The Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music

by Bauer, Amy; Cagney, Liam; Mason, William

• ISBN13: 9780190633547
• ISBN10: 0190633549
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780190633561
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-10-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

Spectral music as a school of compositional thought was originally associated with the ensemble l'Itineraire in Paris in the 1970s. Since that time, it has only grown in significance and recognition as it transitioned from concert halls to dance clubs and made other incursions into popular culture. The Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music offers a fully new and expansive understanding of current scholarly and creative activity related to the spectral music movement and its legacy from its founding in the mid-1970's to the current day.

The definition of spectral music has been at the center of debate among spectral composers and scholars since Hugues Dufourt first coined the term in the late 1970s. Rather than aiming to present an overarching definition of spectralism, the handbook shows the multiplicity of the spectral legacy by presenting diverse perspectives from top scholars and composers in the field. It includes essays on major founding figures such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, as well as the proto-spectral practices of Scriabin and Messiaen, and the influences of spectral music on serialism, postmodernism, sound art, and psychedelic rock. It features essays by some of the movement's most significant living composers, such as Steve Lehman, Marilyn Nonken, Ken Ueno, and Patricia Alessandrini.

A long overdue examination of an important compositional trend in late 20th century music, this handbook will appeal to scholars, composers, and students desiring to become better acquainted with the broad influence of spectral music: what birthed it, what defines it, and what its future holds in the 21st century.

Author Biography

Amy Bauer is Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She has published articles and book chapters on the music of Thomas Adès, Carlos Chávez, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Georg Friedrich Haas, Helmut Lachenmann, Mauro Lanza, David Lang, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Gabriela Ortiz, Salvatore Sciarrino, Helena Tulve, and Claude Vivier, as well as on television music, opera, spectral music, and the philosophy and reception of modernist music and music theory. Her monographs include Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (2011), and the collection György Ligeti's Cultural Identities (2017), co-edited with Márton Kerékfy.

Liam Cagney is Lecturer in Music at BIMM University. His musical criticism regularly appears in publications like the Irish Times, Gramophone, the Guardian, the TLS, the Spectator, the Telegraph, VAN, and Frieze and his podcast with Stephen Graham, Talking Musicology, was nominated for a Classical:NEXT Innovation Award. Liam's first monograph Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music Composition in the Information Age was published in 2024.

Will Mason is Associate Professor of Music at Wheaton College (MA). His work as a composer and performer has appeared on New Amsterdam Recordings and Exit Stencil Records. His scholarship covers topics ranging from microtonality to electroacoustic music, particularly concerning philosophies of embodiment.

Table of Contents

Part I Introduction
Chapter 1. Introduction
Part II Spectral Precedents
Chapter 2. Skryabin's Mystical Space and the Spectral Attitude
Kenneth Smith
Chapter 3. Hugues Dufourt's Epistemology of Fields, vis-à-vis Varäse and Bachelar
d Matthew Mendez
Chapter 4. Olivier Messiaen: Spectralist
Robert Sholl
Chapter 5. Paul Hindemith's Technologically Mediated Concept of Nature
Alexandra Monchick
Chapter 6. Scelsi's Pfhat: Apparitions of a Monumental Past
Rebecca Leydon
Chapter 7. György Ligeti as a Forerunner to Spectral Composition
Benjamin Levy
Chapter 8. A Short History of Just Intonation in America
Kyle Gann
Chapter 9. James Tenney and the Theory of Harmony
Robert Wannamaker
Chapter 10. The Incorporeal Music of Eliane Radigue
Charles Curtis
Part III Spectralisms
Chapter 11. Gérard Grisey and Spectra as Theoretical and Practical Models
François-Xavier Féron
Chapter 12. Hugues Dufourt and the Origins of His World
Marilyn Nonken
Chapter 13. Tristan Murail's Poetics of Music
Liam Cagney
Chapter 14. Timbre, Technology, and Hybridization in the Music of Michael Levïnas
Eddie Campbell
Chapter 15. Timbral-Harmonic Hierarchy in Claude Vivier's Lonely Child
Christopher Gainey
Chapter 16. On Saariaho's Microsonology
Judith Lochhead
Chapter 17. Spectralism as "Spiritual Breakthrough" in the Music of Jonathan Harvey
Arnold Whittall
Chapter 18. Spectral aesthetics and slow listening in the music of Helena Tulve
Amy Bauer
Chapter 19. Philippe Leroux and the Notion of the Post-Spectral
Paul Clift
Chapter 20. Peter Ablinger and the Liminal Voice
Rebecca Flore
Chapter 21. Harmonic structure, optics, and ideology in the music of Georg Friedrich Haas
Amy Bauer and Landon Morrison
Chapter 22. Psychedelic Rock, Techno, and the Music of Fausto Romitelli
Arbo, Alessandro
Part IV Spectralism in cross-cultural context
Chapter 23. Horatiu Radulescu and the Intangible Dimensions of Plasmatic Music
Liviu Marinescu
Chapter 24. Jean Louis Florentz and Spectralism
Robert Sholl
Chapter 25. Transcending Ethnic Borders in Spectral Music
Yayoi Uno Everett
Chapter 26. Spectralism in the Service of Expression and Irishness in the Music of Donnacha Dennehy
Nicole Grimes
Part V Spectral Performance Practices
Chapter 27. An Attitude Towards the Performance of Spectral Music
Marilyn Nonken
Chapter 28. Performing Spectral Ensemble Works by Grisey and Dumitrescu
Richard Carrick
Chapter 29. Sources, aesthetics and performance in Radulescu's Piano Sonatas
Ian Pace
Part VI Critical and Material Perspectives
Chapter 30. Sound in Itself: the French theorization of timbre
James Steintrager
Chapter 31. The Phenomenological Turn in Romanian Spectralism
Aaron Hayes
Chapter 32. Spectralism and Research in Psychoacoustics and Music Perception
Philippe Lalitte
Chapter 33. French Spectral music and improvisation
Stephen Lehman
Chapter 34. Expression and Technologies of Perception in DiCastri and Adamcyk's Phonobellow
William Mason
Chapter 35. Dynamic Form and Models for Analyzing Processive Form in Spectral Music
Joshua Banks Mailman
Chapter 36. "La voix comme radicale altérité"? Spectral Music for the Voice
Lukas Haselböck
Part VII Spectral composers on their work
Chapter 37. Spectral Methodology of the Virtual and Physical in the Sonic Art of Patricia Alessandrini
Patricia Alessandrini and Timothy Rutherford-Johnson
Chapter 38. Edmund Campion's Spectral Influences
Edmund Campion
Chapter 39. Embodied Practice and Historical Aspectuality in Ken Ueno's "Person-Specific" Concertos
Ken Ueno
Chapter 40. Jean Luc Hervé and his Aesthetic of Surroundings
Jean Luc Hervé
Chapter 41. Sounds and Spectra as Symbols
Jacob Sudol

Index