source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 24 Jun 1996 12:56:19 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: The French spectral composers -- A while back, Johnny Reinhard mentioned in passing the French "spectral composers." This is a movement that doesn't yet have a name in America. In France, the two most prominent spectral composers are Gerard Grisey and Tristan Mureil. These composers consider psychoacoustics more important to composition than Fortean pitch-class matrix serialist theory or other non-sensory-based methods of ordering notes and timbres. The result of Grisey's and Mureil's work has been a series of remarkable compositions which blend almost-just pitches into a set of tonally fused timbres which shift in a prismatic and uncanny way. I say the pitches are "almost just" because Tristan Mureil, Gerard Grisey, and their most prominent disciple, Philliphe Hurel, don't use true small-whole-number ratios in their music. Instead, they round off the just values to the nearest eighth- (sometimes sixteenth-) tone and notate and have the music performed that way. The result is sometimes peculiar, from a pure hard-core American JI perspective. However, all three of these composers are extremely talented and their work is well worth listening to. However, it's hard to get hold of. IRCAM has put out a CD of Phillipe Hurel's pieces performed by the Ensemble Contemporaine at the Espace Projection in Paris. Other than that CD, there's little available in this country. (I heard Grisey's "Joure, contre-jour" and some Mureil pieces whose names escape me off cassette at a friend's house. The friend had just returned from Paris.) This is one instance where the French seem to be ahead of us Americans. While isolated voices like John R. Pierce and James Dashow and William Sethares have been talking about the musical and compositional benefits of fitting timbre to tuning, there is as yet no organized movement of "spectral composition" in America. This is peculiar, inasmuch as virtuoso groups like Johnny Reinhard's AFMM exist in prominent American cities, and these performers can *easily* perform high-limit just ratios on traditional acoustic instruments. Listening to Johnny Reinhard quadratic just intonation string quartet "Cosmic Rays" made my jaw drop. These performers can hit *any* pitch, and do it at top speed, and do it consistently. You'd think with these kind of musicians available in this country, we'd have a full-blown "spectral composition" movement. To give you an idea of how important the spectral composition movement is in French avant-garde circles right now, consider the following quote from Denis Cohen: "I tried to show in an article I wrote ("Ulysses and the Mermaids") that the contrast often made in France between serial music and spectral music was probably useful conceptually, but was incomplete and bore littel relation with reality." In America, the contrast is between the New Complexity and minimalism of one sort or another. But in France, the lines of division are drawn between Fortean set-theory serialism and spectral composition. -- Another (non-spectral) French composer of note is the aforementioned Denis Cohen. I mention him because IRCAM has released a new CD of his music, the last track of which is microtonal. "Il SOgno Di Dedalo" (1990-1991). According to Richard Toop's liner notes, "Without venturing a key to the labyrinth of Il Sogno Di Dedalo, one can at least draw attention to some recurrent elements: loping, almost *ethnic* percussion rhythms, rapid melodies in (mostly) four-part harmony, little brass glissandi, falling (and later, rising) microtonal scales, and throbbing Varese-like brass chords." [Toop, R., liner notes to "Il Sogno Di Dedalo] This is a fine piece of music and distinctly xenharmonic. This is Musique France d'Ajourd Hui CD sponoserd by the SACEM and Radio France. It is probably available from Harmonia Mundi as an import. Highly recommended. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 25 Jun 1996 11:23 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id CAA07603; Tue, 25 Jun 1996 02:23:03 -0700 Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1996 02:23:03 -0700 Message-Id: <199606250921.CAA07516@eartha.mills.edu> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu