Wanted to mention Morton Feldman in the context of spectral music. Feldman is certainly one of the big dogs as far as contemporary classical, and everything he’s ever touched is gold as far as I’m concerned, but my point of departure is going to start with a slim academic volume written by pianist Marilyn Nonken.
In "The Spectral Piano" (2014), Nonken traces work from Liszt (1826) through Debussy, Scrabian, Cowell, Varèse, Messiaen, Ives, Babbit, Cage, Stockhausen, Scelsi, Xenakis, Ligeti, Murail, Harvey, Feldman, Tenney, Crumb, Grisey, Nono, Lucier, Lindberg, Campion, Fineberg, Saariaho...leaving out a bunch, well over 100 specifically-enumerated pieces...to Dufourt (2012).
[Every name, above, is absolutely worth following up imo btw.]
While Nonken takes pains to emphasize that Feldman would be little concerned with the psychoacoustic tenets of spectral music, she devotes a few innerestin paragraphs to his work, noting how aspects of spectralism could overlap with Feldman's preoccupation with resonance- the mysterious effect whereby each sound almost erases in one's memory what happened before.
For wankers like yours blumpily, spectral concerns could map onto an item of Fake Noise Analysis (™) termed harmonicaness, massed clusters of harmonic ambiguity, I drone on. Forget about that memory stuff. Just forget it. Memory? No idea wutchyertalkinbout. But whether you are Mr Ultimate Ambience (MSBR) or The Rita, arguments could probably be made that would push the preeminence of sound/tone color. Not that I'd be the one to make these arguments, but I think they could be made. That there is part my in for ye olde spectral music.In my own music, I am so involved with the decay of each sound and try to make its attack sourceless. The attack of a sound is not its character...Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing – leaving us rather than coming toward us (Feldman, 1973 ).
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Meant to drop this innerestin little article here
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Worth making it to the end of the above article for the comments, which also touch briefly on spectralism.
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“Hey Bunita, hear that? ‘Pay more attention to tone color.'”