Spectral World Musics: Proceedings of the Istanbul Spectral Music Conference (review)

This collection is an outcome of the Spectral Musics Conference held at İstanbul Technical University, 18–23 November 2003, organized by Michael Ellison, Robert Reigle, and Pieter Snapper. In welcoming delegates to the University, the co-directors of the Dr. Erol Üçer Center for Advanced Research in Music, Professor Kamran Ince and Cihat Aşkın noted that hosting the first international conference on spectral music was a long-term goal of the faculty (p. xi).

A quick Internet search of the title gives the sense that proceedings have been distributed to various international music journals, but there have been few reviews to date; and, there seems to be limited additional copies of the collection now available. Without the benefit of attending the conference, this review is of the published material alone.

The proceedings open with track listings for the two audio discs included, followed by written notes of uneven length and quality about each track. The 17 tracks on CD 1 relate to the paper presentations, and are primarily extracts rather than full works. The second disc, with eight tracks, has complete works from conference concerts.

Paper abstracts in Turkish are provided at the beginning of the text without an English translation, and no abstracts are given at the beginning of each paper. Papers are divided into sections: Introductory Talk; Interdisciplinary Panel Discussion; Spectral Ideas; Ethnomusicological Perspectives; Composers Discuss their Music; Spectral Compositions; Performance Perspectives; and Improvisation with Spectra. Transcriptions of questions and answers sometimes follow each paper presentation.

With no index apart from page references to track listings on CD 1, no signposting in the body of the text as to section divisions, and no English abstracts, the collection becomes something of a detective novel to navigate for the uninitiated.

Computer Music Journal readers will probably be aware of spectral synthesis techniques, or the process of manipulating spectral data with physical modeling synthesis packages. More generally, for those unfamiliar with the field of spectral music, two issues of Contemporary Music Review (19/2 and 19/3, 2000), edited by Joshua Fineberg, are worthwhile reading as a primer. In addition, William A. Sethares’s Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (MIT Press, 2004) provides an interesting technical perspective.

For the benefit of lay people, spectral music is a compositional approach through which decisions are made based on the analysis of sound spectra. While acknowledging that definitions in the field seem to be partly problematic, spectral music is more an attitude to sound, rather than an aesthetic. One approach to spectral composition originated in France in the early 1970s at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and the Ensemble l’Itinéraire, particularly through the work of Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. In contrast to this structural approach, the Romanian spectral tradition is more concerned with looking at sound in performance, so includes the transitory aspects of timbre and non-harmonic components—focusing on the subjective sense of sound as dynamic experience rather than grounding work in the scientific study of sound. To put the focus of the two perspectives crudely, the French approach uses spectra to make the structure of the work, extending the sound, as it were; and the Romanian approach arrives at structure through transformations of spectra.

The Spectral Musics Conference extended the term through a broader definition to include all music that foregrounds timbre as either an important element of structure or musical language, allowing aspects of world music to be included and discussed along with “art music.”

This inclusive approach brought together a variety of perspectives that may not otherwise meet, and also engaged a range of people in an ongoing interest in continuing academic work that might otherwise...