Spectral music
The (acoustic-composition) spectral approach originated in France in the early 1970s, and techniques were developed, and later refined, primarily at IRCAM, Paris, with the Ensemble l'Itinéraire, by composers such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail.
Proto-spectral composers include Claude Debussy, Edgard Varèse, Giacinto Scelsi, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, La Monte Young, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
[9] Also crucial to the origins of spectralism was the development of techniques of sound analysis and synthesis in computer music and acoustics during this period, especially focused around IRCAM in France and Darmstadt in Germany.
[11] Spectralism as a recognizable and unified movement, however, arose during the early 1970s, in part as a reaction against and alternative to the primarily pitch focused aesthetics of the serialism and post-serialism which was ascendant at the time.
Their early work emphasized the use of the overtone series, techniques of spectral analysis and ring and frequency modulation, and slowly unfolding processes to create music which gave a new attention to timbre and texture.
[12] The German Feedback group, including Johannes Fritsch, Mesías Maiguashca, Péter Eötvös, Claude Vivier, and Clarence Barlow, was primarily associated with students and disciples of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and began to pioneer spectral techniques around the same time.
[14] This folk tradition, as collected by Béla Bartók (1904–1918), with its acoustic scales derived directly from resonance and natural wind instruments of the alphorn family, like the buciume and tulnice, as well as the cimpoi bagpipe, inspired several spectral composers, including Corneliu Cezar, Anatol Vieru, Aurel Stroe, Ștefan Niculescu, Horațiu Rădulescu, Iancu Dumitrescu, and Octavian Nemescu.
[25] Other spectral music composers include those from the German Feedback group, principally Johannes Fritsch, Mesías Maiguashca, Péter Eötvös, Claude Vivier, and Clarence Barlow.
[1] Independent of spectral music developments in Europe, American composer James Tenney's output included more than fifty significant works that feature spectralist traits.
The spectralist movement inspired more recent composers such as Julian Anderson, Ana-Maria Avram, Joshua Fineberg, Georg Friedrich Haas, Jonathan Harvey, Fabien Lévy, Magnus Lindberg, and Kaija Saariaho.
[28] In the United States, composers such as Alvin Lucier, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Phill Niblock, and Glenn Branca relate some of the influences of spectral music into their own work.
