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CFP: Spectralisms, 2nd edition
Deadline: October 29, 2018 (12:00 UTC)
Conference dates: June 13-14, 2019
Ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), Paris
Organised by the Analysis of Musical Practices research team STMS—Ircam, CNRS, Sorbonne University, Ministry of Culture
Detailed call for papers: goo.gl/HHna52

In March 2017, the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford, in association with Ircam, organised Spectralisms, a conference devoted entirely to the discussion of issues in spectral music (http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/spectralisms/). The wide range of ideas engaged during the two days of the conference reflected the plural nature of spectral music. Though such music emerged in France in the early 1970s centred on the composers of the collective L’Itinéraire (Murail, Tessier, Grisey, Dufourt, Levinas), its roots can be found in such key figures of the twentieth century as Debussy, Varèse, Cowell, Messiaen, Dutilleux, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Xenakis, Partch, Scelsi or even La Monte Young. Moreover, if by ‘spectralism’ is meant any music that takes account of the acoustic structure of sounds and the mechanisms of auditive perception in order to produce forms, timbres, temporalities and new modes of expression, then many aesthetics (from Radulescu to Harvey by way of Mayuzumi, Amacher, Radigue, Haas...) can be understood to participate in ‘spectral thinking’ without necessarily having any direct connection to the creative and performance tradition that developed in France around L’Itinéraire.