This chapter describes new music in Paris in the late 1960s, the period when the young spectral composers were students at the Paris Conservatoire. It opens with an account of Messiaen’s composition class and how elements such as neumes and Messiaen’s analyses of Debussy and Ravel informed Grisey’s, Murail’s, and Levinas’s emerging musical sensibilities. After giving a brief biographical account of those latter composers and Roger Tessier, the chapter touches on serialism’s changing status at a time when it had begun to be taught at the Paris Conservatoire; the effect of May ’68 on the Conservatoire’s pedagogy and on musical mores more generally among young composers; Fifth Republic France’s increased funding for new music festivals in regional cities such as Royan; Boulez and Xenakis’s profiles as the two most influential composers in France; and collectives, aleatoricism, and music theatre in post-1968 composition. The chapter closes with an account of Grisey’s early student works, in particular their creative adaptation of Messiaen’s personnages sonores concept towards the construction of audibly distinct musical figures, which would become a key element in Grisey’s musical style.

The composer-performer collective l’Itinéraire, founded in 1973 by Murail and Tessier, was the de facto platform for spectral music in France. This chapter shows how l’Itinéraire formed with the aim of establishing an organ for the music of the youngest generation of French composers, and how, with the demise of Boulez’s Domaine Musical ahead of the opening of IRCAM, l’Itinéraire fortuitously found itself positioned as the successor to that Parisian new music series, endorsed by Messiaen and recipient of a state subsidy. The chapter details how Grisey composed Périodes, a l’Itinéraire commission and the first work composed from his Les Espaces acoustiques cycle, and how Grisey attended the acoustics laboratory at the Université Paris VI Jussieu, where, alongside lessons in musical acoustics, he absorbed the work of Abraham Moles on the application of information theory to art. The chapter also shows how Murail began to incorporate the models of spectral harmonicity and periodicity into his music from Tigres de verre onwards, and it explores the relationship of these instrumental compositional techniques to the computer sound synthesis work of Risset and Chowning.

The book’s conclusion situates spectral music as a modernist musical movement. It shows how spectral music reprises many of serialism’s concerns, albeit on a more psychoacoustically accurate level. It relates the debates between Levinas and the other spectral composers to an older debate about formalism in art between Flaubert and Sand. Finally, the book concludes by situating Grisey as the founder of spectral music.

This chapter gives an overview of Gérard Grisey’s youth and early musical formation. It shows how, having been given an accordion at the age of five, Grisey went on to become a youthful virtuoso on the instrument, winning medals at the accordion World Cup. It discusses how, as a teenager, Grisey became preoccupied with music, religion, and death, three topics that were for him intimately linked, and how Grisey’s later musical values of beauty, clarity, and perceptivity were already established by the time he arrived at the Paris Conservatoire. It details aspects of his compositional training in Trossingen under Helmut Degen and in Paris under Henri Duttileux, before finishing with a glimpse of Grisey’s interest in the Catholic mystic and scientist Teilhard de Chardin.

Spectral music as a distinct movement began in 1976, when, within a few days of each other, Murail’s Mémoire-érosion and Grisey’s Partiels were both premiered by Ensemble l’Itinéraire. This chapter explores how, driven by the theorist Dufourt, the young composers associated with l’Itinéraire developed a theoretical identity in contradistinction to Boulez and IRCAM. As well as detailing the salient qualities of Grisey and Murail’s music in this period, the chapter explores the diverse spectral music of Dufourt, Levinas, and Tessier. Dufourt’s works Erewhon, La tempesta d’après Giorgione, and Saturne engage with insights regarding sound related to his encounters with Risset and Chowning. Levinas’s works like Appels foregrounded sonic parasitism and a dramatic spectacle far removed from the more reserved forms of Murail, of which the chapter shows Levinas to have been at times a public critic. Tessier’s music in this period was expressionistic and explored electroacoustic resources. As well as detailing these various spectral sub-currents, the chapter explores the role of l’Itinéraire’s performers in helping to develop performing techniques adequate to the spectral writing.

This chapter and the next focus respectively on Grisey’s last two student compositions, in which salient features of his mature music begin to appear in germinal form. Vagues, chemins, le souffle is scored for two spatialised orchestras and amplified clarinet. The chapter details how Grisey adopted and creatively modified techniques from the post-war modernist composers Xenakis, Boulez, and Stockhausen, and how the latter music, often referred to as sound-mass music, should be considered in actuality a continuation of serialism’s principles applied to statistical masses. In this regard, Grisey’s music developed through creative engagement with serialism. The aspects of Grisey’s music covered are the use of resonance models and the harmonic spectrum, the composition of auditory processes, the composition of sound metabolisms, and the notion of a large-scale orchestral simulation of a small-scale instrumental timbre.

