Feeling Machines: Immersion, Expression, and Technological Embodiment in Electroacoustic Music of the French Spectral School William Mason Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 William Mason All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Feeling Machines: Immersion, Expression, and Technological Embodiment in Electroacoustic Music of the French Spectral School William Mason This dissertation considers the music and technical practice of composers affiliated with French spectralism, including Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Jean-Claude Risset, and Kaija Saariaho. They regularly described their work, which was attuned to the transformative experiences that technologies of electronic sound production and reproduction could inspire in listeners, using metaphoric appeals to construction: to designing new sounds or exploring new illusory aural phenomena. To navigate a nascent but fast-expanding world of electronic and computer music, the spectralists appealed to physical musical attributes including gesture, space, and source-cause identification. Fascinated by gradual timbral transformations, they structured some of their pieces to invite speculative causal listening even while seeking to push it to expressive extremes. I hypothesize that, much as the immersive technology of the cinema can create the illusory feeling of flight in viewers, electronic music can inspire listeners to have experiences in excess of their physical capabilities. Those feelings are possible because listening can be understood as empathetic and embodied, drawing on a listener’s embodied and ecological sensorimotor knowledge and musical imagery alongside referential, semiotic, and cultural aspects of music. One way that listeners can engage with sounds is by imagining how they would create them: what objects would be used, what kind of gestures would they perform, how much exertion would be required, what space would they inhabit. I cite recent research in psychoacoustics to argue that timbre indexes material, gesture, and affect in music listening. !ii Technologies of sound production and reproduction allow for the manipulation of these tendencies by enabling composers to craft timbres that mimic, stretch, or subvert the timbres of real objects. Those electronic technologies also suggest manipulations to composers, by virtue of their design affordances, and perform an epistemological broadening by providing insight into the malleability of human perceptual modes. I illustrate these claims with analytic examples from Murail’s Ethers (1978), Saariaho’s Verblendungen (1984), and Grisey’s Les Chants de l’Amour (1984), relating an embodied and corporeal account of my hearing and linking it to compositional and technological features of spectral music. !iii Table Of Contents List of Figures ii List of Examples ii Acknowledgments iii 1 Introduction: Imagination Beyond the Body 1.1 Three Illusions 1 1.2 Technologies of Sound Creation and Production 3 1.3 Perceiving Aural Worlds 6 1.4 Virtuality and Illusions 11 1.5 Immersion 14 1.6 Chapter Summary 17 2 Spectralism and Modernism: Contexts and Disruptions 2.1 Overview 25 2.2 Modernist Historiography and an Account of Musical Modernism 25 2.3 Grisey’s Partiels (1975) and Techniques of Spectral Composition 39 3 Body, Tool, and World in Acousmatic Musical Experience 3.1 Introduction 55 3.2 Embodied Music Cognition 63 3.3 Acousmatic Representations 80 3.4 The problem of timbre and Chion’s three modes of listening 85 3.5 Chapter summation 93 4 Constructing Sonic Worlds 4.1 Introduction 94 4.2 Hearing and Constructing Virtual Worlds 98 4.3 Artificial Objects in Kaija Saariaho’s Verblendungen (1984) 110 4.4 The volition of sounds 115 5 Grisey and/at the Limits of the Voice 5.1 Introduction 123 5.2 CHANT 127 5.3 Pre-compositional genesis and structure of Les Chants de l’Amour 130 5.4. Analytic scenes 132 6 Conclusion: For a Posthumanist Embodied Cognition 147 Bibliography 151 !i List of Figures 2.1 Partial rank and frequency of E1 43 2.3 Spectrogram of low E from Hasegawa 2009 46 2.4 Spectrogram of low E from Fineberg 1999 46 3.1 Analog modeling synthesizer with default settings in Ableton Live 10 57 3.2 Reverb plug-in in Ableton Live 10 57 3.3 Opening gestural process of Murail’s Ethers 65 4.1 The duck-rabbit 106 4.2 The Rubin vase 106 4.3 Paintbrush gesture that forms the structuring formal metaphor for Verblendungen 111 4.4 Opening pitch progression in Verblendungen 112 4.5 Parameter curve sketches of Verblendungen 115 5.1 Grisey’s list of the 28 phonemes of “I Love You” 132 5.2 Excerpts from a pre-compositional sketch of thematic material in Les Chants de l’Amour held in the Paul Sacher archive 134 5.3 Map of formal sections of piece and formant frequencies, from Grisey et al. (1985) 135 5.4 Types of writing in Les Chants de l’Amour (from Grisey 