February 16, 2009 Concert: Gérard Grisey’s Acoustic Spaces
Program Notes
by Paul Griffiths
Introduction
“Dismembered by the media, drowned in excess information, over-determined in the age of zapping and clips, the time Bataille called ‘sacred’—the time of art, love, and creativity, the moment when something unprecedented happens—can only be preserved by artists who completely resist the late twentieth-century environment. Paradoxically, however, these are precisely the rhythms that feed and inspire artists; this is the only world that calls forth their questions. And so the response to this discontinuous flood of information will be a music finding its own unity and continuity. Its wintry slowness will be the reversed echo of a stress-ridden world rushing to an end.” (Gérard Grisey)
Gérard Grisey is often thought of as one of the spectralists, along with Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt, and others—composers who, starting out in the mid-seventies, used the frequency spectra of sounds as models for orchestration. However, Grisey came to dislike the label, and certainly his music has a thoroughly individual and independent kind of vividness and vigor. His interest in spectra was part of a readiness to engage, almost atavistically, with the stuff and power of sound. He was also very much concerned with how sound can shape time, with processes of change that are immediate, fully present, and strongly expressive.

Born in 1946, Grisey studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where he joined Olivier Messiaen’s class in 1968 and won the Prix de Rome in 1972. That summer, before leaving for Italy, he attended courses given by Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti at Darmstadt. In Rome, he was reunited with his classmate Murail, who had won the prize the year before, and the two formed a plan to set up their own ensemble, L’Itinéraire. Grisey’s Périodes, for seven instrumentalists, was given its first performance by L’Itinéraire in Rome in 1974. Back in Paris, the ensemble became a focus for other young composers, including Dufourt and Michel Lévinas. Meanwhile, Grisey continued his studies, working with the acoustician Émile Leipp in 1974-5.

Soon he was receiving important commissions, notably from Pierre Boulez for the Ensemble InterContemporain (Modulations, 1976) and from Les Percussions de Strasbourg (Tempus ex machina, 1979). Les Espaces acoustiques, a sequence of compositons lasting well over an hour, through an expansion from solo viola to symphony orchestra, received its première at the 1981 Venice Biennale. The following year, he took a teaching post at Berkeley, though his creative opportunities continued to come from Europe, and in 1986 he moved back to teach at the Paris Conservatoire. Among his subsequent works are L’Icône paradoxale for two female voices and two orchestral groups (1992-4), which the L.A. Philharmonic introduced, Vortex temporum for piano and mixed quintet (1994-6), and Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil for soprano and ensemble (1996-8). He died in November 1998, at the age of fifty-two, before this last work had been performed.

In the decade since his death, he has been increasingly recognized as the most important French composer in the generation after Boulez and Barraqué. Les Espaces acoustiques is one of the musical landmarks of recent times, and has been recorded complete twice, in performances conducted by Sylvain Cambreling (Accord 206532) and Stefan Asbury (Kairos 0012422 KAI). Also on Kairos are a Grisey anthology including Tempus ex machina (Kairos 0012502 KAI) and a recording of the late and powerful Quatre Chants (Kairos 0012252 KAI).


GERARD GRISEY (1946-98)
Tempus ex machina

Grisey’s own program notes take us into his way of thinking. On this piece he wrote as follows:

Tempus ex machina is principally a study of time. The pitches of the skin, wood, and metal instruments, very simplified and quickly identified by the ear, allow an extreme degree of concentration on the temporal structure. Hence a projection where color is reduced to what is strictly necessary, where what emerges is only form, and the least error is fatal!

Such an abstract project allows me, I dare hope, to escape the chronic boredom generally brought about by percussion pieces that depend only on the immediate appeal of the sounds. These sounds, employed now for more than thirty years, need to be taken a little more seriously!

As in most of my other works, the material is virtually sublimated into pure sonorous becoming. Thus, the rhythms of the initial sequence are not to be understood as cells, but rather as time vehicles: periodicity, acceleration, and deceleration are only three centers among which the musical discourse oscillates, taking a path between similarity and difference toward the very interior of the sound.

This slow traverse from the macrophonic to the microphonic determines the form of Tempus ex machina, a real machine to expand time, with a zoom effect that little by little lets us perceive the grain of the sound, then its very substance.

Thus, the last sounds to be heard are only the bass drum and wood drum strokes from the beginning, but expanded in the extreme, permitting us to apprehend the inaudible: transients, partials, beats—the same body of sound. After numerous meanderings, we reach the goal of the voyage: the other side of the mirror.


GERARD GRISEY
Les Espaces acoustiques: Part I

Les Espaces acoustiques is one of the great dreams of the seventies: a musical exploration taking an entire evening. Grisey introduced it as follows:

Begun in 1974 and finished in 1985, the cycle Les Espaces acoustiques comprises six instrumental pieces, going from solo viola to full orchestra. The pieces may be linked in performance without interruption, each widening the acoustic field of the last. Their unity comes from their formal similarity and also from two acoustic points of reference: the harmonic spectrum and periodicity.

