonic-timbral colors, hanging canopy-like over an undulating, increasingly rhythmic texture. As the soundworld expands spatially outwards in register, the musical surface becomes yet more complex. Its gestural vocabulary expands from arpeggiations and sixteenth-note undulations to include trills, staccato chords, chromatic passagework, and polyrhythmic streams recalling Ligeti’s études and Nancarrow’s studies for player piano. As the overall environment becomes more centered around an evolving harmonic rhythm, the listener may come to characterize certain pitches as “non-harmonic” tones, grasping contextual relations of greater or lesser consonance and dissonance and traces of a vestigial tonal functionality. The directed use of harmony may reflect Campion’s grounding in set theory, and the association of specific timbral-harmonic complexes with pitch-class sets; in Murail’s Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe … similarly, the kaleidoscopic play of harmonic-timbral colors has been linked to the rotation of set-classes, each distinguished by a unique intervallic content (Nonken, 2013). Yet how harmony, timbre, and function are heard depends on the temporal element, which Campion further manipulates. As the work’s harmonic complexity increases, the rate of presentation shifts. This necessarily alters the listener’s perception. Without sufficient time to grasp the nature of the harmonic content, contrasting diatonic, whole-tone, and chromatic sonorities are increasingly perceived not as readily identifiable chordal-complexes related within stable and functional pitch space but as less defined sonic entities related along a broader continuum of noise and sound. All low order ratio harmonic relationships are being exhausted and something like a spectral attitude is appearing … moving away from a notion of “note” and toward a notion of “frequency,” into inharmonicity and toward noise. The “whole-tone” thing, for example, is a filtering of the piano chromatic into two functionless camps: no longer harmony but sound. (Campion, personal correspondence, 2012)

Again and again, Campion’s processes exhaust themselves, in one case reaching a point of rupture heralded by a stark E flat tremolo spanning four registers (Example 5.5). This harmonic unison, and the projection of pure harmonic tone, is a moment of erasure and cleansing. Grisey spoke of the possibly unavoidable connotations of the material. Campion plays with the referential qualities, or semiotic potential, of each

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Example 5.5 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, mm. 262–266.

naked sound. In A Complete Wealth of Time, certain elements introduce themselves to the listener, emerging from the texture and assuming a character, or evoking an association. In them, we might hear a faint echo of musics past, as one might momentarily glimpse in the skeleton’s bare bones the shadow of the creature who once animated it. This work in particular demonstrates not only the acoustic transformations from timbre to melody and harmony to noise, but also the infiltration of “impure” elements that seem to materialize from the neutral palette: polyrhythmic evocations of Ligeti and Nancarrow; shades of Debussy evoked by certain arpeggiated figures and whole-tone sonorities (mm. 262–266, Example 5.5); echoes of Ravel’s La valse, attributable to elements of register and rhythmic interplay (Example 5.6); a hint of Fats Waller’s stride piano in bizarre two-part texture and left-hand articulation (Example 5.7); and even a breath of Wagnerian “endless melody” that emerges, ghostlike and innocuous, on the score’s fifteenth page (Example 5.8) These elements momentarily take on lives of their own, engaging the listener’s consciousness and memory through the specificity of their harmonic-timbral profiles. Campion invites them as other spectrally influenced composers do not. Yet we can also hear the composer, through his strategies of composition, neutralizing these elements again and again, wiping away their “identity” like a smudge from one’s eyeglasses. For the final third of the piece, crashing chords in the piano’s most extreme registers remove the listener from the realm of referentiality and history, returning to the concrete noises of wood and metal-wound strings – the piano’s basic materials – and to Cagean silences (Example 5.9) The work’s stark denouement acknowledges the noise that has always dominated the piano’s timbre.

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Example 5.6 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, mm. 449–464.

So much of the piano’s sound, acoustically, comprises noise. For much of the instrument’s history, however, the efforts of pianists have been directed towards creating those illusions of cantabile and legato, and towards systematically denying the limitations of an inherently inharmonic instrument with no true capacity for controlled sustain. Throughout A Complete Wealth of Time, listeners may sense a composer willfully confronting his more reference-laden elements. In the manner in which Campion displays and then hides them among the other elements of his score, he suggests an oddly emotional narrative of musical instrumental identity achieved and lost. A work falling between Flow-Debris-Falls and A Complete Wealth of Time is Natural Selection. This composition provides the pianist not with a fully notated score but rather with a real-time environment in which to perform and improvise, using a computer and specifically designed interactive software, a score suggesting harmonic paths (indicated as pitch-class

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Example 5.7 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, mm. 530–537.

sets), and a MIDI-equipped acoustic piano. The software component consists of a set of tools, which can be configured to match changing performance situations. In practice, every detail of the musical surface is initiated by the pianist from the keyboard. The pianist improvises on specific sets of pitches, which enable or cancel effects and responses of the computer; the pianist reacts to both the sounds coming from the instrument and also the computer-processed sound generated in response. There is no “fixed” version of the work, although all interpretations emerge from the same landscape of possibilities (Campion, 2001). The live performer engaged with the computer-assisted acoustic instrument explores a world of sound inspired by the piano’s essential acoustic qualities: the harmonic vibrations of the strings and the noises generated by the action itself, made tangible in performance via microphones attached to the escape mechanisms.

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Example 5.8 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, mm. 220–231.

Campion describes his compositional endeavor as essentially spectral in orientation. All of this stuff to me is strongly connected to the idea of spectral thinking and pianos. It is dependent on electronics, on building hybrid instruments that have allowed me to expose surfaces and structures that exist within the metaphor of piano, but are not actually possible without some kind of mediation – the microphone, the sample, real-time processing. It is the relationship between frequencies, noise and resonance – surfaces are clouded – filled with debris – muddied or clarified into sonorities – spectra – but all piano. (Campion, personal correspondence, 2012)

As the development of techniques for spectral analysis and synthesis techniques led to new ideas of how to write for the piano in the twentieth

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Example 5.9 Campion, A Complete Wealth of Time, final cadence.

century, the twenty-first century has seen the creation of interactive software and hybrid instruments designed to explore further the unique inner metaphors of the original instrument. Campion, whose personal aesthetic evolution was very much a product of the digital revolution, was led by technology towards a more intimate understanding of the acoustic instrument. Yet he would never characterize his work as revolutionary. Emerging technologies have been the generative source for most of my musical explorations. There is nothing new here. For Chopin, it was the modern piano, and for Schaeffer, it was the tape recorder. Finally, there is no distinction between acoustic sound, natural sound, or electronic sound. Everything is integrated with the full spectrum of all possible sounds. Bach’s Art of the Fugue [sic] and the noise of Niagara Falls both have a place in my

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compositional thinking. The site of the concert hall has become exciting again, and writing for acoustic instruments alone is just another part of the work. I hope I am coming full circle, back to the essential musical material, to music that is made just for hearing. (Makan, 2004)

A deeper level of spectralism: Harvey, Tombeau de Messiaen Jonathan Harvey was a composer whose work spiritedly embraced and explored the radical philosophical and aesthetic implications of spectralism. A disciplined musician from an early age, rigorously trained first as a child chorister and then as a cellist with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the young composer displayed a near-insatiable curiosity about music. He studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and also with the émigré composer Erwin Stein (1885–1958), Schoenberg’s close friend and assistant, as well as the musicologist Hans Keller (1919–1985), and his early influences included the composers of the Second Viennese School and Benjamin Britten (1913– 1976). His early and sympathetic exposure to serialism, as well as a memorable 1966 encounter with Stockhausen at Darmstadt, led him to investigate enthusiastically the potential of twelve-tone composition; a few years later, he pursued this vein of research at Princeton University, where he studied with Babbitt. By this time, however, Harvey was becoming dissatisfied with the organizational powers of serial techniques: “I wanted to gather from Babbitt how much one could hear, how possible was it to get a real sense of structural depth, which one has almost automatically in the great tonal works. I came away, having made my own experiments in composition, with a feeling that that was not really the path” (Harvey, 2009). He continued to seek an approach to composition compelling on technical, aesthetic, and philosophical grounds, taking into account his profound interest in the listening experience. This personal odyssey led him to IRCAM in the early 1980s, where he arrived upon the invitation of Boulez. It was a colorful environment peopled by the composers of L’Itinéraire, visited by Hurel, Lindberg, Saariaho, and Dalbavie, as well as the Italian polyglot composer-theorist Marco Stroppa (b. 1959), who had studied cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence at MIT, and American David Wessel, who had been invited to IRCAM in 1976 to liaise with the pedagogy and performance programs. The institute offered a promising yet highly volatile environment, filled with immensely creative and capable people, yet some recalled it as still “just kind of a hole in the ground at the time and a concrete shell” (Taylor, 2005). Out of this chaos, Harvey gravitated towards the techniques and ideals of spectralism. His quest led him to recognize the potential of the

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spectrum – the sound itself as a vast repository of partials iterated at varying frequencies and intensities – which became for him the grounding of timbre, harmony, and melodic elements and the source of energy animating all musical play. In the 1990s, he described his compositional art as the exploration of the spectral space; here, he identified something profoundly, exclusively musical that, when accessed, enabled the listener to traverse the borderlands of transcendence (Whittall, 1999: 16). Exploring the possibilities inherent in the harmonic and inharmonic series, in all their natural and synthetically engineered manifestations, granted Harvey access to the very breath of music, providing a way to negotiate the finer edges of perception. Harvey’s spectral attitude led him away from the contemporary tendency to construct (in composition) and reconstruct (in analytical listening) musical forms by compiling smaller “illusory structures,” such as themes, melodies, and motives. Instead, he developed a less linear approach having “more to do with seeing everything as a whole, as a unity, from above …” (Whittall, 1999: 34). Like Messiaen, he recognized the value and utility of distinctive rhythmic and melodic details. In encounters with tonal music, listeners acquire knowledge of a composition’s inner dialectics and narratives by gleaning the significance of these elements in context. Harvey had long been concerned with how listeners could acquire that same sense of deep structure and connectedness in atonal contexts. By the 1990s, however, he deemed this kind of musical knowledge – focusing on local details as the basis for formal abstractions  – inherently limited. “This isn’t real knowledge,” he later asserted,“it is knowledge about things, not knowledge of things in all their vividness” (Whittall, 1999: 33). While not abandoning the use of motivic rhythmic and melodic elements, Harvey sought to provide an experience of the larger, vivid soundworld of which such small elements were a part “with no discourse or argument to distract from its essence” (Whittall, 1999: 54). Tombeau de Messiaen and works written by Harvey in that same phase, such as Advaya (1994) and One Evening (1993), are most revolutionary not in how they respond to narrative, semiotic, or symbolic explication and analysis, but in how they seek to rise above the dialectic of structure and sound. They present intervallicism seen in a spectral light, and the symbolic world seen in the larger perspective of a semiotic one. They captivate through the sheer evocativeness of their essential material, not the rationality of their thematic argument. While Tombeau is characterized by rhythmic and melodic gestures that evoke Messiaen’s signature birdcalls and Indianinspired rhythms, these highly distinctive motivic and thematic elements play subsidiary roles, as the means by which Harvey draws attention to the larger harmonic-timbral context and the interstices between piano and

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tape. Harvey clarified his emphasis: “All the harmonic series we hear colouring every instrumental sound at every point are becoming functional in themselves. They are not merely colouristic designators of thematic argument, but are also assuming the mantle of thematic argument themselves” (Harvey, 1984: 85). The liberating aspect of his nondiscursive approach was recognized by the critic Paul Griffiths (b. 1947). … very often in Harvey’s music, we are invited to exercise our imaginations in ways that are not rational. For there are rational questions that have precise answers exactly as diatonic music works towards a precise answer: the tonic triad … But there are other questions that do not have such answers: questions like “What is the present?,” “What is the past?” … [These are] questions of a philosophical order, and it is part of their nature that they do not have singular and true answers. They bring about rather a field of contemplation, not a line of reasoning. (Griffiths, 1984: 96)

