Much of the discourse surrounding spectral music has centred on references to nature and related language. Appeals to the natural, the ecological, the biological, or the organic are pervasive enough that they are sometimes presented as a kind of justification or validation of the genre. This rhetoric is employed extensively by both practitioners of the music and, in analyses, by theorists and musicologists. However, it is not always clear that these terms are used in the same way. It is therefore worth examining the different senses in which spectral music, techniques, and thinking may be understood as ‘natural’, the extent to which the rhetoric of nature may be misleading, and the cultural context and possible motivations for the use of this kind of rhetoric.
The term ‘spectral music’ is commonly linked to a defining article by Hugues Dufourt in 1979Footnote 1 and the associated group of composers who founded Ensemble L'Itinéraire, including Dufourt as well as Michaël Lévinas, Gérard Grisey, and Tristan Murail. All these composers have made important musical contributions to the genre, but it is expressly the latter two who have written most extensively about their own music in these terms, and who have received the most significant scholarly attention to the spectral approach in their works. While many other propositions have been put forward to identify historical precedents, practices of other musical cultures, and alternative perspectives as spectral, the work of these French composers and those who have adopted and developed their ideas and methods remains a focal point. For clarity and simplicity I will also be centring my discussion on those composers and surrounding writings, though some of the ideas I will present may be applicable in broader conceptions of the genre.
Observers have been quick to note that the spectralists are not the first composers to discuss their music in terms of nature, identifying that ‘appeals to “the natural” as justification for particular compositional choice also constitute a venerable tradition in Western music’.Footnote 2 Paul Griffiths traces a long historical trajectory:
Modern composers have often sought validation for their new approaches precisely in nature – so proving themselves entirely traditional, since the appeal to nature is a constant of harmonic theory, from Pythagoras through medieval and Renaissance theorists, then through Rameau (whose treatise provided the first systematic understanding of chords and functions in the major-minor system), to the spectralists of the 20th century and early 21st. Messiaen's harmonic ideal was to imitate natural resonances, an ideal that spectralism then endorsed.Footnote 3
These writers’ use of terms such as ‘traditional’ is surely provocative, as early spectralists tended to view themselves as radical, if not revolutionary.Footnote 4 I do not find something as simple as a shared interest in nature sufficient grounds to call spectralism ‘traditional’, and few would argue that it offered no novel contributions. This aside, a clear preoccupation with nature runs through the discourse.
Gérard Grisey identified in spectral music an ‘ecology of sounds’ and ‘biological rhythms’, listing among the music's ‘consequences’ a ‘more “ecological” approach to timbres, noises and intervals’ and a ‘more “organic” approach to form by self-generation of sounds’.Footnote 5 He further stated that in his music ‘[t]he material derives from the natural growth of sonority’.Footnote 6 Other writers have said of Grisey's work that it ‘invokes the idea of nature’,Footnote 7 that it ‘[treats] sound as a living organism’Footnote 8 or even that the music itself is ‘an entity derived from the order of nature’.Footnote 9 Similarly, Tristan Murail has described ‘the natural life of the sound’,Footnote 10 affording each frequency its ‘own life’,Footnote 11 and commentators have found in his music an ‘attachment to a certain type of “Nature” that is undoubtedly linked to wide open spaces’,Footnote 12 an effort to afford an ‘intimate perception of natural sonic phenomena’,Footnote 13 to ‘[draw] on sounds from nature as a source for compositional material’,Footnote 14 and to ‘retain the spectrum [of a sound] as a marker of the natural realm’.Footnote 15
The appeal to nature and cultural context
When these descriptors are interpreted as a ‘justification’ or ‘validation’ of the spectral approach, they appear to act as an appeal to nature. As a rhetorical strategy, such an appeal insinuates that something is ‘good’ or ‘right’ because it is ‘natural’. In these postulations, terms associated with nature are meant to carry implicit value judgements. The British philosopher G E. Moore formalized the term ‘appeal to nature’ and discussed its application as a logical fallacy in his Principia Ethica.Footnote 16 Indeed, even if we accept at face value any of the claims about spectralism's natural qualities, this does not tell us that such qualities are desirable or interesting. Of course, artworks are not logical arguments, and it is not particularly sensible to imagine ‘spectralism’ as the conclusion to a deductively reasoned logical syllogism. Few would argue that it is incumbent upon any art form to ‘justify’ itself in these terms. However, some have described spectralism as a ‘radical challenge to avant-garde orthodoxy’Footnote 17 resulting in ‘a fundamental shift after which thinking about music can never be quite the same again’.Footnote 18 Such claims do seem to have something invested in the use of naturalistic language.
