gérard grisey and the foliation of time

8/6/2019 Grard Grisey and the Foliation of Time

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(Qlde1rl)1llmrij Ml is ic R a )J ir .w2000, .vol. 19,i'att 3, p. 2~OPhotocopying p~ rmitted by license only@ 2JJQ OOPA (Overseas Pub lishe rs A ssocta tien) N .V :. Published by 1i'(en5eunderHte Harwood Academic Pu blishers imprint,

part: "fCocd"" arid Breach l'iJblisl1iJil,g,a mernberof theTaylor & > Francis GI'OtlF'f.

Gerard Grisey and the Foliation ofTimeP . .A.CastanetTranslated by Joshua Fineberg

In the midst of the grayish panOTCU'1l8 ofcontemperary musie.amengthecreators of the post-war generation; Gerard Grisey (born in 1946) h .


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guide the developmentof the ensemble l'Itineraire in Paris, began, eachin their own way, the route towards, whatHugues Dufourtcallsdin hisnow historical article, "Spectral Music", Following a long line of eminentscientists, going from Calileo or Descartes to Newton or Saveur andtouching upon the. "concomitant sounds' of Father Marin Merserme, the'spectral' composers began hawkiltg a new idea and formed a new'school.' In the middle of this group of experimenters, extolling thevirtues of the 'ecology' of musical sautee material, Crisey would woikdiligently on the 'evolution of sound]' focusingaesthatically on bothmusical and temporalissues.

Sonic fll'cheoiogy, 111usicalmythologyWHhoutgoing back to mythelogical references such as the Gandlurrva, thestories and legends o r China, the diphonic vocal techniques o rMongolian Hooml singers or the techniques of the peasants of TOLrvCl ,consideration of natural acoustic phenomena highlighting a fundamentalnote and its colored train. of upper partials has effected many post-romantic musicians (from Debussy, Hindamirh, Soriabin, Varese, [olivet,Scelsi and Messiaen to Radulescu, Vivier, Per Norgaard ... ).In the wakeof this cosmopolitan movement, confronted with the hippie-like happen-ings that grew out of the culture inspired by the student uprisings inParis inMay 1968, and in opposition to Fiene Boulez's Domuin e Mu sicliland its image of compositional technique within a vacuum, a group ofParisian composers and instrumentalists founded the ensemblel/Itineraire in 1973.With the approval of Olivier Messiaen, this group's first efforts criedout for listening to the sounds themselves.for a musical 'language'and'syntagm' based on a profound use of sonic phenomena. in.all their C:OIll .-plexity, both harmonic and (youth and creative greed oblige) inharmonic,Those most concerned with the overall relationships of phenomenolegi-cal sorucntatetiaJ (0 this g:ro.l lp of co~!.tlpose.rs,only Dufourt was notMessiaen's student) are dearly Cerard Grisey and Tristan Murail arongwith Michael Levinas. to a lesser degree, Although a bit late, a spirit ofmodified rniero-spectrality is felt in certain recent works of Levinas: forexample, Rebo1 '1ds (1993}, Diaclas (1993t Par-Deli: (1994) and the work

1.t.rtlusldtor's ..I 'l '".te: the expression used in French is 'devenir du 50)10re;' this implies thesonic evolution as p~0ieded into the work's future: the sound's becoming what it wi l lbecome,


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which synthesizes much of the research in the other pieces, the operaGO~gol (1994). In as much as his music make no use of micro-intervalsand in opposition to the generally held view, Hugues Dufourt must beconsidered a sort of 'faux-spectral' composer. As for Roger Tessier, heonly dealt obliquely with the techniques offered by spectral music, onlyoccasionally using the solipsistic concept of a single sound as the basisfor a piece (Cl~7ir~Ol7scu.r for soprano, instrumental trio and electro-acoustic treatments - 1977, Coalescence for clarinet and two orchestras-1987).