1985) 136 5.5 Grisey’s sketch for each section of Les Chants de l’Amour, part I 138 5.6 Grisey’s sketch for each section of Les Chants de l’Amour, part II 139 List of examples 2.1 Opening gesture of Partiels 40 2.2 First 24 partials of E1 44 2.3 Pitch collection of first phrase of Partiels 48 2.4 Pitches in Partiels rehearsal 4 50 2.5 Reduction of pitches of Partiels rehearsal 7 51 2.6 Bass attack rhythms in opening of Partiels 51 3.1 First flute sonority in Ethers 65 3.2 All six flute combination tone sonorities in Ethers opening 65 5.1 Measures 1-3 of Les Chants de l’Amour 144 5.2 Rehearsal 2 from Les Chants de l’Amour 145 !ii Acknowledgments Thanks are due first and foremost to my advisor Ellie Hisama. Her keen insights, careful editing, and abundant patience on this dissertation managed not only to clarify and improve it but to energize my work and leave me genuinely excited to delve further. I could not have imagined a better model of a scholar, teacher, and mentor, and look forward to a career spent aspiring to the example she has set. I am also grateful to the rest of my committee for their help and advice. Benjamin Steege’s scholarship and graduate proseminar provided important introductions to many of the questions about technology and listening that motivated this work. Early meetings and coursework with George Lewis precipitated many of the questions that became this dissertation’s core preoccupations, and through his example he has inspired me to consider the ways in which scholarly and artistic work can be mutually constructive. Mariusz Kozak’s comments on chapter drafts cut straight to important underlying debates in embodied cognition, and helped me untangle complicated interdisciplinary research. Jennifer Iverson’s research into mid-century electronic music has helped me think about what music theoretic models might have to say about that repertoire, and about how that repertoire might help broaden scholarly constructions of music theory. I have benefitted from coursework and conversations, as well as advice and support, from a number of the faculty at Columbia University outside of my committee. I would especially like to thank Zosha di Castri, David Adamcyk, Georg Friedrich Haas, Brad Garton, Fred Lerdahl, Joseph Dubiel, Chris Washburne, Brian Larkin, Walter Frisch, and Peter Susser. Jean-Baptiste Barrière spoke with me about this dissertation on several occasions while in residence at Columbia, and his candor and wealth of first-hand knowledge were of immense help. Columbia’s music librarians Elizabeth Davis and Nick Patterson tracked down a variety of !iii hard-to-find resources with skill, patience, and good humor. I’m enormously grateful to the Columbia music department’s administrative staff for their assistance throughout my graduate career. Thanks are also due to music department administrators Beth Pratt, Johanna Lopez, and Gabriela Kumar Sharma; and especially to Anne Gefell, who was a constant source of good humor and support for me and for so many graduate students, and who is deeply missed. I would also express gratitude to Robert Hasegawa and Judy Lochhead, who have been especially generous with their guidance. Thanks are also due to Amy Bauer, Liam Cagney, Steve Lehman, Marilyn Nonken, Peter Swendsen, Max Silva, Andrew Goldman, and Carmel Raz. Parts of this dissertation were presented to Ann Sears, Matthew Allen, Delvyn Case III, Julie Searles, and Guy Urban at Wheaton College, and I am grateful to them for their questions and suggestions. I am excited beyond measure to join their wonderful faculty and to contribute to the Wheaton College community. Faculty at my alma mater Oberlin Conservatory have assisted me first as an undergraduate with aspirations of graduate study, and then while I was a visiting faculty member during the 2017-2018 academic year. My thanks to Billy Hart and Jamey Haddad, and to Wendell Logan, who introduced me to a number of figures in the African-American musical avant-garde that influenced my musical development. I’m particularly grateful to Arnie Cox and Rebecca Leydon for their input and for the influence of their research on this dissertation; to Megan Kaes Long, for her encouragement and advice; and to Brian Alegant, whose exemplary teaching, mentorship, and encouragement first inspired me to pursue advanced study in music theory. It is unthinkable that I would have finished this project without the aid of frequent conversations, not to mention camaraderie, with my endlessly inspiring colleagues in the music !iv department at Columbia. Thanks to Orit Hilewicz, Ben Hansberry, Galen DeGraf, Maeve Sterbenz, Marc Hannaford, Paula Harper, Eamonn Bell, Russell O’Rourke, Ralph Whyte, Josh Navon, David Gutkin, Dan DiPaolo, Kate Heidemann, Tyshawn Sorey, Matthew Ricketts, Taylor Brook, David Bird, Nina Young, Courtney Bryan, and Sky Macklay.