Structuralism and Spectralism in Music

by

Mehmet Okonsar



Discography by Mehmet Okonsar



J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"
All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

Structuralism And Post-Structuralism In Brief

An overview of the Structuralism and post-Structuralism that followed.



J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"



F. Liszt: "modern" works


J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"


Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"


J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations


Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.


Structuralism is a theory of the language and an area of the discipline of semiotics.

It is mainly searching at how verbal expressions are used on context to produce a pattern of meaning, this is instead of the historic etymological approach. So that it requires a "diagonal" (cross) sectional method of investigation of the particular language as opposed to a "straight-line" (longitudinal) one.

Structuralism can also be on "what people do", disregarding what causes them to do that.

It cannot inform us why we behave this particular way, it simply targets to analyze the particular behavior that is occurring.

This method for analyzing and understanding common behavioral patterns targets typical, standard, universal designs of behavior.

It informs us that "this is one way people, or at best a subgroup of that people we are examining, reacts in most of these situations. For those who have that type of information on the "structure" of the group's behavior, in a few contexts, you will be able to make good forecasts on what may happen later on. But this method does not explain why we have seen the particular behavior we have seen.

It is, in addition, a technique for human sciences that tries to evaluate a particular field such as the mythology like a complex system of related parts.

It started in linguistics using the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. However, many French intellectuals perceived it to possess a wider application, and also the model was soon modified and put on other fields, for example anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory. This created within the beginnings of structuralism a wide intellectual movement that was going to take "French" existentialism's stand within the 1960's.

Structuralism is frequently belittled for its inability to prove something through usual hypothesis testing and validation methods.

Strauss makes unprovable presumptions about humans, and for many people the idea of universal structures is hard to embrace. Structuralism also is commonly a-historic, thus not explaining the way in which history effects the current time.

The value of structuralism in the literary world is to check out every aspect of that work of literature. A structuralist would not just take a look at one phrase but all phrases within "The Yellow Wallpaper" for instance.

The structuralist may scrutinize the structure of "A mans role within the female role" or "energy over weakness." If you take each particular motif from the story, their structures and flip them, more motifs would develop which would enable for the origin of the systems (structures) inside the text(s) to become analyzable.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper" the systems (structures) and binaries (the sup and sub-structures) inside the text indicate the foundation of the author's own encounters while as being a patient throughout the Victorian times. This understanding of Charlotte Gilman's existence helps you to evaluate much more structures without focusing mainly about the text and it is plot.

The theme of mathematical structuralism is the fact that what matters to some mathematical theory is not the internal characteristics of their objects, for example points, numbers, sets or functions, but exactly how those individuals objects connect with one another.

In this way, the thesis is the fact that mathematical objects only have no intrinsic character.

Structuralism based itself most particularly on advances within mathematics towards the finish of the nineteenth century, as well as on the program for supplying a categorical foundation to mathematics.

Because the political turbulences from the sixties and seventies and specially the student uprisings of May 1968 started affecting academia; particular issues of domination and political struggle have been brought to individuals' attention. The ethnologist Robert Jaulin identified a different ethnological approach which in turn obviously pitted itself in opposition to structuralism.

Today, structuralism is less popular than post-structuralism and deconstruction. You will find a lot of reasons for this.

Structuralism has frequently been belittled to be "a-historic" and for favoring deterministic structurel causes more than ability of people to take action.

Post-Structuralism is really a late twentieth century movement in philosophy and literary critique, tough to sum up yet which typically identifies by itself within the challenge in the direction of the widely accepted Structuralism movement which preceded it in nineteen fifties and sixties France. It's carefully related to Post-Modernism, even though two concepts are not synonymous.

Post-structuralism describes an extremely heterogeneous and large amount of ideas that came after the structuralism. They are expressed by the philosophers Jacques Derrida, the particular sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, J. F. Lyotard and many more.

Broadly post-structuralists build about the experience of structuralism. Particularly on its inclination to to determine conventional and natural ideas about language, history, society as covering over structures and procedures that must be understood using ideas that appeared to contradict the "common-sense" world.

I believe the central insight of post-structuralism was that there are not any supreme guarantor associated with significance, basically no "transcendental signifier" that will seem sensible for all things: meaning is definitely elsewhere. As whenever, for instance, you take a look at a dictionary, there is no "original" word that guarantees the understanding of all other definitions.