The work'S of Crisey from 1970-1980 contain at once self-generativ-e phe-nomena and self-destructive ingredient _Extracted from the mega-cycleLes Espaces Acoustiques (1975-1985), Modulat-f.on:s (1976-1977), forexample, shows acoustic zones. in perpetualmotion around a fundamen-tal E (41.2 Hertz). In this piece, where at eachinstant the material seemsto be hoarding to itself the fragile allegory of self-genesis, the form itselfrecounts 'the history of th sounds of which it is made.' Moreover, in thesame instrumental cycle, the composers attempts - with Partiele (1975)- to synthesize more richly the spectrum. of a single 110te played on thetrombone using si teen instruments for the task. An analytical use ofsonograms of bras .instruments along with spectrograms of the transfer-mations caused by adding various mutes, allow the synthetic reconstruc-tion of the gIob


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the coutposer (listen to the duo titled 'Llove you' which unleashes a sonicvision worthy of Dante's' hell; a crowd of lovers is depicted by thousandof voices which call out to each other, swirling around then collapsing),Freely personified, the breath-date we call it the aruma? - learns tolive, to breathe, to sing, to move/ to stammer, then finally to speaktwenty-two different languages. Staged in the theater of life, the spatio-sonic relations of the man-chorist with the machine-singer is made up ofboth fusion and interaction, of conflict and phagocytosis but also thefalse autonomy of J;llany types of dialogue (of belligerents, of friends, oftender confidence).Two moreexamples. first, Iook at the middle section in which 1 . 1 systemof alternating echoes between the human and robot voices is established(see Figuren then consider the touching scene where the chorus sings alast lullaby then drifts off intosleep, dreaming in the 3n01;'eof the elec-tronic monster, "Supreme seduction," Grisey told us, "that voice risks.being more human then a natural voice. both more pure and morepainful." As can be seen, the true division between natural and unnat-ural has dearly, and happily.become very artistically vague.In fact Gerard Crisey, a curious and intelligent aesthete, likes the truthof nature. He:uses, to this end, fine distortions and precise blurs. CharlesIves said of nature that "she likes analogies but she hates repetition." I fDufourt strangles the beautiful nature of the encyclopedists (and the paS-toral flute -think of Antiphysis -1978) and ifMurail plays at warpingmechanical systems (reread the pretext forthe grOlmd rules of Memoire- Elios,ion-1976), Grisey has subtly harmonized the laws of a curiosityinspired craftsmanship. GCilingfrom a system of timbro-temporaldefor-mation to a controlled spatia-harmonic dilation, Grisey'g iniprint neverbreaks the thread of his continuous preoccupation with temporal meta-morphoses. Furthermore, the archetypal. times of nature move freelybetween the movements of Vortex 'Iemporum (1994~1995) "in constanttimes as different as those of humans (the time G f language and the timeof respiration), that of whales (the 'spectral time of sleep rhythms) andthat of birds or insects (extremely contracted time where the bordersbecome blurred)," explains the composer.

Delicate 'violence ar,d realtfatse natureIn the same way that the scenes of slight "catastrophes' suspended by themathematician Rene Thorn or in the same tendency manifested in thepictures showing the imprecise crossing of the border from indigo toviolet in the experiments of Newton on the dispersion of light, some


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34 P. A . Ctlslauel

pages from Criseys work di creetly reveal the inde cribable paradox orthe impossible dialectic. lour, Conire- jour (1978-1979) is an exact image ofa quasi-virtual passage of the progression 'from daily time to musiraltime,' As in Pariiels the imagination perceives the timbral lighting, inextremely special halftone colors, as sweeping movements from shadowto clarity, exposing impressions of a jumble, now nocturnal, now diurnal.Le Nair de I'Etoile (1989-1990), written for si percussionists placedaround the audience, integra res into the sonic discourse a fill ic createdby the speed of rotation of two pulsars (the residue of a Super Nova):one called Vela (in French) was prerecorded and the other is captured'Jive' by radio telescope. The troubling. effect o.fthe re-transmitted peri-odico-astronomic sound of this neutron star comes in part from. the factthat the sounds are the result of the audible transcoding of the electro-magnetic waves that make up < . I , portion of- the star's 'light' .and alsobecause the sounds that have finally become audible h O I ve taken at leastfifteen thousand years to reach us,For those wanting to study more Iosely Grlsey' continuous transi-tions, his parametric dovetailing OJ:' his aesthetic mediations} all iII

depth study of Portiels or Tale might prove useful. Concerning Part icle,and outside of the analysis of the classic parameters, an informedlistener could concentrate OJ1 the following dichotomies (see the tablebelow):

dynml7ic pole durations phqsil7g /'inw

ppp strict no ttltion periodic striatedFBI; repetition ad-Lib. aperiodic non-pulsatedk ine . t- ic , spaho-f :mLpO I :a f ac ti vi ty rhythm agog-i f

passive (fermata) sometimes free sometimes free releaseactive poly-tempi tensionS O l l i e g e l7 .e s is aesthetic

biomorph (natural model) organic; naturetechnomorph (electronic model} artificial noise


