Klangperspektiven by Lucas Haselböck (review)

It is difficult to imagine a book like this being published in English these days, for both positive and negative reasons. Some of the topics explored here have arguably unjustly fallen out of favour with publishers based in the Anglosphere; at the same time, the volume would have benefited from some of the more critical perspectives that have emerged in Anglo-American musicology in recent years. The book makes no excuses for focusing on new music, primarily dealing with quite radical tendencies, and it doesn’t shy away from at times dense technical analytical commentary and a concentration on musical material. This may not be a bad thing, but it often happens at the expense of a critical investigation of the music’s social contexts and cultural meanings.

The contributing authors consist of an international mix of composers, analysts, musicologists, and (in one case) a philosopher, who are mostly based in continental Europe. Many but by no means all of the composers are associated with the field of spectral music, which has made the subject of sound in the collection’s title its own. Many of the musicologists write about works by the featured composers, a pairing that could have been revealing but that too often results in the scholars acting as little more than spokespersons for the composers. The chapters differ in length between just three-and-a-half and forty-six pages, which suggests substantial differences in the nature of some of the contributions.

The book opens with an appeal for a deconstructivist approach to listening by the philosopher Arno Böhler. Based notably on Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent work, Böhler argues for a mutual interdependence between listening and logos, which is, however, contingent on the former liberating itself from habit, thus enabling the perception of sound qua sound outside fixed categories.

The section on analysis is opened by Gianmario Borio’s ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der Klangkomposition’ (‘On the pre-history of sound composition’). This is pretty much what it says on the tin: a thorough, insightful, and detailed historical survey, but a survey nonetheless, covering largely the area one would expect (Debussy, Schoenberg, Webern, Varèse, Stockhausen, Ligeti, et al.). Next, Denis Smalley outlines his concept of ‘spectromorphology’. This minute differentiation between different types of sound (of which noise and pitched tones are just two) and their compositional manipulation demonstrates the authority gained from decades of intensive artistic research. Unfortunately, though, it is not always easy to do justice to the fruit of many years of work when it is condensed in twenty-five pages; that Smalley frequently refers to specific musical excerpts that are not given as musical examples does not help in this regard.

The section is concluded by Christian Utz and Dieter Kleinrath, who propose a sophisticated analytical method combining score study with novel forms of digital spectral analysis. In contrast to earlier proponents of spectral analysis, they go out of their way to emphasize that it cannot be regarded as an objective representation of music as it is actually heard, and should therefore be constantly complemented by the subjective listening experience and the score. But even so, one wonders how to read the often significant discrepancies they reveal between spectral analysis of recorded music and the written score, which may simply be the result of imprecisions introduced by performances and recordings, but also and more fundamentally of all manner of psycho-acoustic effects. One significant problem they don’t discuss is the experience of live performance, which, in contradistinction to sound recordings, allows audiences to focus their listening on instruments that they see being played but that are barely audible (one also hears with one’s eyes, surely). Another is that we cannot always be certain that the sonic outcome was intended by the composer: as the authors’ examples show, some psycho-acoustic phenomena are so complex that their results can hardly be fully predictable even for the keenest and most experienced ears, so the score may in one sense remain the...