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Born in Belfort, he began to study composition at the
Conservatory in Trossingen, Germany (196365) and subsequently attended a
course in composition given by Messiaen at the Conservatoire National Supérieur
in Paris (196872). He was also
a student of Henri Dutilleux at the École Normale Supérieure de Musique
(1968), attended seminars given by Stockhausen, Ligeti and Xenakis in
Darmstadt (1972), and studied electroacoustics and acoustics at the Faculté
des Sciences de Paris (1969 and 1974). Thanks to a grant from the Deutsche
Akademische Austauschdienst he spent some time working in West Berlin. He
established a high reputation for himself as a teacher of composition,
conducting seminars in Darmstadt, ircam in Paris, Scuola Civica in Milan
and at many American universities. Between 1982 and 1986 he taught at the
University of California in Berkeley. He spent the latter period of his
life, until his sudden death on 11 November 1998, lecturing in composition
at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris.
Selected works: Initiation for trombone, double-bass
and male voice (1970); D1eau et de pierre for two groups of instruments
(1972); Vagues, Chemins, le Souffle for orchestra and clarinet (1972); Dérives
for two orchestras (1974); Périodes for performers (1974); Partiels for
16 or
18 musicians (1975); Prologue for alto and live electronic (1976);
Modulations for 33 performers (1977); Sortie vers la lumi…re du jour for
electric organ and 14 musicians (1978); Tempus ex machina for six
percussionists (1979); Jour, contre-jour for electric organ, 13 musicians
and 4-track tape (1979); Transitoires for large orchestra (1981);
Anubis-Nout, two pieces for double-bass clarinet (1983); Les Chants de
l1Amour for natural voices and synthetic voice (1984); Epilogue for four
solo horns and large orchestra (1985); Les Espaces Acoustiques, a
continuous cycle of six pieces for a gradually expanding number of
performers (1974 85); Talea for violin, cello, flute, clarinet and piano
(1986); Accords perdus, miniatures for two horns (19887); Le Temps et
l1Ecume for four percussionists, two synthesizers and chamber orchestra
(1989); Le Noir de l1Etoile for six percussionists surrounding the
audience, tape and in situ retransmission of astronomical signals (1990);
Anubis et Nout for two saxophones (1990); Lilene paradoxale (Hommage a
Piero della Francesca) for two female voices and large orchestra in two
groups (1994); Vortex temporum I, II, III for piano and five instruments
(1995); Stele piece for two percussionists (1995); Wolf Lieder for voice
and ensemble (instrumentation of a song by Hugo Wolf, 1996); Quatre chants
pour franchier le seuil for chamber orchestra (1998).
Anubis et Nout
Anubis is the name of a god typically represented as a man with the head
of a black jackal. He led the souls of the dead to judgement. The patron
of embalmers, he mummified the body of Osiris and was identified with
Hermes from Greek mythology. Nout is the long body of a naked woman. It is
blue and starlit, with its legs directed to the east and its arms to the
west. This is the canopy of heaven, an Egyptian night as well as the
mother of the sun. She can be sometimes met inside sarcophaguses, where
she protects mummified bodies. The musical material of both sections
employs the harmonic spectrum, reversed (Anubis) and simple (Nout), as
well as the process of transformation of durational time, from the
predictable to the unpredictable and vice versa.
The form of the composition is based on the polyphony of materials and
parameters: its setting into motion provokes various paroxisms. Melodic
and rhythmic insertions conduct a dialogue on two planes: macrophonic (melodies
of non-harmonic pitches) and microphonic (timbral melodies inside the
instrument1s spectrum).
Gérard Grisey
Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four Songs for
the Crossing of the Threshold) is intended as a musical meditation about
death in four scenes the death of the angel, civilisation, sound and
mankind.
The individual sections of the work are interspersed with brief interludes,
which are a kind of aural dust whose aim is to keep tension at
a level slighly higher than that during the period of polite silence in
the concert hall between two movements of a piece. The selected texts
represent four different civilisations; Christian, Egyptian, Greek and
Mesopotamian. The unifying thread is the theme of the inevitability of
death. The musical form was dictated by the necessity to create a
counterbalance to a light soprano in the shape of a sound block that is
serious and heavy and at the same time rich and colourful.
I. La mort de l1ange, according to Les heures de la
nuit by Christian Guez-Ricord. I had a chance to meet Ricord in Villa
Medici in 19721974 and we often discussed the possibility of working
together. Then each of us went our own way. In my research I was diverted
away from vocal music for some time. Ricord1s sudden death in 1988, after
a tragic life, was a profound shock to me. I was even more deeply moved by
these few poems. For me they are a quiet apogee of his life1s work, which
was of great weight, mystical in character and profuse in Judeo-Christian
symbolism.
The death of the angel is therefore the most frightening of all, because
it signifies mourning after the loss of our dreams. This fragment is quiet,
minimalist and built with great precision. Through the pattern of
proportions, it introduces certain metric structures, the traces of which
will be preserved in two subsequent sections of
the piece. One can detect something like an overabundance of time in the
metric structure. This fatal syntactical mistake is a signal that the
death sentence has been pronounced on poetry and the poet.