Usage rights:

You can use this article under the Creative Commons License CC-BY. This license lets you distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon my work, even commercially, as long as you credit me, by displaying the information on me given below verbatim for the original article.


Mehmet Okonsar is a pianist-composer-conductor and musicologist. Besides his international concert carrier he is a prolific writer. Founder of the first classical music-musicology dedicated blog-site: "inventor-musicae" as well as the first classical-music video portal: "classical videos".



Discography by Mehmet Okonsar



J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"
All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

Another Ism in New Music: Spectralism

Description and critique of the spectralism in music composition.



J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"



F. Liszt: "modern" works


J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"


Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"


J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations


Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.


In music as with all of the arts, the struggle for brand new is eternal. Even when sometimes the "new" is a kind of undertake yesteryear, whether fresh or simply oblivious.

To title just one: Bartok might be so "old", so "primeval", he was "new". Regardless, if you're a serious artist you are not thinking about investing your existence replacing something someone else did much better than you can. Simultaneously, you would rather to not starve, would rather have people much like your stuff and pay out well for this, prefer for individuals to admire you and wish to jump your bones. The strain among these forces can also be eternal within the arts.

Spectral is really a term referring to music composed mainly in Europe during seventies which uses the acoustic qualities of sound itself, i.e. sound spectra, as the foundation of its compositional material.

It is become connected particularly with the French composers Grisey and Murail, and Fritsch, Vivier, Maiguashca, and Barlow of the German Feedback group.

The word "spectral music", created in 79 by Dufourt within an article, stresses the significance of the sound spectra towards music and it is techniques in music composition. However, the inclination has additionally had important implications within the fields of musical form and musical time.

Computer based seem spectrum analysis, utilizing a Fast Fourier transform (FFT) is among the more prevalent techniques utilized in producing the descriptive data "spectralist" composers use for composition. Using FFT analysis, data that come with a specific sound spectrum could be visualized utilizing a spectrogram.

Spectral composition focuses, then, on offering these functions, internally connected and changing over time.

Spectralism is really a way of thinking by which musical composition gives dominance to tone colour and timbre.

The particular spectral analysis of the sound consequently notifies its "structure". The arrangements in this way of thinking derive from harmonic spectra and overtones instead of chord progressions or tone rows.

Gerard Grisey was born in 1946 in Belfort, France. Grisey taught composition in the College of California at Berkeley from 1982 to 1986, before coming back to Paris as Professor of Composition in the Conservatoire. Additionally, his insights in the domains of rhythm and sound included in his treatise "Tempus ex machina" have been of important effect to some other contemporary composers. He died in Paris in 1998.

According to Grisey spectralism isn't a system. It isn't something like serial music as well as tonal music. This is an attitude.

It views sounds less as dead objects that you could easily and randomly permute in most directions, but to be like living objects having a birth, lifetime and dying. This isn't new. I believe Varese was thinking in that direction also. He was the "grandfather" of all we are here.

The other assertion through the spectral movement, particularly at the beginning, had been to attempt to search for a greater formula concerning the concept of the actual score along with the comprehension the audience may have from it. Which was very essential for us."

To me, this reveals a total misunderstanding about the "structural" factors in music.

This is exactly what Spectralism is all about. Abandoning pitch as defined intervals and taking sound because it suits the "feeling". This movement developed mainly using electronic music as its medium although composers, for example Hugues Dufort, attempted to share this for full orchestra.

The roll-out of IRCAM coincided using the rise of musical post-modernism, along with a kind of crisis of confidence for musical modernism.

Most of the composers who have labored at IRCAM, for example Manoury, Harvey, Lindberg, and Benjamin may adopt superficial options that come with spectralism, however their music is dependant on concepts declined through the spectralists who came old within the 70s. The very first two employed fairly orthodox serialism within their IRCAM-recognized works.






Usage rights:

You can use this article under the Creative Commons License CC-BY. This license lets you distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon my work, even commercially, as long as you credit me, by displaying the information on me given below verbatim for the original article.


Mehmet Okonsar is a pianist-composer-conductor and musicologist. Besides his international concert carrier he is a prolific writer. Founder of the first classical music-musicology dedicated blog-site: "inventor-musicae" as well as the first classical-music video portal: "classical videos".


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