Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

This book is the first in-depth historical overview of spectral music, which is widely
regarded, alongside minimalism, as one of the two most influential compositional
movements of the last fifty years. Charting spectral music’s development in France
from 1972 to 1982, this ground-breaking study establishes how spectral music’s
innovations combined existing techniques from post-war music with the use of
information technology. The first section focuses on Gérard Grisey, showing how
he creatively developed techniques from Messiaen, Xenakis, Ligeti, Stockhausen,
and Boulez towards a distinctive style of music based on groups of sounds
mutating in time. The second section shows how a wider generation of young
composers centred on the Parisian collective l’Itinéraire developed a common
vision of music embracing seismic developments in psychoacoustics and computer
sound synthesis. Framed against institutional and political developments in
France, spectral music is shown as at once an inventive artistic response to the
information age and a continuation of the French colouristic tradition.

         is a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music, and his

musical criticism appears regularly in places like Gramophone, the Guardian, the
Telegraph, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Irish Times. He is
the recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Emerging Writer Bursary and a City,
University of London doctoral studentship. He lectures at BIMM University.
Music Since 1900

  Philip Rupprecht and David Beard

  Arnold Whittall

This series – formerly Music in the Twentieth Century – offers a wide

perspective on music and musical life since the end of the nineteenth century.
Books included range from historical and biographical studies concentrating
particularly on the context and circumstances in which composers were
writing, to analytical and critical studies concerned with the nature of musical
language and questions of compositional process. The importance given to
context will also be reflected in studies dealing with, for example, the
patronage, publishing, and promotion of new music, and in accounts of the
musical life of particular countries.

Titles in the series

Jonathan Cross
The Stravinsky Legacy
Michael Nyman
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond
Jennifer Doctor
The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936
Robert Adlington
The Music of Harrison Birtwistle
Keith Potter
Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass
Carlo Caballero
Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics
Peter Burt
The Music of Toru Takemitsu
David Clarke
The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics
M. J. Grant
Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe
Philip Rupprecht
Britten’s Musical Language
Mark Carroll
Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe
Adrian Thomas
Polish Music since Szymanowski
J. P. E. Harper-Scott
Edward Elgar, Modernist
Yayoi Uno Everett
The Music of Louis Andriessen
Ethan Haimo
Schoenberg’s Transformation of Musical Language
Rachel Beckles Willson
Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War
Michael Cherlin
Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination
Joseph N. Straus
Twelve-Tone Music in America
David Metzer
Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Edward Campbell
Boulez, Music and Philosophy
Jonathan Goldman
The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez: Writings and Compositions
Pieter C. van den Toorn
and John McGinness
Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom
David Beard
Harrison Birtwistle’s Operas and Music Theatre
Heather Wiebe
Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction
Beate Kutschke
and Barley Norton
Music and Protest in 1968
Graham Griffiths
Stravinsky’s Piano: Genesis of a Musical Language
Martin Iddon
John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance
Martin Iddon
New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez
Alastair Williams
Music in Germany Since 1968
Ben Earle
Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy
Thomas Schuttenhelm
The Orchestral Music of Michael Tippett: Creative Development and the
Compositional Process
Marilyn Nonken
The Spectral Piano: From Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the Digital Age
Jack Boss
Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea
Deborah Mawer
French Music and Jazz in Conversation: From Debussy to Brubeck
Philip Rupprecht
British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and their Contemporaries
Amy Lynn Wlodarski
Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation
Carola Nielinger-Vakil
Luigi Nono: A Composer in Context
Erling E. Guldbrandsen
and Julian Johnson
Transformations of Musical Modernism
David Cline
The Graph Music of Morton Feldman
Russell Hartenberger
Performance and Practice in the Music of Steve Reich
Joanna Bullivant
Modern Music, Alan Bush, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the
Communist Bloc
Nicholas Jones
Peter Maxwell Davies, Selected Writings
J. P. E. Harper-Scott
Ideology in Britten’s Operas
Jack Boss
Schoenberg’s Atonal Music: Musical Idea, Basic Image, and Specters of Tonal
Function
Sarah Collins
Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in
Interwar Britain
Nathan Seinen
Prokofiev’s Soviet Operas
David C. H. Wright
The Royal College of Music and its Contexts: An Artistic and Social History
Martin Iddon
John Cage and Peter Yates: Correspondence on Music Criticism and Aesthetics
John Link
Elliott Carter’s Late Music
Jonathan Goldman
Avant-Garde on Record: Musical Responses to Stereos
Gérard Grisey and Spectral
Music

Composition in the Information Age

Liam Cagney
BIMM University
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009399524
DOI: 10.1017/9781009399494
© Liam Cagney 2024
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
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First published 2024
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cagney, Liam, 1983– author.
Title: Gérard Grisey and spectral music : composition in the information age / Liam Cagney.
Description: [First edition] | Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge
University Press, [2023] | Series: Music since 1900 | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023027604 (print) | LCCN 2023027605 (ebook) | ISBN 9781009399524
(hardback) | ISBN 9781009399517 (paperback) | ISBN 9781009399494 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Grisey, Gérard--Criticism and interpretation. | Spectral music--History and
criticism. | Music--20th century--History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML410.G923 C34 2023 (print) | LCC ML410.G923 (ebook) |
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For Vincent and Ann Cagney
But is it not the case that these elements, this final residue which we are
obliged to keep to ourselves, which speech cannot convey even from friend
to friend, from master to pupil, from lover to mistress, that this
inexpressible thing which reveals the qualitative difference between what
each of us has felt and has had to leave on the threshold of the phrases
which he uses to communicate with others, something he can do only by
dwelling on points of experience common to all and consequently of no
interest to any, can be expressed through art . . . which makes manifest in
the colours of the spectrum the intimate make-up of those worlds we call
individuals, and which without art we should never know?
Proust1

1
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Prisoner and the Fugitive, translated. by Carol
Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 236.
 Contents

List of Figures page xii

List of Music Examples xiii
Acknowledgements xiv
List of Abbreviations xvi
Introduction 1
Part I Grisey’s Style 11
1 Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 13
2 Messiaen’s Class and New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 34
3 Statistical Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 69
4 On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 95
Part II Spectral Music 125
5 Psychoacoustics and the New Compositional Framework (1973–1974) 127
6 L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 157
7 New Dimensions (1976–1978) 197
8 Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 234
Conclusion 261

