Gérard Grisey

Gérard Grisey was born in Belfort on June 17th, 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris. Here he won prizes for piano accompaniment, harmony, counterpoint, fugue and composition (Olivier Messiaen’s class from 1968 to 1972). During this period, he also attended Henri Dutilleux’s classes at the École Normale de Musique (1968), as well as summer schools at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena (1969), and in Darmstadt with Ligeti, Stockhausen and Xenakis in 1972. He was granted a scholarship by the Villa Medici in Rome from 1972 to 1974, and in 1973 founded a group called L’Itinéraire with Tristan Murail, Roger Tessier and Michael Levinas, later to be joined by Hugues Dufourt. Dérives, Périodes and Partiels were among the first pieces of spectral music. In 1974-75, he studied acoustics with Émile Leipp at the Paris VI University, and in 1980 became a trainee at the I.R.C.A.M. In the same year he went to Berlin as a guest of the D.A.A.D., and afterwards left for Berkeley, where he was appointed professor of theory and composition at the University of California (1982-1986). After returning to Europe, he has been teaching composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris since 1987, and holds numerous composition seminars in France (Centre Acanthes, Lyon, Paris) and abroad (Darmstadt, Freiburg, Milan, Reggio Emilia, Oslo, Helsinki, Malmö, Göteborg, Los Angeles, Stanford, London, Moscow, Madrid, etc.) Gérard Grisey died in Paris on 11 November 1998. Among his works, most of which were commissioned by famous institutions and international instrumental groups, are Dérives, Jour, contre-jour, Tempus ex machina, Les chants de l’Amour, Talea, Le temps et l’écume, Le noir de I’étoile, L’icône paradoxale, Les espaces acoustiques (a cycle consisting of six pieces), Vortex temporum and Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil. In order to present Gérard Grisey’s art, one has to retrace almost thirty years of continual thought concerning the question of musical time, conceptualized as the conjugation of different times surrounding a musical work: the time imagined by the composer, the chronometric time of the execution, the subjective and psychological time of the listener’s perception, etc. Grisey considers time as being the very object which has to be shaped and organized by the composer, like a demiurge, who himself alone has been able to offer contemporary man the ability to experience the pure sensation of ‘time as it passes’. «Cut to pieces by the media, drowned in overinformation, measured in this age of zapping and clips, this time, the time which Bataille called ‘sacred’, the time of Art, Love and Creativeness, the instant when something unprecedented happens, can only be preserved by the artist if he completely resists this late 20th century environment. Paradoxically, however, these are precisely the rhythms which feed and inspire him. This is the only world which calls forth his questions. And so, the response to this discontinued flood of information will be a music finding its unity and continuity. Its wintry slowness will be the reversed echo of a stress-ridden world rushing towards its end». Reminiscing about his early years, Grisey said: «I was fascinated by the very extended time practised by Ligeti, or by Stockhausen in certain pieces, but I realized that this extended time was not yet filled with the material it required: they filled it with clusters or chromatic music, but that was very different from what, as far as I was concerned, should have happened in this kind of time». This was in 1974 when Grisey was taking a course in musical acoustics with Émile Leipp at Jussieu’s science faculty. New technology then made it possible to obtain precise analyses of the spectral decomposition of sound, especially through sonograms, that is to say visual representations of the temporal evolution of sound, or images that were intelligible both to acousticians and to musicians. For Grisey this was a revelation of the material he was seeking. The harmonic aspect is another essential reason for Grisey’s interest in the acoustic spectrum. In the late 70s, the aesthetics of continuity and purely spectral time reached their height in a work such as Jour, contre-jour, a piece which is unique among Grisey’s works in that it achieves the formal concept of a simple movement of musical time, for those who are willig to listen to such slow fluctuations. This work is in a way a final stage after which it is no longer possible to use the purely linear process without running the risk of repeating oneself. Later Grisey reduces his musical objects to archetypes: the sound patterns the listener is meant to perceive and perhaps memorize are characterized by rudimentary criteria: a rising or falling movement, a rapid or slow tempo, a rhythmic / pulsating or non-rhythmic / non-pulsating aspect, a ‘noise-like’ or ‘harmonic’ sonority. This reduction of the material to archetypal gestures, the first essential characteristic of Grisey’s style from the 80s to the present, cannot be conceived without the correlated idea of a multitude of relative times, an idea which forms the gist of Grisey’s preoccupations, both in his theoretical writings and in his compositions. Starting with Le Temps et l’écume (1989-1990), Grisey’s music distinguishes between three types of distinctly opposed temporalities: the time of language, the usual time of tonal music, the ‘spectral’ time disproportionately slowed down, and a very compressed, accelerated time which is hardly audible. Claimed by many young composers as an influence, the music of Gérard Grisey can today remain true to its great aesthetic aims without becoming the prisoner of a manner. It makes no concessions to tastes and fashions, stays outside of schools and quarrels, and asserts itself as both singular and relevant in today’s music.