Harvey’s compositions for piano deserve attention – Four Images after Yeats (1969), an extensive and largely serial composition dating from the composer’s time with Babbitt; Tombeau de Messiaen; and the miniatures ff (1995), Homage to Cage, à Chopin (und Ligeti ist auch dabei) (1998), Haiku (1997), and Vers (2000), a tribute to Boulez. Like Murail’s piano works, these compositions chart the course of the composer’s career and reveal the evolution of an artist finding his way. Tombeau, written shortly after Messiaen’s death, is particularly compelling in that it reveals Harvey in full command of his powers, writing idiomatically for the instrument and using electronic resources to expand its capacities for resonance and harmonic-timbral color. In Tombeau de Messiaen, the prerecorded tape part is composed exclusively of piano sounds entirely tuned to harmonic series. Twelve series are presented, one for each class of pitch, and these align and clash with the tempered acoustic piano in specific ways. The recorded part resounds with the natural harmonic series. Ideally, it is played back at the same volume as the tempered live piano, and, because of the close blend of acoustic and prerecorded sound, often it is not clear to the listener which is which. The concert instrument is integrated and subsumed within the harmonically and timbrally unified atmosphere. The harmonic-timbral fusion can be seamless, evoking a meta-instrument. The instrument takes on an anthropomorphic life, with body parts stretched as if by some distorting photographic process … what we end up with is a sensualist’s music, in which the intellect has done its work and then been forgotten. In a curious way, Mr. Harvey’s computer invests in traditional instruments the power to dream: an odd conceit, perhaps, but what are

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dreams but a liberation from the limitations of the physical world? The message may be that electricity has come to music not to replace old instruments but to free them. (Holland, 1999)

Because of the different temperaments at play, certain piano pitches can variously resonate as “out of tune” with the larger environment. At times, the tempered live piano provides a gritty, resistant element of dissonance and disruption, becoming something in dialectic with the fused nature of the harmonic series. Harvey’s self-described “thinking in and out of fusion” (Whittall, 1999: 28) determines the most salient aspects of the sonic environment. In this way, Tombeau descends directly from Bhakti (1984), a work for fifteen instruments and tape that explores similar borderline states (Harvey et al., 1984). Detailing his intent in composing Bhakti, Harvey maintained that the most profound relationships between prerecorded and live sound were revealed when tape and acoustic instruments performed the same material: “Some of the best moments are when the instruments double the tape, playing almost exactly the same sounds” (Harvey et al., 1984: 111). Tombeau de Messiaen uncannily references its namesake’s distinctive compositional language while never appearing to parody or pander, and offers a sincere, artful homage to one of the most influential composers, pedagogues, and musical figures of the twentieth century. It is a landmark work in that it heralds the ideological shift brought about by the rise of spectralism. It practically demonstrates how the spectral attitude can transform the roles and experiences of listener and performer, celebrating the jointure that has been identified as “the interplay between the disembodied computer-based sounds capable of executing musical gymnastics far beyond the reach of human fingers and the human-made sounds whose sonic radiation … can never be matched by electronics” (Levy, 2008). Tombeau de Messiaen further illustrates how spectral music offers not only the possibility of liberation from the limitations of the physical world but also vital new perspectives on longstanding oppositions and dialectics involved in the composition and perception of harmonic, textural, and formal processes. What are these oppositions, and how do they relate to the perception and performance of spectral music, and music in general? Harvey identified his own interests in circumventing dualities such as center/periphery, inner/outer, mental/physical, and discourse/spirit, refocusing on the stuff of music and designing sonic environments in which “the mind settles to such a degree that it lives in the sound, freely experiencing the spectra” (Harvey, 1999: 37). In so doing, he joined the first-generation composers of L’Itinéraire in their quest to reorient the musical experience by abandoning

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the systematic use of oppositions and dialectics. This rejection of dualist philosophy was perhaps the most revolutionary and shocking aspect of spectral music, more radical than its sonic character. As an example of this changing orientation, we can consider the distinctions of “outer” and “inner,” as they relate to performer and listener. The Cartesian perspective holds that there are separate domains of experience, that of the environment and that of the person. Applied to the musical experience, these two domains can be interpreted roughly as the world of acoustics (sound itself) and the world of the receiver (music as heard). In a strict dualist framework that separates the bodied self from the physical environment, the musical materials and the musical mind operate according to different laws; the material world operates in a mechanistic fashion, according to the laws of physics, while the mind does not. According to this perspective, the musical object and the listening subject inhabit different worlds, uncomfortably reconciled, operating according to unique laws. In the past decade, musicologists, music theorists, and psychoacousticians have adopted more moderate perspectives, investigating how the physical and intellectual aspects of musical experience relate and acknowledging that musical listening operates on many levels simultaneously (Sloboda, 2005; Clarke, 2005; Jackendoff and Lerdahl, 2006). Yet a central problem for the psychology of music remains: to explain the structure and content of musical experience, how musical materials are perceived on a sensory level, and the extent to which the basic perception of sensory information is mediated by mental representations and preacquired knowledge. Cognitive psychology still grapples with the body–mind divide. And whenever the listener is characterized as either a passive receiver of the musical stimulus or an active seeker of musical information, these oppositions inevitably underlie, and often reduce in scope and subtlety, the basic inquiry. The spectralists realized this. Determined to distinguish themselves from their contemporaries who did not take the processes of the listener into account, they reoriented the discussion, drawing on research in psychoacoustics to cast the reality of musical listening in a new light. Influenced by his Buddhist practice as well as his IRCAM-based research, Harvey sought to evoke a musical continuum encompassing elements otherwise construed, within a dualist framework, as antithetical. Discussing One Evening, scored for two singers, chamber ensemble, and electronics, he commented upon a passage in which a dance rhythm is sped up to the degree that it is transformed into noise. This transformation spans a continuum encompassing both the physical and the ethereal. The composer commented:

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[T]here’s the body, and there’s the spirit. I don’t particularly like to draw a distinction between these two things as you end up with a dualistic philosophy; but that is the seamless transition from dance and the continuous shimmer or colour, static sound; once you’ve speeded up the first it becomes the second, and you can’t put a sword in between them. (Jaffé and Harvey, 1999) In metaphysical terms, this meant that the rhythms of the physical world, of the body, of the dance, of gesture, became speeded up until they became steady stasis … And that I regard as a kind of transcendence, going into a high static empty sound, quite close to silence. So the dialectic here was between body rhythm and transcendence and with all the stages in between. (Whittall, 1999: 31)

In a line of thought descending from Stockhausen (Stockhausen, 1957), Harvey situated rhythm and pitch as members of a broader spectrum of possibility. They would function not as independent parameters subject to permutation but rather unveil themselves as different manifestations of a single source-entity, in a constant state of becoming. Another basic opposition Harvey blurs in his music involves the concepts of “center” and “periphery.” These concepts are summoned in ascertaining the role and place of listeners (of whom the performer is one). The “peripheral” perspective invokes a listening situation in which the listener is an observer, actively witnessing a musical representation. The listener maintains a detached but investigative stance, consciously attending to the musical environment and seeking out information regarding the work’s content or form. This analytically oriented listening mode is most commonly invoked by those discussing perception in novel listening situations, such as those involving musics to which the listener brings few schematic expectations (Deliège, 1989; Clarke and Krumhansl, 1990). The opposing “central” perspective metaphorically places the listener not on the periphery, but at the center of the experience. The perceiver is a passive receptor of musical stimuli that must be cognitively processed, enriched by supplemental associations, inferences, and expectations stored in the mind: preacquired knowledge essential to the interpretation of musical meaning. Mental representations mediate the experience, grant significance to a neutral musical stimulus, and give purpose to the act of perception; theoretically, within this framework, more sophisticated judgments take place as the music’s qualities and significances become known  – literally, become knowable  – in relation to tacit knowledge. This perspective is shared by many scholars concerned with the cognitive psychology of music (Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 1987; Lerdahl, 2001; Krumhansl, 2005).

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However dissimilar, both depictions present the components of musical listening in terms of an either/or dualistic proposition: as active or passive listener, and as direct or indirect experience. From one perspective, the listener must remain apart from the experience to perceive it at all. From the other, the music itself is peripheral to perception, only becoming meaningful in relation to the listener. Clearly, listeners may at times have a shifting awareness of their place in the musical environment, and the spectralists recognized that privileging the passive/active opposition had led towards needlessly static depictions of the acts of listening and performing, and, aesthetically, to compositional inertia in the avant-garde. As Harvey stressed, it is never all one to the utter exclusion of the other: “we are (center) and we look on (periphery)” (Harvey, 1999: 24). This inclusiveness typifies his spectral attitude, and the need at the very least to question the relevance and reality of these kinds of oppositions in mediating musical experience. Through the fusion of live and prerecorded components in Tombeau, Harvey removes the focus from issues of center and periphery. There is no sense of a classical concerto (solo versus tutti). In Tombeau de Messiaen, neither live pianist nor tape is decidedly central or peripheral at any given moment. Often, they sound as one and the same. Considering the work’s notation, one could suggest that Tombeau self-consciously plays with the idea of which part “leads” (center) and which part “responds” (periphery). Committed to the oppositional viewpoint (piano versus tape), a scorereader might suggest the piece requires that the performer must both lead and respond. Early in the work, for example, the piano embarks on a series of descending chords marked “delicate and colored,” to be articulated over the tape’s gradually diminishing resonance. Later, a similar passage occurs; in this passage, the piano joins the tape, which already has begun its chordal descent. The written score suggests that, when this first occurs, the tape part adds resonance to the piano’s chords, and that the acoustic piano’s chords are heard as triggering the tape’s “reaction,” a slow diminuendo al niente that reflects the decay of the piano’s low A (Example 5.10). The second time this occurs, the situation is reversed; the piano’s resonances, articulated at triple and quadruple piano una corda beneath the prerecorded chords, could be described as a response to the sonorities of the tape. (Harvey’s performance instructions even read “colour the DAT,” an insightful directive despite the reference to relatively obsolete technology.) A score-driven interpretation such as this depicts the piano and tape as opposed, separate entities, with the pianist responding to the recorded stimulus. Hearing the music, however, is not the same as reading the score. The abstract duality suggested on the page is unsupported by the sounding

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Example 5.10 Harvey, Tombeau de Messiaen, p. 4.

reality. In an ideal performance, for pianist and listener, the parts perceptually fuse; in no instance can the performer be said to lead or follow the tape. The composite sound is a hybrid of the two timbres and myriad harmonic series. Like the wavering illusion of double-vision – and even more aptly, like timbre and harmony themselves – the components may be glimpsed as two things but cannot be perceived independently (Harvey, 1986; Harvey and Vandenheede, 1985). The listener cannot separate the piano’s own live resonance from the prerecorded resonance of the tape part, nor distinguish the piano’s chords from prerecorded chords. As the composer writes in his program notes, “The ‘tempered’ live piano joins and distorts these series, never entirely belonging, never entirely separate. One is aware of a single entity with multiple parts, yet their interconnection is so complete, one cannot put the metaphorical sword between them.” Harvey, like Fineberg, saw his music as an arena for the apprehension of the epiphenomenal. Many discussions of works for piano and tape focus on analogous dichotomies (acoustic/electronic, live/prerecorded, and human/machine) and the problems they pose for performers and audiences (McDonald,