Bibliography 270
Index 292

[xi]
 Figures

0.1 L’Itinéraire composition seminar at the Darmstadt Summer

Courses in 1982. page 3
1.1 Gérard Grisey as a child. 20
2.1 Messiaen’s composition class, 1969–70. 35
3.1 Grisey’s rough sketch of the floor plan for the layout of the
orchestra in Vagues, chemins, le souffle. 71
3.2 Sketch showing Grisey’s intention that the chords in ‘Le Souffle’ be
modelled on resonance and the spectre harmonique. 83
4.1 Grisey’s programme note for D’eau et de pierre from the Metz
1972 booklet. 122
5.1 An early outline sketch for Grisey’s Dérives. 148
5.2 Grisey’s ‘harmonic prism’ determining Dérives’s pitch content
and temporal proportions. 152
6.1 Promotional material from l’Itinéraire’s debut season, 1973–4. 166
6.2 Grisey’s illustration of the harmonic spectrum upon which
Périodes’s harmonic content is based. 171
6.3 Grisey’s graph of Périodes’s formal process. 171
6.4 Grisey’s schematic diagram for the opening section of Partiels,
calculating the degrees of change of the Gestalt of the ensemble
instrumental synthesis simulation. 194
7.1 Stage set-up for Dufourt’s Saturne. 228
7.2 Promotional photograph for l’Itinéraire’s sub-ensemble, the
Ensemble d’Instruments Électroniques de l’Itinéraire (EIEI). 229
8.1 L’Itinéraire composition seminar at the Darmstadt Summer
Courses in 1982. 259

[xii]
 Music Examples

1.1 Grisey’s Passacaille (1966) for accordion. page 30

2.1 Murail’s Comme un œil suspendu et poli par le songe (1967) for
piano. 42
2.2 Some of the ‘mobiles’ for Grisey’s Charme (1969) for clarinet. 62
2.3 Grisey’s Échanges (1968) for prepared piano and double bass. 64
2.4 Grisey’s Mégalithes (1969) for fifteen brass. 66
3.1 Opening of final movement of Grisey’s Vagues, chemins, le souffle
(1970–2) for two orchestras and amplified solo clarinet, featuring
three resonance chords. 84
3.2 Opening chord of Boulez’s Don from Pli selon pli (portrait de
Mallarmé) (1957–62) for soprano and orchestra. 87
3.3 Final movement of Grisey’s Vagues, chemins, le souffle. 93
4.1 Éloy’s Kâmakalâ (1971) for choir and orchestra. 103
4.2 Levinas’s Arsis et thesis (1971) for amplified solo bass flute. 111
4.3 Grisey’s D’eau et de pierre (1972) for two instrumental groups. 117
4.4 One of the second group’s aleatory events in D’eau et de pierre. 118
4.5 First reaction of group 1 in D’eau et de pierre. 119
5.1 Murail’s Couleur de mer (1969) for ensemble. 134
5.2 Murail’s Altitude 8000 (1970) for strings. 135
5.3 The first page of Grisey’s Dérives (1973–4) for orchestra and
amplified ensemble. 151
6.1 Grisey’s Périodes (1974) for ensemble. 170
6.2 Murail’s Tigres de verre (1974) for ondes Martenot and piano. 175
6.3 Murail’s Sables (1975) for orchestra. 187
6.4 Murail’s Mémoire-érosion (1975–6) for horn and nine instruments. 190
6.5 Grisey’s Partiels (1975–6) for eighteen instruments. 192
7.1 Motif from Grisey’s Prologue (1976) for viola. 205
7.2 Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli (1977) for piano. 210
7.3 Levinas’s Appels (1974) for eleven instruments. 218
7.4 Dufourt’s Erewhon III (1972–6) for six percussionists. 224
7.5 Dufourt’s La tempesta d’après Giorgione (1976–7) for eight
instrumentalists. 226
7.6 Dufourt’s Saturne (1979) for twenty-two instrumentalists. 231
8.1 Levinas’s Les Rires du Gilles (1981) for five instruments and tape. 257

[xiii]
 Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Hugues Dufourt, Michaël Levinas, Tristan Murail, and

Roger Tessier for each giving generously of their time for interviews. I also
gratefully acknowledge the following for their informative correspondence:
Patrice Bocquillon, Georgina Born, Walter Boudreau, François Bousch,
George Couroupos, Jean-Max Dussert, Jean-Claude Éloy, Richard
Felciano, Guy Lelong, Mesías Maiguashca, Octavian Nemescu, Louis
Roquin, François Rose, Denis Smalley, and Fernand Vandenbogaerde.
I am indebted to the Paul Sacher Foundation and to Raphaël Grisey for
allowing me to reproduce and reference herein materials held in the
Foundation’s Gérard Grisey Collection. At the Paul Sacher Foundation,
I thank Michele Noirjean and, in particular, Angela Ida De Benedictis and
Robert Piencikowski for their help. I am also deeply grateful to the
Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (in particular, Claudia Mayer-
Haase) for allowing me to cite and reproduce materials from its archive.
Thanks, too, to the staff of the Centre de Documentation de la Musique
Contemporaine in Paris for their helpfulness during my periods of
research there.
At Cambridge University Press, thank you to Kate Brett and series
editors David Beard and Philip Rupprecht for their guidance and wisdom.
Thank you to Sarah Starkey, Fiona Little, and Marijasintha Jacob
Srinivasan for their work during the production process. I am grateful
for J. P. E. Harper-Scott’s enthusiastic encouragement of my book in the
early days. I also thank Robert Hasegawa for his characteristically astute
comments on the manuscript; the book has been much improved by his
knowledge, observations, and suggestions.
Much of this book’s research was done during my PhD, and I am
grateful to City, University of London for the award of a university
doctoral studentship. I also thank the Society for Musicology in Ireland
for the award of two study grants, and the Paul Sacher Foundation for the
award of a two-month stipend to research its Gérard Grisey Collection.
Thank you to my PhD supervisor Ian Pace and my examiners Björn Heile
and Miguel Mera. I also thank the following: Julian Anderson, Amy Bauer,
Abdelaziz Cadi Essadek, Edward Campbell, Daniel Chua, Seán Clancy,
Paul and Anja Clift, Jonathan Cross, Omar Dhobb, Nicolas Donin,

[xiv]
Acknowledgements xv

François-Xavier Féron, Paul Gilgunn, Bob Gilmore (RIP), Stephen

Graham, Roddy Hawkins, David Horan, Jaime Jones, William Lockhart,
Wolfgang Marx, Will Mason, Alexandra Monchick Kathy Nellens, Roger
Nichols, Marilyn Nonken, Emma Shyne, Karin Weissenbrunner, Harry
White, and Charles Wilson. During my master’s degree, Joshua Fineberg’s
work on spectral music opened the door onto the topic for me
Last but not least, thank you to my parents Vincent and Ann Cagney for
their love and support going back to the days of clarinet lessons in Donegal
Town, and to Indrani Ashe, safe cove.
 Abbreviations

CDMC Centre de Documentation de la Musique Contemporaine, Paris

CIRM Centre International de Recherche Musicale
CNRS Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
CRISS Collectif de Recherche Instrumentale et de Synthèse Sonore
EIEI Ensemble d’Instruments Électroniques de l’Itinéraire
GERM Groupe d’Étude et Réalisation Musicale
GGCPSF Gérard Grisey Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel
GRM Groupe de Recherches Musicales
IRCAM Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique
ISCM International Society for Contemporary Music
LAM Laboratoire d’Acoustique Musicale
ORTF Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française

[xvi]
 Introduction

In July 1980, Gérard Grisey sent Hugues Dufourt a letter from Berlin,
where Grisey was at the time living as a DAAD fellow. Grisey’s letter
concerned the imminent Darmstadt Summer Courses, at which perform-
ances of their music had been programmed and Grisey, Dufourt, and
Tristan Murail were to give presentations. This would be the first major
international presentation of their collective musical aesthetic – it was for
Darmstadt in 1980, for example, that Murail’s classic orchestral work
Gondwana was commissioned – and, being aware of the importance of
first impressions, and considering it prudent to present a united front,
Grisey wrote to Dufourt with two purposes: to get Dufourt’s feedback on
the text of one of Grisey’s lectures (a lecture on musical time, which after
further development was published as ‘Tempus ex machina: A Composer’s
Reflections on Musical Time’)1 and to solicit Dufourt’s approval of the
name that Grisey thought they should use for their collective aesthetic:
‘liminal music’.
In presenting their music to a German audience, Grisey wrote, the three
composers ran the risk of being saddled with some ‘derisory adjective’ or
other.2 ‘I propose therefore for Darmstadt the adjective LIMINAL’, he
writes. ‘Liminal (limen: the threshold, that which concerns the threshold,
which stands on the threshold) is only used, as far as I know, in psychology.
Liminaire seems to have the sense of “that which is held before”.’ Grisey’s
choice of this term is informed by the fact that, for him, it crystallises the
salient feature shared by his music, that of Dufourt and that of Murail: not

1
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’. The other lecture Grisey gave at Darmstadt in 1980 was
‘L’Ombre du son’, focused on Grisey’s technique of resultant tone harmonies (Gérard
Grisey Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, hereafter GGCPSF). All documents from the
Gérard Grisey Collection are quoted with the kind permission of the Paul Sacher
Foundation.
2
All quotations in this paragraph from Grisey, ‘Lettre à Hugues Dufourt’. All translations in
this book are my own unless otherwise stated. Grisey may have had in mind here the
reception he received two years earlier at Darmstadt when he gave a presentation on his
music: the audience was not particularly receptive, and when at one point the young
Frenchman listed at length the influences on his music, a wave of mocking laughter broke
out (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt). That presentation was published as Gérard
Grisey, ‘Zur Entstehung des Klanges’, reproduced as ‘Devenir du son’.

[1]
2 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

a focus on frequency spectra but a focus on psychoacoustic thresholds. ‘The

threshold is what joins all of us; it is our common denominator. It can have a
dynamic sense (only a retrograde person rests on a threshold!). It implies at
least two fields, and it encourages movement. We play with thresholds as
others play with series.’ In proposing this name, Grisey rejects two other
candidates: ‘vectorial’ (too much like Xenakis) and ‘spectral’ (‘too static, too
vague: Stimmung and Tibetan music are spectral musics’).
Dufourt was not slow to respond. Although, because of other work
commitments, he would unfortunately not be able to come to Darmstadt,
he did have some views on Grisey’s theoretical and aesthetic concerns. ‘Use
the adjective “liminal” if you wish’, Dufourt writes, ‘but I am not very
warm, for it is too restrictive, too “reductive”.’3 Dufourt then makes a
remark that, from our later historical standpoint, might come as a surprise:
‘I’ve given up on “spectral” since a while back – much too narrow as well.
But it doesn’t matter; I have more pressing things to talk about.’
It was at Darmstadt in 1982 that the French composers as a group
ultimately presented their music to the international contemporary music
scene (Fig. 0.1). This epistolary exchange opens a window onto that
transitional moment when the music of a group of young Paris-based
composers started to shift towards becoming a wider international insti-
tution. That transition was effected in part through the invention of a
common identity: not, in the end, écriture liminale but spectral music, an
act of naming that brought with it, alongside a characteristic set of com-
positional techniques, some conceptual homogenisation and a partial
obscuring of the movement’s historical background. This initial doubts
about a concept – musique spectrale – that is nowadays so well established
in our discourse gives us pause for thought. That the composer who was
principally responsible for inventing the current and the composer who
named it each regarded the concept as not fit for purpose is useful entry
point for considering the historical background to the French spectral
movement, a movement that, in terms of musical sound, shifted from
being to becoming, from notes to frequencies, from classical forms to
processes of mutation, and from constituted identities to anonymous
thresholds.
This book is a historical study of the emergence of French spectral
music. It is divided into two parts: the first part focuses on Grisey, while
the second part looks at the composer group that formed around the
collective l’Itinéraire. The reason for this double focus is as follows.

3
Dufourt, letter to Gérard Grisey, 9 July 1980, GGCPSF.
 Introduction 3

Figure 0.1 L’Itinéraire composition seminar at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982. From left to
right: Costin Miereanu, Michaël Levinas, Harry Halbreich, Gérard Grisey, Hugues Dufourt,
Tristan Murail. Used with the permission of the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.