Eric Drott has compellingly argued that the generally politically charged early writings on spectralism (cast as ‘manifestos’Footnote 19) can be linked to the rise in prominence and changing language of leftist politics in France in the late 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 20 Situating their music as an anti-institutional perspective in contrast with established figures in the avant-garde (especially serialist composers and associated institutions) offered them a powerful source of cultural capital.Footnote 21 Indeed, Murail has described an ‘anti-establishment’ ethic in the early days of spectralism, precisely stating that ‘serialism was the establishment’.Footnote 22 He has further offered that ‘at a certain point the “spectral movement” was seen as a reaction against the “avant-garde”. And clearly it was a reaction against certain composers who believed that they were the avant-garde.’Footnote 23
Specifically regarding the use of naturalistic language, Drott writes: ‘Consider, for instance, Grisey's invocation of ecology. More than just a call for a return to origins or to the putative nature of sound, ecology implies a reformulation of the relations between individual and totality, as well as a changed comportment towards the natural environment.’Footnote 24 Drott's examination of the term ‘ecology’ alone involves a multi-layered interpretation, and significant scholarship has already been devoted to the multiple meanings invoked through Grisey's frequent use of the term ‘ecology of sound’. Peter Niklas Wilson has applied the term towards thinking of sound of an organism or ‘biomorph’ with ‘a will of its own’, and compared composing in this manner to the study of the natural sciences.Footnote 25 The term may apply equally to ‘a sound’, relationships between sounds, compositional process, ways of listening, or ways of understanding relationships between parameters of sound. More broadly, it is evident that various applications of naturalistic language in scholarship surrounding spectralism can be understood in many ways and may apply to many different aspects of the music.
Structure and the ‘nature of sound’
One sense in which spectralism can be conceived of as ‘natural’ is indeed described in its opposition to serialism and other highly ‘structural’ approaches to composition. Murail identified the need for an ‘antidote to the structuralist trend in music’.Footnote 26 Grisey outlined his conception of musical time in opposition to the durational approach of ‘Messiaen and the serial school’ wherein a micro-pulse ‘only exists as a way of working and has no perceptual reality’.Footnote 27 The spectral approach has been described in contrast to ‘local and ad hoc stratagems such as are involved in building musical structures on the basis of a cell or a motif’.Footnote 28 Through this kind of language, the spectral school situates itself against the perceived artificiality of imposing an independently derived structure on sound, and instead aims to derive structural principles from observation of sound. I believe this is what is insinuated by the numerous appeals to ‘sound itself’,Footnote 29 ‘sound in and of itself’,Footnote 30 or ‘sounds themselves’Footnote 31 in describing spectral music. In this sense, spectralism shares much in common with Pierre Schaeffer's original definition of musique concrète,Footnote 32 where musical values and structure are derived from working directly with concrete sound, rather than traditional music practices where sound is the result of a pre-conceived abstract notation and structure.Footnote 33 In this sense, both spectralism and musique concrète can be described as developing a syntax ‘abstracted’ from their materials, rather than employing an ‘abstract syntax’ (as in the case of serialism, or to continue our parallel example from the electroacoustic world, Stockhausen's elektronische Musik).Footnote 34 Appeals to nature in discussing this aspect of spectralism use the term ‘nature’ in the sense of ‘[t]he basic or inherent features, character, or qualities of something’.Footnote 35 I believe that this is the way Grisey used the word when he referred to ‘material [deriving] from the natural growth of sonority’Footnote 36 and an ‘“organic” approach to form by self-generation of sounds’.Footnote 37 The related appeals to ‘science’ and the ‘physics of sound’Footnote 38 appear to be addressing this understanding of ‘the nature of sound’ as well. If this is ‘natural’, it is because it respects or derives from what the composers believe to be the basic or inherent features of a sound,Footnote 39 of its ‘nature’.