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1995; McNutt, 2003; Ding, 2006). Yet these dichotomies and problems become less relevant in Tombeau de Messiaen, which explores the border regions where elements fuse and become inaccessible to discrete perception: “I love music which dissolves and makes ambiguous whatever exists. Electronic music does that: it can turn anything into anything else; it can make sounds which remind you vaguely of something but which are not exactly that thing. Well-known instruments can be made ambiguous, made to be both themselves and something else” (Harvey, 2009). Timbre becomes and is harmony. Pitch becomes and is rhythm. And the piano is no longer consistently identifiable as such. Even for the performer sitting at the keyboard, it is impossible always to distinguish with certainty the sounds and their sources as the piano’s resonance spills from the harp and mingles with that emanating from the speakers. Tombeau de Messiaen features the appearance of bird-like motivic material that overtly refers to the idiosyncratic writing of Messiaen. In a manner not characteristic of the first-generation spectral practices, these motives conjure the composer of Réveil des oiseaux, Oiseaux exotiques, and Catalogue d’oiseaux, the showcases for piano that Messiaen wrote for Yvonne Loriod in the 1950s. The distinctive materials are ultimately subsumed, swallowed in the final crescendo in which their identity is lost. In the context of a tombeau (literally, “tomb”), there are spiritual connotations with the birth, life, and death of the artist as reflected in the life of the sounds themselves. In the metaphorical burial, the music is liberated from its earthly connotations. Scriabin saw music as a way to transform daily reality. Like Scriabin, Harvey considered how musical experience could enable listeners to escape the inner/outer opposition and reconcile the conflicts between subjective and objective perception. If the listener is indeed “located” on the periphery of a musical event, a witness who consciously stands apart from the musical environment, the music takes place “out there.” Objecting to this proposition, it can be argued that meaningful musical listening only takes place “in here,” in the mind of the listener, which is full of memories, emotions, and expectations. Some theorists seek an easy middle ground, claiming that the state of the listener changes, from central to peripheral, throughout the listening experience. Yet clinging to these oppositions leads to theoretical distractions involving active and passive listening and conscious and unconscious behaviors. These conflicts culminate in further confusion regarding the reality of the musical experience. In relation to Harvey’s work, it has been suggested that “pianists … are accustomed to being emotionally involved with our understanding of and feeling about the music, sometimes to the point of self-indulgence. To play

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with a fixed part indeed contradicts these habits” (Ding, 2006: 256). This statement assumes that the performer’s essential experience of music is primarily interior, concerned with emotions and intellectual abstractions. When she is required to attend to another element (the “outside” tape part), the normal balance is disrupted. For the performer suddenly detached from her inner world, self-conscious synchronization with the outer becomes the focus: “In this situation, the pianist must not only continue the gesture of the tape part, or anticipate the gesture for the music in the tape part to follow, but also be sensitive to timing, articulation, and loudness to create the best response with the tape part and make the result an integrated entity” (Ding, 2006: 259). According to this description, forced to align with the tape, the performer must become active, rather than passive. She must leave the inner world of understanding and feeling and enter the outer world of creating and making. Depicting the performer’s process as hinging on this either/or proposition (mind or body, thought or action) portrays the pianist-listener as rigid and oppositionally oriented. The explanation is anachronistic, as it accepts as basis for the performative action the inherent conceptual separateness, or contradiction, of the sound sources, and characterizes the relationship between live performer and playback as stimulus– response and conflict-based. Transcendence is not implied. But the spirit of the work, and a spectral or more ecological attitude towards performance, suggest that the pianist consider the instrumental part as co-existing with the tape in a shared acoustic space, and the live sound and prerecorded sound as integrally linked, reciprocal members of the shared environment. They are not unlike partials in a shared harmonic series, continually evolving within the lifetime of the sound. The performer must prioritize the macrostructure, not the individual parts that contribute to a final sum, accepting that “discreteness precipitates out of flow; flow does not build up from discreteness” (Mace, 2005: 201). The pianist’s role is neither to complete the picture nor to solve the problem, neither to “make” anything nor to provide an answer (e.g. the tonal triad) in response to a half-stated question presented by the tape. Instead, the sense of living within the unfolding, evolving macrostructure directs the performer’s actions. Thus, the role of the performer as a Lisztian virtuoso is negated, although the Romantic emphasis on physicality remains. Referring to the “destruction” of thematic material, Grisey notoriously defined the spectral attitude by what it was not: “We are musicians and our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture” (Grisey, 1998: 298). Murail also denied the existence of parametric absolutes assumed by Boulez and the integral serialists. This distinctly spectral

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conceptualization, and the assertion that a work’s sonic material would be derived from nothing but its own properties (Croft, 2010: 195), have been construed as essentially negative. It may be in these acts of negation, however, that the real historical significance of a spectral attitude towards performance lies. In the ideally “negative” spectral state, the identities of performer, listener, tape, and score become less interesting in and of themselves, and more interesting in relation to the vivid sound environment in which they interact. Seel refers to this as “artistic resonating.” Artistic resonating too creates a possibility for mystical experience. It consists not so much in becoming one with the presence of a work as in being part of its kinetic energy … In this experience too, nothing but the sensuous appearing of the work is opened; no extra-artistic meaning for which the work could serve as confirmation is revealed. The work is the source of its own energy of appearing … (Seel, 2005: 153)

If one accepts that the piano’s resonance and the prerecorded sound are, from the start, part of the same continuum – two ways of articulating the “same” sound, conceived by the composer and suggested by the score – the paradigm shifts. If the performer and tape are recognized as interlocking parts of a single entity, and not the former as the prisoner of the latter, the task of the performer need not be described as one of either accommodation or synchronization. It’s not the case of … witnessing a changing and fluctuating representation of some sort, nor does the music depict how the psyche works or express emotion in any simple sense. We ourselves are volatile; we are constantly changing. When we listen to music we, as well as the music, are on the move, constantly reconstituting our selfhood, redefining ourselves, perhaps more intensely than usual. (Harvey, 1999: 29)

Performers realize themselves and their roles within the environment of the work, as constituted in real-time performance. The prerecorded sounds have an inner life of their own, which continues to evolve as the hybrid timbres resonate within the performance space. The global environment is one of mutual realization and becoming. “This,” Fineberg states, “is what Grisey means: the real content of music is not mathematics, quantum physics, or even aesthetic philosophy but sound, the way sound changes in time and the affects it produces in the human mind” (Fineberg, 2006: 113). Harvey’s music, like Buddhism, offers performers and listeners the opportunity to lose themselves in contemplation and shed the performative, or demonstrative, ego. Some critics suggest that, in so perceiving the unity of sound and structure and willfully blurring some of the boundaries

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among text, performance, and perception, “We [may] not only cease to hear timbre, but also lose our sense of the materiality of sound, of the body and of the work of sound production” (Croft, 2010: 195). Yet this sense of dematerialization and disembodiment may be more fruitfully considered a reward than a loss. The sublimation of musical materials to pure sound – as described by Scriabin, Varèse, Grisey, and myriad composers of acousmatic music– was a state to which Harvey aspired as well, locating in dematerialized sound a special aesthetic and spiritual fulfillment. Harvey’s was a distinctly Buddhist perspective on the impermanence of subjects and objects, explored via the creation of complex musical environments emptied of argument and opposition. Sounds can be part of a whole. And they are so much a part of that whole that you can’t distinguish them any more as parts … they lose their individuality … [S]ounds which you took to be individual … can hide themselves and blend so perfectly you can’t see them any more. They come in and out of identity. They are highly individual beings and yet they are also empty, lacking inherent existence. And when this process occurs … we have a kind of musical essence of music which I think is very important; I would not dismiss it as illusion … (Whittall, 1999: 28)

Ecological perception – taken to include the perceptions of the performer and listener in the musical context – is accompanied by the experience of an “I,” a self who moves through the environment. Academic culture, in relation to much work in music perception and cognition, tends to prioritize the Cartesian self and its concomitant self-consciousness. Yet as the ecological psychologists suggest, in a line of reasoning extending from Gibson back to James, it is possible to accept the existence of the self and not embrace it as a “disembodied entity that is self-aware as it thinks” (Heft, 2001: 120). Perception need not be mediated by a self that imposes associations, references, memories, and domain-specific knowledge on the environment. Harvey suggests an ecological self that eludes the distinction of inner/outer. I am not my body. I am not my mind. I am not the whole collection of my body and my mind, since the parts do not make a new whole, except for convenience of reference. Neither am I outside my body and mind as some “soul.” Me and my other do not exist from their own side except by conventional imputation. They cannot be found … [but are rather] inseparable from the universe. (Harvey, 1999: 85)

In the sense that Harvey describes the body and mind as inseparable from the universe, the live piano sound and taped electronic sound in Tombeau are inseparable from the spectral environment they simultaneously constitute and inhabit. The listener and performer live in the environment,

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coming in and out of identity. The self that Harvey conceived, part of its environment and constantly in a state of evolution, closely resembles the self proposed by Gibson. This is not unexpected, as the spectral attitude was from its inception concerned more with the listener’s engagement with the physical sound environment than the mental gymnastics involved in constructing and manipulating abstract representations of experience. In performing and listening to spectral music, this state of selflessness is something to which the performer and listener can aspire: as individuals deeply engaged, defining and losing themselves, in constant states of becoming, in the environment of the work as it is realized. To accept the distinction between subjective (mental/intellectual) and objective (physical/visceral) components of the listening process invites stubborn questions regarding the relationship between the listener and the musical environment. Considering musical perception as a purely mental, intellectual pursuit, one depicts the listener as driven to satisfy a desire for meaning, who chooses which notes to connect with others, making decisions regarding the discrimination of musical materials. It involves the mediating role of preacquired knowledge and assumes something of an active, self-aware stance. Harvey contrasts this primarily mental mode with a physical mode that does not rely on formal representation but engages more fully with the experience of the present moment and the color of the music. In this physical listening mode, the listener interacts more directly with the acoustic material itself. To participate in the musical environment in this manner, “one must be able to get inside the sound itself, not hear it as a passing element belonging to structure” (Harvey, 1999: 34–35). He acknowledges, as the performer of any interactive work must, that the mental/physical distinction can feel artificial and imposed. Getting “inside” the sound itself assumes it is possible to be “outside” the sound as well. How the bodied self moves between these different realms defies easy explanation. Yet distinguishing between mental and physical listening requires accepting the concept of a disembodied self that experiences music differently than the body to which it belongs. Musical performance, listening, and composition require physical and mental engagement. Rather than seeing the physical and mental as oppositional qualities, a spectral attitude approaches them as inherently unified within the musical context. Thinking is conventionally considered an abstract and objectless process, detached from the body, and performing, antithetically, as sheerly mechanical. Contemporary ecological psychologists concur that human perception does not operate between near-exclusive physical and mental domains. The body’s state and the affordances of the environment influence mental as well as physical performance. Motives

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Example 5.11 Harvey, Tombeau de Messiaen, p. 17.

are not purely internal factors. Thinking, like all human activity, is influenced by the concrete physical environment, including the environment of the body, in which the mind can be said to reside. In Tombeau de Messiaen, the performer’s thought processes and physical processes are motivated by the musical environment. The pianist’s part does not truly exist apart from the performance of the work, and this is best exemplified in an excerpt from the work’s climax. Leading to this moment, the pianist’s movements are not specifically synchronized with the tape, as the prerecorded sound is largely unnotated – the situation, which invites and accepts the chance occurrence, is reminiscent of Territoires de l’oubli. The combined texture of live and prerecorded piano sounds is dense, featuring an array of sharply articulated forte chords, glissandi, and trills. The agitated polyphonic activity intensifies, with a coordinated acceleration, until, at the moment marked by the change of tempo (to quarter-note = 50), a cue is given for the pianist and both parts align. This brilliant convergence is heralded by the fortissimo articulation of an F sharp major chord (Example 5.11) Even for a player who has performed the work repeatedly, the minutes leading up to this moment are a time of tremendous exhilaration and (the word is deliberately chosen) liberation. As emphasized earlier, the musical notation indicates neither how the listener or performer perceives the musical drama nor what actually happens. Theoretically, the player must be

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mentally aware of the tape part, in all its unspecified detail, tracking it carefully in order to perceive the cue and successfully rendezvous at the tempo change. In practice, however, the live part is volatile, and its place within the precomposed musical environment is ever-changing, as if mirroring the self in its state of continual redefinition. The pianist’s part as realized maintains a certain aleatoricism, because of its continuous accelerando and the many opportunities to omit material as desired, perform approximate pitches, and incorporate trills and repetitions at will. The soloist’s part is always in a state of transformation. As a result, its relationship to its environment is not rigid but richly fluid. “Knowing” the tape part in advance, as a thing, is not sufficient. The overall pacing of the section, as is often the case in interactive works in which the score provides only a rough representation of the prerecorded elements, such as Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1959–1960) or Lucier’s Music for Piano with Pure Wave Slow Sweep Oscillators (1992), depends not only on knowing but on sensing and experiencing the sonic environment in all its vividness – on physical memory, the bodily memory of time, and a choreographed sense of the passage neither wholly mental nor strictly physical. Throughout Tombeau de Messiaen, Harvey’s loose notation frees the performer from taking a primarily mental or physical approach. By omitting details of the tape part, he prevents the performer from adopting the peripheral (mental) mindset, yet he provides the pianist with materials inherently unstable, far too volatile to serve as a reliable center. The moment of coalescence marks neither a physical achievement nor a mental victory but a cathartic moment that shares aspects of each. The moment is meaningful for its clarity but unclear in what it means. To paraphrase the composer, the moment celebrates music neither as an abstraction nor an object per se, but as an inner coming-to-life of something that sees beyond oppositions and conflicts.

