From Spirit to Spectrum: mysticism and spirituality among spectral composers
While it is no surprise that scientism suffuses the theoretical writings of the initiators of the spectral movement in the context that engendered these writings, it nonetheless overshadows some of the fundamental motivations that guided these composers, or, in Kandinskian terms, that determined their inner necessity. In the case of Gérard Grisey, his private writings (letters, excerpts from personal diaries) arose from that facet of the composer’s personality that he, possibly due to modesty, preferred to show only to those closest to him. They reveal a mystic fervour beset with doubt and anxiety but also states of grace, euphoria, and certainties, notably the sense of being invested with a gift from God, and hence a mission it would be inconceivable to abandon. However, the mysticism of the adolescent and young adult seems to widen progressively to a spirituality that the author of this paper proposes as a “spirituality of immanence”.