Closely related to this are the numerous references to ‘perception’ within the discourse, which appears to be interwoven with the idea of ‘nature’. Tildy Bayar writes that ‘Spectral composers’ views of music consistently refer to nature as well as to notions of direct, unmediated perception of acoustic phenomena.’Footnote 40 Indeed, Grisey's arguments against structuralist approaches are strongly reinforced by discussions of what is perceptible in music. He compares the ‘spatial’ reference points used by composers such as Messiaen, Bartók, Stockhausen, Risset, and Xenakis as ‘[falling] far short of sound as it is perceived’.Footnote 41 Importantly, this appeal to perception references both the compositional process and listener interpretation. Claude Ledoux, speaking generally about Tristan Murail's music, posits that ‘[the listener] rediscovers, through a few musical events constructed by the composer, a configuration that aligns wonderfully with one of the many neural cartographies generated by the more or less intimate perception of natural sonic phenomena’.Footnote 42 Robert Hasegawa makes a distinction between these material-based and perception-based discussions, proposing two ‘contrasting concepts of nature – one based on the objective, physical nature of external reality, the other on the subjective, internal nature of aural perception – [which] lead to very different ways of thinking about musical structure’.Footnote 43 However, the two appear to be deeply interwoven in the discourse around the music. As Bayar writes, spectral composers have ‘claimed to organize music in accordance with the ways we naturally perceive sounds; and to produce perceptible results along these lines’.Footnote 44
Theorists have questioned to what degree various instances of spectral music follow through with this ethos, and the way in which it interacts with other imposed structures. The much-discussed opening of Grisey's Partiels (1975) from the cycle Les espaces acoustiques seems to do most of the heavy lifting in demonstrating the development of structure from the observation of a sound. John Croft refers to Les espaces acoustiques as a ‘proof of concept’, stating that:
Nobody now, of course, would present the harmonic series so starkly as in the opening of Partiels; we have more sophisticated and subtle techniques . . . There is a sense in which Les espaces acoustiques is the one and only spectral work; anything composed since this cycle might, of course, be informed by it in many ways, but one cannot go beyond it.Footnote 45
Even in this cycle, we see extensive structural impositions that seem to have their genesis elsewhere (perhaps, even sometimes influenced by serial techniques).Footnote 46 Some of the ‘imposed’ structures in spectral music, while not derived from direct observation of sound, instead have their basis in ecological models. Grisey has extensively detailed temporal processes in his music that are meant to follow physical phenomena, such as acceleration and deceleration, environmental periodicities, and changes in proximity.Footnote 47 In this conception, sounds are viewed not as ‘objects’ but rather as ‘forces’.Footnote 48 We can understand these structures as ‘ecological models’, described by Damián Keller as structures where ‘variables are directly related to environmental processes such as excitation of resonant bodies, time patterns etc. The range of possible values that these variables can take is restricted to ecologically feasible spans. Thus, a ball cannot bounce forever and a surface cannot be perfectly regular. These sounds provide cues to feasible events in the environment.’Footnote 49 However, even a cursory examination of a given piece of spectral music will find exceptions to these kinds of structures. Tristan Murail offers:
The initial goal, which motivated our extensive timbral and harmonic research, was the desire to develop the capacity to control the finest possible degrees of change. Having achieved this, however, 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. Contrary to the widely held view, they were never truly absent; even in the earliest pieces, like Partiels, there are quite a few unexpected turning points. In [Murail's] Gondwana (1980) for orchestra, which is considered a typical piece from this period, there is continuity, but there are also ruptures and many other types of transition.Footnote 50
As initial spectral techniques and perspectives have been elaborated upon towards the ‘parametrization of spectral structure’Footnote 51 or the development of ‘spectra as reservoirs’ of pitch material then treated as modes,Footnote 52 we can observe a re-introduction of abstract structure into spectral music that complexifies the initial manifesto and makes its claims more subtle.