The spectral attitude in listening and performance In prioritizing the heightened perception of acoustic reality, the first-generation spectral attitude differentiated itself from other compositional perspectives on musical notation and performance. The spectral composers encouraged the listener and performer to engage not primarily with the metaphorical interpretation of thematic and motivic materials and their relationships as formal determinants, but rather with the physical sound as the source of musical structure. The experience of form in spectral compositions would be directed by the search for expression through the material itself, without traditional references, hidden or conventional. Instead of

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drawing upon schematic formal devices, the spectral composers emphasized processes. While their attitude was not without important historical precedent, it was projected at a moment of particular import, particularly for the piano. Spectral composers of the first generation embraced aspects of the piano long denigrated and identified compelling strengths in the instrument’s weaknesses and idiosyncrasies, as historically perceived. Composers influenced by the spectral attitudes of the first generation were attracted to the possibility (or fantasy) of thinking in purely musical terms (without language, beyond the symbolic), freeing themselves from the mental obligation of assigning structural-thematic significances, and turning away from the formal metaphors and abstractions tied to the interpretation of conventional genres. They asked that the listener not piece together the larger form by connecting the dots of its telltale motives but linger on individual notes and chords, sensing their inner life and engaging with each, not as part of a goal-oriented progression but as an entity containing progressions within itself. By viewing music as an environment for contemplation and not conflict, spectrally influenced composers redirected their listeners’ attention, presenting an alternative to the oppositional, or dualist, philosophies that had long dominated discussions of the musical experience. Their proposal invited listeners to a field of contemplation and imagination, not a line of reasoning. A contemporary of the first spectral generation, Martin Seel proposes three attitudes towards perception: the contemplative, corresponsive, and imaginative. These attitudes concern the relation of humans to their environment, the apprehension of beauty, and the analysis of aesthetic interest and its preferred objects (Seel, 1992). In the contemplative state of perception, the listener becomes oriented to the objective characteristics of the environment itself, identifying its affordances contextually and inferring potential meanings and possible uses: what they are good for, or could mean, in terms of making sense of or navigating the environment. In the corresponsive state, the listener experiences reality in relation to the atmosphere evoked by the music; subjective and objective characteristics gain added meaning for the perceiver in relation to multiple planes of psychological reality. In the imaginative state, associations and metaphors may be brought into play. Seel’s terminology reflects a strongly ecological approach that seeks to reconcile the same objective and subjective aspects of the musical experience that drew Scriabin to the scientific literature. It is ideally suited towards describing the perception of spectral music. One of our main tasks as listeners of spectral music could be to follow this steady exchange of contemplative, corresponsive and imaginative perspectives. Like a landscape which … is defined through the lack of

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unity, spectral music is characterized by multi-perspective. The listener of spectral music is confronted with a variety of possibilities, as far as aesthetic perception is concerned, with a fascinating game which will never be reduced to a single dominating point of view: a game at the threshold of perception, a “second nature which begins to speak.” (Haselböck, 2007: 11)

The contemplative, corresponsive, and imaginative modes of experience underlie protospectral and spectral attitudes towards composition, listening, and performance. The recognition of immediacy and spontaneity and the apprehension of the lives of sounds as they transpire in real time are crucial to how the musical experience is conceived and notated by its composers. These factors determine the approach the performer takes to the physical acts of performance and the realization of the score. They similarly define the mindset of the listener, who approaches the musical work as a point of entry, to the manifold experience of sound in time. “To apprehend things and events in respect to how they appear momentarily and simultaneously to our senses represents a genuine way for human beings to encounter the world,” states Seel. “In perceiving the unfathomable particularity of a sensuously given, we gain insight into the indeterminable presence [Gegenwart] of ourselves” (Seel, 2005: xi). Welcoming ambiguity, the indeterminable, and the unfathomable as integral dramatic components, the spectral composers sought to capture in music the liminal state. Led to this state of openness and becoming, their listeners and performers could become resensitized to the internal life of sounds. For Grisey, the liminal realm was a realm in which the listener approached the thresholds of perception, exploring the outlands of transience and continuity. He aspired to the delight in sound first acknowledged by the Romantics. Grisey shared his ideas on the piano with Campion, who located points of crisis in the attempt to subvert and valorize the identity of an instrument whose timbre, even in the ever-expanding electroacoustic arena, would seemingly defy neutralization. For Murail, the liminal was manifested in musical processes subsuming elements of both inevitability and chance, in environments volatile yet rigorously disciplined. Heir apparent to Messiaen, Murail envisioned a color palette that expanded upon that of Debussy, and a keyboard-based virtuosity that transcended Liszt’s. For Harvey, the liminal state accompanied another kind of transcendence. Rising above dualism and the oppositional gambits, he saw the search for unity and resolution as unnecessary; a higher unity was assumed, and simple conflicts jettisoned for complex contemplation. In Harvey’s music, we sense Seel’s artistic resonating, relative to which pianistic performance can be reconceived as neither spectacle nor ritual but the exchange of energies, through which dematerialization and incorporeality are approached.

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Fineberg breached the threshold of perception in the exploration of epiphenomic musical environments, worlds of sound and shadow that challenge conceptions of causality and continuity. As Beckett used language, Fineberg summoned the piano to chart the path of sounds linking unfathomable abysses of silence. And Dufourt sought to create a work of art that, through the expressive motions of the pianist, would unveil itself as a pure phenomenon of emergence. There would be no being apart from becoming. These composers would invite their listeners and performers to explore sonic environments of tremendous forces and animation, rich with affordances but essentially vague in terms of what they might “mean.” Offering true musical terrae ignotae for pianists and listeners alike, their works ask that we engage with a spectral piano.

6 Spectral music and its pianistic expression Translated from the French by Joshua Cody H u g u e s D u f o u rt

In the spirit of mutuality and in recognition of undeniable affinities, I have elected to share these final pages with Hugues Dufourt. Dufourt writes with peerless authority on the subject of spectral music and the evolving role of the pianist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The relationship of the performer and the act of interpretation to the specific historicity of the work of art is his primary concern, and it is this specific sense of historicity to which The Spectral Piano ultimately appeals. I felt it would be a grave omission were this essay, originally conceived as a preface to this volume, not reproduced at this point in its entirety. MN

With the benefit of hindsight, we might conceive of music’s evolution to “spectralism” as the outgrowth of a shift in orientation, a new conception of the process of musical composition. The original aim of spectralism was to sever that process from the influence of neo-serialism, from its entirely conventional arrangements, its functional devices that had bestowed far too much power on the syntactic and combinatorial levels of the language. Musical form isn’t simply a layout of figures, a metaphoric algebra; it’s a deployment of materials, of forces. Music after World War II was characterized by a certain tendency to eliminate what we might call the “plasticity of movement.” Thus, the familiar jerks, thrusts, and lurches of the neo-serial style of the 1950s gave the impression of discontinuity, reiterated ad infinitum. And moreover, neo-serialism claimed, audaciously, that any process – no matter how complex – can be expressed by a finite number of logical operations. Spectral music, to the contrary, is conceived as an articulation of power of movements, qualities, and masses. It focuses on the discovery of sound as energy, not number. It is an art devoted to the dynamism of continuous transitions, rather than dialectical shifts, rather than the assembly of disparate elements in conflict. Its very form is tied to the transformations of its material. Spectral music highlights sliding values, overlapping phases, distortions of environments. The essence of its expressive energy springs from this dynamic of instability: configurations in the midst of crystallizing, an infinity of possible movements, polarities diversified to their very

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extremes. The mediation of the form is located at the point of engagement between these directions, intentionally multiplied. The musical form is based on a singular intuition – however diverse and proliferated it might be – that is itself drawn from the same process deployed within the multitude of its phases: a process that, in a certain sense, mimics the “indeterminate” modalities of spontaneous synthesis. On the other hand, spectral music has occupied a position favoring simultaneous contradictions, ambivalence, and the co-existence of opposites – as if the work is constantly tempted to complete some action that it, paradoxically, defers or even postpones indefinitely. Process in spectral music has nothing to do with dispassionate deduction. Rather, as in psychoanalysis, the form reaches its achievement via denial; it must overcome its own intimate resistances; it circles back on itself by undertaking a laborious explicitation. At times, it’s been criticized for a certain indolence in “getting going,” for a kind of mental microscopy, practicing slowdown within growth. In general, during a conflict of tendencies, one of the opposing forces seems to be constantly suppressed by the other with an obsessive tenacity. In the case of spectral music, a type of mutual self-suppression might appear to confine the work to a shadowy space of indecision, a perpetual chiaroscuro, to the extent that the contrasting, conflictingly agitated sounds of a chord seem to be on the brink of rupture, at the threshold of a polyphonic release. Here, the musical form resembles a symptom of compromise between rivaling tendencies, which is nevertheless bound to admit a certain unity, dedicated to flow within the continuity of dynamism. Two distinct orders – the harmonic and the polyphonic – correlate within a zone of indistinction or of apparent neutrality. There’s no triumphalism, no climactic apotheoses in this aesthetic of halftones and shimmerings that eschews all aggressive proselytizing. The music elliptically, deliberately, keeps itself just alongside the symbolic, conventional moment of formalization, just askance of the abstract logic of representation: that demarcation of direction over which, precisely, the dualities are confronting each other. The general deportment of spectral music invites the listener to apprehend, rather, the evolution of an organic structure; it leads the listener, step by incremental step, to witness its generic attributes of articulation. Considered from this point of view, musical time is a succession of emanations, each of which is a specific product of network interactions; and its shape depends on the global properties of those interactions. Spectral music has likewise abandoned the obsession with the dream of absolute artistic freedom, of total syntactic dispersion, in favor of a real commitment to questions of sensation and perception. Sensation is the psycho-physiological aspect of external stimulation. Perception is rooted in

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physical reality: it’s the form (Gestalt) around which the dust of the senses organizes itself. Perception is a dynamic scheme that develops in images. Cognitive psychology has shown that categorization is one of the essential functions of perception. Continuous acoustic dimensions in the physical world are partitioned, identified, and catalogued by the auditory system. A more acute understanding of the mechanisms of perceptual fusion and separation of sources shows that an organization based on pitch can be both reinforced and weakened by an organization based on timbre. Phenomena of masking, ambiguity, or interference can result from such processes. During the seventies, psychophysics, sensory physiology, and cognitive psychology were applied to music, and they all converged to contribute to the constitution of a new philosophy of nature. We witnessed the birth of a new era of knowledge. The sense of hearing was perfected and multiplied by the computer, which introduced new sensations: preternatural timbres; paradoxes in pitch or duration; sounds moving through space, although their sources are fixed. Science, in other words, was able to create artificial syntheses from sensory impressions. This advancement constituted an unprecedented cultural phenomenon, a veritable philosophical breakthrough, in that certain functions of the nervous system found themselves, in a fashion, externalized. Risset showed that characteristic combinations of sound, with their unlimited range of differentials, were all determined by time – the agent of the organization of qualitative data. Grisey, in turn, demonstrated that the composer’s very mission is the transcription of the flux of becoming within the passage of time. The goal of art, for Grisey, is not the expression of an idea, and it’s not articulated by representational forms. For him, music absorbs itself within the interior continuity of a qualitative consciousness. Art’s aim – for Grisey just as it is for Risset – is to suggest movement, as such: a movement within the interior of the work, reduced to a pure genesis or a deep condensation. The homogeneous simultaneity of neo-serialism consisted of the conglomerate of different, discontinuous perspectives. But the dynamic simultaneity of spectral music is that of a synoptic vision, one that embraces a multitude of successive events. With its contact with time, music is nothing more than contraction, expansion, and tension: under this same contact, space is nothing more than the condition of that expansion, the repository of movement. At the core of spectral music is the pure intensity of duration. Its particular objective is capturing the mobility, fluidity, and continuity of processes. Curiously, this same aesthetic nevertheless emphasizes – more than any other musical approach  – time’s opacity, time’s peculiar consistency, because it also integrates the factors of withholding, repetition, expectation, and targeting, all factors susceptible to interpenetration. It doesn’t

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impose a fixed direction on a process. A development towards slowness brings to life “time-outs,” friction, obstacles. With spectral music, we must distinguish two tendencies: an accumulative temporality and a prospective temporality. Musical time expresses a power of assimilation, but it also capable of diversification: its development is never homogeneous. In this sense, spectral composition is best conceived as a functional analysis of formative processes. Formally speaking, spectral music was born in the reflections and collective practices of the core of the group L’Itinéraire, over the course of the 1970s. Its genesis is situated in the confluence of various mindsets that preceded it. It discovered its source in the notion of sonic substance that Debussy conceived. It assumed, too, the global dynamism of sonority imagined by Varèse, who was, just like the Futurists, the musician of speed, of synthesis. Xenakis brought to music the idea of tree structures, graphic representations of hierarchies; Ligeti introduced ramification; Stockhausen presented the sonic continuum. All these approaches converged in the principles of spectral music, which then went on to integrate computer-derived musical data and the field of psychoacoustics that technology parented; spectral music would never have seen the light of day had it not been for the principle of mutation introduced by sound synthesis, engendered by the foundational work of Mathews, Pierce, Risset, Chowning, James A. Moorer, and John M. Grey. This coherence was first manifested in a distinct corpus of works. Risset’s Mutations (1969); Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques (1974– 1985); Lévinas’s Appels (1974), Voix dans un vaisseau d’airain (1977), and Ouverture pour une fête étrange (1979); Chowning’s Stria (1977), for tape; Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli (1976–1977), Ethers (1978), and Gondwana (1980); and my own Saturne (1978–1979) all contributed to the axiomatic repertoire of spectral music. Spectral music offered far more than the simple modeling of sound via the harmonic spectrum. It represented the appropriation of inharmonicity as well as the differentiation of noise. The physical problem of the alteration of the harmonic profiles of waves  – their distortion  – became a specifically musical one. Modulation – the transposition of a quantity by another quantity, or, if one prefers, the variation of a parameter of a signal under the effect of an incidental function  – also became a customary compositional technique. The concept of the threshold, too, played a considerable role in compositional practice: a threshold is found at the confrontation of conditions that permit stabilization and those that forbid it. From this perspective, the examination of systems of transition between heterogeneous domains has evolved into a cardinal precept of spectral music: the comings and goings, the fluctuations between harmony and timbre, between

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complex sounds and noise, between pitch and noise, between harmonicity and inharmonicity, between timbre and saturation – all of these continua produced a sort of basic repertoire of idioms at the heart of spectral music. Musical thought had to differentiate and specify these types of objects, many of which belonged to acoustic categories theretofore inassimilable, irreducible. The parameter of timbre, for example, was now expanded from “instrumental color” to the variation of the distribution of sonic energy within the temporal field. We can summarize these perspectives by stating that spectral music reimagined musical composition as an art based on the principle of functional interaction. The governing idea was the unification of the entire domain of sound, scrutinizing a wide range of types of transitions between phenomena as disparate as pitch, noise, timbre, or harmony. Spectral music, fundamentally, is a change in our conception of music. It’s no longer based on traditional, neatly isolated categories like melody, counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, or timbre. On the contrary, spectral music is a music of adjoining categories, of hybrid objects. It creates composites. Its problematic is that of crossing thresholds of perception. Its working hypothesis is interference or intermodulation. In this sense, music, viewed as a whole, has changed simultaneously on the levels of scale, language, and optic. Spectral music based its language on new structural genres: topological articulation and dynamic functionality, internal equilibria and exchanges, interaction and co-adherence, rapports with potentialities and tension, transformations created by transitions and mutations. The spectral “doctrine,” if indeed there is one, would contain three principal ideas: the interaction between unstable elements; criteria that determine location between reference points and thresholds; and a comparator, a device comparing voltages or streams of data – or a feedback circuit. The doctrine in this sense is indebted to cybernetics, if the discipline is conceived less as a technology of a new class of machines and more as a new technique of thinking, a technique that has given birth to numerous scientific and artistic domains by presenting them with highly original problematics and perspectives. The use of the piano offers a uniquely distilled, revealing panorama of the aesthetic oppositions among twentieth-century schools of thought. The piano repertoire of the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the constructivist spirit of neo-serialism, which imposed a percussive, combinatorial conception of the keyboard. Among the very first serial compositions, in fact, we find Babbitt’s 1947 Three Compositions for Piano and his Composition for Four Instruments. In Europe, the dissociation of rhythmic and harmonic structures, first set in motion in 1948 by Messiaen in his Cantéyodjayâ, was brought to full fruition in 1949 with his “Mode de valeurs

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et d’intensités.” This work, the second of his Quatre études de rythme for piano, provided the paradigm for integral serialism; it served as the model for Boulez’s Structures Ia (1951–1952), Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel (1951), and Karel Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos (Nummer I, 1950–1951), as well as Michel Fano’s Sonate pour deux pianos (1952). With Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I–IV of 1953, we reach a new step, characterized by performance difficulties and parametric logic. These four works inaugurate complete predetermination of material, ending at a pointillist aesthetic practicing composition through layers or superpositions of textures. The eleven Klavierstücke were composed between 1950 and the beginning of the 1960s. The Klavierstücke are emblematic of an age of abbreviated musical physiognomy. Rhythmic complexity and the suspension of any perceptible meter are sustained. The composer confronts the question of the irrational, of the immeasurable. The nature of physical interventions – notably, modes of attack and the use of sforzato – becomes a problematic. Questioned, too, are meter and physical time, articulations and tempo. The second cycle of the Klavierstücke, however, is founded on an architectural structure of tempi, and it’s marked by the restoration of periodic rhythms. It also reintroduces preoccupations with harmonies, restores the idea of progression, and, above all, systemizes the composition of resonances. Richard Toop notes that in 1958 and 1959, Stockhausen had planned to compose five more Klavierstücke that would have integrated all genres of variable forms, creating a sort of matrix of possibilities (Toop, 1983: 349). Unfortunately, we don’t have the formal map of this new poetic art, a poetics of the labyrinth and the open form. According to Lévinas, works like Stimmung and Mantra were decisive steps in the path from the series to timbre. Although he played a crucial, initial role in the spectral tradition, Lévinas today expressly denies membership. And in spite of his stature as one of the pioneers of realtime acoustic transformations, the composer has always defied any resurgences of querelles des d’Indystes et des Debussystes – a phenomenon that is frighteningly recurrent. Over his career, Lévinas has pursued a singular, visionary path that has led him to sonic chimeras and hybridization as well as paradoxical polyphonies (Préfixes, Rebonds, Go-gol, Les nègres, Par-delà, Les “Aragons”). The Concerto pour un piano-espace no. 2 – revised in 2010 – prolongs sonorities of the piano by the artificial, electronic sustaining and amplifying of resonances – resonances that, furthermore, are almost imperceptibly deformed by out-of-tune echoes. This fundamental “crack” that breaks apart the normal functioning of the resonant body of

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the instrument exposes the sonic space, thus created, to the tempest of a rumor, of saturation, of breath. Lévinas himself claims to have borrowed the idea of “piano-space” from the novel schemes of virtuosity inaugurated by Liszt, notably in the Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, where every component of pianistic writing converges in effects of timbre and reverberation. From a certain point of view, Lévinas – himself a virtuoso pianist – has a place in the tradition of Liszt and Scriabin. Territoires de l’oubli (1977) stands at a pivotal period in Murail’s career. The work, of course, is a celebrated one; it’s been the subject of much commentary. The piece is entirely dedicated to the procedure of metamorphosis, and it exploits the principle of continuous transformation. With this work, Murail attempts to conceive music as a form irreducible to any composite of material constituents. He seeks to paint the image of a continuity in which any interruption is arbitrary. Territoires de l’oubli is a “fabric-work” (oeuvretissu), without a seam or a tear, a piece that flows out in overlapping waves. To understand the modes of thought at work in this score is a challenge. To comprehend the composer’s stance, one should refer not to the computer but to the field of continuum mechanics, which represents movement by plotting a diagram of densities against a diagram of speeds. The movement that results is produced by displacements of contours. This radical exploration of transformation, pushed to its very limit, found its principle obstacle and its principal inspiration in the phenomenon of the piano’s resonance, which allows the diffraction and interference of harmonies and timbres. If he harbored no particular affinity with Stockhausen, Murail resuscitated the posthumous project of the last Klavierstücke, all the while moving the problematic into an entirely different terrain and treating the compositional complexities in alternative ways. Territoires de l’oubli finally manifests itself as a chain of alterations created by interactions. Grisey was obsessed with the notion of a plastic, whirling time. From certain angles, his entire work forms a supplement to Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s 1686 work of popular science, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). [Interestingly, Fontenelle also authored the Théorie des tourbillons cartésian (A Cartesian Vortex Theory, 1752) – Trans.] It proposes a diversity of points of view on the universe, a superposition or an entanglement of times, highlighting the phenomena of rotation, acceleration and deceleration, compression and expansion. Grisey advocated the application of psychoacoustic paradoxes, discovered with the help of the computer, to instrumental writing. For Grisey, composition was a sort of double expansion – sonic and temporal – with a transposition of scale and a stretching of time. Vortex temporum (1994–1996) for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano, touches