Firstly, without Grisey, there would not have been any French spectral
music: it was Grisey’s development of his mature musical framework, with
its dual poles of the harmonic spectrum and periodicity, that was subse-
quently adopted by other composers, and this influence comprised the core
of the movement. Secondly, without the collective l’Itinéraire as an insti-
tutional platform, many now classic first-period spectral works would not
have been commissioned, and without the political context in Paris of this
young new music collective’s ongoing existence being threatened by the
creation of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique
(IRCAM) and Ensemble Intercontemporain, the composers associated
with l’Itinéraire would not have felt an urgent need to invent a name for
their common musical tendency such as would legitimise their work.
In this way, in recounting French spectral music’s early historical context,
there was a need to balance examination, by turns, of how the style
emerged in Grisey’s écriture and how the movement thereafter developed
among him and his peers.
4 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

As humans, we’re rather obsessed with origins, probably as a relic of the

tribal mind (if you’ll excuse the irony). Calling this tendency ‘the idol of
origins’ in historiographical research, Marc Bloch points out that it can
conflate beginning and cause: ‘But there is a frequent cross-contamination
of the two meanings, the more formidable in that it is seldom very clearly
recognized. In popular usage, an origin is a beginning which explains.
Worse still, a beginning which is a complete explanation. There lies the
ambiguity, and there the danger!’4 This book seeks less to explain spectral
music than to chart its causes: post-war innovations in information tech-
nology; the dissemination of knowledge regarding advances in psychoa-
coustics and computer sound synthesis; the early 1960s establishment of a
musical acoustics laboratory at the Université Paris VI with the installation
there of France’s first sonogram, allowing quick and precise sound analysis
on a micro scale; a growing sense during the 1960s that pointillist serialism
had had its day; the appearance of a group of like-minded composition
students in Messiaen’s class at the end of the 1960s; the French Fifth
Republic’s Ministry of Culture’s fulsome funding of new music festivals
and initiatives and in particular, from 1973 onwards, of l’Itinéraire;
Grisey’s and Murail’s having been Prix de Rome scholars together in
1972–3, during which time they became friends and had discussions on
integrating psychoacoustical models into instrumental composition; the
1975 addition to l’Itinéraire’s bureau of the philosopher Hugues Dufourt,
and the need for the group to define itself and its work strongly in the face
of threatened funding cuts following the establishment of IRCAM; and so
on. Spectral music was multi-modal in origin. This book’s method accord-
ingly moves from sketch study to reception history to cultural history
and beyond.
One of the most prevalent myths about spectral music is that it is
antithetical to serialism. Usually, spectral music is considered a music of
perceptual immediacy where serialism was a music of abstract calculations;
spectral music, a music taking off from the model of spectral resonance,
where serialism was a music that ignored harmonic hierarchisation. The
truth is more complex. As this book shows, Grisey developed his mature
style not through outright rejection of serialism but, on the contrary,
through intensive engagement with the 1960s compositional models of
Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Messiaen. The salient initial elements of
Grisey’s mature compositional framework were creatively adapted from
those models: Xenakis’s organisation of an instrumental ensemble’s

4
Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 29–30.
Introduction 5

musical material in statistical terms using quasi-serialist parameters such

as density, timbre, and register; Stockhausen’s notion of the degree of
change as applied to such a statistically defined sound material; Boulez’s
use of resonant sonorities, including resonance chords simulating an
attack, sustain, and decay pattern; Xenakis’s idea of a sound metabolism,
an auditory process of change of a given sound phenomenon. It was
through absorbing and setting forth in his own compositions these post-
serialist ideas that Grisey created his own characteristic sound and form;
thereafter, he consolidated his mature style through studying psychoacous-
tics and information theory. The narrative that Grisey rejected serialism
outright stems from a historical misunderstanding of serialism’s develop-
ment. Serialism was not uniform but had different iterations. Grisey
rejected the pointillist serialism of the late 1940s and early 1950s, but he
embraced what, following Jennifer Iverson, one might call statistical
serialism.5 Statistical serialism, in works like Boulez’s Pli selon pli and
Xenakis’s Metastaseis, is French spectral music’s precursor. When it found
its first statement in Dérives for orchestra and amplified ensemble, Grisey’s
mature style was a mutated version of statistical serialism, a filiation
underlined by the fact that that work’s pitch content, based on the har-
monic series, is a quasi-spectral vertical ordering of the twelve chromatic
notes as defined in Boulezean terms as prisms and sub-prisms. Grisey
rejected in serialism what he deemed was arbitrary but retained the
techniques he found useful. From this insight, it follows that previous
accounts of spectral music, their analytical and theoretical strengths not-
withstanding, have suffered at times from a lack of historical knowledge
and a consequent lack of conceptual clarity.
The larger historical context is the development of information technol-
ogy in the post-war period. Through advances in information technology,
a new, more accurate psychoacoustical model was created of human
audition: Fritz Winckel, Émile Leipp, Abraham Moles, Pierre Schaeffer,
Jean-Claude Risset, and other researchers made important insights that
allowed psychoacoustics to move away from the nineteenth-century
Helmholtz model. The main change was a recognition of the key role for
the perception of timbre of a sound’s temporal dimension: on the one
hand, the framework of attack, decay, sustain, release; on the other hand,
the staggered, reciprocal evolution of multiple frequency components in
any complex sound envelope, some partials, for example, taking longer to
reach peak amplitude than others. The complexity of this model would not

5
Iverson, ‘Statistical Form’.
6 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

have been analysable without information technology and the invention of

the transistor. The transistor was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories
in the USA, which is also where, subsequently, key advances in computer
sound synthesis were made. Risset, working as part of Max Mathews’s
team, developed in the 1960s a computationally non-intensive means of
generating convincing pseudo-instrumental sounds, as set forth in his
1969 publication An Introductory Catalogue of Computer-Synthesized
Sounds; this set the ground for spectral music’s synthetic instrumental
simulations. A decade earlier, the information theorist and thinker
Abraham Moles had brought the first sonograph into France, and in
1963 Leipp established a research centre for the study of musical acoustics,
the first of its kind in France and a cousin of the Groupe de Recherches
Musicales (GRM) at the French Radio. This musical acoustics laboratory,
the Laboratoire d’Acoustique Musicale (LAM) at the Université Paris VI
Jussieu, was a centre not only of scientific research but of collaboration
between acousticians, theorists, and musicians. Using computational
power to achieve Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis, the sonograph
installed there (as François-Xavier Féron tells us, a Kay Elemetrics
Spectrum Analyser 7029A) allowed visual representation of complex
sounds in the form of sonograms: ‘a magnetic tape with recorded sounds
is mounted on a rotating disc; an electrically sensitive paper is placed on a
metallic cylinder which is connected to this disc; and a stylus linked to a
bank filter sends a spark and marks the paper each time a spectral
component of the recording signal coincides with one of the filters’.6
These information technology tools did not exist for composers in the
post-war years, nor did the more accurate model of human audition. They
did not simply provide the basis for Grisey’s use of sonographs as technical
models in his ensemble instrumental writing (the technique of instrumen-
tal synthesis); more fundamentally, they encouraged the spectralists to
discard (or at least, try to discard) the classical musical concepts, such as
that trusty mainstay, the self-identical note, that were hand-me-downs
from a scientifically long-surpassed era, and which were thus psychoacous-
tically inaccurate, a particular impediment in the context of post-tonal
composition. Grisey said:
From now on it is impossible to think of sounds as defined objects which are
mutually interchangeable. They strike me rather as force fields given direction
in time. These forces are infinitely mobile and fluctuating; they are alive like
cells, with a birth, life and death, and above all tend towards a continual

6
Féron, ‘Spectra as Theoretical and Practical Models’.
Introduction 7

transformation of their own energy. There exists no sound which is static,

immobile, any more than the rock strata of mountains are immobile.
By definition, we will say that sound is transitory. It is not defined by an
isolated moment, nor by a series of isolated moments fastidiously realised and
placed in sequence. What would bring us to a better definition of sound
would be the knowledge of the energy which inhabits it and of the network of
correlations which govern [sic] all its parameters. One can imagine an ecology
of sound, like a new science placed at the disposal of musicians.7

These comments are not simply rhetoric or aesthetics; they are de facto
metaphysics, the logical outcome of studying the psychoacoustical insights
of the information age. Frequencies and other acoustic micro-phenomena,
whether you consider them, according to your preference, spectral or
liminal in character, exist in a way that is prior to, and is thus irreducible
to, constituted identities. Spectral music was a transatlantic effort to apply
those insights to musical composition. Dufourt explained that the epithet
‘spectral’ connotes
not simply sound, but that all these phenomena called ‘emergence’ suppose
the abandonment of traditional rhetoric. It is an entire aesthetic. It is not
simply a technique for using partials and connecting them. That is too
restricted, far too narrow and naïve a view. Naïve because (as I explained in
my book) I would say today, in retrospect, that spectral music is the result of
the head-on collision between the French and the Americans [. . .] Who
initiated it? It was Risset. That is, in America. Who was it that renewed from
top to bottom, from the end of the Fifties and throughout the Sixties, our
vision of music? It was Risset, it was Chowning, it was Mathews.8

For the philosopher Dufourt, whose view is more longue durée than
histoire événementielle, the term ‘spectral music’ stands for the deep global
historical-structural changes that generated as composing subjects Grisey,
Murail, himself, Levinas, Tessier, and others (a Kuhnean paradigm shift).
For others, spectral music means simply a set of techniques.
This book is not a survey of spectral music per se but a historical account
of how it came about. Its scope is roughly from the mid-1960s to the
beginning of the 1980s, the period during which the spectralist compos-
itional framework and musical movement came into being. The historio-
graphical model used is intellectual history. François Dosse writes:
Without imperial ambitions, intellectual history simply aims to bring together
works, their authors, and the context that bore them, and to do so in a way

7
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 268–9.
8
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
8 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

that refuses the apparent alternative between an internalist reading of works

and an externalist approach that privileges networks of sociability. Intellectual
history intends, beyond disciplinary boundaries, to take account of works,
trajectories, and itineraries.9

What this means in the current context is that the conventional oppos-
ition between internalist (score-based) and externalist (context-based)
analysis of compositions has been eschewed in favour of a more holistic
approach whereby the technical strategies and stylistic attributes of, for
example, Grisey’s early works are situated relative to their concrete
historical context and influences. Likewise, rather than theorising freely
on concepts found in Grisey’s writings (like the notion of becoming,
which one might be too easily tempted to ascribe solely to Grisey’s
reading of Deleuze), I have researched Grisey’s source for adopting these
concepts, which, in the case of becoming and liminality, turns out to be
the psychoacoustics and information theory treatises by Winckel and
Moles, respectively, that he read. Within the overall framework of intel-
lectual history, this study combines several methods – sketch study,
musical analysis, reception history, primary source study in archives,
secondary source study in French and English, interviews, correspond-
ence – which are integrated within the chronological narrative. Given
that my account of the development of Grisey’s mature style is based in
part on study of Grisey’s sketches, a word is due on Grisey’s creative
process and the role played in that process by sketches (and although
I diverge slightly here from the genetic analysis of IRCAM-associated
musicologists like Nicolas Donin, I agree with its methodological
approach). Joseph Kerman says about compositional sketches that, while
scholars must distinguish between charting the compositional process
and understanding the final composition, sketch studies can provide ‘a
closer route to such insight than is provided by most of our other
scholarly activities’;10 this is basically my attitude. During my PhD
research, interviews with Murail, Dufourt, and Tessier allowed me to
ask these composers about topics not previously covered by the literature,
and each composer was helpful towards my research. The book’s opening
chapter features some biographical analysis inasmuch as Grisey’s charac-
ter and early musical ambitions help one to understand what drove him
towards developing the style he did. A. S. Byatt wrote: ‘People often leave
no record of the most critical or passionate moments of their lives. They

9
Dosse, ‘Afterword: For Intellectual History’, 355.
10
Kerman, ‘Beethoven Sketchbooks’, 93.
Introduction 9

leave laundry bills and manifestoes.’11 Biography is a separate discipline

from historiography, and it was not within my remit to research Grisey’s
private life, which, drawing in minor part on my PhD,12 Jeff Brown has
done well at length. Finally, this book’s genesis was the fact that no
history of French spectral music had been written: musical analysis is
thus largely absent, and for analyses to read alongside my historical
narrative, I refer readers in particular to the excellent work of Féron,
Baillet, and Hasegawa.

11
Quoted in Wade, ‘Laundry Bills and Manifestos’.
12
Cagney, ‘Synthesis and Deviation’.
 

Grisey’s Style
 1 Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966)

When Grisey was asked in a 1990 interview to describe his training (in
French, formation), he offered the following pithy summary:
My training essentially took place at the Paris Conservatoire, with classes in
composition, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and piano accompaniment.
I studied with Olivier Messiaen for four years and alongside this took a few
courses with Henri Dutilleux at the École Normale, a few courses in acoustics
with Émile Leipp at the University of Paris VII-Jussieu [sic], and a few
seminars at Darmstadt with Xenakis, Ligeti, and Stockhausen. That’s my
training. But is a composer’s training [formation] confined only to his or her
musical studies?1

For Grisey, composition was not simply a question of technique: compos-

ition was in the service of art, a more profound matter bound up with the
existential question of being alive in the first place. As he put it in another
interview from the same time: ‘It is worth reaffirming that for the artist, art
is not about manufacturing products, even if they are avant-garde, but is
above all a mode of being and of questioning.’2 The question of art was the
central one of his life. Consequently, in looking at how Grisey developed a
style that became so influential, it is instructive to look at elements of
his early biography, in which much of what he went on to achieve is
foreshadowed.