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pitch sound t imbve relat-ion materialspectral sinusoidal. pure consonant homogeneouscluster noisy dirty dissonant he terogeneouscnara te l' IIm in o si Iy densi ty

smooth material clear dngle ound/two part spectralband ( 2 I.)grainy materia'! dark tutti - each instrument deployingits own network of harmonics

dramll,furg!} p r o c e s s

dynamic and timbric purificationisual and scenic contamination by parasite

More recently, L e Temp s ei I'Ecunie (1988-1989) for four percussion-ists, two synthesizers and chamber orchestra contains pairs of mstru-merits rigorou Iy written in "false-unisons' or 'false-octaves.' Simjlaxly,Vortex T empor um U (1994;....1995)or sextet, leaves the pianist with thefeeling of being free, but under surveillance as regards the means ofcircumscribing the metronomic stability: "to give the impression of hes-itation to the tempo (accelerando 01: rallentando)" ... "to create a blurredperiodicity using slight fluctuation around a constant," writes Criseyon the conductor's score, along with the dedication to SalvatoreSciarrino.

Mnemosyne exposed

Gerard Crisey looks for inspirationin the richness of extra-European artand philosophy: in this regard, the poly-metric ritual of Tempus exuutcnina (j979) for six percussionists must be considered .as well as thespatial disposition and accumulating stratification of temporalities ofL 'lco ne P nr aa a xa le (homage to Piero della Francesca -1993-1994 for twowomen's voices and large orchestra divided into two groups). TheEgyptian symbolic codification inspired by The Book oj the Dea d wasused in Anubis-Nout (1983-1988) and a desire to bring out the 'myth of


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36 RA. C!lSi!I1IlG!

duration' ispresent in Vo'tte; 'C Temponsm II I and in S t , e l e (1995). All of theseexamples serve as so many cultural clues to a need which is musical,above all else. Ste le ~ , duo for percussion dedicated to DominiqueTroncin ~ bears aheading with the followingsymptomatic phrases:"How can, a cellular organization be made to emerge from a flow whichobeys other laws? How can you sketch with precision and at the edge ofsilence, a rhythmic inscription, first indiscernible then finally in a11archaic hammering? While composing, an image carne to me: that ofarcheologists discovering a stele and cleaning its surface until its funeralinscription becomes visible."See, in . Figure 2, the hi-temple use of the can trabass torn and very lawbass drum extracted from Stele. The motion of the represented space isbuilt LJPQn two simultaneous processes. The first rule governs the super-position of the different 'tempi (quarter note .""40 for the torn, quarternote 450):' slower for the bass drum); the second controls.the evolutiontowards disappearance of the rhythmic cells that nourish it (longer andlonger rl1ythmic values fbI the torn, a cellular game of variable durationswith stopping points for the bass drum).Grisey is no stranger to thesecular archetypes of occidental music,either. To illustrate this, take Modula_t ions (1976-1977), for example. Acanon of neumes crystallizes in a polyphony of blocks.in which can beobserved the independence of structural models. Additionally; the appli-

cation 'in situ' of the medieval idea of the iale influencing the disassocia-tion of rhythms and pitches! the co lor , is manifested in Taie a (1 98 6).Remember that Michael Levinas wrote something along the same orderwith Arsis and Thesis :in 1971. We should also try to understand theGl'iseyist idea of (re)considering the aura of sympathetic resonance thatis wrapped around the ancient notion of monody in Pro logue (1976.),thefirst piece of the EspaceS Aco'llstiques, Looking through this prism, withits almost didactic connotations, the presence of zones of coherence canbe seen ~ dose in some ways to the ancestral apparatus of occidentaltonalify - within the complex stratagraphy that sculpts the interior ofVortex TempCml l1 ' l (1994-1995). We C2m finally judge the lyrical interplayof duplication, spectral ambiguity,ambiva1.ence and. consonance inL ' T c 6 1 : 1 _ e P a r 6 1 d o x a l e '(1.993-1994). In that recent work, the orchestra is spa-tialized as two times two ensembles: the large orchestra is divided intolow instruments and high ones and a small phalanx 'is split into twosymmetrical g)"Oupswhich envelope the two female voices, A close rela-tion is created to th e visualIogic of Fiero della Francesca's fatT1QUS paint-ing, La Ma .domwd 'el P aru: Explicit references are given by Grisey in thetitle, through the distribution of the orchestral ensembles a n d alsothrough the structure of th e piece. Whlle the ferm of the work 'traces rnacontrary evolutionaranalegcus tOtW0 diagonals whose rntersection


