ever heard of spectralist music? Well, here's an introduction by way of an author who has noted that spectralism never seemed to take off

https://van-us.atavist.com/spectral-music

Something is killing spectral composers. Gérard Grisey, the pioneer of the genre, died of a stroke at age 52, immediately following the completion of his funereal work “Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.” Claude Vivier, the Quebecois Jonathan van Ness of new music, was murdered at 34 by a man he picked up in a gay bar, after writing “Glaubst Du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele,” a piece that seemed to predict the circumstances of the crime. The Italian Fausto Romitelli, whose work is tinged with distorted electric guitar and LSD, succumbed to cancer at 41. The Romanian Ana-Maria Avram passed away at 55, the Spaniard Francisco Guerrero Marín at 49. (Bob Gilmore, the musicologist who wrote groundbreaking biographies of Vivier and Harry Partch, died in 2015 at 54.) Besides a premature death, there is something else that ties each of these composers together—not necessarily their adherence to “spectralism,” which involves material drawn from the harmonic series, but the combination of intellectual rigor and passionate hedonism in their work.
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I like some music by Ligeti, Xenakis, Kurtag and some of the other proto-spectralists but I never got around to listening to the spectralists proper, if you will.

I'm reading a dissertation by Martin Vishnick on the morphologies of extended techniques in classical guitar compositions and it's ... well, I'm not hugely into the spectralist or new complexity scenes even if I'm finding the dissertation itself fascinating reading.  I can't produce those multiphonics that are said to be accessible at the sixth fret.  I just get a septimal minor seventh harmonic, more or less, slightly behind the sixth fret.

It's a bit weird how authors feel some obligation to take shots at Kyle Gann.  I saw Andrew Durkin do that in Decomposition on whether or not Gann's work on Nancarrow really got to the "real" music.  Now I have written about my various disagreements with Durkin's book elsewhere at this blog.  Trying to claim that Western musical notation is so slippery and uncertain we can never have an "authentic" score is just a stupid argument.  It's a stupid argument at multiple levels because anyone who's read even a few books from early music specialists can tell you that the score was thought of in relationship to the performed music in a way similar to how a recipe for chocolate chip cookies is not the same as eating chocolate chip cookies.  The cults of art that evolved in the wake of German idealism and Romanticism are probably to blame for the sacred score approach and early music specialists have been working to attack that cult's supremacy for a generation or two.

But to simply treat what Gann has written as if it is somehow a new "authorized" narrative that has to be criticized seems a bit weird.  I don't have to agree with everything Gann writes to appreciate that he's spent his whole life writing about music where if he weren't writing about it I might not know it ever existed.  I have his work to thank for why I know who Ben Johnston is now!  Johnston's string quartets are fantastic.  I might not share his love for Sorabji but, hey, at least now I know who Sorabji is and I admire the Reicha 36 fugues quite a bit.  From Gann's mention of them I went out and got the entire cycle of woodwind quintets.  Which might be another way to say that for those of us who are into eighteenth century music in all its varied weirdness and epoch-crossing changes it gets tiresome to read contemporary writers who seem to write as though there's the fusty old Romantic era and high modernism as though there weren't centuries of other things going on and, I'm a classical guitarist so I actually do like some of the Romantic era music.  I admire Chopin and Mendelssohn, for instance.  i can even appreciate ... some ... Lizst now in middle age I couldn't stand when I was younger.  Still can't get into Berlioz though but he wrote more concisely on the guitar than most so I can respect that (and I know why he could).

Spectralism has its value for study but ... I get a sense listening to it that while there's interesting sounding work in the idiom it is in some kind of mid-point between a kind of Hollywood soundtrack ambience for genre films and some kind of post Varese technocratic exploration of sound-as-sound that I only like in small doses.