Readings and guides

 

Mark DeVoto, "The Debussy Sound: colour, texture, gesture"

Caroline Potter, "Debussy and nature"

Gary Don, "Brilliant Colors Provocatively Mixed: Overtone Structures in the Music of Debussy"

Anthony Pople, "Messiaen's Musical Language: An Introduction"

Chart of the Modes of Limited Transposition

Chart of Messiaen's late chord types

Paul Griffiths, "Catalogue de Couleurs: Notes on Messiaen's Tone Colors on his 70th Birthday"

Alex Ross, "The Messenger"

"La Notes Juste. Julian Anderson Appraises the Work of the Enigmatic Giacinto Scelsi"

Excerpts from Olivier Messiaen, Technique of my Musical Language (1944)

Amy Bauer, "The Impossible Charm of Messiaen's Chronochromie"

Cheong Wai-Ling, "Plainchants as Coloured Time in Messiaen's Couleurs de la Cité Céleste"

Robin Freeman, "The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi"

Tristan Murail, "Scelsi and L'Itinéraire: The Exploration of Sound"

Tristan Murail, "Scelsi, De-composer"

Atmosphères form chart

Lukas Haselböck's spectral chart of Atmosphères

Jennifer Iverson, "The Emergence of Timbre: Ligeti's Synthesis of Electronic and Acoustic Music in Atmosphères," twentieth-century music 7:1 (2011), 61–89.

Amy Bauer, "The Transparent Tangle of History: Ligeti's Lontano"

Bob Gilmore, "On Claude Vivier's 'Lonely Child'"

Jane Piper Clendinning, "Structural Factors in the Microcanonic Compositions of György Ligeti," in Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Mermann (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2002), 229–56.

Bryan Christian, "Combination-Tone Class Sets and Redefining the Role of les Couleurs in Claude Vivier's Bouchara," Music Theory Online 20:2 (1014)

Claude Vivier, vingt-cinq ans après: une introspection, Circuite: Musiques Contemporaines 18:3 (2008) (contact me for articles not available at website)

Viviana Moscovich, "French Spectral Music: An Introduction"

Francois Rose, "Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music"

Joshua Fineberg, "Spectral Music"

Joshua Fineberg, "Guide the the Basic Concepts and Techniques of Spectral Music"

Gérard Grisey, "Did You Say Spectral?"

P.A. Castanet, "Gérard Grisey and the Foliation of Time"

Interview with Gérard Grisey, 1996

Eric Daubresse and Gérard Assayag, "Technology and Creation — The Creative Evolution"

Robert Hasegawa, "Tone Representation and Just Intervals in Contemporary Music"

Tristan Murail, "The Revolution of Complex Sounds"

Tristan Murail, "Spectra and Sprites"

Ronald Bruce Smith, "An Interview with Tristan Murail"

Tristan Murail, "Target Practice"

Anthony Cornicello, "Timbral Organization in Tristan Murail's Désintégrations," Chapter 2

Éric Humbertclaude, "The Challenge of Tristan Murail's Work"

Brian Jameson, "'Rock Spectrale': The Cultural Identity of the Electric Guitar in Tristan Murail's vampyr!"

Horia Surianu, "Romanian spectral music or another expression freed"

Radulescu interview with Bob Gilmore

William Dougherty, "On Horatiu Radulescu's Fifth String Quartet (Before the Universe was Born), Op. 89"

Julian Anderson introduces the work of Kaija Saariaho

Horatiu Radulescu, "Brain and Sound Resonance: The World of self-Generative Functions as a Basis of the Spectral Language of Music"

Bob Gilmore, "Spectral techniques in Radulescu's Second Piano Sonata"

Radulescu interview with Guy Livingston

Vivien Schweitzer, "Unearthly Harmonies, Heard in the Dark"

Alex Ross, "Darkness Audible"

Georg Friedrich Haas, "Five Theses on Microtonality"

Robert Hasegawa, Parcours de l'oeuvre: Georg Friedrich Haas (English)

Haas in UE Musikblätter 5 (English)

Guy Lelong, Liner notes from Dalbavie's Color, Violin Concerto and Ciacconia

Robert Hasegawa, Clashing Harmonic Systems in Haas's Blumenstück and in vain

Amy Bauer, The 'harmonic series' is an artifact": ideology, process and perception in Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain

Jonathan Harvey, 'Spectralism', Contemporary Music Review, 19: 3, 11–.

Interview in Cadence with Steve Lehman

Philippe Lalitte, Acoustique et perception dans l'esthétique de Marc-André Dalbavie (French)

Steve Lehman, "Liminality as a Framework for Composition: Rhythmic Thresholds, Spectral Harmonies and Afrological Improvisation" (PhD diss, Columbia, University, 2012)

Donnacha Dennehy, "Owning Overtones: Grá Agus Bás and Spectral Traditions

Ia Remmel, "An Oasis for Concentration. Metamorphoses in the Music of Helena Tulve," Estonian Music Review 7 (2005)

Dennehy's U of I dissertation (on reserve)

Lutz Lesle , "Balance and der Nadelspitz: die estnische Komponistin Helena Tulve," Musiktexte (German)