The Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music

Spectral music as a school of compositional thought was originally associated with the ensemble l’Itineraire in Paris in the 1970s. Since that time, it has only grown in significance and recognition as it transitioned from concert halls to dance clubs and made other incursions into popular culture. The Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music offers a fully new and expansive understanding of current scholarly and creative activity related to the spectral music movement and its legacy from its founding in the mid-1970’s to the current day.

The definition of spectral music has been at the center of debate among spectral composers and scholars since Hugues Dufourt first coined the term in the late 1970s. Rather than aiming to present an overarching definition of spectralism, the handbook shows the multiplicity of the spectral legacy by presenting diverse perspectives from top scholars and composers in the field. It includes essays on major founding figures such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, as well as the proto-spectral practices of Scriabin and Messiaen, and the influences of spectral music on serialism, postmodernism, sound art, and psychedelic rock. It features essays by some of the movement’s most significant living composers, such as Steve Lehman, Marilyn Nonken, Ken Ueno, and Patricia Alessandrini.

A long overdue examination of an important compositional trend in late 20th century music, this handbook will appeal to scholars, composers, and students desiring to become better acquainted with the broad influence of spectral music: what birthed it, what defines it, and what its future holds in the 21st century.

Amy Bauer is Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She has published articles and book chapters on the music of Thomas Adès, Carlos Chávez, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Georg Friedrich Haas, Helmut Lachenmann, Mauro Lanza, David Lang, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Gabriela Ortiz, Salvatore Sciarrino, Helena Tulve, and Claude Vivier, as well as on television music, opera, spectral music, and the philosophy and reception of modernist music and music theory. Her monographs include Ligeti’s Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (2011), and the collection György Ligeti’s Cultural Identities (2017), co-edited with Márton Kerékfy.

Liam Cagney is Lecturer in Music at BIMM University. His musical criticism regularly appears in publications like the Irish Times, Gramophone, the Guardian, the TLS, the Spectator, the Telegraph, VAN, and Frieze and his podcast with Stephen Graham, Talking Musicology, was nominated for a Classical: NEXT Innovation Award. Liam’s first monograph Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music Composition in the Information Age was published in 2024.

Will Mason is Associate Professor of Music at Wheaton College (MA). His work as a composer and performer has appeared on New Amsterdam Recordings and Exit Stencil Records. His scholarship covers topics ranging from microtonality to electroacoustic music, particularly concerning philosophies of embodiment.