The Spectral Attitude and Its Relation to Performance
Marilyn Nonken · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022
Abstract The spectral attitude toward composition that emerged in France in the 1970s and 1980s was intimately related to the creative processes of performers, their practices, and their perceptions. The composers associated with L’Itinéraire in its early years—Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey, Michaël Lévinas, Hugues Dufourt, and Roger Tessier—were performing musicians themselves, and their experiences contributed to their pre-occupation with timbre, temporality, process, and perception. Expressing an ecological perspective, they saw the performer as an integral part of the sensory environment, and of the ensemble energies and forces effecting the animation of acoustic phenomena. The “pure becoming of sound” could only be conveyed through the pure becoming of a performance, requiring a highly disciplined performer dedicated to processes of synthesis and transformation. Locating the performance practice of spectral music historically leads to a consideration of virtuosity and physicality in relation to Romantic, aleatoric, and New Complexity repertoire, and also to the work of post-spectralists Jonathan Harvey and Georg-Friedrich Haas.