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on the delicate problem of musically representing a vortex. A vortex is the rotation of a fluid. In a moving vortex, the lateral streamline is spiral, and the central pathline is helicoidal. A vortex adheres to a pulsation. It reproduces itself in periods. It is represented by an axis and a loop. Here, we reach the heart of Grisey’s poetics, which always searched to represent this first palpitation of space, the flux, the flow. Four keys on the piano are tuned a quarter-step down, giving the ensemble its vertiginous allure and its slightly raspy sonority. My own return to the piano coincided with an exploration of fundamental patterns of physical movements in instrumental music. In his Opus posthumum, Immanuel Kant attempted an inventory of every type of movement the human body is capable of performing. Following this, the brilliant French mathematician René Thom (1923–2002) sought to establish the definitive division of human gestures, here considered exclusively as operational schemes, organized by corresponding muscular sensations: pressing, penetrating, tearing, splitting, spreading, covering. The movement of the human body is the foundation of all technique. For my part, I wanted to reduce my piano writing to primordial ideas of technique: breaking, cutting, assembling. From this point, one can move on to imagine representations of more complicated gestures, like elastic deformations, flexing, twisting. These actions are all tied to configurations of the attack. I therefore attempted a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic procedure of writing for the piano. And at the same time, I sought to concentrate solely on the problem of formal expression in music. Erlkönig reimagined the piano as a harmonic instrument: amidst the difficulties facing pianistic writing in our time, there is that of atonal virtuosity. How to write new types of gestures that, at the same time, fit naturally in the hand? At this point, it is fitting to return to the legacy of Louis Hiltbrand. If Hiltbrand had an acute awareness of the historical dimension of art, his conception of music rejected aesthetic relativism. The work is always the precipitate of a certain state of historical development. It’s even a cultural phenomenon, the specificity of which is irreducible. And cultural history will doubtlessly be more and more closely associated with interpretation, because it will be necessary to untangle the work, in order to extricate from it the heart of its historical resonances. Nonetheless, a performing musician’s vocation is not that of the art historian. Her role is not to perform an exegesis of a past text, not to recapture the sensibility of a certain epoch. Her function is to take on the specific historicity of the work of art. For the work reaches far beyond the circumstances of its conception. Interpretation – a thoroughly modern phenomenon, born out of an inversion of our sense of history – strives for the continuously renewed recreations of the works

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of artists of the past. Not only does the most obscure past contain (thanks to interpretation) something of the present moment, but it inherits new formulations. Musical interpretation finds itself confronted, too, by another scenario: that of man’s archaic inheritances, his deepest fears, his psychic residues of a bygone past that continuously resurface and even form an integral part of civilization. Music, for Hiltbrand, has the power to untie unconscious energies and retell them. Music plunges itself into the most obscure reaches of the soul. But the successful interpretation belongs less to a motion of deliverance than a kind of self-annihilation in the sublime. Against effusive clichés, it defies expectations and manages an economy of stringency. Far from an exhibition of desire, a great interpretation equates more to a process of mourning. Text was, for Hiltbrand, a different thing entirely from a “perfect framework,” or a system of formal marks that lend themselves to decryption. The crucial moment of interpretation was for him the transfiguration of the written message in absolute, literal fidelity. The true nature of musical interpretation is to bring out a wholly original order of existence. It is through unearthing affinities, discovering correspondences  – mysterious bridges  – within the text that the pianist reaches the fundamental essence of musical thought. Learning the text consists first in determining the true relationships of affinity and the distinction between the various structures implemented within the work, then in the gradual articulation of these structures that, inexorably, coordinate themselves; mutually specify themselves; diminish in depth; and, little by little, restore the dynamic unity of the form. Through doing so, each extrinsic element – each element that, in a sense, stands outside the internal unity of the process – is leveled flat, as if into the dimensions of a plane; and any allegorical meaning is erased. The work, by internalizing itself, unveils itself as a pure phenomenon of emergence.

Select discography

Campion, Edmund. A Complete Wealth of Time. Gloria Cheng and Vicki Ray, pianos. Albany TROY 1037. 2008.   Natural Selection (Version IRCAM). Edmund Campion, piano. http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/audio/7678.   Outside Music: Music of Edmund Campion. San Francisco Contemporary Music Players; David Milnes, conductor. Albany TROY 1037. 2008. Dufourt, Hugues. L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo. Ensemble Recherche. Kairos 0013142KAI. 2010.   An Schwager Kronos. Dominique My, piano. Accord 465 715-2. 2007.   Erlkönig. Marilyn Nonken, piano. Metier MSV-CD 28524. 2012. Fineberg, Jonathan. Fantastic Zoology. Marilyn Nonken, piano. Metier MSV-CD 28524. 2012.   Grisaille. Marilyn Nonken, piano. Metier MSV-CD 28524. 2012.   Lightning. Marilyn Nonken, piano. Metier MSV-CD 28524. 2012.   Recueil de pierre et de sable. Ensemble Court-Circuit; Pierre-André Valade, conductor. Decca. 2008.   Till Human Voices Wake Us. Dominique My, piano. MFA-Radio France 216007 – HM 73. 1995.   Till Human Voices Wake Us. Marilyn Nonken, piano. Metier MSV-CD 28524. 2012.   Tremors. Jean-Marie Cottet, piano. Decca. 2002.   Tremors. Marilyn Nonken, piano. Metier MSV-CD 28524. 2012.   Veils. Dominique My, piano. Mode 208. 2009.   Veils. Marilyn Nonken, piano. Metier MSV-CD 28524. 2012. Grisey, Gérard. Vortex temporum. Ensemble Recherche; Kwame Ryan, conductor. Accord 464 292-2. 1999.   Vortex temporum. Ensemble Risognanze; Tito Cecherini, conductor. Stradivarius STR 33734. 2007. Harvey, Jonathan. Bird Concerto with Pianosong. Hideki Nagano, piano; London Sinfonietta; David Atherton, conductor. NMC 2011.   ff. Florian Hölscher, piano. Neos 10828. 2009.   Four Images after Yeats. Philip Mead, piano. Sargasso SDVD001. 2008.   Haiku. Florian Hölscher, piano. Neos 10828. 2009.   Haiku. Javier Torres Maldonado, piano. Stradivarius STR33796. 2011.   Homage to Cage, à Chopin (und Ligeti ist auch dabei). Florian Hölscher, piano. Neos 10828. 2009.   Tombeau de Messiaen. André Ristic. ATMA. 2001.

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Porter, Andrew (1991). “Music Makers,” The New Yorker (January 11): 78. Pressnitzer, Daniel and Stephen McAdams (2000). “Acoustics, Psychoacoustics, and Spectral Music,” Contemporary Music Review 19/2: 33–59. Reed, Edward S. (1988). James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Perception. London and New Haven: Yale University Press. Reigle, Robert and Paul Whitehead, eds. (2008). Spectral World Musics: Proceedings of the Istanbul Spectral Music Conference. Istanbul: Pan. Reydellet, Jean de (1996). “Pierre Schaeffer, 1910–1995: The Founder of ‘Musique concrète,’” Computer Music Journal 20/2: 10–11. Risset, Jean-Claude (1977). “Musique, calcul secret?,” Critique 359: 414–429.   (1992). “Composing Sounds with Computers: The Historical Context. Two Avenues for New Music, and the Advent of Electricity,” in John Paynter, Tim Howell, Richard Ornton, and Philip Seymour (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, 2 vols., Vol. I. London: Routledge. 583–621.   (1996a). “Introductory Catalogue of Computer Synthesized Sounds,” The Historical CD of Digital Sound Synthesis, Computer Music Currents 13. Mainz: Wergo.   (1996b). “My 1969 Sound Catalogue: Looking Back from 1992,” The Historical CD of Digital Sound Synthesis, Computer Music Currents 13. Mainz: Wergo. Roads, Curtis (1996). The Computer Music Tutorial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rockwell, John (1999). “Morton Feldman (and Crippled Symmetry),” liner notes to Morton Feldman, Crippled Symmetry. BRIDGE 9092A/B. Rose, Gregory, and Simon Emmerson (1979). “Stockhausen 1: Stimmung,” Contact 20: 20–25. Rosen, Charles (1995). The Romantic Generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rovner, Anton (2002). “An Interview with Tristan Murail,” Musica Ukrainica, www. musica-ukrainica.odessa.ua/i-rovner-murail.html. Sabbagh, Peter (2003). The Development of Harmony in Scriabin’s Works. Boca Raton, FL: Universal. Sachs, Curt (1962). The Wellsprings of Music. The Hague: Nijhoff. Samson, Jim (2003). Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt. Cambridge University Press. Samuel, Claude (1967). Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen. Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond.   (2003). Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color. Conversations with Claude Samuel, trans. E. Thomas Glasow. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press. Schaeffer, Pierre (1952). A la recherche d’une musique concrète. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Schloezer, Boris de (1987). Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schmitz, E. Robert (1937). “A Plea for the Real Debussy,” The Etude (December): 781–782. Seeger, Charles (1951). “An Instantaneous Music Notator,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 3: 103–107.

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Index

Abbott, Alain, 72 acousmatic music, 14, 16, 46, 83, 153 Adams, John, 116 Phrygian Gates, 76, 113 affordances, 157 defined by Gibson, 95 relation to Dufourt, 102, 108 relation to ecological perception, 5, 94, 96 relation to Fineberg, 118 relation to performance, 154 relation to spectral music, 114, 159 aleatoricism, 60 definition, 82 relation to Boucourechliev, 60 relation to Cage, 26, 84 relation to Harvey, 156 relation to Messiaen, 61 relation to Murail, 18, 79, 83, 85 relation to serialism, 60 Amy, Gilbert, 57, 60 Ancona, Solange, 72 Arrau, Claudio, 16 Artaud, Pierre-Yves, 72 Babbitt, Milton, 3, 5, 76, 115, 129, 142 life activities at CPEMC, 67 relation to Harvey, 144 works Partitions, 120 Reflections, 112 relation to perception, 26 Three Compositions for Piano, 164 viewed by Burge, 3 viewed by Fineberg, 126 viewed by Harvey, 142 writings Who Cares If You Listen?, 125 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 141 Bachelard, Suzanne, 98 Baleyev, Mitrofan, 41, 48 Ballif, Claude, 72 Bancquart, Alain, 99

Barlow, Clarence, 19 Barraqué, Jean, 60 works viewed by Dufourt, 101 viewed by Hodeir, 57 Bartók, Béla, 64 works relation to Ligeti, 20 relation to Messiaen, 57 Basile, Armand, 1 Bayle, Laurent, 7 Bazille, Auguste-Ernest, 55 Beckett, Samuel, 124 relation to Fineberg, 159 Beethoven, Ludwig van instruments owned by Liszt, 36 Bell Laboratories, 17 activities of Mathews, 68, 69 activities of Risset, 44, 69 activities of Stokowski, 69 development of spectrum analyzer, 65 Bennett, Gerald, 75 Berg, Alban works relation to Messiaen, 57 relation to Scriabin, 40 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 25 writings relation to Debussy, 50 relation to Fineberg, 127 Berio, Luciano and IRCAM, 75 works viewed by Dufourt, 101 Bermel, Derek, 126 Bernstein, Leonard, 76 Boucourechliev, André, 60 Boulanger, Nadia, 66 Boulez, Pierre, 3, 7, 15, 60, 71, 75, 142 life IRCAM, 75 relation to Harvey, 144 viewed by Grisey, 92

184

Ind ex Boulez, Pierre (cont.) works Deuxième sonate, 113 Le marteau sans maître, 57 Pli selon pli, 57 Structures Ia, 120, 165 viewed by Adams, 116 viewed by Dufourt, 74, 101 viewed by Feldman, 92 viewed by Hodeir, 57 viewed by Murail, 151 Bousch, François, 72 Brahms, Johannes, 24 reception of works, 109 Britten, Benjamin, 142 Brown, Earle, 60 relation of works to L’Itinéraire composers, 91 Bruce, Neely, 2 Buddhism relation to Fineberg, 120, 127 relation to Harvey, 146, 152, 153 Burge, David, 3 Busoni, Ferruccio, 3 life relation to Feldman, 93 relation to Varèse, 66 works relation to Liszt, 38 relation to Scarpini, 3 Cage, John, 4, 60, 111 views on listening, 26 works 4’33’’, 83 Cheap Imitation, 61 Etudes Australes, 76 One5, 83 relation to Campion, 137 relation to L’Itinéraire composers, 91 relation to Murail, 82, 112 viewed by Adams, 116 Campion, Edmund aesthetics, 140 life Paris, 132 relation to Fineberg, 128 works A Complete Wealth of Time, 133, 134–138 Flow-Debris-Falls, 133, 134 Natural Selection, 133, 138 Outside Music, 133, 134