Everything began with Périodes, a succession of episodes in the last of which I experimented with a technique that seemed to me in need of development. I had analysed, with the help of a spectrograph, the sound of a low E on the trombone, and I recreated its main components (the fundamental and harmonics) with the instruments of Périodes. That opened the way to a new kind of harmonic thinking and to what I later called “instrumental synthesis.”

I may summarize thus the language used in these pieces:

– to compose no longer with notes but with sounds;
– to compose no longer with sounds but with the differences that separate them;
– to act on these differences—that is, control the evolution (or the nonevolution) of the sound and the speed of this evolution;
– to take account of the relativity of our auditory perception;
– to apply in the instrumental domain phenomena long experienced in electronic music studios (as happens most radically and perceptibly in Partiels and Modulations);
– to seek out a synthetic way of writing so that the different parameters participate in the elaboration of each unique sound—for example, the layout of non-tempered pitches creates timbres, and from it are born durations, etc. The synthesis governs, on the one hand, sound elaboration (material), and on the other, the different relations existing between sounds (forms).

The story is begun by the solo viola of Prologue, which plays for about a quarter of an hour, moving toward a crisis point about two-thirds of the way through, and after that leading into the next piece:
Essentially melodic, Prologue slowly and gradually removes itself from the weight and the hypnotic effect of repetition. A single melodic cell, playing on the pitches of a harmonic spectrum, serves as axis and reference point for a kind of spiral. Everything comes from this cell; everything returns to it—but never at exactly the same level. The melody is treated here in its very essence, in its gestalt, in its profile, but never at the level of the note, for the pitches from which it is composed come to distance themselves little by little from the original spectrum to arrive at noise by way of different degrees of inharmonicity.

The viola’s melodic profile governs at once the large-scale form, the tempos, and the arrival of two kinds of insert: heartbeat (short-long) and echo. Not tempered, Prologue poses enormous problems to the performer (quite apart from those of the instrument!).

This melodic dream has its inert response in the sympathetic vibrations of the different instruments that surround the viola and that play exactly the same passive role as the sympathetic strings of the sitar or sarangi.

One voice alone, a phantasmic response from uninhabited instruments, but also an abstract structure that makes no concessions—I hope I have succeeded here in stammering out what I believe music to be: a dialectic between frenzy and form.

Six instruments—flute, clarinet, trombone, and strings—join the viola as it goes into Périodes, which also plays for about fifteen minutes:
In Périodes there are three kinds of moment (growing loudness or tension, progressive relaxation, and stasis or periodicity) analogous to the phases of human respiration: inhalation, exhalation, rest. Periodicity is experienced here as a real weight, a pole where the lack of a new energy obliges us literally to turn in circles, before an anomaly might be detected, the germ of a new evolution, the point for a new take-off. Yet the periodicities here are not like those a synthesizer could provide. I call them “flowing,” like our hearts, like our walking, never rigorously periodic but with that margin of fluctuation in which lies all the interest.

Périodes is an intimate score, in which the string quartet has an essential and also delicate role. One may note in particular:

– the first “inhalation,” during which the instruments surround the viola with a spectrum of harmonics and then gradually remove themselves, into sound complexes that are increasingly distant from the original;
– the second “inhalation,” essentially rhythmic (moving from periodicity to aperiodicity) and growing out of the heartbeat;
– the passage using a particular string technique, allowing the instruments to move progressively from a highly differentiated harmonic complex to an extremely simple coloration of the fundamental.

As for the temporal structures, these are wholly derived from the spectrum of odd-numbered harmonics employed in the piece.

A further increase, happening magically, takes us into Partiels:
The title can be understood as indicating this is part of a larger work, but it also carries the acoustic meaning of composites of a sound.

Two beacons direct how the sound progresses: periodicity and the harmonic spectrum. Easily identifiable, these shape the continuity and the dynamics of the musical language, which follows the cyclic form of human breathing: inspiration—expiration—rest, or if one prefers: tension (breaking up)—relaxation—energy reconstruction.

Many sequences of Partiels herald a new technique, of instrumental synthesis. Analogous to digital electronic synthesis, this compositional method uses instruments to express the different partials of a sound, so that, as we perceive it, the different instrumental sources disappear in creating a totally invented timbre. These different fusions make it possible to articulate and organize a whole range of timbres, going from harmonic spectra to white noise by way of different spectra of inharmonic partials.

Partiels is longer than its predecessors, playing for over twenty minutes. Somewhere in the middle, the texture thins to leave just two flutes calling to one another, like birds, or like people making contact within a forest. Then, as always in Grisey’s music, change comes again, taking us toward the end, or toward the new beginning of the cycle’s second part.


Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.