OCallaghan-spectral Music and The Appeal To Nature

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Spectral Music and the Appeal to Nature
Article in twentieth century music · February 2018

DOI: 10.1017/S1478572218000063
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Twentieth-Century Music 15/1, 57–73 © Cambridge University Press, 2018
doi: 10.1017/S1478572218000063
Spectral Music and the Appeal to Nature
JAMES O’CALLAGHAN
Abstract
Discourse surrounding spectral music frequently makes reference to nature and related language. Practitioners,
theorists, and musicologists have discussed different aspects and perspectives on the idea of nature in the relation
to this music and it is not always clear that these terms are used in the same way. This article examines the
different meanings of ‘nature’ applied to various concepts and techniques in spectral music, the extent to which
these descriptors may be misleading, and the cultural context and possible motivations for the use of this kind
of rhetoric. Through a discussion of the derivation structure in spectral music, a focus on human perception,
metaphorical references to nature, the rhetoric surrounding the harmonic series and instrumental (re)synthesis,
and finally mimetic references to nature in music using spectral techniques (including a discussion of the music
of François-Bernard Mâche), the article endeavours to provide a thorough survey of the subject.
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
19791 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
Email: jamesocallaghan3@gmail.com
1 Hugues Dufourt, ‘Musique spectrale’, Société Nationale de Radiodiffusion, Radio France/Société Internationale de
Musique Contemporaine 3 (1979).
57
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572218000063
58 O’Callaghan Spectral Music and the Appeal to Nature
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’.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.3
These writers’ use of terms such as ‘traditional’ is surely provocative, as early spectralists
tended to view themselves as radical, if not revolutionary.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’.5 He
further stated that in his music ‘[t]he material derives from the natural growth of sonority’.6
Other writers have said of Grisey’s work that it ‘invokes the idea of nature’,7 that it ‘[treats]
sound as a living organism’8 or even that the music itself is ‘an entity derived from the order
of nature’.9 Similarly, Tristan Murail has described ‘the natural life of the sound’,10 affording
each frequency its ‘own life’,11 and commentators have found in his music an ‘attachment to a
2 Tildy Bayar, ‘Music Inside Out: Spectral Music’s Chords of “Nature”’, in Spectral World Musics: Proceedings of the
Instanbul Spectral Music Conference ed. Robert Reigle and Paul Whitehead (Istanbul: Pan Yayincilik, 2008), 118.
3 Paul Griffiths, The Penguin Companion to Classical Music (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), 317.
4 See Gérard Grisey, ‘Did You Say Spectral?’ trans. Joshua Fineberg, Contemporary Music Review 19/3 (2000); Jonathan
Harvey, ‘Spectralism’, Contemporary Music Review 19/3 (2000); and Eric Drott, ‘Timbre and the Cultural Politics of
French Spectralism’, Proceedings of the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (Montréal, 2005).
5 Grisey, ‘Did You Say Spectral?’, 2–3.
6 Gérard Grisey, 1978, quoted in François Rose, ‘Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music’,
Perspectives of New Music 34/2 (1996), 8.
7 Robert Hasegawa, ‘Gérard Grisey and the “Nature” of Harmony’, Music Analysis 28/2–3 (2009), 349.
8 Justyna Humiecka-Jakubowska, ‘The Spectralism of Gérard Grisey: From the Nature of the Sound to the Nature of
Listening’, trans. John Comber, Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 8 (2009), 229.
9 Humiecka-Jakubowska, ‘The Spectralism of Gérard Grisey’, 227.
10 Tristan Murail, 1999, quoted in Ronald Bruce Smith, ‘An Interview with Tristan Murail’, Computer Music Journal
24/1 (2000), 17.
11 Tristan Murail, ‘Spectra and Pixies’, trans. Todd Machover, Contemporary Music Review 1/1 (1984), 159.
O’Callaghan Spectral Music and the Appeal to Nature 59
certain type of “Nature” that is undoubtedly linked to wide open spaces’,12 an effort to afford
an ‘intimate perception of natural sonic phenomena’,13 to ‘[draw] on sounds from nature as
a source for compositional material’,14 and to ‘retain the spectrum [of a sound] as a marker
of the natural realm’.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.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’17
resulting in ‘a fundamental shift after which thinking about music can never be quite the
same again’.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’19 ) can be linked to the rise in prominence and changing
language of leftist politics in France in the late 1960s and 1970s.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.21 Indeed, Murail has described an ‘anti-establishment’ ethic in the early
days of spectralism, precisely stating that ‘serialism was the establishment’.22 He has further
offered that ‘at a certain point the “spectral movement” was seen as a reaction against the
12 Claude Ledoux, ‘From the Philosophical to the Practical: An Imaginary Proposition concerning the Music of Tristan
Murail’, trans. Joshua Fineberg, Contemporary Music Review 19/3 (2000), 44.
13 Ledoux, ‘From the Philosophical to the Practical’, 51.
14 Smith, ‘An Interview with Tristan Murail’, 17.
15 Bayar, ‘Music Inside Out: Spectral Music’s Chords of “Nature”’, 117.
16 George E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903) (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), 47
17 John Croft, ‘The Spectral Legacy’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135/1 (2010), 193.
18 Harvey, ‘Spectralism’, 11.
19 Drott, ‘Timbre and the Cultural Politics of French Spectralism’, 1.
21 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction’, in Power and Ideology in Education, ed. Jerome
Karabel and A. H. Halsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
22 Murail in Smith, ‘An Interview with Tristan Murail’, 11.
“avant-garde”. And clearly it was a reaction against certain composers who believed that they
were the avant-garde.’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.’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.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’.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’.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’.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’,29 ‘sound in and of itself’,30 or ‘sounds themselves’31 in describing
spectral music. In this sense, spectralism shares much in common with Pierre Schaeffer’s
23 Murail, Tristan, ‘After-thoughts’, Contemporary Music Review 19/3 (2000), 6.