The introductory chapter to Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music: Composition in the Information Age situates the book’s historical narrative by focusing on correspondence between Grisey and Dufourt in 1980 discussing what name they should give their common musical movement:’ spectral music’ or ‘liminal music’. This matter of naming indicates the compositional values the composers prioritised: movement over stasis, thresholds over states, psychoacoustic phenomena over traditional notes and pitches. The chapter then gives an overview of the book’s argument that spectral music developed from serialism through embracing information theory and developments in psychoacoustics and computer sound synthesis. Inasmuch as it arose in France but depended on developments that occurred at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the USA, spectral music was transatlantic in origin and signified a paradigm shift in musical composition.

By the end of the 1970s, the spectral composers were being invited to speak at the Darmstadt Summer Courses and were enjoying favourable press coverage in France. Recognising the need for a common epithet for their musical movement, they discussed a few possibilities: ’spectral’, ’liminal’, and ’vectorial’. This chapter explores, in turn, Dufourt’s concept of spectral music, which signified a compositional approach recognising and drawing on the microscopic scale of sound as the composer’s true material; Murail’s more technical vision of spectral music, and how, at IRCAM from the beginning of the 1980s, beginning with the electroacoustic work Désintégrations, Murail developed a sophisticated music drawing on computational resources; and Grisey’s notion of écriture liminale, a psychoacoustics-informed approach to compositional writing based on blurred statistical parameters and musical mutation. The chapter ends by detailing how the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982, at which the composers of l’Itinéraire gave a joint seminar, were the end of their common movement and the beginning of spectral music as an internationally known compositional attitude.

In 1972, Grisey and Murail were resident together at the Villa Medici in Rome as Prix de Rome winners. It was during this period that they first discussed together ideas regarding compositional techniques related to psychoacoustics and computer sound synthesis. This chapter explores each composer’s work during the period, which laid the foundation for the subsequent collective French spectral movement. Murail’s music, from Couleur de mer through Altitude 8000 onwards, sought to move away from the austerity of pointillist serialism towards sonorous beauty and poetic colour, aligning him to some degree with symbolist aesthetics. Grisey engaged in in-depth psychoacoustics self-study through reading books by Leipp and Winckel, books which outline what became known as the spectral attitude, and in Dérives he finally established his mature musical style. The chapter shows how, for each composer, meeting Scelsi was significant.

The chapter starts with an account of the rather hesitant and belated reception of twelve-tone technique in Western Europe, as exemplified by the situation in Italy, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. This is followed by an overview of the origins of European multiple serialism extending beyond Webern and Messiaen. The chapter shows above all that European serialism should not be restricted to its main protagonists such as Boulez, Nono, or Stockhausen. The music historical narrative of this important development in the period 1950–75 is in want of a more diverse view. Consequently, this chapter focuses on lesser-known composers of serial music such as Jean Barraqué, Michel Fano, Gilbert Amy, Karel Goeyvaerts, Herman Van San, Henri Pousseur, Bruno Maderna, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Bill Hopkins, and Bo Nilsson. The perspective is not merely broadened by introducing other composers who wrote aesthetically appealing works, but more importantly, presented other interpretations of what constitutes multiple serialism.

On 13 October 2017, James MacMillan’s 29-minute cantata The Sun Danced received its first performance in the Sanctuary of Fatima in Portugal. This was the 100th anniversary of what is claimed by the Catholic Church to have been the last in a cycle of apparitions of the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children in the Cova da Iria where, according to historical documentation, at least 50,000 people witnessed dramatic solar phenomena that to date remain unexplained. This chapter focuses primarily on the theological background to MacMillan’s compositional process, with particular reference to his choice of texts. These are highly unusual to the extent of being attributed by the children to a supernatural origin (the Virgin and the Angel of Portugal). The chapter will seek to explore how the work relates to the composer’s larger artistic and spiritual trajectory, to assess MacMillan’s purpose behind the writing of The Sun Danced, and to contextualize it with reference to other attempts by contemporary composers to take up the challenge of engaging with themes, positing the existence of an invisible spiritual realm and its interaction with human history and assessing the ‘mystical’ elements of the work in comparison to the musical mysticism of Olivier Messiaen.