Debussy was associated with various French composers whose work stylistically spanned nineteenth-century tradition to the twentieth-century avant-garde. This chapter explores his connections with Ernest Guiraud, Ernest Chausson, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, Paul Dukas, and Erik Satie. It assesses key issues in each setting. Various relationships are represented here: the student-teacher archetype, less formalised mentorship, peer friendships, the more distant collegial relationship, and sometimes adversarial exchanges. Debussy and these composers engaged with each other in multiple ways; dynamics shifted such that the student became the teacher, a distant figure became a colleague, a peer became a critic. The study of these relationships casts new light on Debussy and the other parties.

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 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.

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.