An alternative claimant to the source of spectral music is the ‘Romanian School’, including Horațiu Rădulescu, Ana-Maria Avram, and Iancu Dumitrescu. As it happens, this perspective, as articulated by Dumitrescu, ‘regards French spectral music as a continuation of quantitative, reductive, “structuralist” musical thinking, in contrast to his own recognition of the irreducibility of timbre; for Dumitrescu, French spectralism is an artificial, as opposed to a “natural”, spectralism’.Footnote 53 It appears that even within discourse surrounding spectral music, cultural capital is a prize to be won through claims to the natural and opposition to structuralism and artificiality.
Nature as metaphor and imagery
Writers have occasionally been careful to specify that these uses of the term ‘nature’ outlined so far do not refer to ‘the natural world’ or the use of natural imagery:
In the 20th century numerous composers have made use of nature in its raw form, as musical material. Water, wind, fire, along with various other naturally produced phenomena have been recorded or created in concert, offering composers (such as Mâche, Messiaen, Xenakis, Kagel . . .) a collection of instruments rich in parametric possibilities. However, in the early seventies a different aspect of nature — the organic, living, acoustic nature of sound — strongly influenced a few research-minded musicians.Footnote 54
Nonetheless, in some discussions of ‘nature’ in spectral music, it becomes difficult to exclude this other definition, namely ‘the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations’.Footnote 55 Grisey has defined his work in opposition to ‘anthropocentrism’,Footnote 56 suggesting that ‘a truly Copernican revolution remains to be fought in music’.Footnote 57 Grisey also made references to non-human temporal structures such as the ‘time of whales’, of ‘birds’ and ‘insects’ in describing his work Vortex Temporum.Footnote 58 Through this kind of rhetoric, it becomes clear that even if ‘nature in its raw form’ does not manifest itself as musical material in Grisey's work, it remains an important theoretical reference point. In Grisey's own writing, it is unclear whether these are merely theoretical points of reference or if they are important metaphorical elements of the discourse of the music. It may be a fine distinction, but it is clear that at times discussions situate nature as a metaphorical extra-musical reference or ‘topic’Footnote 59 of the music. Certainly many titles of spectral works make reference to the natural world, and discussions of these works build upon the evocative suggestions of these references. Ledoux has written that ‘one has but to listen to [Murail's] Sables or L'esprit des dunes, and the desert appears’.Footnote 60 Referencing L'esprit des dunes, Murail writes: ‘There are several ways of using sounds from nature. There is a metaphorical way and a more direct way . . . I am not working with the sounds themselves, but with images of the sounds, the structures of the sounds.’Footnote 61 Here Murail seems to be identifying a metaphorical reference to nature in his work, as opposed to a mimetic one.Footnote 62 However, the similarity of language to other references to nature may make this distinction confusing. At least in this piece, Murail is not working with ‘the sounds themselves’ (in this case ‘sounds of nature’) whereas his other references to working with ‘sounds themselves’Footnote 63 appear to refer instead more to ‘the nature of sound’ (in our first definition). Bayar may have a point when she writes that ‘this music is deeply ambiguous regarding what it wants to communicate: a metaphorical image of the natural . . . or a direct, literal representation of sonic properties and acoustic phenomena’.Footnote 64
The harmonic series as trope of nature
Through examining much of the writing surrounding spectral music, it becomes clear that some of the materials in the music are interpreted as mimetic, or representational of nature. It is difficult to escape insinuations of the sort in particular when discussing spectral composers’ interest in the harmonic series, which according to François Rose, they have ‘established . . . as their point of reference’.Footnote 65 Fineberg, in his ‘Guide to the Basic Concepts and Techniques of Spectral Music’, describes it as ‘a mathematical phenomenon of sound which was recognized at least as early as the Greeks. It is defined by an integer relation between a fundamental frequency and other components of a sound.’Footnote 66 This phenomenon is (described however