25 Peter Niklas Wilson, ‘Vers une “ecologie des sons”: Partiels de Gérard Grisey et l’esthétique du groupe de l’Itinéraire’,
Entretemps 8 (1989).
27 Gérard Grisey, ‘Tempus ex Machina: A Composer’s Reflections on Musical Time’, trans. S. Welbourn, Contemporary
Music Review 2 (1987), 240.
28 Rose, ‘Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music’, 7.
29 Hasegawa, ‘Gérard Grisey and the “Nature” of Harmony’, 349.
31 Tristan Murail, ‘The Revolution of Complex Sounds’, trans. Joshua Cody, Contemporary Music Review 24/2–3 (2005),
121.
original definition of musique concrète,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.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).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’.35 I believe
that this is the way Grisey used the word when he referred to ‘material [deriving] from
the natural growth of sonority’36 and an ‘“organic” approach to form by self-generation of
sounds’.37 The related appeals to ‘science’ and the ‘physics of sound’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,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.’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’.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’.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
32 Pierre Schaeffer, A la recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1952).
33 I am not the first to notice this similarity. For an interesting account of the connections between spectral music and
Schaeffer’s ideas, see John Dack, ‘Spectral Music and Schaefferian Methodology’, in Spectral World Musics: Proceedings
of the Instanbul Spectral Music Conference, ed. Robert Reigle and Paul Whitehead (Istanbul: Pan Yayincilik, 2008).
34 Simon Emmerson, ‘The Relation of Language to Materials’, in The Language of Electroacoustic Music, ed. Simon
Emmerson (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1986), 21.
35 Oxford Dictionaries, ‘Nature’. Oxford University Press. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nature.
36 Grisey in Rose, ‘Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music’, 8.
37 Grisey, ‘Did You Say Spectral?’ 2.
38 Grisey, ‘Did You Say Spectral?’ 1.
39 I am careful here to say ‘a sound’ rather than more generally ‘sound’. I will later discuss this distinction and the
essentialist assumptions behind certain references to ‘the nature of sound’.
41 Grisey, ‘Tempus ex Machina’, 240.
42 Ledoux, ‘From the Philosophical to the Practical’, 50–1.
reality, the other on the subjective, internal nature of aural perception – [which] lead to very
different ways of thinking about musical structure’.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’.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.45
Even in this cycle, we see extensive structural impositions that seem to have their genesis
elsewhere (perhaps, even sometimes influenced by serial techniques).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.47 In this conception, sounds are
viewed not as ‘objects’ but rather as ‘forces’.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.’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

