A Night of Gerard Grisey at Miller Theatre

One would normally be surprised to find a sell-out crowd gathered to hear a program of spectral music, but at the Miller Theatre such wonders are commonplace. The all-Grisey program launched Sounds French, a month-long New York festival celebrating the last 50 years of French music. 

In pre-concert discussion, Tristan Murail, himself a spectral composer, noted that Gerard Grisey (1946-1998) concerned himself with psychoacoustics (the study of and perception of sound qua sound) and with the belief that "change in music is more important than musical objects." These two focal points, the infatuation with the perception of sound and a predilection toward the shifts in musical consciousness rather than the shifters, are a fine layman's introduction to spectralism. But, as Murail warned, "spectralism," like minimalism, processism and serialism, "is an easy way of putting composers together." A summary stamping of Grisey, Dalbavie, Murail and others as "spectralists" or of their work as "spectral," serves only as a poor substitution for scholarship. To label music and composers exclusively through the use of such terms dismisses the individual value of the creator and his work; once labeled, the implication is that all is understood and there is no more insight to be gleaned.

The Ensemble Sospeso's program of three works by Grisey, performed in the order of their creation, verified that Grisey still has much to teach us. The first piece was the American premiere of Jour, contre-jour. Murail called this work "symptomatic of Grisey's research;" it strips down music to sounds, and sounds to their most basic elements. Scored for 13 instruments, electric organ and four-channel tape, the piece begins with only two sounds, a low rumbling and a high-pitched tone. This auditory landscape recalled John Cage's description of his experience in the anechoic chamber or, for many New Yorkers, recalled their most recent subway ride. Instruments gradually enter to mask or take over the sounds on the tape and the landscape is slowly fleshed out and pared down. Like listening to a bagpipe, a drone is always present, grounding the sound. Unlike the bagpipe, the center slowly changes. The real trick is that we don't notice the shift until it has already happened. Hypnotic and seamless, Jour, contre-jour remains a work that sounds better in theory than in practice. Nonetheless, the performance was helpful in giving the audience a point of reference for Grisey's later works. 

Talea, ou la machine et les herbes folles, is scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Here, Grisey does not so much employ trompe l'oreille as explore a musical gesture. His examination of this motif leads to two separate treatments of the material and, in turn, two different conclusions. The Ensemble Sospeso played with coherency and authority and were undaunted by phasing rhythms. 

The final work on the program was the strongest, the American premiere of Vortex Temporum. Written two years before Grisey's death, the work takes a piccolo solo from Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe as its starting material which is then repeated, phased and slowly cut. The piece, scored for piano and five instruments, brings together the motivic exploration of Talea and the Jour, contre-jour technique of sounds eclipsing other sounds in the latter's decay, e.g., cello pizzicato blending with flute key clicks. Pianist Stephen Gosling delivered a cluster-filled, violently beautiful solo, made more so by the piano's detuning from the rest of the ensemble. An absolutely riveting performance. The Ensemble transmitted the effect of dying echoes under the steady baton of Pierre-Andre Valade...  

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