mathematically), according to Bayar, ‘the most widely used trope of nature in Western music’.Footnote 67 Certainly references to nature can be found in discussions of the topic dating back centuries. Griffiths identifies the ‘appeal to nature’Footnote 68 in Rameau's adoption of the harmonic series (le corps sonore) as the basis for his theory of harmony.Footnote 69 Josef Matthias Hauer posited that diatonic interval relationships ‘emerged from nature as objects from the harmonic series’.Footnote 70 Heinrich Schenker went as far as to call the harmonic series ‘Nature's only source for music to draw upon.’Footnote 71 These sentiments are echoed in language employed by spectral composers, such that Jonathan Harvey (who made the harmonic series the central material in his piece Advaya (1994)) has referred to it as ‘the natural series’.Footnote 72
I do not find the association of the harmonic series with nature intuitive. It is difficult enough to manufacture an object that adheres to its mathematical purity, let alone to discover one in the natural world. Of course, this is a high standard – we do not expect to find perfect circles in nature, and yet we may readily call things ‘circular’. In the same way, theorists appeal to the Platonic purity of the harmonic series when they describe things that resemble it: perhaps any resonant object, any sound exhibiting periodicity. Murail has called these ‘defective spectra’, listing ‘nature, traditional instruments and synthesizers’ as examples.Footnote 73 However, even if we extend our search for the harmonic series in nature to ‘imperfect’ resonances, they are rarely found. Our best examples are objects of human manufacture (the perennial example of Pythagoras's ‘plucked string’), or the resonance of our own voices:
Most natural sounds, such as those generated by forces like wind, moving water, or the movements of predators or prey, have little or no periodicity. When periodic sounds do occur in nature, they are almost always sound signals produced by animals for social communication. Although many periodic animal sounds occur in the human auditory environment, the most biologically important for our species are those produced by other humans . . . With respect to music, these facts suggest that our attraction to harmonic tones and tone combinations derives in part from their relative similarity to human vocalization.Footnote 74
With this in mind, it is difficult to consider the musical importance of the harmonic series as anything but anthropocentric. While other periodic sounds do occur occasionally in nature (as in the vocalizations of some non-human animals, or perhaps in resonant spaces like caves, and so on), the rhetoric of the appeal to nature surrounding the harmonic series would seem to suggest that all one need do is step outside to discover the whole world humming in octaves. Some harmonic theorists have been critical of this appeal to nature. Helmholtz, critiquing Rameau's contention that consonant tone combinations are more natural, noted that ‘in nature we find not only beauty but ugliness . . . proof that anything is natural does not suffice to justify it esthetically [sic]’.Footnote 75
Parallel appeals to ecological approaches in music emerging from the 1960s and 1970s make similar metaphors to resonance and consonant harmony. R. Murray Schafer, inventor of the term ‘soundscape’ (which has since developed as the basis for its own genre of electroacoustic music),Footnote 76 made a distinction between ‘hi-fi soundscapes’ (those found in natural settings), and ‘lo-fi soundscapes’ (in urban, human-built environments). In the former, ‘sounds overlap less frequently’.Footnote 77 It may not be a surprise that Schafer titled his text on the subject ‘The Tuning of the World’. Bernie Krause's related theory of the ecological niche more explicitly refers to environments with non-overlapping bands of spectra as natural, and draws a parallel with instrumental music: ‘experienced composers know that in order to achieve an unimpeded resonance the sound of each instrument must have its own unique voice and place in the spectrum of events being orchestrated’.Footnote 78 As in music and conceptions of harmony, in the development of the discourse of acoustic ecology there have been parallel critiques to this point of view. Andra McCartney writes: ‘if [the distinction between] hifi and lofi is to delineate a boundary between modern and pre-modern, industrial and natural, city and countryside, what do we do with noisy nature and sparse city soundscapes? There are many natural soundscapes