II. La mort de la civilisation according to the text from an Egyptian
sarcophagus. My interest in the civilisation of ancient Egypt is borne out
by the fact that I devoted to it three of my compositions. Jour,
Contre-Jour is a distant echo of The Book of the Dead. While reading an
archeological catalogue of hieroglyphic texts discovered on the walls of
sarcophaguses and on the bandages of mummies, I felt an instant urge to
compose a slow litany. The music is diatonic, even though it contains
micro-intervals as well as some Oleft-overs1 of material from Section I.
III. La mort de la voix is set to a text by the Greek poetess Erinna (6th
century b.c.). Virtually nothing is known about her. These two poems are
her only extant works. For a musician like me, emptiness, echo, voice, the
shadow of sounds and silence are so close and intimate that they almost
cry out to be translated into the language of music. Could it be therefore
that the passage of centuries has not changed anything in our sorrow?
IV. La mort de l1humanité according to the epic of Gilgamesh, in which
the immortal Utanapistî tells the story of the hero of the deluge Othe
secret of gods1. Like the Biblical Noah, Utanapisti survived the calamity,
whose dimensions terrified even the gods. The Great Goddess-Mother cries
like a woman giving birth; the place of the tale about the disaster is
taken by music which imitates the sounds of
the elements. The hurricane, torrential rain, lightning, deluge, the
hecatomb of victims these are the components of a great polyphony, in
which every layer is the trajectory of time.
And finally the fifth song: a gentle lullaby which cements the whole cycle.
Its aim is not to rock the listener to sleep but to wake up. It is music
of a new birth for mankind, at long last freed from the nightmare. I hope
it will not be used to rock the first human clone to sleep. If this was to
happen, it would be a rape of genetics and psychology,
a rape that nothing can justify.
Gérard Grisey
Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil
When the French composer Claude Vivier died in 1983, his colleague Grisey
dedicated a diptychon for wind instruments Anoubis Nout to him.
This was not the first time for Grisey a pioneer thinker of the
so-called spectral composition to recur to the Egyptian view of the
world. Jour, contre jour, dating from 1979, already musically mirorrs the
dualism of the kingdom of the sun and the kingdom of shadows, of the
spheres of the living and the dead. Even though the theoretician Grisey
was against freighting music with stories and extra-musical programmes,
his music was in no way free of a semantic layer. Nowhere is this more
obvious than in the Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, the last score
Grisey completed before his sudden death on
11 November 1998.
It is difficult to consider mere coincidence that the work happens to be
one that thematizes death. Quatre chants are four poetic attempts to
express in words what is intagible. The first song (Prelude. Death of the
Angel) is a reflection on the dying angel from Les heures a la nuit by the
poet Christian Guez Ricord (d. 1989), whom Grisey met at Villa Medici in
Rome in 1972 (Grisey: OThe death of the angel is the most frightening of
all because the angel is someone to whom we entrusted our dreams1). In the
second song (Interlude. Death of Civilization) Grisey used the words from
the inscriptions on Egyptian sarcophaguses from the period of the Middle
Kingdom. The third song (Interlude. Death of the voice) is set to verse
about the quiet in the realm of the dead by the Greek poetess Erinna from
Telos. Finally, the fourth song (False Interlude. Death of Humanity)
contains an excerpt from the epic of Gilgamesh which depicts the
peacefulness and beauty of the world after the Deluge.
Four chants on crossing the threshold; four reflections on death from four
epochs and cultures (Christian, Egyptian, Greek and Mesopotamian) have one
thing in common a peaceful acceptance of a new, other form of existence;
the lack of revolt or desperation.
It is no coincidence that Grisey repeatedly felt inclined to acoustic
reflections on coming and going, on light and shadow, since he himself
considered sound to be a living being, an organism. And since sound exists
in time, composing means reflection on waxing and waning at the time.
Sound as a creature, composition as a biography of sounds, a biologistic
understanding of the acoustic, and in compliance with this creed we once
again discover all those aesthetic qualities in Grisey1s Quatre chants.
OBiomorphous1 composition means: sound not as a parametric, classifiable
object, but as a living micro-organism whose own momentum becomes the
model of musical creation in all dimensions, Obiomorphous1 composition
means natural alternation of tension and relaxation, activity and repose
with breathing as the model. It also means the soft, Oindistinct1
periodicity of the heart beat. Instead of the rigid pattern of pulse and
beat gradual transition. Instead of abrupt contrast mediation
between extreme states of the sound. OBiomorphous1 composition also means
a propensity toward the no-man1s land, where the bounds between a single
sound and a chord, between a chord and
a tone colour, between pure sound and noise seductively blur.
OBiomorphous1 composition stands for processural composition.
Grisey was a master at working in these various Oaltitudes1, one who
skilfully zoomed back and forth between micro- and macro-time, or, in his
beautiful imagery, between human time and the extended time of whales and
the extremely compressed time of insects. And this disposal of time, of
the hearing perspective (Grisey certainly knew it) affords the music a
power that touches on the metaphysical just as the texts of Quatre chants
do.