Canguilhem, Georges, 98 Carnegie Hall activities of Ensemble Intercontemporain, 7, 8 activities of Saariaho, 7 relation to “uptown” aesthetic, 4 Carter, Elliott, 5, 115 Night Fantasies, 76 Cassirer, Ernst, 108 CCRMA, see Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Cecconi-Botella, Monic, 72 CECM, see Center for Electronic and Computer Music (CECM) CEMAMu, see Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu) Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), 17, 67 Center for Electronic and Computer Music (CECM), 57 Center for New Music (Boston University), 128 Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), 67, 76 activities of Campion, 128, 133 Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu), 57, 130–133 activities of Campion, 132 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 99 Cerha, Friedrich, 117 Chopin, Frédéric, 14 works performance practice, 49, 53 relation to Dufourt, 99 transcribed by Liszt, 38 viewed by Campion, 141 Chowning, John, 67, 163 Stria, 163 Clarke, Eric F., 95 CNMAT, see Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) CNRS, see Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CRNS) Cody, Joshua, 6 cognitive psychology, 4, 94, 146, 147, 162 compared with ecological psychology, 95 Cohen, Dalia, 65 Collectif de Recherche Instrumentale et de Synthèse Sonore (CRISS), 99

Ind ex Columbia University, 130 activities of Campion, 129 activities of Fineberg, 117 activities of Murail, 7, 90 IRCAM@Columbia, 6 Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), 7, 17, 67, 129 activities of Babbitt, 26 Conservatoire de Genève activities of Dufourt, 98 Conservatoire de Paris 1980s, 131 activities of Campion, 130, 132 activities of Debussy, 55 activities of Decoust, 75 activities of Messiaen, 56, 57, 58 activities of Murail, 71 activities of Risset, 69 activities of Varèse, 66 Copland, Aaron, 129 Cortot, Alfred, 66, 100 Cotel, Morris Moshe, 115 Cowell, Henry, 4, 111 works viewed by Murail, 112 CPEMC, see Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) CRISS, see Collectif de Recherche Instrumentale et de Synthèse Sonore (CRISS) Crumb, George, 73 Makrokosmos, 76, 112 Cunningham, Merce, 84 Curtis-Smith, Curtis, 111 Dagognet, François, 98 Dahlback, Karl, 65 Dalbavie, Marc-André, 6, 142 Piano Concerto, 115 Darmstadt, see Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt) Davidovsky, Mario, 90, 112, 129 Synchronisms no. 6,129 De Visscher, Eric, 7, 8 Debussy, Claude, 13 life relation to Varèse, 66 views on notation, 53 works Cloches à travers les feuilles, 54 Danseuses de Delphes, 54 Estampes, 15

185 Images, 43 influence on Messiaen, 15, 35 influenced by Helmholtz, 54 L’isle joyeuse, 54 La cathédrale engloutie, 54 La mer, 34, 54 notation, 33, 34 Pagodes, 54 Pelléas et Mélisande, 15, 35, 58 Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, 54 relation to Campion, 137 relation to Liszt, 52 relation to Messiaen, 57 viewed by Hiltbrand, 100 Voiles, 126 Decoust, Michel, 75 Deleuze, Gilles, 24, 98 Le bergsonisme, 25 Delmain, Jacques, 59 Dillon, James, 75 disciplined action, 83–84 relation to Campion, 133 relation to Dufourt, 108 Domaine Musical, 57, 73–74 Donatoni, Franco, 115 Dufourt, Hugues, 6, 7, 72 life, 98–99 views on Stockhausen, 21 works Erlkönig, 103–109, 167 L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo, 100, 102 L’origine du monde, 99, 100 La maison du Sourd, 99 La tempesta d’apres Giorgione, 99 Les hivers, 99 Lucifer d’après Pollock, 99 On the Wings of the Morning, 30, 100 relation to Boulez, 74 Saturne, 163 Soleil de proie, 100 Vent d’automne, 99 writings relation to politics, 97 views on Boulez, 74, 92 Dukas, Paul, 54 Dumesnil, Maurice, 43, 52 Dumesnil, René, 61 Dumitrescu, Iancu, 19 Dusapin, Pascal, 8 Dutilleux, Henri, 8, 72 relation to Grisey, 56 Dutrieu, Pierre, 6

186

Ind ex Eckardt, Jason, 3, 126 Eco-Ensemble, 133 Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes activities of Murail, 56 ecological psychology, 18, 94–96, 154 compared with cognitive psychology, 95 concept of self, 153 relation to Harvey, 153 relation to Seel, 157 écriture, 79, 99, 131, 132 Eliot, T. S., 118 Ensemble 21, 6 Ensemble Fa, 6 Ensemble Intercontemporain, 7, 8, 74, 117 Ensemble L’Itinéraire, 35, 163 activities of Dufourt, 99 history, 17, 71 programming, 72 relation to Harvey, 145 relation to Hurel, 114 relation to Messiaen, 56 relation to New York School, 91 relation to Scriabin, 48 relation to technology, 70 rhetoric, 73, 98 viewed by Campion, 132 Ensemble Sospeso, 6, 7 Eötvös, Péter, 19 Escaich, Thierry, 7 Estrin, Morton, 93 Fano, Michel Sonate pour deux pianos, 165 Fauré, Gabriel, 44, 49 Feinberg, Alan, 4 Feldman, Morton, 4, 76 life views on Boulez, 92 works For Bunita Marcus, 92 Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, 93 Piano, 92 relation to Murail, 91 Triadic Memories, 92 Fenelon, Philippe, 6 Ferneyhough, Brian, 3, 75, 114, 115 works Lemma-Icon-Epigram, 76 viewed by Burge, 3 Ferrari, Luc, 8

festivals and exhibitions Festival Archipel, 2007, 103 Festival d’Automne, 2006, 103 Full-Fire Tribute to Tristan Murail, 2013, 23 IRCAM@Columbia, 1999, 6 Milano Musica, 2008, 101 Rendezvous – Masterpieces from the Centre Georges Pompidou and Guggenheim Museums, 1998, 6 Sounds French, 2003, 7 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Wissenschaftslehre, 42 Fineberg, Joshua, 115–118 life relation to Campion, 128 views on Grisey, 152 works Grisaille, 128 Lightning, 117 Recueil de pierre et de sable, 127 Till Human Voices Wake Us, 118 Tremors, 118–120 Veils, 120–124 writings Classical Music – Why Bother?, 125 views on Dufourt, 109 Finnissy, Michael, 3, 75, 76 works English Country Tunes, 76, 77, 81 relation to Liszt, 38 relation to Murail, 91 Florent, Maurice, 72 Florenz, Jean-Louis, 7 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 166 Forte, Allen, 130 Franck, César, 55 Fritsch, Johannes, 19 Gerzso, Andrew, 7 Gibson, James J., 94 writings concept of self, 153, 154 relation to Dufourt, 108 The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 95 Gieseking, Walter, 100 Glass, Phillip relation of works to Dalbavie, 115 Globokar, Vinko, 115 IRCAM, 75 Glock, William, 116

Ind ex Goehr, Alexander, 57 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von works Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 109 Die Walhverwandschaften, 8 Erlkönig, 103 relation to Dufourt, 99 relation to Helmholtz, 10 Goeyvaerts, Karel Nummer I, 165 Goldenweiser, Alexander, 42 Gordon, Michael, 128 Grey, John M., 163 Griffiths, Paul views on Harvey, 144 Grisey, Gérard, 6, 7, 17, 26, 71, 151, 153, 162, 166 life Darmstadt, 20 relation to Messiaen, 16, 56, 71 relation to Murail, 91 viewed by Fineberg, 152 views on perception, 94 views on piano, 47 works influence on Saariaho, 7 Les espaces acoustiques, 48 Modulations, 24 Partiels, 48, 72, 82, 99 relation to Dufourt, 109 Talea, 6, 130 viewed by Fineberg, 152 viewed by Hurel, 114 Vortex temporum, 27, 47–48, 127, 133, 134, 166 writings relation to politics, 97 views on Boulez, 92 GRM, see Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), 8, 17, 66, 131 relation to Campion, 132 Gurvin, Olav, 65 Guy, François-Frédéric, 103 Guyonnet, Jacques, 98 Hába, Alois, 19 Hamelin, Marc-André, 103 Handel, Stephen, 95 Harvard University activities of Adams, 116 activities of Bernstein, 76

187 activities of Fineberg, 117, 120 Harvey, Jonathan life Buddhism, 152 views on perception, 154 views on technology, 69 works Advaya, 143 Bhakti, 145 Four Images after Yeats, 144 Haiku, 144 Homage to Cage, à Chopin (und Ligeti ist auch dabei), 144 Mortuos plango, vivos voco, 7, 44 Nataraja, 6 One Evening, 143, 146 relation to Fineberg, 149 Song Offerings, 6 The Riot, 7 Tombeau de Messiaen, 6, 150 Vers, 144 Heimer, David, 129 Heine, Heinrich, 37 Helffer, Claude, 118 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 42 works Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik, 27 writings influence on composers, 54 views on Goethe, 10 Henry, Pierre, 8, 66, 132 Hersant, Philippe, 72 Hersh, Michael, 126 Hervé, Jean-Luc, 125 Hesiod Works and Days, 89, 91 Hiltbrand, Louis, 19, 98, 100, 104, 105, 118, 167 views on interpretation, 168 Hodeir, André, 57 Hofman, Josef, 16 Holstein, Jean-Paul, 72 Honegger, Arthur, 97 Horowitz, Vladimir, 16 Hurel, Philippe, 6, 7, 47, 142 views on spectral music, 114 d’Indy, Vincent, 97 Institut d’Etudes Politiques activities of Murail, 56

188

Ind ex Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), 17, 75, 130–133 activities of Boulez, 74 activities of Campion, 128, 132, 133 activities of Dalbavie, 115 activities of Harvey, 142 activities of L’Itinéraire composers, 74 activities of Saariaho, 114 Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt), 60 activities of Harvey, 142 activities of Messiaen, 57 activities of Thomas, 75 IRCAM, see Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) Ives, Charles, 111 James, William writings Principles of Psychology, 40 relation to Gibson, 153 Johnston, Ben, 54, 112 Knocking Piece, 112 Jolas, Betsy, 57 Jolivet, André, 69 politics, 97 Kant, Immanuel, 108 relation to Dufourt, 167 Katz, Ruth, 65 Keller, Hans, 142 Kempff, Wilhelm, 100 Kodály, Zoltán, 64 Koechlin, Charles, 97 Kubera, Joseph, 5 L’Itinéraire, see Ensemble L’Itinéraire Lachenmann, Helmut, 115 Guero, 76, 112 Laloy, Louis views on Bergson, 50 Leikin, Anatole, 45 Lenot, Jacques, 6 Leroux, Philippe, 6, 7 Leschitizky, Theodor, 41 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 72 Lévinas, Michaël, 17, 72, 99, 165 relation to Murail, 78 works Appels, 163 Concerto pour un piano-espace no. 2, 165