dominated by overlapping sounds: noisy environments that are very dense and without clear perspective.’Footnote 79 Similarly, spectralist references to the harmonic series as a ‘phenomenon of sound’Footnote 80 seem to appeal to a universal, natural, essentialist point of reference, but instead betray a more particular interest in specific kinds of sound which more often than not have a human (even instrumental) reference point. The broader appeal to ‘sound itself’ seems to rather reflect a more specific reference to ‘certain properties of certain sounds’. As Bayar argues, spectral composers appear to insinuate that ‘the harmonic spectrum is the essential element necessary to preserve a meaningful sense of “a sound” after its remediation from a natural to a musical context’.Footnote 81
Instrumental (re)synthesis and ‘sounds of nature’
While I certainly detect various forms of appeal to nature in spectralist accounts of the harmonic series as material, I find it difficult to interpret it as a mimetic ‘trope’ or ‘marker of the natural realm’ in the sense that Bayar seems to suggest.Footnote 82 However, there is perhaps even more discussion around ‘natural material’ with regard to the related technique of instrumental synthesis. Described as ‘[p]erhaps the most important idea emerging from early spectral music . . . [instrumental synthesis takes] the concept of additive synthesis, the building up of complex sounds from elementary ones, and [uses] it metaphorically as the basis for creating instrumental sound colors’.Footnote 83 Most examples involve the analysis of a recorded sound as a ‘model’ for re-synthesis.Footnote 84 The pre-eminent example remains the analysis of an E2 played on a trombone as the basis for the beginning of Grisey's Partiels. Identifying the idea of mimesis in this approach, Hasegawa has claimed that ‘[f]or Grisey, the mimicry of features of natural sounds is an essential compositional technique’.Footnote 85 It appears to be this technique that Ledoux is referring to when he writes that ‘[t]he computer, through its computational power which has increased enormously in recent years, has allowed [Murail] to get closer to “Nature” and its equivocal subtleties’.Footnote 86 Ledoux further refers to the instrumental (re)synthesis technique as ‘acoustic anamorphosis’, implying a distorted perspective that nonetheless preserves its source material as a referent. To him, the importance of the reference to nature in this approach is clear: ‘Applying an acoustical anamorphosis can no longer be seen as a complete perversion of natural models. This principle can also be found directly in nature.’Footnote 87
However, there is no consensus about what is preserved from the source sounds (or ‘models’) used in instrumental resynthesis. Indeed, many practitioners and theorists have emphasized that the technique is not intended (or to some, not capable) to represent or even resemble the source sound. Rose writes: ‘Naturally, the result of this procedure, while deriving from physical models, no longer shares but replaces the characteristics of the modeled phenomenon.’Footnote 88 Murail writes of his own work that ‘the idea is that one finds an object in nature, an interesting object, and transforms it to make something artistic with it’.Footnote 89 More drastically, composer Roger Reynolds describes the notion that instrumental synthesis ‘could possibly result in an orchestrated product that bears anything other than an incoherent and metaphoric relationship to the supposed model’ as ‘clearly absurd’.Footnote 90 Referring specifically to Bayar's discussion about mimesis in this technique, John Croft writes:
I wonder, however, whether Bayar is not attacking a straw figure here, inflating the claims about nature made by these composers before knocking them down. The spectral characteristics of ‘real-world’ sounds were never more than a starting point . . . Where analyses of ‘real’ sounds are used as a starting point for compositional processes, the ambiguity between mimesis of the original timbre and the metaphorical use of the spectrum as harmonic material is precisely and explicitly the point: our perception drifts between timbre and harmony. One suspects that the ‘confusion’ identified by Bayar is more a pseudo-problem resulting from an excessively strong interpretation of the composers’ words.Footnote 91
I suspect that Croft may be correct in identifying the goal of many spectral composers, but from the survey of the scholarship I have presented so far, it appears to me that this confusion is rather pervasive.
