ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the spirit by considering Olivier Messiaen's relationship to the spectral movement in its nascency, restricting the inquiry to the years 1967-73. At that time, spectralism had not yet been recognized as a compositional movement. Many works defining the aesthetic- Murail's Mémoire/Erosion, Ethers, Treize couleurs du soleil couchant and Gondwana, and Grisey's epic cycle Les Espaces acoustiques were years away. An artist's development can be charted in relation to others and to contemporaneous historical and cultural events. The evolution of a compositional movement such as spectralism, which has emerged in the last 40 years, is an elusive essence, for an artistic movement is like ether than flesh. The initial group of Murail, Grisey, Dufourt, Tessier and Lévinas would be joined by Jean-Claude Risset, a student of Jolivet who had pursued psychoacoustic research at Bell Labs as a colleague of Max V. Mathews. Messiaen's treatment of colour as a harmonic-timbral complex was a formative influence on the French spectralists.
