I met a cellist recently who introduced me to a composer called Radulescu. After looking into his work I've discovered a genre of modern classical music called spectral music, thus named because it is based on mathematical analysis of the sonic spectrum. One of the founders of the school is a Frenchman known as Gerard Grisey, he wrote a piece called Partials which uses an orchestra to reconstruct the timbre of a trombone by progressively playing all of the overtones contained within a note played by the trombone. This kind of thing is fairly rudimentary, but by the time we get to Radulescu the genre is much more highly developed, using tuning systems based around naturally occurring overtones and strange combinations of instruments playing almost entirely in harmonics. Now I'm not usually a fan of musical modernism, but this genre particularly interested me because, rather than being based around arbitrary methods of pitch organization, it is informed by the mathematical structure of sound directly. I think this sort of exploration should be encouraged as an alternative to trying to 'invent' new musical systems out of thin air, which always seems to be occurring in conservatories.
Here's an example of Radulescu's music, this piece is called Das Andere (The Other) for solo violin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPdMdEaUYGs&feature=related