Perhaps we ought to make a distinction in the types of sounds used as models in instrumental resynthesis. Among the most common sources are recorded instrumental sounds, which feature as models in many of the landmark pieces of spectral music. Examples include the trombone note that we have already discussed in Grisey's Partiels, bells and brass in Murail's Gondwana (1980),Footnote 92 low piano notes, brass instruments, and cello notes in Murail's Désintégrations (1982/3),Footnote 93 and string instrument notes again in Kaija Saariaho's Verblendungen (1984)Footnote 94 and Harvey's Advaya (1994).Footnote 95 Similar to my previous discussion of the harmonic series, the degree to which these sources may be understood as ‘natural sounds’ is questionable. I am inclined to agree with Bayar when she rhetorically asks: ‘What could be less natural than taking the results of a computer analysis of the spectrum of an instrument (already a technological creature the sound of which bears little relation to anything found in nature) and orchestrating them from different instruments to play in a new composition?’Footnote 96 Further, Nicolas Donin has precisely identified the similarity between these instrumental source sounds and the instrumental sounds that play their resynthesized orchestrations as a barrier to mimesis: ‘[S]pectralist “instrumental synthesis” of natively instrumental sound stays within the world of musical sound and does not afford the imitation or representation of the pre-existing sonic object to be grasped by the listener (if this had ever been the point in the context of spectralism).’Footnote 97 Nonetheless, Donin identifies referentiality as ‘crucial’ to what he calls ‘the “ghostly” character of instrumentally resynthesized sounds’.Footnote 98 While the self-referential quality of instrumental synthesis of instrumental sounds may obscure mimesis, composers have used other models whose extra-musical associations may afford a more mimetic approach.
Donin writes: ‘not all sounds are equal under resynthesis, though. Obviously some sounds are more or less well-suited to analysis, transcription and instrumentation. Some are still easily recognizable once in their resynthetic guise, while others lose essential features that used to define their identity.’Footnote 99 Spectral composers have also used models more readily associated with the natural world. Tristan Murail has sourced material from ocean waves in later works such as Le Partage des Eaux (1996)Footnote 100 and Bois Flotté (1996).Footnote 101 He writes, however, that in these works ‘I kept the contours of the wave rather than the sound itself’,Footnote 102 and further, that ‘I don't think that one could recognize the origins of the sound in this case.’Footnote 103 In light of observations such as this, I would suggest that it is not only the selection of source materials that impacts mimetic potential, but also the approach with which they are used. I believe that this distinction is significant enough that in previous writing I have argued that mimetic instrumental resynthesis represents an alternate aesthetic that has developed in parallel to spectralism, while sharing some of the same tools.Footnote 104
Mimetic instrumental resynthesis and François-Bernard Mâche
The earliest examples I can identify of this mimetic approach are in the works of François-Bernard Mâche. Mâche's use of the spectrogram to derive pitch information from analysis of a recorded sound predates the founding of L'Itinéraire by a decade,Footnote 105 first appearing in his piece Le son d'une voix (1964), which used as its source a recording of the composer reading Paul Éluard's poem Poésie ininterrompue II.Footnote 106 Mâche went on to more unambiguously ‘natural’ models in Rituel d'oubli (1969), which takes various environmental sounds as its models, including those of birds, bees, a windstorm, bubbling, and recordings from a marine cave.Footnote 107 Mâche has since continued to make this integration of environmental sounds a central aspect of his work, and this mimetic approach to instrumental resynthesis appears in countless other pieces of his. The breadth of his environmental materials, embracing noise-based and inharmonic sounds, and his extensive research in zoomusicologyFootnote 108 (a term that he coined), characterize his interest in the non-anthropogenic. Through his use of the instrumental resynthesis technique, Mâche has been linked to the spectral school,Footnote 109 but he has remained idiosyncratic in his approach, and is frequently left out of discussions of spectral music. He referred to his own use of the technique as ‘phonography’.Footnote 110 In contrast to Murail's ‘indirect’ use of natural