ABSTRACT
The chapter first focusses on the question of the progress of material, a question that has played a decisive role in the theoretical debates accompanying the history of the emergence of sound (see Adorno’s school). It goes on to develop the idea of composed resonances to study dodecaphonism (Webern's Symphony Op. 21) and serialism (Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître), electroacoustic music, as well as pop or disco music where studio played an important role, along with certain mixed instrumental-electronic music productions in which electronics appear as a sort of 'aura' of the instrumental parts. Next it develops the idea of composed sonorities to analyse instrumental Varèse's Ionisation and to discuss the idea of continuum. Then comes the notions of texture, mass and surface, explored with the work of Xenakis. The idea of process closes this part and allows for broaching minimalism and spectral music. The last part of the chapter apprehends the micro-composition of sound, i.e., sound syntheses, with a historical panorama of the development of the latter, then a development on granular synthesis, a method which supports the hypothesis that sound synthesis embodies the possibility of generalising the praxis of composition by thinking the entire work as composed sound.
