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The first in-depth historical overview of how spectral music arose in France: the most influential European compositional movement of the past fifty years.
The first biography of the composer Gérard Grisey shows how the artist's sensuality and rigor came together to form the musical genre known as spectralism. The French composer Gérard Grisey (1946-98) changed the course of music history with his small but potent output. Labeled "spectral" music, his compositions looked to the physics of sound and the capacities of human perception for material and inspiration. Born in Belfort, Grisey was the son of a French Resistance veteran turned car mechanic and a homemaker. His first instrument was as humble as his background: the accordion. But Grisey rose from his provincial background to the heights of his profession. This first biography of Grisey traces his journey from rigid Catholicism to broader mysticism; his studies in Olivier Messiaen's legendary composition class; the development of the first "spectral" works in the 1970s; Grisey's stint teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, during which he suffered severe depression; the development of his late, post-spectral style; and his untimely death at the age of 52, shortly after completing his masterpiece on death, the Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold. Drawing on original archival research, interviews with more than fifty of Grisey's colleagues, friends, and lovers, and the study of previously overlooked sketches, this biography shows the delirium and form at the heart of Grisey's life and art--the structured sensuality that allowed him to revolutionize the music of the twentieth century.
The first in-depth historical overview of spectral music, which is widely regarded, alongside minimalism, as one of the two most influential compositional movements of the last fifty years. Charting spectral music's development in France from 1972 to 1982, this ground-breaking study establishes how spectral music's innovations combined existing techniques from post-war music with the use of information technology. The first section focuses on Gérard Grisey, showing how he creatively developed techniques from Messiaen, Xenakis, Ligeti, Stockhausen and Boulez towards a distinctive style of music based on groups of sounds mutating in time. The second section shows how a wider generation of young composers centred on the Parisian collective L'Itinéraire developed a common vision of music embracing seismic developments in in psychoacoustics and computer sound synthesis. Framed against institutional and political developments in France, spectral music is shown as at once an inventive artistic response to the information age and a continuation of the French colouristic tradition.
Drawing on a passion for music, a remarkably diverse interdisciplinary toolbox, and a gift for accessible language that speaks equally to scholars and the general public, Jann Pasler invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the forces that affect our sonic encounters. In an extraordinary collection of historical and critical essays, some appearing for the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral, and political preoccupations lurking behind aesthetic taste. Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our understanding of past, present, and future, Pasler's work trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to important public debates about who we can be as individuals, communities, and nations. The author's wide-ranging and perceptive approaches to musical biography and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about important cultural and philosophical issues including national identity and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the economics of power, and the relationship between classical and popular music. Her work uncovers the self-fashioning of modernists such as Vincent d'Indy, Augusta Holmès, Jean Cocteau, and John Cage, and addresses categories such as race, gender, and class in the early 20th century in ways that resonate with experiences today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs narrative. Pasler's innovative and influential methodological approaches, such as her notion of "question-spaces," open up the complex cultural and political networks in which music participates. This provides us with the reasons and tools to engage with music in fresh and exciting ways. In these thoughtful essays, music--whether beautiful or cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible--comes alive as a bearer of ideas and practices that offers deep insights into how we negotiate the world. Jann Pasler's Writing through Music brilliantly demonstrates how music can be a critical lens to focus the contemporary critical, cultural, historical, and social issues of our time.
The most influential compositional movement of the past fifty years, spectralism was informed by digital technology but also extended the aesthetics of pianist-composers such as Franz Liszt, Alexander Scriabin and Claude Debussy. Students of Olivier Messiaen such as Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey sought to create a cooperative committed to exploring the evolution of timbre in time as a basis for the musical experience. In The Spectral Piano, Marilyn Nonken shows how the spectral attitude was influenced by developments in technology but also continued a tradition of performative and compositional virtuosity. Nonken explores shared fascinations with the musical experience, which united spectralists with their Romantic and early Modern predecessors. Examining Murail's Territoires de l'oubli, Jonathan Harvey's Tombeau de Messiaen, Joshua Fineberg's Veils, and Edmund Campion's A Complete Wealth of Time, she reveals how spectral concerns relate not only to the past but also to contemporary developments in philosophical aesthetics.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions, DAPI 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2023, which took place as an hybrid event in Copenhagen, Denmark, in July 2023. A total of 1578 papers and 396 posters have been accepted for publication in the HCII 2023 proceedings from a total of 7472 submissions. The 60 papers included in the DAPI 2023 proceedings were organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Designing and evaluating intelligent environments; user experience in intelligent environments; pervasive data; Part II: Smart cities and environment preservation; media, art and culture in intelligent environments; supporting health, learning, work and everyday life.
Standard surveys of 20th century visual art imply that there is a continuity between, say, Rembrandt and Koons, between Caravaggio and Hirst. Even the sharp critics of artists who dominate the contemporary art scene, such as Warhol, Hirst, Ai Weiwei and countless others, imply such a continuity. They are all wrong. There is no such continuity, or, more precisely, it is only very weak, at best. This book explains why and how the claims regarding this continuity are false, and how we arrived at this point of great confusion about the arts.