sounds that intentionally does not preserve recognizability,Footnote 111 Mâche emphasizes the mimetic aspects of his engagement with natural sounds, and states that ‘by abandoning the cult of notation in order to enjoy a reunion with sound, one must be careful not to substitute a new acoustic formalism for the old formalism of signs’.Footnote 112 Here Mâche identifies himself as being more concerned with ‘sounds of nature’ rather than the ‘nature of sound’.Footnote 113 As another distinction, the environmental sounds used as models in Mâche's music also frequently appear directly in electronic parts in his work, a use of ‘nature in its raw form’, that Castanet describes as separate from the spectral approach.Footnote 114 I have argued that the juxtaposition of the source sounds with their instrumental imitations serves to strengthen the mimetic aspect, suggesting that ‘the presence of recorded environmental sounds dramatically increases the likelihood that a listener will draw a relationship between these sounds and their instrumental imitations’.Footnote 115
With Mâche's pioneering efforts as an exception, it may also be worth mentioning that the early focus on instrumental sound-sources as models in instrumental resynthesis could have been partly the result of the technological limitations of the time. Donin has suggested that ‘[t]he increasing use of this kind of technique by composers in the two last decades reveals the gradual transition of musical material from analogic to digital reproducibility: the more powerful and user-friendly computer-assisted composition tools become, the more variable in length and nature samples become’.Footnote 116 Indeed, a new generation of composers appear to share some aspects of Mâche's approach. Composers such as Peter Ablinger,Footnote 117 Aaron Einbond,Footnote 118 Alec Hall,Footnote 119 Chaz Underriner,Footnote 120 Charles-Antoine Fréchette,Footnote 121 and myselfFootnote 122 have each developed bodies of work employing the spectral instrumental resynthesis technique while situating their aesthetic specifically around mimetic concerns. In that sense, their work and their understanding of ‘nature’ departs from the focus of the spectral school but owes much to its methods and perspectives. Viewed as a continued development of spectral thinking, these mimetic approaches are an assurance of its lasting impact.
Conclusion
The manifold ways in which ideas of nature have impacted the discourse surrounding spectral music are significant in how it has been described and understood. The origins, motivations, applications, and interpretations of this rhetoric are diverse and complex, and so it is my hope that this comprehensive survey has clarified, detailed, and given context to some of the many perspectives, while offering some of my own interpretations.
Through my discussion, I have outlined a significant distinction between conceptions of ‘sounds of nature’ and ‘the nature of sound’; however, composers and theorists appear to link the two ideas at times. Through an effort to base their compositional methods on the physical phenomenon of sound and perception, spectral composers have situated themselves in contradistinction to the perceived artificiality of parametrized approaches to music associated with the avant-garde of the post-war period. At the same time, much of the language they and other theorists use to describe their music makes at least metaphorical references to the natural world. Both of these understandings of ‘nature’ are important to the rhetorical approach used to frame (and to a certain extent validate) claims towards the perceived value and revolutionary quality of spectral thinking.
I have critiqued this rhetoric and the intermingling of conceptions of nature with regard to some of the more prominent techniques of spectral composition. The use of both the harmonic series as a reference point and instrumental sound sources as models for instrumental resynthesis have been invoked in appeals to nature, and yet preserve a focus on the parametric and pitch-oriented concerns associated with traditional and formalist conceptions of music. However, composers have been quick to orient the powerful methods put forward by the spectral school towards environmental sounds, as in the case of mimetic instrumental resynthesis. And so the focus on nature in spectral music has proliferated into many different perspectives and applications.
At the same time as my analysis has been a call for clarity of language in these discussions and ways of thinking; rather than attempting to invalidate any perspectives I have sought to highlight and celebrate the plurality of understanding of ‘the natural’ in spectral thinking.
