This chapter describes new music in Paris in the late 1960s, the period when the young spectral composers were students at the Paris Conservatoire. It opens with an account of Messiaen’s composition class and how elements such as neumes and Messiaen’s analyses of Debussy and Ravel informed Grisey’s, Murail’s, and Levinas’s emerging musical sensibilities. After giving a brief biographical account of those latter composers and Roger Tessier, the chapter touches on serialism’s changing status at a time when it had begun to be taught at the Paris Conservatoire; the effect of May ’68 on the Conservatoire’s pedagogy and on musical mores more generally among young composers; Fifth Republic France’s increased funding for new music festivals in regional cities such as Royan; Boulez and Xenakis’s profiles as the two most influential composers in France; and collectives, aleatoricism, and music theatre in post-1968 composition. The chapter closes with an account of Grisey’s early student works, in particular their creative adaptation of Messiaen’s personnages sonores concept towards the construction of audibly distinct musical figures, which would become a key element in Grisey’s musical style.

This chapter and the next focus respectively on Grisey’s last two student compositions, in which salient features of his mature music begin to appear in germinal form. Vagues, chemins, le souffle is scored for two spatialised orchestras and amplified clarinet. The chapter details how Grisey adopted and creatively modified techniques from the post-war modernist composers Xenakis, Boulez, and Stockhausen, and how the latter music, often referred to as sound-mass music, should be considered in actuality a continuation of serialism’s principles applied to statistical masses. In this regard, Grisey’s music developed through creative engagement with serialism. The aspects of Grisey’s music covered are the use of resonance models and the harmonic spectrum, the composition of auditory processes, the composition of sound metabolisms, and the notion of a large-scale orchestral simulation of a small-scale instrumental timbre.

By the end of the 1970s, the spectral composers were being invited to speak at the Darmstadt Summer Courses and were enjoying favourable press coverage in France. Recognising the need for a common epithet for their musical movement, they discussed a few possibilities: ’spectral’, ’liminal’, and ’vectorial’. This chapter explores, in turn, Dufourt’s concept of spectral music, which signified a compositional approach recognising and drawing on the microscopic scale of sound as the composer’s true material; Murail’s more technical vision of spectral music, and how, at IRCAM from the beginning of the 1980s, beginning with the electroacoustic work Désintégrations, Murail developed a sophisticated music drawing on computational resources; and Grisey’s notion of écriture liminale, a psychoacoustics-informed approach to compositional writing based on blurred statistical parameters and musical mutation. The chapter ends by detailing how the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982, at which the composers of l’Itinéraire gave a joint seminar, were the end of their common movement and the beginning of spectral music as an internationally known compositional attitude.

In 1972, Grisey and Murail were resident together at the Villa Medici in Rome as Prix de Rome winners. It was during this period that they first discussed together ideas regarding compositional techniques related to psychoacoustics and computer sound synthesis. This chapter explores each composer’s work during the period, which laid the foundation for the subsequent collective French spectral movement. Murail’s music, from Couleur de mer through Altitude 8000 onwards, sought to move away from the austerity of pointillist serialism towards sonorous beauty and poetic colour, aligning him to some degree with symbolist aesthetics. Grisey engaged in in-depth psychoacoustics self-study through reading books by Leipp and Winckel, books which outline what became known as the spectral attitude, and in Dérives he finally established his mature musical style. The chapter shows how, for each composer, meeting Scelsi was significant.

Between 1958 and 1960, three prominent figures of the European post-war musical avant-garde premiered major works for spatially distributed orchestral groups: Pierre Boulez’s Doubles, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Carré, and Henri Pousseur’s Rimes pour multiples sources sonores. This period coincides with the introduction of stereo long-playing records that led to the mass distribution of stereo sound technology, buoyed by an aggressive marketing campaign. To what extent were listeners’ experiences of spatialized works like Doubles, Gruppen and Rimes informed by their new familiarity with stereo sound? How did composers respond to listeners’ expectations about, and understanding of, stereo in their spatialized works? This chapter evaluates the extent to which an allusion to the technology of stereophony was inscribed into these works, an inscription that might include both ways audiences were inclined to hear stereophonic effects in these works and composers might have reacted in their works to these expectations.

While the ‘post-serial’ has been a resilient critical category over more than half a century, its status remains problematised by ongoing debates around the nature and limits of the serial itself. In particular, as insight grows into European serial practice after World War II, so does the case for understanding serialism as a more capacious concept than hitherto, embracing not only technique but also aesthetic and – a category regarded as taboo by certain of its practitioners – style. The generalisations that serialism underwent in the 1950s led less to a rigidly deterministic model of ‘total’ serialism than to a proliferation of the concept in many directions. Its seemingly endless possibilities of permutation led it (surprisingly to some) towards the statistical and the aleatory, while its notion of the ‘parameter’ went at times beyond the conventional categories of pitch and rhythm to embrace the manipulation of text, action and gesture. If relatively few composers now profess an overt allegiance to serialism, fewer still can entirely avoid the explicit reflections on material and process that it stimulated.