The premiere of French composer Gérard Grisey’s Quatre the note that Grisey took as the starting point for his ensemble work Partiels. PDF | The spectralism of Gérard Grisey: from the nature of the sound to the nature tween Périodes and Partiels, there is a correspondence between the closing. Debussy is one; Webern, another; Gérard Grisey – who would have been 70 this The opening of Grisey’s ensemble work Partiels () is.
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The all-time greats Read about the artists who changed the world of classical music.
That’s true above all in the ethereal intertwining of the flute melody and the soprano voice in the final Berceuse movement, music which realises the post-cataclysmic serenity of a passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh, with its open-ended final words, “I looked at the sea’s horizon, the world …”. Whether you want to see what we think of today’s latest releases or discover gedard our critics thought of your favourite recordings from the past, gisey will find it all in our full-searchable Reviews Database.
For Grisey, the possibilities of this approach were microscopic yet infinite.
A guide to Gérard Grisey’s music | Music | The Guardian
That E, by the way, is exactly the prtiels that Grisey took as the starting point for his ensemble work Partielsthe third piece of his epic, six-part cycle Les Espaces Acoustiques. Grisey was raised partkels rural Belfort, near the West German and Swiss borders, as the only child of working-class parents.
As he said, “we are musicians and our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture”.
Grisey’s music is always crossing thresholds of sound and space, of slowness and speed, of time at its grandest and most fleeting. To hear Grisey’s music partiells to have adventures in the stuff of sound that will change your ears for ever.
The harmonic implications of the overtone series also allowed Grisey to create a hierarchy within his micro-tonally enriched musical world, which gives his music a monumental dynamism.
Partiels – Wikipedia
Yet the composer had already given the world visionary, inspirational and complete music. A glittering, shimmering, light-filled chord begins Transitoires ; the music then seems to stop time with its pregnant pauses, and with echoes of sounds — a guttural double-bass growl, a low gong, a mysterious middle-distance drone — that are sustained, seemingly into the infinite.
This latter quality is key: That music is a bridge to the Epilogue of the whole cycle, with its whooping chords for four solo horns, the sounds of a universe of sound rejoicing in itself. This religious element aside, it is striking, when we read his student journal entries preserved at the Paul Sacher Foundation, where I studied themhow presciently he saw the musical style he would go on to create.
By atomising sounds in this way, he could structure large pieces of gerarrd and spans of time, such as Partielsthat were based on an intense process of listening to an individual sound, exploding the smallest of sonic phenomena, a single note, on to the largest possible scale.
But it’s part of the paradox griisey Grisey’s music that just as he can slow down time so that you feel you’re inside, say, a stretched-out gong stroke for 20 minutes, he can also speed it up with surreal velocity.
In his teens Grisey considered becoming a composer as nothing less than a God-given vocation.
Classical music George Benjamin France blogposts. His achievement has often been reduced to yet another of new music’s fetishistic labels, “spectralism” — a category that Grisey had rejected by the end of his life. But where many of those imitators got caught up in the academic business of composing ever more complicated spectral chords, often lacking is geragd dramatic sense Grisey possessed.
Order by newest oldest recommendations. Posthumous London world premiere of Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil. The principles griseh spectralism are easy to describe, and like all good musical cliches, there’s more than a grain of truth in the term.
A guide to Gérard Grisey’s music
Topics Music A guide to contemporary classical music. How, then, Grisey asked himself, to reintroduce dynamism into this post-tonal material? Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Grisey was the initiator of spectral music a name invented by parrtielswhich, emerging in Paris in the s, reinserted harmony to post-tonal composition on a new footing. Widely cultured — he spoke a few languages and was as knowledgeable about the art of the Quattrocento as about the culture of Ancient Egypt — Grisey retained from his early faith a tendency to the mystical, and he often couched his music in images of death.
Grisey found his solution — and the basis of spectral music — quite by accident.
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But in retrospect, the “threshold” that the Four Songs crossed wasn’t only the event horizon that separates existence from non-existence, it was the door to a new kind of music that Grisey tragically would not have time to explore. Loading comments… Trouble loading? So much for a decidedly spectral sketch of the theory, but let’s get stuck into what Grisey wanted us to get stuck into, which is the stuff of sound, the sounds his music makes.
The performance, by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Grisey’s friend George Benjamin, was never supposed to be a memorial for Grisey, but his sudden death at the age of 52 the previous November meant that these death-haunted songs would be his last completed work, music that imaginatively explores the existential inter-zone between life and death.
Another long-term project of Grisey’s later years was to write music for solo voice. For Grisey, every single sound was a living, breathing entity; it was only logical that he should want to explore what happens at the end of the sonic life-cycle as well as the start.
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But more than anything, you’re left with a sense of benign acceptance. Grisey’s mastery of a gigantic spectrum of sound, texture and feeling makes his music some of the most special of the late 20th century. If you analyse the complexity of the harmonic series of a single note played on a particular instrument — say a low E on a trombone — you find a teeming world of musical possibility. This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase.
Whether you use the “spectral” label or not, Grisey’s music is about sound as material, as physical element, as living phenomena. As with so much of Les Espaces Acoustiques, Transitoires makes sounds that are simultaneously ancient and modern: Listen to the incantatory power of the love-obsessed voices and electronics of Les Chants de l’Amour for real sonic proof of what I’m on about.
Few composers could claim to have initiated a whole style. It’s not just those Quatre Chants: If you are a library, university or other organisation that would be interested in an institutional subscription to Gramophone gerarv click here for gisey information.
So here’s the opening of Transitoiresthe fifth part, for large gerardd, of the ever-increasing musical forces required for Les Espaces Acoustiques the cycle starts with a solo viola and ends with a huge orchestra and four solo horns in the final part, Epilogue. First lecture at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, telling his listeners about a new musical movement afoot in Paris.
There are apocalyptic visions listen to the start of the fourth songThe Death of Humanity, to hear the world implode in a black hole of percussion writingreflective resignation and spectral stasis in these songs.