45 Croft, ‘The Spectral Legacy’, 195.
46 An extensive discussion of this matter may be found in François-Xavier Féron, ‘The Emergence of Spectra in Gérard
Grisey’s Compositional Process: From Dérives (1973–74) to Les espaces acoustiques (1974–85)’, Contemporary Music
Review 30/5 (2011), 343–75.
47 Grisey, ‘Tempus ex Machina’.
49 Damián Keller, ‘Social and Perceptual Dynamics in Ecologically-based Composition’, Electronic Musicological Review
6 (2001), www.rem.ufpr.br/˙REM/REMv6/Keller/SPD.html.
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.50
As initial spectral techniques and perspectives have been elaborated upon towards the
‘parametrization of spectral structure’51 or the development of ‘spectra as reservoirs’ of
pitch material then treated as modes,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’.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.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
50 Murail, ‘After-thoughts’, 7.
52 Joshua Fineberg, ‘Guide to the Basic Concepts and Techniques of Spectral Music’, Contemporary Music Review 19/2
(2000), 99.
53 Fineberg, ‘Guide to the Basic Concepts and Techniques of Spectral Music’, 99.
54 P. A. Castanet, ‘Gérard Grisey and the Foliation of Time’, trans. Joshua Fineberg, Contemporary Music Review 19/3
(2000), 29.
opposed to humans or human creations’.55 Grisey has defined his work in opposition to
‘anthropocentrism’,56 suggesting that ‘a truly Copernican revolution remains to be fought in
music’.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.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’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’.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.’61 Here Murail seems to be identifying a metaphorical reference to nature in his
work, as opposed to a mimetic one.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’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’.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 . . .
55 Oxford Dictionaries, ‘Nature’.

58 Gérard Grisey, Programme note on Vortex Temporum, 2 October 1996, BRAHMS, IRCAM, http://brahms.
ircam.fr/works/work/8977/.
59 In the sense advanced in Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980).
62 Mimesis, from the Ancient Greek ‘to imitate’, refers to the ‘imitative representation of the real world
in art and literature’; Oxford Dictionaries, ‘Mimesis’, Oxford University Press, https://en.oxforddictionaries.
com/definition/mimesis.
63 Murail, ‘The Revolution of Complex Sounds’, 121.
as their point of reference’.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.’66 This phenomenon is (described however
mathematically), according to Bayar, ‘the most widely used trope of nature in Western
music’.67 Certainly references to nature can be found in discussions of the topic dating back
centuries. Griffiths identifies the ‘appeal to nature’68 in Rameau’s adoption of the harmonic
series (le corps sonore) as the basis for his theory of harmony.69 Josef Matthias Hauer posited
that diatonic interval relationships ‘emerged from nature as objects from the harmonic series’.70
Heinrich Schenker went as far as to call the harmonic series ‘Nature’s only source for music
to draw upon.’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’.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.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

66 Fineberg, ‘Guide to the Basic Concepts and Techniques of Spectral Music’, 85–6.
68 Griffiths, The Penguin Companion to Classical Music, 317.
69 Jean-Philippe Rameau, Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie (Paris: Chez Durand, Pissot, 1750).
70 Josef Matthias Hauer, ‘The Orchestra: Diatonic and Atonal Music’, in Orchestration: An Anthology of Writings, ed.
Paul Matthews (New York: Routledge, 2006), 124.
71 Heinrich Schenker, Harmony, ed. Oswald Jonas, trans. Elisabeth Mann Borgese (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 20.
73 Murail, ‘The Revolution of Complex Sounds’, 126.
our attraction to harmonic tones and tone combinations derives in part from their
relative similarity to human vocalization.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]’.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),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’.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’.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.’79 Similarly, spectralist references to the harmonic series as a
‘phenomenon of sound’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’
74 Daniel L. Bowling and Dale Purves, ‘A Biological Rationale for Musical Consonance’, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112/36 (2015), 11157.
75 Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Liehre von den Tonempfindungen (1885) (On the Sensations of Tone), 4th edn, trans.
A. J. Ellis (New York: Dover), 232.
76 Barry Traux, ‘Genres and Techniques of Soundscape Composition as Developed at Simon Fraser University’,
Organised Sound 7/1 (2002).
77 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1977), 71.
78 Bernie Krause, ‘Bioacoustics, Habitat Ambience in Ecological Balance’, Whole Earth Review 57 (1987), 15.
79 Andra McCartney, ‘Ethical Questions about Working with Soundscapes’, keynote presentation at World Forum for
Acoustic Ecology International Conference: Ideologies and Ethics in the Uses and Abuses of Sound, Koli, Finland, 19
June 2010.
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’.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.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’.83 Most examples involve the analysis of a recorded sound as a
‘model’ for re-synthesis.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’.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’.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.’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.’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’.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’.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.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),92 low piano notes, brass instruments, and cello notes
in Murail’s Désintégrations (1982/3),93 and string instrument notes again in Kaija Saariaho’s
Verblendungen (1984)94 and Harvey’s Advaya (1994).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?’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
90 Roger Reynolds, ‘Seeking Centers’, Perspectives of New Music 32/2 (1993), 282–3.
93 Murail, ‘Spectra and Pixies’, 161.
94 Kaija Saariaho. ‘Timbre and Harmony: Interpolations of Timbral Structures’, Contemporary Music Review 2/1 (1987),
107.
the context of spectralism).’97 Nonetheless, Donin identifies referentiality as ‘crucial’ to what

