The spectral music is a movement which was born at the beginning of the 1970′s with the research of Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail. It is an aesthetic school from which, following work of their elders, several composers of the next intermediate generation draw their inspiration: Philippe Hurel, Philippe Leroux, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Jean-Luc Herve, Thierry Went, Fabien Lévy or Thierry Blondeau in France; Kaija Saariaho or Magnus Lindberg in Finland; George Benjamin or Julian Anderson in the United Kingdom, to quote only some of them.

But what is this technique of composition? The spectral music is based on the discovery of the nature of the musical tone and on the composition of the spectrum – entity integrating at the same time the harmony and the tone – of a sound. It is a music which works on the transformation of sound material, thanks to continuous processes and by using microtonal techniques of orchestration which will allow an amalgamated perception (that of the tone finally). Tristan Murail, Gerard Grisey, Hugues Dufourt and Michaël Levinas developed this research, while incorporating techniques derived from the analyze-synthesis by computer, which made possible to return to the details of the representation of the tone. They will apply thus to the writing for traditional instruments, the techniques discovered in electroacoustics such as the compression of spectra, the frequency modulation, the loop of re-injection, or the reverberation. Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s Stimmung, György Ligeti’s Atmospheres, Iannis Xenakis’s Metastasis or Jean-Claude Risset’s Mutations are works which basically influenced the spectral current by their ambiguity between harmony and tone.

On the contrary to other composers, Gerard grisey theorized much on his school which he called liminal (limen: threshold), his analyses remain circumspect and the technical analysis prevails. Nevertheless one could release a leitmotiv which would reach its climax in its positioning towards the composition, composition which he brings closer to the Deleuzian concept of splendor of the pronoun „one“. In Tempus ex machina, he writes: “The composition of process, writes it, leaves the daily gesture and by that even frightens us. It is inhuman, cosmic and causes the fascination of Crowned and Unknown, joining what Gilles Deleuze defines as „Splendeur du On“: a mode of impersonal individuations and singularities pre-individual. ”

The doubt is thus thrown on the identity of the being sound and is accentuated with the following vision of Grisey: “The sound, with its birth, its life and its death, is similar to an alive being”, which consequently raises questions of classical ontology: “From what the sound comes? Where does it go? Which is its way? Which are its junctions? In which direction does it go, here, there? “.

Much more than a closed current and a simple technique of composition, the spectral music is an attitude. An attitude resolutely turned towards the future, without dogma, opened to the world and the sound, which makes possible for the young composers to explore the plurality of the musical expression.