Hugues Dufourt, La musique spectrale. Une révolution épistémologique.

Laura Zattra (1, 2)

1 IRCAM - Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique
2 Equipe Analyse des pratiques musicales

Spectral music is now more than forty years old. In his preface, French composer and philosopher Hugues Dufourt defines it thus: Spectral music basically represents a change in our ways of thinking music. It is no longer a music based on traditional and well separated categories, such as melody, counterpoint, harmony or timbre. Spectral music, on the contrary, is the music of middle categories and hybrid objects. Its objects stand at the frontier of two or more dimensions, timbre and harmony, harmonicity and inharmonicity, pitch and noise, rhythm and grain. Spectral music is the exploration of continuous transitions between traditionally heterogeneous domains; it creates mixtures and works to breach the thresholds of perception. The music of the end of the last century has irresistibly uncovered colour, as both a predominant and autonomous dimension of its language. We can define it as the art of colour modulation. (15-16) After reading this introductory passage, coming as it does from the person who coined the term " Musique spectrale " (in 1979, Dufourt wrote the famous manifesto " Musique spectrale "), 1 the reader might expect a book that takes stock of the state of this compositional technique / movement, and explores its historical development and main protagonists – a sort of ultimate book on spectral music. In fact, this volume (published in 2014 and running to 485 pages) reunites a series of essays composed by Dufourt over the course of twenty years and should be read in the light of this consideration. As a collection of old and recent articles dealing with spectral questions, it has another goal: neither musicological, nor merely historical, analytical, phenomenological or autobiographical. Placing himself in the dual role of editor and contributor, Dufourt introduces in the preface the underlying themes and motivations: This book […] deals with the structural mutations of 'serious' music from the 1970s. It also traces the portraits of illustrious predecessors who initiated music to the irreversible path of modernity and enabled a moulding of the new matrix of the world. The purpose of this book is to outline the history of categories of musical thought in 1 Written for the Société Nationale de Radiodiffusion, Radio France/Société internationale de musique contemporaine, SIMC, 1979, 30-32.

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène

Laura Zattra. Hugues Dufourt, La musique spectrale. Une révolution épistémologique.. twentieth-century music, 2018, 15 (01), pp.125 - 130. ⟨10.1017/S1478572218000099⟩. ⟨hal-01780557⟩