The Nigerian-born composer Akin Euba (1935–2020) saw it as his life’s mission to create an ‘African art music’: ‘a form of music [that is] universal to all Africa’. As the chapter will outline, his career took him from Lagos to Bayreuth (Germany) and, eventually, Pittsburgh (USA), in the course of which he came up with the notions of ‘African pianism’, ‘creative ethnomusicology’ and, finally, ‘intercultural composition’, of which he was an acknowledged pioneer. Rather than seeing intercultural composition as a contradiction of African art music, I argue that Euba’s music embodies the concept of cosmopolitanism as a series of concentric circles as proposed by the Stoics, whereby the local (Yoruba) is contained in a wider (pan-African) sphere, which is in turn encapsulated in the universal. Compositionally, this vision is realised through the combination of elements from Yoruba music, such as timelines, other African influences from the likes of xylophone and mbira music and Western modernism, exemplified by serialism. As my analyses show, these elements are integrated to such an extent as to become inextricable.

This introduction briefly explores the relationship between compositional choice and stylistic expectation or ideology. With new music now a plethora of styles and approaches, how might we understand work that’s happening currently in the context of historical and social influence?

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.

The composer-performer collective l’Itinéraire, founded in 1973 by Murail and Tessier, was the de facto platform for spectral music in France. This chapter shows how l’Itinéraire formed with the aim of establishing an organ for the music of the youngest generation of French composers, and how, with the demise of Boulez’s Domaine Musical ahead of the opening of IRCAM, l’Itinéraire fortuitously found itself positioned as the successor to that Parisian new music series, endorsed by Messiaen and recipient of a state subsidy. The chapter details how Grisey composed Périodes, a l’Itinéraire commission and the first work composed from his Les Espaces acoustiques cycle, and how Grisey attended the acoustics laboratory at the Université Paris VI Jussieu, where, alongside lessons in musical acoustics, he absorbed the work of Abraham Moles on the application of information theory to art. The chapter also shows how Murail began to incorporate the models of spectral harmonicity and periodicity into his music from Tigres de verre onwards, and it explores the relationship of these instrumental compositional techniques to the computer sound synthesis work of Risset and Chowning.

The book’s conclusion situates spectral music as a modernist musical movement. It shows how spectral music reprises many of serialism’s concerns, albeit on a more psychoacoustically accurate level. It relates the debates between Levinas and the other spectral composers to an older debate about formalism in art between Flaubert and Sand. Finally, the book concludes by situating Grisey as the founder of spectral music.

Spectral music as a distinct movement began in 1976, when, within a few days of each other, Murail’s Mémoire-érosion and Grisey’s Partiels were both premiered by Ensemble l’Itinéraire. This chapter explores how, driven by the theorist Dufourt, the young composers associated with l’Itinéraire developed a theoretical identity in contradistinction to Boulez and IRCAM. As well as detailing the salient qualities of Grisey and Murail’s music in this period, the chapter explores the diverse spectral music of Dufourt, Levinas, and Tessier. Dufourt’s works Erewhon, La tempesta d’après Giorgione, and Saturne engage with insights regarding sound related to his encounters with Risset and Chowning. Levinas’s works like Appels foregrounded sonic parasitism and a dramatic spectacle far removed from the more reserved forms of Murail, of which the chapter shows Levinas to have been at times a public critic. Tessier’s music in this period was expressionistic and explored electroacoustic resources. As well as detailing these various spectral sub-currents, the chapter explores the role of l’Itinéraire’s performers in helping to develop performing techniques adequate to the spectral writing.

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.

The introductory chapter to Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music: Composition in the Information Age situates the book’s historical narrative by focusing on correspondence between Grisey and Dufourt in 1980 discussing what name they should give their common musical movement:’ spectral music’ or ‘liminal music’. This matter of naming indicates the compositional values the composers prioritised: movement over stasis, thresholds over states, psychoacoustic phenomena over traditional notes and pitches. The chapter then gives an overview of the book’s argument that spectral music developed from serialism through embracing information theory and developments in psychoacoustics and computer sound synthesis. Inasmuch as it arose in France but depended on developments that occurred at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the USA, spectral music was transatlantic in origin and signified a paradigm shift in musical composition.

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.

Chapter 4 describes the field of cognitive science, which is the arena where all those who study “intelligent systems” (“minds“) get together to compare notes. A shared idea is that the mind can be understood as an information-processing computational system. We will see how during the 1960s renewed interest in the mind from different academic disciplines emerged as a reaction to the denial of the mind of an approach to psychology called behaviorism. We then discuss the various strands of thinking in a variety of different fields that led to this “cognitive revolution.” We learn that there are fundamental, opposing views in this field that are relevant to the nature–nurture debate. Despite differences, a general understanding within cognitive science is that the mind can be studied at different levels of abstractness and from different angles which to some extent compete but also complement each other.

Writing about serialism by its earliest practitioners tended to underline its evolutionary qualities, something made easier by the baroque and classical connections of early examples from the 1920s like Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano op. 25 and Wind Quintet op. 26. Such an emphasis did not prevent more conservative critics from condemning twelve-tone music as ‘mathematical’. But by the early 1950s, there was more cogent criticism from younger composers, claiming that Schoenberg and Berg had failed to understand the innovative implications of twelve-tone methods. Boulez and Stockhausen in Europe and Babbitt in the United States were among those who explored a more systematic, stylistically radical serialism. But in the later Stravinsky, and in Boulez’s music after 1970, this avant-garde spirit gave way to techniques that were able to make productive compromises with more traditional ideas about musical materials and structures; at the same time, writing about serialism turned increasingly pedagogical, offering academic models for analysis and composition.