In the last years of his life, Grisey sought a new relationship with
Western music tradition. In Quatre chants there are, despite all spectral
and temporal stretchings and compressions so typical of Grisey, evident
references to the traditional Western topoi of the musical development of
the death theme. This explains the chromatics descending to the range of
microtones in the first song, and the demonstrative dark colours of the
ensemble with bass and double bass clarinet, with low sounding percussion,
with two tubas and double-bass. There is an unusually manifest connection
to traditional death ciphers in the last song, extracted from the
Gilgamesh epic, which depicts a catastrophe that devastates the world and
the beautiful quiet following the apocalypse. Powerful low sounding drums
and the fourfold fortissimo of two tubas; registers of the acoustic
inferno involuntarily remind of Berlioz and Mahler. With the musical
Armageddon, which is followed by the lyrical swan song, Grisey, perhaps
unintentionally, ranks himself among the great death and farewell
scenarios of Mahler and Strauss. Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil is a
postscript to the moving songs of farewell of the late 19th and early 20th
century. Grisey himself, of course, heard this music differently: OThe
delicate berceuse, which ends the cycle [...] is not intended to make one
fall asleep but to awaken. It is the music ot the dawning of a humanity
finally liberated of its nightmare. I dare to hope that this lullaby is
not one of those we will one day sing for the first human clones1.
(extracted from programme notes by Peter Niklas Wilson)
Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil
I. Prélude. La mort de l1ange
De qui se doit
de mourir
comme ange
(...)
comme il se doit de mourir
comme un ange
je me dois
de mourir
moi meme
il se doit son mourir
son ange de mourir
comme il s1est mort
comme un ange
(according to Les heures de la nuit by
Christian Guez-Ricord)
II. Interlude. La mort de la civilisation
no 811 et 812
(presque enti…rement
disparus)
no 814: OAlors que tu reposes
pour l1éternité...1
no 809
(détruit)
no 868 et 860
(presque enti…rement détruits)
no 870: OJ1ai parcouru _
j1ai été florissant_
je fais une déploration...
Le lumineux tombe
a l1intérieur de...1
no 961 et 963
(détruits)
no 973: Oqui fait le tour du
ciel _ jusqu1aux confins du
ciel _
jusqu1a l1étendue des bras _
Fais-moi un chemin de
lumi…re, laisse-moi
passer _1
no 903
(détruit)
no 1050:
Oformule pour etre un
dieu _1
(according to the inscriptions on Egyptian
sarcophaguses from the Middle Kingdom)
III. Interlude. La mort de la voix
Dans le monde d1en bas,
l1écho en vein dérive.
Et se fait chez les morts.
La voix s1épand dans
l1ombre
(according to Erinna)
IV. Faux interlude. La mort de l1humanité
...Six jours et sept nuits,
Bourrasques, Pluies battantes
Ouragans et Déluge
Continu…rent de
Saccager la terre.
Le septi…me jours arrivé.
Tempete, Déluge et
Hécatombe cass…rent.
Apr…s avoir distribué
leurs coups de hasard.
Comme une femme
dans le douleurs.
La Mer se calme et
s1immobilise.
Je regardai alentour:
Le silence régnait.
Tous les hommes étaient
Retransformées en argile:
Et la pleine liquide
Semblait une terrasse.
(Berceuse)
J1ouvrie une fenetre
Et le jour tombe sur ma joue.
Je tombai a genoux, immobile,
Et pleurai...
Je regardai l1horizon
de la mer, le monde...
(according to the epic of Gilgamesh)
I. Prelude. Death of the angel
By him who was the duty
to himself
to die as an angel
just as he has a duty to
himself do die like an angel
my duty is
to die
myself
he owes this death to himself
his angelic destiny is to die
just as he has departed
like an angel
II. Death of civilization
811 and 812
(almost entirely
disappeared)
814: ONow that you rest for
eternity1
809:
(destroyed)
868 and 869:
(almost entirely destroyed)
870: OI have travelled
through ... I have been
prosperous... I make my
lamentations _ The Luminous
falls inside the...
961 and 963
(destroyed)
973: Othat makes the circuit
of the sky_ right to
the borders of the sky ... right to
the arms1 furthest reach ...
Make me a pass
of light, let me
pass on _
903:
(destroyed)
1050:
OFormula for being
a god...1
III. Death of Voice
In the world below,
the echo drifts in vain,
and fallen silent among the
dead. The voice spreads in
the shadow.
IV. Death of mankind
...For six days and seven
nights, Squalls, Pelting rains,
Hurricanes and Flood
Continued
to ravage the earth.
When the seventh day arrived,
Tempest, Flood
and Carnage ceased.
Having distributed
their random blows.
Like a woman in labour
The Sea calmed herself into
stillness.
I looked about:
Silence reigned.
All mankind had been
Returned to clay
And the flat liquid
Resembled a terrace.
I opened the window
And daylight fell on my cheek.
I fell to my knees, immobile,
And wept...
I looked at the sea1s horizon,
the world...
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