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vortexes (organized by the idea of a spiral.centered on multiple ostinati)1 r 1 L a M a n i i J 'a g r 5 'r e for piano (1993).Hugues Dufourt works with a new typology of duration, transgressingthe strictures of traditionally assignable forms. In the same w.ay as for apagan ritual, he tries to suppress all external references. and all articula-tionswhlch are too connotated, Look at the extreme auto development inthe progression 'of the P hilosoph eelo R emb ra nd t for orchestra(1987-1992), at tile. intcl.ligent manipulations of parametric perspectivein 1 7 1 ' e . W a t e r ' Y Star for octet (J.993)erasill,g, at once harmony; timbre andpulse to create theinextricabUls of instrumental fusion. At the recent pr,e-miere of L 'Espace aux O mbre s (1994-1995), the composed evoked thequarrel which has framed the last ten yeats1modernism VB. post-mod-ernism. According to Dufourt, this conflict can doubtlessly find a "con-structive solution," leading to a "synthesis of styles" and giving birth to"an original from of art." 011e of thereal problems facing current musicalcreation is "that of re-using tradition." "The relation. to past attachments.does not, however, cry out for vain repetition. On the contrary, it hasbecome essential. to re-evaluate the craft of musical composition, to pickback up the threadof history, with neithereclecticism nor tech..nicalobsession.' I n f i r r ~ , the basic question presented by the authoref L ' f . { e l - / ' r ed es T ra ces Was phrased in the following way: "How (an we renew omrelationship with tradition without giving these renovations a traditionalform?"Gerard Grisey solemnly swore to us that, like many people today.behas stopped believing in an tnfiuitely rosy future and that the notion of"enlarging the field of consciousness in concentric circles" seems to have

become preferable, today, to that of. progress. Following Dufourt'sexample, Levinas seems to have kept some distance hom the ardentflames of technology to embrace the acoustic body inits brute form, freefrom the artifice of Magical Electricity Moreover, while Dufourt thinksthat 'the orchestra is still the best synthesizer we have,' Cri:sey ismovingslowly away from the sphere of art-scienee in which he had totalconfidence in earlier decades (19705-19805). Today, Gdsey tends to.denounce the plethora of orgiastic sounds and the almost unlimitedbreadth of scale systems which, according to him, willnot necessarilyproduce viable long-term solutions.Thus history has ..never stopped following ils long; chaotic but uninter-rupted, rocket ride of referential or even irreverentevents, If serious lis-tening to Le T e m p s e1 I'Ecum,e by Crisey evokes a certain heritage fromDebussy; scrutinizing certain pages of I m ; l I i, C B l 1 . t r e - j o u . ' rj inevitably callsto mirtd a certain kinship to Ligeti. In this way, leaving the circularmatrix that encloses the ideas of Messiaen and Stockhausen, camped attheend of a boundary Iine Iinkir...g the three 'eas' (Debussy, Scelsi and


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~o P.A. Cdot(in~1Ligeti], Grisey searches, listens, evolves, lives and opens. "You have toope.nup in order to live better within the enclosed gardel:L of sonicimages. Listen then rnedita te, then listen again,' ad vises the composer ofChants de l'Arno'utin an article printed in the Cahiere du Renerd.In this way, otherunexpectedinfluences have marked the pieces with

a more recent spectral 'essence: from the rhythmic sedimentation, thatcomes from extra-European musical practices, to the original COnce p t ofvertiginous repetition, d.ear to Morton Feldman, passing through theincisive rapidity of short objects inthe manner of Janacek, or the swirlingtreatment of distinctive material in the manner of a Ravel quotation forVO l'te..cT emp o n.lI1 1 I, II- III ' . . . to be continued: Raymond Queneau wrote,during World War II, that the truly gTea,t history was the history of inven-tions. "It is they which provoke history, based on statistical, biologicaland geographic data'{ ... A t the dawn of the XXIst century and inour specialty, might we not add to this perspective credo the adjective'musicological'?

gérard grisey and the foliation of time

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