{"id":3519,"date":"2020-04-14T05:00:58","date_gmt":"2020-04-14T05:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5145.temp.domains\/~mangopri\/?p=3519"},"modified":"2021-02-09T17:46:30","modified_gmt":"2021-02-09T17:46:30","slug":"sophie-and-the-spectralists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mangoprism.com\/staging\/5310\/sophie-and-the-spectralists\/","title":{"rendered":"SOPHIE and the Spectralists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In her first-ever TV interview<\/a>, Scottish-born electronica producer SOPHIE reclines gracefully, clad in a skin-tight, boldly patterned dress, with one elbow propped atop a plush white duvet, and explains the inspirations and ambitions of her music, which strives towards \u201chyperreal\u201d musical environments that \u201ccartoonize and exaggerate\u201d the sounds of the natural world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By way of example, she conjures the image of a piano the size of a mountain, asking what the sound of the massive strings therein may be. \u201cYou have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, in theory, and any sounds,\u201d she says. \u201cSo why would any musician want to limit themselves [to acoustic instruments]?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interview is a fitting and revealing peek into PC Music, the London-based avant-pop collective to which she is a central affiliate. It\u2019s not only a glimpse behind the software-curtain, but also is a rare chance to even see the producer, with her now-iconic red pixie cut and cheekbones in their high, sharp glory, and offers a rare insight into how someone would start with a blank file in a digital synthesizer and produce tracks built around the enticing, ear-bending, speaker-busting\u2014and indeed hyper-real\u2014sounds that have come to typify the PC Music style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I first encountered SOPHIE without even realizing it\u2014her production undergirds catchy mainstream tracks like Madonna\u2019s \u201cBitch I\u2019m Madonna\u201d<\/a> feat. Nicki Minaj\u2014but when I finally came across her avant-garde side, tracks like \u201cLEMONADE,\u201d<\/a> \u201cHARD,\u201d<\/a> and  \u201cVYZEE,\u201d<\/a> I felt like I was finally hearing music that was unabashedly and even unapologetically pop, but still imaginative and even revelatory in a way I couldn\u2019t at the time articulate. Hearing the progressive voice of the artist unleashed, I could tell she was thinking about the sounds that surrounded (and sometimes saturated) my adolescence: the plastic bubble-gum beats and synthesized accompaniments of the late \u201890s and early aughts. In the hands of SOPHIE, the plastic, super-polished sounds which propelled (usually women) pop singers to the top of the charts with hits like Spice Girls\u2019 \u201cWanna Be\u201d<\/a> and Christina Aguilera\u2019s \u201cCome on Over\u201d<\/a> take on a new, avant-garde life, invigorated through exaggeration and experimentation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much has been said about the way PC Music artists appropriate the familiar sounds of pop music that inhabits the Billboard charts by bending, stretching and distorting its beats and textures to create their new sonic terrain. After spending a not insignificant part of my life studying and trying to make contemporary classical music (what we in the classical music business ourselves sometimes annoyingly call \u201cart\u201d or \u201cserious\u201d music), I find myself often thinking about how certain popular musicians, especially those in the PC Music orbit, accomplish genuinely artistic, communicative, important\u2014in other words, \u201cserious\u201d\u2014innovations in music. But for a number of reasons you could probably imagine, as well as more arcane ones,1<\/a><\/sup>A big one being that PC Music, like most popular music, tends to have a firm, predictable beat, which has been a sort of taboo for Western composers for a few decades.<\/span><\/em> musicians like SOPHIE would probably not be considered \u201cserious\u201d in the classical music world. Nonetheless, sound is sound, regardless of the source or whether it\u2019s heard in concert halls or underground dance halls, and I can\u2019t help but feel that PC Music is up to something serious, something that my world has been hard at work at for decades.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spectralism, like PC Music, makes for a nebulous genre. It can be controversial to apply this label to certain composers or pieces, but it became an important and central aesthetic in classical music, especially in Europe, in the late twentieth century. It emerged as a response to the dominance of Serialism (what some refer to still as the \u201cdark ages\u201d), the angular, crunchy aesthetic of Schoenberg and Weber that tends to elicit strong and rarely positive reactions from current-day listeners. Spectralist composers, on the other hand, thought that interesting and pioneering music could still be pleasurable, and were especially preoccupied with natural sounds and organic forms. But the name itself derives from the\u00a0spectrum<\/em>\u00a0of sound, which composers and acousticians were by the 1970s better able to analyze and document via spectrographs, revealing the frequency content of sounds, the different elements that combined to give a sound, such as a guitar pluck or a brass chord, its specific quality.\u00a0 A low C and a high C on the piano might sound like the same note in different registers to most listeners,2<\/a><\/sup>The \u201cequivalence\u201d of notes in different registers is an implicit axiom of Serialism.<\/span><\/em> but the Spectralists realized these were entirely different notes with very different spectra, and should be treated as such.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This focus on the spectra of sound and effort to emulate and embrace natural forms led French composer G\u00e9rard Grisey (1946-1998) to compose the landmark Spectralist piece Partiels<\/a><\/em> in 1975. This piece uses eighteen orchestral instruments to emulate the spectrum of a trombone playing a low register E, using careful and nuanced adjustments to each instrumental part to approximate the depth of sound all contained by this single fundamental pitch. The resulting music is intensely dramatic and undergoes beautiful transformations, from the harshly brutal beginning of the piece<\/a> to a biting yet sweet high register interlude<\/a>. It remains hugely influential for composers today, revealing rich potentials in orchestration, form, narrative, and idea. Crucially, Grisey worked with acoustic means, and likely would today even with the advent of so much synthesizer potential. Answering SOPHIE\u2019S aforementioned question, many composers and classical musicians believe there is something vital about live acoustic performance that digital means will never capture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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