he calls ‘the “ghostly” character of instrumentally resynthesized sounds’.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.’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)100 and Bois Flotté (1996).101 He writes, however, that in
these works ‘I kept the contours of the wave rather than the sound itself’,102 and further, that
‘I don’t think that one could recognize the origins of the sound in this case.’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.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,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.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.107
Mâche has since continued to make this integration of environmental sounds a central aspect
97 Nicolas Donin, ‘Sonic Imprints: Instrumental Resynthesis in Contemporary Composition’ in Musical Listening in
the Age of Technological Reproducibility, ed. Gianmario Borio (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 334.
98 Donin, ‘Sonic Imprints’, 335.
104 James O’Callaghan, ‘Mimetic Instrumental Resynthesis’, Organised Sound 20/2 (2015).
105 M. Olivier Class, ‘François-Bernard Mâche et la musique spectrale’, in Colloque “ François-Bernard Mâche : le poète
et le savant face à l’univers sonore”, Université de Strasbourg, 9–10 October 2015, www.canalc2.tv/video/13619.
107 François-Bernard Mâche, Music, Myth, and Nature: or, The Dolphins of Arion (1983), trans. Susan Delaney
(Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992), 193.
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 zoomusicology108 (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,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’.110 In contrast to Murail’s
‘indirect’ use of natural sounds that intentionally does not preserve recognizability,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’.112 Here Mâche
identifies himself as being more concerned with ‘sounds of nature’ rather than the ‘nature
of sound’.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.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’.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’.116 Indeed, a new generation of composers appear to share
some aspects of Mâche’s approach. Composers such as Peter Ablinger,117 Aaron Einbond,118
108 Mâche, Music, Myth, and Nature, 95.

109 Class, ‘François-Bernard Mâche et la musique spectrale’.
110 Mâche, Music, Myth, and Nature, 192–3.
111 Murail in Smith, ‘An Interview with Tristan Murail’, 17–18.
112 Mâche, Music, Myth, and Nature, 33.
113 He also clearly makes use of politicized language when referring to the ‘cult of notation’, situating himself in
opposition to the institution of ‘formalism’ as much as the spectralists situated themselves in opposition to the
institution of ‘structuralism’.
114 Castanet, ‘Gérard Grisey and the Foliation of Time’, 29.
115 O’Callaghan, ‘Mimetic Instrumental Resynthesis’, 238.
117 Peter Ablinger, ‘Quadraturen documentation’, 2006, http://ablinger.mur.at/docu11.html.
118 Aaron Einbond, ‘Musique instrumentale concrète: Timbral transcription in What the Blind See and Without Words’,
in The OM Composer’s Book, ed. Jean Bresson, Carlos Agon, and Gérard Assayag (Paris: Editions Delatour/Ircam-
Centre Pompidou, 2016).
Alec Hall,119 Chaz Underriner,120 Charles-Antoine Fréchette,121 and myself122 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
119 Alec Hall, ‘Celebrating 100 Years of Noise’, in The Noise Non-ference Reader, ed. Alec Hall (New York: Qubit New
Music, 2003), 7.
120 Charles Francis Underriner, ‘The Sound-Poetry of the Instability of Reality: The Audio Reality Effect and Mimesis’,
Organised Sound 22/1 (2017).
121 Charles-Antoine Fréchette, ‘L’Écomimétisme ou les reflets des manifestations sonores de l’environnement’, Circuit
25/2 (2015), 19–37.
122 O’Callaghan, ‘Mimetic Instrumental Resynthesis’.
sought to highlight and celebrate the plurality of understanding of ‘the natural’ in spectral
thinking.
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Spectral Music and the Appeal to Nature

Article in twentieth century music · February 2018

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Spectral Music and the Appeal to Nature

The appeal to nature and cultural context

Structure and the ‘nature of sound’

23 Murail, Tristan, ‘After-thoughts’, Contemporary Music Review 19/3 (2000), 6.

43 Hasegawa, ‘Gérard Grisey and the “Nature” of Harmony’, 349.

Nature as metaphor and imagery

Nonetheless, in some discussions of ‘nature’ in spectral music, it becomes difficult to

The harmonic series as trope of nature

55 Oxford Dictionaries, ‘Nature’.

65 Rose, ‘Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music’, 7.

Instrumental (re)synthesis and ‘sounds of nature’

81 Bayar, ‘Music Inside Out: Spectral Music’s Chords of “Nature”’, 113.

the context of spectralism).’97 Nonetheless, Donin identifies referentiality as ‘crucial’ to what

Mimetic instrumental resynthesis and François-Bernard Mâche

108 Mâche, Music, Myth, and Nature, 95.

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