Can we any longer usefully speak of spectral music, beyond a very particular moment in Paris in the 1970s? Though the label still has a currency, the validity of the term has long been disputed even by its key practitioners. Gérard Grisey preferred to speak of liminal music, music on a threshold, and of spectralism as an attitude rather than a set of techniques. Yet a shared curiosity about the inner life of sounds, stimulated by an engagement with technology, certainly enabled a radical rethinking and renewal of how music could speak. Spectral thinking enabled composers to re-engage with time, with listening, with memory. Through this spectral node flowed all other kinds of music, which flowered in all sorts of new and varied directions. A heightened awareness of the properties of sound prompted new modes of musical thought and expression. Spectralism also represented a renewal of what might be understood more broadly as modernist thinking in the music of the later twentieth century. Spectral thinking – rather than merely the science of the spectrum of sound – acknowledges the importance for so-called spectral music of a wider set of concerns that engage with time, space, listening, nature, and society.

It is tolerably well known that Gérard Grisey's first instrument was the accordion, but little has been written about the influence the pioneering spectral composer's main instrument had on his compositional language. The decade of the 1960s was marked by the centrality of the accordion and saw the completion of his first youthful compositional essays, most of which were scored for the accordion. It was also the period in which he studied at a school devoted to the accordion, in Trossingen. Later, when studying with Messiaen in Paris, Grisey distanced himself from the accordion, writing in 1969 that ‘I am not playing accordion anymore. My way is another one.’ After establishing the chronology of Grisey's engagement with the accordion, this article assesses the extent to which the spectral composer's training on the accordion left traces in his mature compositions and raises questions about the standard historiographies (and geographies) of French spectral music.

Following the aesthetics of pure continuity in the late 1970s, Grisey moved on to compose for unpitched percussion in Tempus ex Machina, focusing on pure rhythm. Shortly afterwards he elaborated on his theory of temporality in a talk and article of the same title; one decade later, he included Tempus as the first movement of Le Noir de l’Étoile. Grisey insisted on the significance of the perception of musical time, of the skin of time – as opposed to its skeleton or flesh. This article puts forward an interpretation of Grisey's thinking of temporality, drawing on concepts from French philosophy. It further provides an analysis of two sections of Le Noir, tracing these concepts in the structuring of musical time, with a view to providing a possible direction towards a re-definition of spectral time.

Discourse surrounding spectral music frequently makes reference to nature and related language. Practitioners, theorists, and musicologists have discussed different aspects and perspectives on the idea of nature in the relation to this music and it is not always clear that these terms are used in the same way. This article examines the different meanings of ‘nature’ applied to various concepts and techniques in spectral music, the extent to which these descriptors may be misleading, and the cultural context and possible motivations for the use of this kind of rhetoric. Through a discussion of the derivation structure in spectral music, a focus on human perception, metaphorical references to nature, the rhetoric surrounding the harmonic series and instrumental (re)synthesis, and finally mimetic references to nature in music using spectral techniques (including a discussion of the music of François-Bernard Mâche), the article endeavours to provide a thorough survey of the subject.

This article examines Haas's politically programmatic work in vain in relation to a later essay wherein Haas disavows politically motivated composition. The first section investigates Haas's allegation that in vain’s ideological failure is due to its politically inappropriate semantic richness. Yet multiple interpretive passes through the piece show that in vain fails to be ideologically straightforward only because of a deeper ethical commitment to an aesthetics of defamiliarization. In the second section, I show how the basic political narrative is complicated by the estranging effect of darkness; in the third section, I align Haas's aesthetics with a post-Spectral ethics, and consider how the narrative meaning of overtone chords is complicated by their potential for challenging preconceived categories of listening. The final section returns to the essay and its blind spot for this deeper ethical aesthetics that obscures in vain’s ideological clarity, speculating that Haas's omission betrays hidden anxieties about the modernist ethical project.

The appearance of the corps sonore at a key dramatic moment in Rameau's Pygmalion (1748) opens up an espace sensible (a term borrowed from Michel Leiris) where sounds derived from the harmonic series can articulate transformed temporal and spatial environments. The corps sonore – rediscovered and repurposed by the spectral movement of the 1970s – reappears in a number of twenty-first-century operas in order to animate a late-modern sense of the espace sensible. Instead of crossing a threshold towards the transcendent, the seemingly immobile corps sonore can now represent a modernist sense of loss, death, exile, ruin, and failure. Michaël Levinas's 2010 operatic reinterpretation of Kafka's Metamorphosis stands as an exemplar of the ways in which the spectrum of sound (here the voice of the ‘becoming-animal’ Gregor Samsa metamorphosed by electronic means) can create a ‘deterritorialized’ space of alienation. Liminal, spectral spaces in works by Dufourt, Grisey, Haas, Harvey, Murail, and Saariaho are also discussed.