Grisey’s Youth in Belfort

Grisey was born in 1946 and raised in Belfort in the Centre-Est of France, a
few hundred kilometres from France’s borders with Switzerland and West
Germany. Owing to changing borderlines and territorial claims, the city of
Belfort, capital of the Belfort département, alternated throughout its history
between being located in France and Germany. One of the main routes
between France and the Rhineland, Belfort celebrates its resistance to
Prussian aggression during the Franco-Prussian War (as commemorated
in the city’s famous statue of a lion), and the Belfort territory has a culture

1
Grisey, ‘Le Compositeur présenté par son éditeur’, 243.
2
Grisey, ‘Le Goût de l’aventure’, 250.

[13]
14 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

and economy much the same as those of neighbouring Alsace. Growing up

on the threshold between France and West Germany led Grisey to train
within both musical systems, with their contrasting compositional trad-
itions, and he later spoke German as a second language. This Germanic
influence distinguished Grisey from his later French spectralist peers.
At the age of fourteen, Grisey began keeping a journal. In his first
journal entry, made on 27 January 1961, the teenager quoted a Latin
antithesis as the journal’s rationale: ‘Verba volant, scripta manent’
(‘Spoken words fly; written words remain’); the classical reference and
use of rhetorical sententia evince his education and intelligence.3
On starting a journal, Grisey elaborates: ‘Yes, I’ve decided to keep a
journal. Maybe it’s too late, but so many things go around in my head
that I have to release them by recording them on these white pages.’ The
wish to record one’s thoughts is common for the creatively inclined
adolescent, expressing as it does a burgeoning curiosity about one’s self-
hood. In Grisey’s case, it was tied to the young musician’s sense of his
potential future fame: his feeling, buoyed by his abilities and ambition, that
some day people might come to read his teenage journal as documentary
evidence of historical value (in which regard the teenager was not wrong).
The double intention Grisey showed towards archival retention and
reflective self-scrutiny is consistent with the other forms of autobiograph-
ical record he privately and publicly pursued up to his death, which often
seem to have one eye cocked towards potential future readers.4 This partly
explains Grisey’s stipulation at the outset of the journal that it should focus
not ‘on the material aspects’ of his life but on his thoughts concerning his
spiritual life and his musical vocation.5 Grisey made entries in this journal
sporadically between January 1961 and the summer of 1966; the three
main themes are music, religion, and death; and it is from this journal that
many of the facts in this section are drawn.
Though Grisey said he was from Belfort, his family home was in the
countryside, around seven kilometres outside the city. At the family home
at 75 rue d’Offement, Grisey grew up with his parents, sister, and (until her
death) grandmother. Grisey’s family was lower middle-class. His parents

3
GGCPSF. All references to Grisey’s journal in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, are to
the physical journal held at the Paul Sacher Foundation.
4
An early journal entry wonders what people in a future time reading his journal will think
of him (GGCPSF), and a later note muses on the musicologists in the future who will be
studying his manuscripts (see Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments années 1980’, 319).
Grisey’s frequent practice upon finishing a composition was to pen his feelings upon the
work’s completion, with one eye on posterity.
5
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 308.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 15

were both divorcees; Grisey was thus the child of a second marriage, born
to relatively old parents. Grisey’s father owned a garage.6 As a teenager,
Grisey felt out of place in his petit-bourgeois milieu. The main target of his
ire was the mundane materialism he thought characterised his family’s
outlook on life: ‘I have lived, and am living, in a working-class environ-
ment, one of workers who have “gone up in the world”. It’s a milieu which
tells itself to believe in God while building a little religion at its own height
[. . .]. It’s a world without instruction, for which life and death pose no
question. [. . .] It’s a world of awful materialism and earthiness in which
I suffocate . . .’. His family’s lack of interest in life’s big questions clashed
with Grisey’s spiritual inclinations (the post-Romantic artist’s traditional
quandary), though once he had left home for West Germany, Grisey came
to appreciate better his parents’ virtues. Writing at the age of eighteen,
Grisey believed he had inherited from his mother ‘an extraordinary sensi-
tivity and a certain delicateness’, and from his father, ‘intelligence and a
passionate character, always having one’s goal in sight’.7 At this time,
Grisey felt that his natural disposition was more similar to that of his
mother; his father’s brusqueness contrasted with Grisey’s timidity and
denied the possibility of intimacy between father and son. Grisey’s assess-
ment of his parents’ salient qualities indicates two of the attributes he
believed himself to possess: sensitivity and stolid determination.
Grisey traced his early musical memories to his boyhood and the influ-
ence of his grandmother. How he characterised that influence changed
over time. In a text dating from 1973 to 1974, Grisey writes:
I owe my most distant musical emotions to my grandmother. She would often
sing to me while sitting me on her knee, a whole repertoire of songs current at
that time as well as folksongs. Very early, at the age of four years old, I asked
my parents for an accordion, and they gladly gave me this ‘plaything’.
In this way, I had the chance to come into the hands of an accordion teacher in
Belfort who was a musician – something that, it must be stressed, was a rare thing!
From then on, I have never seriously imagined doing anything other
than music.
At the age of six, while I was sick, I threw down a few efforts on manuscript
paper. At the age of nine, I composed a waltz (I think).8

A darker and more candid version of this memory, written probably in the
early 1990s, was published posthumously as ‘La Voix perdue’ (‘The Lost

6
‘Deux Francs-comtois lauréats’, GGCPSF. 7
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
8
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
16 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Voice’; a title added by its editor Guy Lelong), wherein Grisey examines his
musical origins from a psychoanalytic point of view. The text, of which
I here give a synopsis, is written in the third person, which has the effect of
distancing the events from their author, portraying them as if in a work
of fiction.
A young boy lives in the countryside with his parents and grandmother
(an alternative version of the text also mentions a sister).9 The boy is
fearful and sensitive; at times, he suffers physical abuse from his father.
He finds solace in his grandmother, who for him personifies ‘love, absolute
and without limits’. She sings to him; she also answers him when, scared at
night, he calls out. These two key features of their relationship lead the boy
to identify his grandmother with her voice. One Christmas, the boy is given
the present of an accordion, on which he tries to imitate his grandmother’s
songs. Not long afterwards, his grandmother dies; insecurity follows. The
boy continues to play her songs, wondering, ‘Where is that Voice [. . .], that
place of infinite protection?’ The boy’s increasing immersion in music is
framed against a backdrop of trauma, illness, and physical violence (which
includes his accordion at one point being confiscated by his father). The
boy’s abiding attachment to music, the text concludes – which in time will
transform into a lifetime project – is a vain effort to recover ‘that lost
voice’. The boy’s loss of his grandmother irrevocably weds music to death
and love. Though often sick, ‘[d]uring moments of remission, he writes big
notes on manuscript paper [. . .]; for he knows it is only the magic of sound
that will ever be able to evoke that lost voice’.
In this text, Grisey curiously yet characteristically projects onto his
biography some of his music-compositional principles. One instance is
the game of call-and-response that the boy plays in the dark with his
grandmother, which embodies the action-and-reaction pattern Grisey uses
in several of his works (for example, the cause-and-effect relation of the
two instrumental groups in D’eau et de pierre). The repeated enactment of
this call-and-response pattern by the boy also expresses periodicity.
Another instance is the inherence of dualisms throughout the text.
Reality is presented throughout in dualistic terms (‘there is [. . .] a tender-
ness of the day and a tenderness of the night [. . .] A sound for the day, a
sound for the night [. . .]’). Dualism underpins Grisey’s works throughout
his career, whether schematically (the opposed sonorous archetypes of
Charme and D’eau et de pierre; the opposed ensemble forces of Dérives
and L’Icône paradoxale) or conceptually, as in the idea that the resultant