This chapter considers the history of serialism in the United States and Canada. After exploring US-based ultramodern composers that used series in their writing and early engagement with Schoenberg’s methods, this chapter contemplates the contexts for the significantly increased interest in serialism that occurred in these countries after the Second World War. Many factors were at play in this development, including the role of serialist giants who arrived as émigrés from Europe as teachers and role models, the influence of US-originating modernist movements, the changing university scene, and the cultural politics of the Cold War. While European serialist exiles like Schoenberg and Krenek were highly influential, this influence was not always direct. Moreover, while US composers using highly systematic approaches have drawn most attention, the majority of Americans and Canadians using serial methods combined them with other musical techniques to produce highly original, individualistic musical languages.

Entering into Anton Webern’s twelve-tone music and its complex reception history is like entering into a combat with the Hydra: cleave off one head of the Webern myth, and two more grow in its place. Taking a step back from the embattled scenes of the past in search of a broader vantage point, this chapter argues that the crux in understanding late Webern lies in understanding that the competing, often contradictory images of the composer that have emerged pose no real contradictions after all. Instead, in the same way that the Hydra’s separate heads are essentially connected entities, these different images are best understood as mediated with one another on a deeper level, representing different aspects of one and the same aesthetic concern: musical lyricism.

Alban Berg’s serial works (c. 1925–35) show his ability to use the twelve-tone method of composition as a form of exegesis for his personal, intellectual, and musical heritage in musical narratives suffused with apparent contradictions. In so doing, Berg combined what has been understood as antithetical ideas in an overarching system that brings together his modernistic aesthetics and the art of the past through textures in which twelve-tone serialism and tonality are interwoven. Problematising scholarship that attempts to understand Berg’s music based on Schoenberg’s compositional models, I argue that Berg followed the lead of Fritz Heinrich Klein and Theodor Adorno and embraced contradiction as a ‘category of thought’ in his compositional process. Berg’s approach is evident from the construction of the series to compositions such as the Violin Concerto (1935), which contains a web of musical and extra-musical significations that continues to challenge existing analytical models.

The concept of serialism appears conspicuously in the academic literature on twentieth-century music in technical, theoretical, and philosophical contexts. These various contexts, expressed over the course of much of the twentieth century, expose differing connotations of the serial concept. Part I of this chapter explores the serial concept before 1945, reflecting on the multi-dimensional origins of the concept in Arnold Schoenberg’s earliest serial compositions and the significance of Olivier Messiaen’s distinctive serial conceptions prior to the Second World War. Part II explores the serial movement in Europe after 1945, the prominent roles of the journal Die Reihe and the Darmstadt New Music Courses, and the contrasting approaches and attitudes to serialism in the United States after 1945. Tensions between rupture and continuity on both sides of the Atlantic and divergent priorities in discourse about new music demonstrate that theorising serialism entails an understanding of its dynamic disposition, instability, and impermanence.

The decade of the 1950s witnessed a great transformation in the compositional practice of Pierre Boulez. The usual narratives of serialism during this decade have tended to dwell on Boulez’s experiments with multiple serialism in Structure Ia (1951), which were tremendously short lived. His desire to expand the serial principle, however, did not end with them. Ensuing works, like Le Marteau sans maître (1952–5), Pli selon pli (1957–62/89), and the Third Piano Sonata (1955–7/63), which brought Boulez to the pinnacle of his reputation within the European circle of composers, are those that truly redefined serialism. Through this redefinition, serialism remained an important element of Boulez’s compositional technique until the end of his career. This chapter shows that Boulez’s serialism was an essential forerunner of future trends, rather than a culmination of an abandoned practice, resulting in works and approaches that opened up new avenues for composition.

According to standard accounts, twentieth-century music in Latin America was dominated by ‘folkloristic nationalism’. As this chapter demonstrates, however, there has been a number of lively serialist movements that, after gaining a foothold in Buenos Aires in the 1930s, gradually coalesced to achieve a modicum of mainstream and institutional acceptance across much of the region by the 1960s. This story not only provides an important facet of Latin America’s music history, but it also touches on crucial issues beyond that, such as the way artistic innovations are disseminated; the role of migration and national, regional, and international networks, such as the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM); the varying connections between aesthetic ideas and ideological and political principles; and debates about progress and tradition, national culture and universalism. The history of serialism in Latin America thus to an extent mirrors that in other regions but adds some specific elements.

Milton Babbitt is accepted as one of the earliest adopters of integral serialism, a label that has been applied to a number of European composers including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luige Nono, and Jean Barraqué. What sets Babbitt apart from this group encompasses both his compositional techniques and his roots as an American musician. Through extensions of twelve-tone techniques pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, Babbitt explored the possibilities of this new approach to pitch structure not so much to recapture historical modes of music making but to build a way of making music derived from a set of first principles emerging from using relationships amongst aggregates of the twelve pitch-classes. He also developed ways of thinking about temporal relationships that adapted his insights into pitch relationships in order to create a compositional world in which to be creative. The chapter traces this development over the span of his career.