Voix dans un vaisseau d’airain, 163 Levinson, Gerald, 35 Ligeti, György, 20, 117, 163 works Atmosphères, 20 études, 136 Lontano, 20 Ramifications, 20 relation to Campion, 137 liminal state relation to Fineberg, 127 relation to Grisey, 158 relation to Harvey, 158 relation to Murail, 86, 158 relation to spectral music, 24 Lindberg, Magnus, 7, 142 relation to Saariaho, 115 Lipatti, Dinu, 98 Liszt, Franz, 13, 166 life instrument collection, 36 performance aesthetic, 36–37 works Au bord d’une source, 52 Bagatelle sans tonalité, 39 Die Glocken des Straßburger Münsters, 43 études, 37 Les cloches de Genève, 43 Les jeux d’eau de la villa d’Este, 38, 166 notation, 34 Nuages gris, 39 Piano Concerto No. 2, 39 relation to Feldman, 93 relation to Scriabin, 46 Réminiscences de Don Juan, 41 Sonata in B minor, 39 Sposalizio, 37, 43 Unstern!, 39 viewed by Hiltbrand, 100 Lomax, Alan, 64 Loriod, Jeanne, 72 Loriod, Yvonne, 59, 150 Lucier, Alvin, 4, 92 Music for Piano with Pure Wave Slow Sweep Oscillators, 156 Magaloff, Nikita, 100 Maiguascha, Mesías, 19 Makan, Keeril, 126 Malt, Mikhail, 7 Manoury, Philippe, 7, 118 Pluton, 131

Ind ex Mantovani, Bruno, 7 de Mare, Anthony, 5 Marmontel, Antoine-François, 3 Martenot, Maurice, 66 Mathews, Max V., 17, 68, 70, 163 IRCAM, 75 writings The Digital Computer as a Musical Instrument, 68, 69 The Technology of Computer Music, 68 Mauzey, Peter, 67 Maxwell Davies, Peter, 58 Merlet, Dominique, 118 Messiaen, Olivier, 9, 13 life politics, 97 teaching, 71 viewed by Hodeir, 57 works Catalogue d’oiseaux, 16, 56, 59, 124, 150 Chronochromie, 59, 61 Couleurs de la cité céleste, 59, 71 Fête de belles eaux, 72 influenced by Debussy, 35 La fauvette des jardins, 15 Messe de la Pentecôte, 56 notation, 34 Oiseaux exotiques, 16, 56, 59, 150 Préludes, 15, 44 Quatour pour le fin du temps, 59 Quatre études de rythme, 15, 120 relation to Harvey, 143 Réveil des oiseaux, 16, 59, 150 Sept haïkaï, 59, 71 serialism, 164 Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine, 56 Turangalîla-Symphonie, 59 viewed by Murail, 112 Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus, 15, 59 Visions de l’Amen, 15 writings Technique de mon langage musical, 56, 62 Traité de rythme, de couleur et d’ornithologie, 57, 62 Metfessel, Milton F., 64 Meyer-Eppler, Werner, 67 Michelangeli, Arturo Benedetti, 100 Michel-Dansac, Donatienne, 6 Milhaud, Darius, 75 Miller, Paul D. (“DJ Spooky”), 126 minimalism, 4, 5, 14, 76, 114, 116, 130

189 Monet, Claude, 86 Moog, Robert, 67 Moore, Keith, 23 Moore, Lisa, 5 Moorer, James A., 163 Moravec, Paul, 128 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus instruments owned by Liszt, 36 works performance practice, 53 relation to Messiaen, 15, 58 Mozer, Alexander, 42 Murail, Tristan, 6, 7, 17 life Columbia University, 7 L’Itinéraire, 99 relation to Fineberg, 117, 120 relation to Messiaen, 16, 56, 63, 71 views on Cage, 82 views on perception, 94 works C’est un jardin secret, 72 Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire…, 44, 85 Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe…, 8, 76, 136 Désintégrations, 24 Estuaire, 76 Ethers, 72, 76, 163 Gondwana, 99, 163 influence on Saariaho, 7 influenced by Liszt, 39 La mandragore, 27, 85 Le désenchantement du monde, 30, 90 Les travaux et les jours, 8, 23, 85–91 Mémoire/Erosion, 72, 76 relation to Boulez, 74 relation to Cage, 82–85 relation to Dufourt, 104, 109 relation to Stockhausen, 166 Territoires de l’oubli, 11, 76–85, 113, 155, 163, 166 writings relation to politics, 97 views on Boulez, 92 musique concrète, 15, 46, 58, 66, 129, 131, 132 My, Dominique, 6 Nancarrow, Conlon works relation to Campion, 137 relation to Ligeti, 20 studies, 136

190

Ind ex New Complexity, 4, 14, 18, 38, 75, 81, 85, 114 Niculescu, Ştefan, 19 Nono, Luigi …sofferte onde serene…, 112 Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR), 17, 67 Noreen, Kirk, 6 notation, 83 influenced by technology, 23 relation to Debussy, 27, 51 relation to Dufourt, 104 relation to Harvey, 156 relation to Murail, 23 relation to New Complexity, 75 relation to transcription, 64 spectral music, 9, 25, 32, 75, 156 Oldfather, Christopher, 4 Oppens, Ursula, 4 Paderewski, Ignacy Jan, 16 Paris, François, 125 Partch, Harry, 112 pedaling, 112 Basile, 2 Campion A Complete Wealth of Time, 136 Debussy, 51, 53 influenced by Liszt, 52 Dufourt Erlkönig, 106 Fineberg, 117, 119 Veils, 122 Liszt, 37 influence on Debussy, 53 Murail Les travaux et les jours, 86 Territoires de l’oubli, 77 relation to spectral music, 9 Scriabin, 45 viewed by Safonov, 44 stratigraphy, 32 relation to Debussy, 52 relation to Fineberg, 127 relation to Liszt, 37 relation to Murail, 78 relation to Scriabin, 44, 45 Viñes, 52 Peignot, Jérôme, 46 Pesson, Gérard, 7, 118 Pierce, John R., 69, 163 Polansky, Larry, 128 Poletti, Manuel, 7

Ponthus, Marc, 4 Poulenc, François, 52 Press, Vera Maurina, 93 Prokofiev, Grigori, 45 Puckett, Miller, 131 Rădulescu, Horaţiu, 19 Rameau, Jean-Philippe relation to Messiaen, 58 Ravel, Maurice works compared with Debussy, 27, 53 Daphnis et Chloé, 58 Gaspard de la nuit, 28, 85 La valse, 28 relation to Campion, 137 relation to Dalbavie, 115 relation to Messiaen, 57 Reich, Steve relation to Dalbavie, 115 Renon, Geneviève, 72 Richter, Sviatoslav, 100 Riegger, Wallingford, 91 Rihm, Wolfgang works viewed by Burge, 3 Risset, Jean-Claude, 17, 26, 44, 69, 162, 163 and IRCAM, 75 Mutations, 24, 163 An Introductory Catalogue of Computer Synthesized Sounds, 70 Rosen, Charles, 11 Rosenthal, Moriz, 11, 129 Rostroprovich, Mstislav, 8 Rubinstein, Artur, 16 Ruggles, Carl, 4 Rzewski, Frederic The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, 76, 77 Saariaho, Kaija, 7, 53, 114, 142 Sachs, Curt, 64 Safonov, Vasily, 41, 44 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 97 Saphir, Moritz, 37 Sauer, Emil von, 93 Scarpini, Pietro, 3 Scelsi, Giacinto, 20, 73 works piano music, 20 Quattro pezzi per orchestra (su una nota sola), 20

Ind ex Schaeffer, Pierre, 46, 66, 132 works relation to Campion, 129, 141 relation to Debussy, 58 relation to Messiaen, 58 Schmitz, E. Robert, 55 Schnabel, Artur, 100 Schoenberg, Arnold, 3, 5 life relation to Feldman, 92 Verein für musikalische Privataufführung, 73 works aesthetics, 4, 109 Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11, 39 relation to Scriabin, 40 viewed by Hodeir, 57 Schubert, Franz works reception, 109 relation to Dufourt, 99, 101 transcribed by Liszt, 53 Scriabin, Alexander, 13, 153, 166 life interest in science, 41 relation to Debussy, 34 relation to Feldman, 93 sound recordings, 33, 49 views on Liszt, 34 works Etudes, Op. 8, 93 notation, 34 Poème-Nocturne, Op. 61, 43 Preludes, Op. 74, 40 relation to Harvey, 150 relation to Liszt, 40 relation to Scarpini, 3 Sonata no. 6, Op. 62, 43 Sonata no. 9, Op. 68, 45 synthetic chord, 42, 59 Vers la flamme, Op. 72, 45 Second Viennese School, 4 relation to Domaine Musical, 73 relation to Harvey, 142 relation to Scriabin, 40 viewed by Hodeir, 57 Seeger, Charles, 65 Seel, Martin concept of artistic resonating, 152, 158 views on perception, 157 semiotics relation to Campion, 129, 133, 136

191 relation to Harvey, 143 serialism, 19 1950s, 160 1970s, 14 relation to aleatoricism, 60 relation to Babbitt, 164 relation to Boulez, 120 relation to cognitive psychology, 94 relation to dynamics, 120 relation to Harvey, 142 relation to Lindberg, 115 relation to Messiaen, 59, 60, 61, 165 relation to Murail, 71, 76, 151 relation to politics, 97 Sherlaw Johnson, Robert, 58 Sontag, Susan, 107 Staatliche Musikhochschule (Trossingen) activities of Grisey, 56 Stein, Erwin, 142 Steuermann, Eduard, 3 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 15, 20, 60, 71, 75, 142, 163 works Hymnen, 57 Klavierstücke, 21, 165 Kontakte, 21, 156 Kreuzspiel, 165 Mantra, 112, 118, 165 Mikrophonie II, 118 Mixtur, 57, 118 Momente, 57 relation to Harvey, 147 relation to Murail, 166 Stimmung, 21, 165 Studien, 21 viewed by Dufourt, 101 viewed by Murail, 112 Stokowski, Leopold, 69 Stravinsky, Igor, 73 Le sacre du printemps, 58, 61 relation to Messiaen, 57 Stroppa, Marco, 142 Studio di Fonologia Musicale, 17 Supové, Kathleen, 5 synaesthesia, 62 relation to Messiaen, 61 relation to Scriabin, 40 synthesizers development, 125 activities of Moog, 67 activities of Stockhausen, 21 relation to Scriabin, 46

192

Ind ex synthesizers (cont.) RCA Mark II, 67 viewed by Mathews, 68 Yamaha DX7, 67 Tenney, James, 19 Termen, Lev Sergeyevich, 66 Tessier, Roger, 17, 72, 99 relation to Dufourt, 109 Tézenas, Suzanne, 73 Thalberg, Sigismond, 37 Thom, René, 167 relation to Dufourt, 108 Thomas, Ernst, 75 Toop, Richard on Stockhausen, 165 Troncin, Dominique, 118 Tudor, David, 91 Ussachevsky, Vladimir, 67 Varèse, Edgard, 46, 66, 73, 129, 153, 163 Viñes, Ricardo, 52 Vinogradov, Boris de, 72 virtuosity, 18 1970s compared with nineteenth century, 77 relation to Debussy, 51, 52 relation to disciplined action, 108 relation to Dufourt, 19, 101, 102, 103, 108, 167 relation to Feldman, 92, 93 relation to Harvey, 151 relation to Hiltbrand, 100

relation to Lévinas, 166 relation to Liszt, 36, 37, 129, 166 relation to Messiaen, 15 relation to Murail, 113, 158 relation to New Complexity, 75 relation to Scriabin, 44 relation to spectral music, 18 Vivier, Claude, 19, 71 Vuillermoz, Emile, 44 Wagner, Wieland, 57 Weber, Max Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, 90 Webern, Anton von, 5 relation to Feldman, 92 Wessel, David, 131, 142 Wieck, Clara, 37 Wolfe, Julia, 128 Wolff, Christian, 4 Wolpe, Stefan, 91 Wundt, Wilhelm, 42 Wuorinen, Charles, 5 Wyeth, Andrew, 86 Xenakis, Iannis, 15, 20, 117, 163 CEMAMu, 131 Musique formelles, 57 works Metastaesis, 57 Pithoprakta, 57 viewed by Dufourt, 101 Zorn, John, 128 Zverev, Nicolai, 41, 42