9
Grisey, ‘Notices et compliments’, 359.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 17

tones present in every sound constitute sound’s shadow (most evident in

Jour, contre jour). This illustrates Grisey’s propensity to map his art onto
his life and vice versa, something he engaged in throughout his life. For
Grisey from the outset, art was inseparable from life. In a journal entry
written while he was studying in Paris, Grisey states that since time is
God’s creation and also the basis of music, he should love the experience of
time passing in his life, stating: ‘Be such that people may say of me: “his life
was as beautiful as his work”’.10 In a journal entry made in 1993 at the age
of forty-six, Grisey quotes Camus’s statement that ‘art does not stand
above everything: it cannot be separated from the person’.11 In a 1981 letter
to his wife Jocelyn Simon, he writes: ‘How lacerating it is to accept time’s
flux and space’s dilations’ – temporal flux and acoustic dilation being two
of his musical preoccupations.12 The key thing to understand here is that
Grisey’s artistic practice is motivated by an effort to bring music closer to
life. This led Grisey to seek an aesthetic moving away from what he
considered the over-academism of intellectual abstraction towards models
such as respiration and the heartbeat (in Périodes and Prologue). Grisey’s
ethos, absorbing psychoacoustics, absorbing organicism, absorbing
Deleuze and Bergson, is one of vitalism, and vitalism, as a reaction to
mechanistic worldviews, has a long heritage in modern France.13
Grisey’s school was the Institution Sainte-Marie in Belfort. A school
report of his results in a single year – 1956–7, when he was ten going on
eleven – shows us his general level as a young scholar. There are thirty-five
students in Grisey’s class, and for each student, beside each subject is a
number corresponding to that student’s rank in the class. Grisey’s results
are as follows:

Excellence I
Religion I
French exercises I
Analysis I
Spelling II
Written composition I
Maths II
Writing I

10
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: trois fragments non datés’, 313.
11
In another journal entry of around this time, Grisey draws an analogy between the
experience of life and that of music: ‘Like Life itself, [Music] is [. . .] beyond language’
(Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments années 1990’, 324.)
12
Quoted in Rigaudiere, ‘De l’esprit au spectre’, 41.
13
See Huneman, ‘Montpellier Vitalism’, 615–47.
18 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Reading I
Recitation I
History I
Geography I
Lec˛ons de choses I

With the exception of spelling and mathematics, where he had to be

content with being second, Grisey was at this time the top student in every
subject he took.14 It is to his Marianist education that is due Grisey’s talent
as a writer: many passages in his published essays indicate training in the
use of classical rhetorical devices such as anaphora, enumeratio, rhetorical
question, and metaphor. If we trust Grisey’s description of his parents as
hard-nosed and lacking in idealism, it would be no surprise that they might
have reservations about their gifted son, who could have pursued any
career, wanting to become an artist rather than something more reliable.
As a teenager, Grisey was devoutly religious. The Institution Sainte-
Marie was run by the Society of Mary – colloquially, the Marianists, a
Roman Catholic order which views Mary ‘as the model of discipleship’.
Residue of this focus on the Virgin Mary can be found in L’Icône para-
doxale (1992–4), a work after Pierro Della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto
(c. 1460), and in journal remarks that Grisey made in the early 1970s on
Lorenzetti’s Annunciation (1344).15 Grisey attended mass every Sunday,
accompanying the local choir’s singing (‘awful’) by playing the harmo-
nium.16 His parents’ lack of religious belief made him regret that he could
garner no spiritual instruction from them, and later made him feel as
though they did not understand how music was a spiritual vocation for
him. ‘I have suffered much from their incomprehension in this respect’, he
wrote, ‘from their lack of instruction and especially of idealism.’ The fact
that his parents were divorcees also weighed on his mind. ‘I was thus born
of a sinful union’, he wrote with melodramatic self-pity at age eighteen,
‘and I sometimes have the intuition that my life should amount to nothing
other than an immense martyrdom to make amends for their transgres-
sions!’17 Despite the teenage extravagance, the sentiment is hinted at
enough times in the journal to indicate that Grisey took it seriously. One
of Grisey’s main differences with his parents in his teenage years was his
Christianity. While Grisey’s parents were irreligious, Grisey was a devout

14
‘La Vie à Saint-Marie’, GGCPSF. ‘Lec˛ons de choses’ refers to a type of object-
based learning.
15
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments 1967–1974’, 316.
16
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 309.
17
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 19

Catholic. This Catholic faith was a common chord with his future com-
position teacher, Messiaen, with Boulez’s early years, and with the child-
hood beliefs of the man who would become his compositional role model,
Stockhausen. Grisey would be a practising Catholic until his early twenties,
and although thereafter no longer a Christian, he always retained a
spiritual outlook.
Grisey’s religious devotion grew in tandem with his devotion to music.
He considered these two elements of his life to be inextricable. Music was
not a pleasurable pastime but a God-given vocation. ‘It is affirmed more
and more in my heart’, Grisey writes rhapsodically, aged fourteen: ‘I will
devote myself to music. That will be my life, my goal, my means of serving
God [. . .] There are so many things to say to men. To reveal to them this
unknown and marvellous world . . . To enrich humanity’s treasure by
themes springing up from the bottom of a man’s soul.’18 That the teenage
musician should grow up to be an adult composer was the wish of God.19
Attendant on that gift was the responsibility of the recipient to recognise
and do due justice to it.20 Consistent with this view of music as a spiritual
calling, the teenage Grisey’s musical role models were Christian composers
such as J. S. Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Messiaen: ‘men who understood that
music is something other than a means of earning lots of money’.21 Herein
is a pre-echo of Grisey’s later view of art as ‘above all a mode of being and a
putting into question’.22
Grisey’s primary instrument was the accordion (Fig. 1.1). Grisey
received a piano accordion for Christmas in his fifth year. The accordion’s
connotation was as an instrument of folk and vernacular music; for this
reason, Grisey at times calls it ‘misunderstood’ or even ‘accursed’.23 When
he entered the Paris Conservatoire, he was highly conscious of its
unsophisticated connotations, as Jonathan Goldman has shown.24
Grisey’s initial compositional efforts were limited to transcribed impro-
visations.25 While his earliest compositions are naive, the guiding principle
as described by their author is that of his mature compositional practice:

18
Grisey, journal, 8 February 1961, GGCPSF.
19
Grisey, ‘Pages de Journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 309.
20
Grisey, ‘Pages de Journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 307 and 311.
21
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF. As Robert Hasegawa notes, Messiaen’s inclusion on this list
hints at an important moment in Grisey’s development: his embrace of musical
modernism and a post-tonal language (private correspondence).
22
Grisey, ‘Le Goût de l’aventure’, 250.
23
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 310.
24
Jonathan Goldman, ‘Gérard Grisey, Accordionist’, 11–29.
25
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 307.
20 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Figure 1.1 Gérard Grisey as a child. Reproduced by kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation,
Basel, Switzerland.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 21

music prioritising the sensory immediacy of sound over abstract rules and
interdictions: ‘I compose what pleases my ear’, Grisey wrote in his journal,
aged sixteen; ‘I have no other rules for now.’ A few years later, around the
time he entered Messiaen’s class, Grisey reiterated this in slightly different
terms: ‘Music must not follow a pre-established system. It is the rule that
must be deduced from the example.’26 In the face of sound’s innate beauty,
rules were irrelevant. ‘I write such music as seems beautiful, and it is that
which counts . . .’.27 At this early stage, long before any talk of processes or
spectra, he had an intuition of what he wanted for his music: clarity and
beauty, equal parts spirit and intellect.
Though Grisey had a ‘strong desire to immediately compose music’, he
also had a ‘sense’ which told him ‘to wait because of [his] lack of musical
knowledge’.28 In September 1963, at the age of seventeen, he began studying
harmony. These lessons probably took place at the Belfort Conservatoire,
the École Municipale de Musique de la Ville de Belfort (now the École de
Musique Claude Valli). The Belfort Conservatoire’s director at the time was
the French composer (and ex-prisoner of war) Richard Ciapolino, who
conducted the local orchestra, La Lyre Belfortaine (now the Orchestre
d’Harmonie de la Ville de Belfort) and some of whose music was published
by Éditions Musicales Transatlantiques ( publisher of some of Murail’s
music in the 1970s). Ciapolino recalled Grisey as having been ‘a down-to-
earth student, friendly and full of talent, who displayed an extremely acute
aptitude for music and composition’.29 One of Grisey’s consistent traits as
an apprentice composer was identifying and taking pains to remedy per-
ceived areas of shortcoming. While in Messiaen’s composition class, he
bolstered his composition studies with a course of study in electroacoustic
music at the Schola Cantorum; impressed by Xenakis’s music, he studied
different branches of mathematics; and following his initial spectral works
Dérives and Périodes, he enrolled for a diploma in musical acoustics at the
LAM. This diligence in remedying his shortcomings and equipping himself
maximally to realise his goals first appeared in his teenage attitude to
harmony.
After God and music, the third main theme of Grisey’s teenage journal is
death. While one would expect in a young artist some degree of meditation

26
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: trois fragments non datés’, 314.
27
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
28
‘I am continually caught between two deep tendencies: my ardent desire to compose
music immediately and my good sense telling me to wait because of my lack of musical
knowledge.’ Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 308.
29
Quoted in ‘Deux Francs-comtois lauréats’, GGCPSF.
22 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

on death, Grisey was particularly preoccupied with it. Consistently

depressed in tone, the journal has two epigraphs written carefully in
Grisey’s hand. The first is a dedication (‘To the one I will have been able
to have loved!’); the second is a morbid poem: ‘How beautiful it is to be
alive! / And how immense the glory of God! / But how good it is, too, /
To die when it is all over.’ That this should stand as an epigraph indicates
how significant the sentiment was. Another poem goes further: ‘My God,
I feel like dying! / I thirst for Eternity, the Absolute / Lord, I would like to
die [. . .].’30 This is more than teenage moroseness: the proliferation of such
remarks throughout Grisey’s journal indicates general depression. Grisey
notes that he has ‘never really been afraid of death. [. . .] I’ve even some-
times – it’s however true – prayed that my death should come in the
middle of youth’.31 In another entry, some months later: ‘I feel anew the
desire to die today. What an awful malady. It’s like nausea.’32 The morbid-
ity was not incidental; it was a core motivator behind Grisey’s immersing
himself in music and going on to become a composer; music gave succour.
His solitude, which closed him off from his peers, was, he felt, of his own
choosing. ‘When I spend my hours at the accordion’, he wrote, ‘I go into a
marvellous world.’33
Death is a regular theme in Grisey’s works – most obviously the Quatre
chants pour franchir le seuil, but also Sortie vers la lumière du jour (based on
the Egyptian Book of the Dead), Anubis-Nout (again, based on the concep-
tion of death in Ancient Egypt), Stèle, his final unfinished work (a Beckett
Mirlitonnades setting), and some of his non-theoretical writings. On one
occasion, Grisey was moved to write a piece of prose on Ravel’s Pavane pour
une infante défunte (1899) for solo piano. As usual, the quality of the writing
stands out, but so too does the preoccupation with morbid imagery. ‘In an
austere room of the palace of the Escurial’, Grisey writes, ‘a young princess
dances the Pavane. Wearing a black dress, with a red rose on her breast, she
has on her lips “the smile of those who do not live for long”. The sun plays
through the stained glass of the gothic windows, scattering multi-coloured
squares which are, nonetheless, a play of sadness. And the princess dances,
and dances, her funereal step’ (though he wrote this with the proviso that
‘music can’t be expressed in words’).34 This sketch presents the complex
association in Grisey’s mind between music, death, and pleasure. The gothic
register is, of course, an aspect of Romanticism, as are the linking of art to
forgetful oblivion, the image of the artist as friendless solitary (Danielle
Cohen-Levinas would later refer to Grisey as the ‘most nomadic’ of the

30 31
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF. Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
32 33
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF. Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
34
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 23

courant spectral composers), and the identification of harmony with love.

None of this is surprising given how, from Rilke to Klee and Symbolism to
Sebald, Romanticism, particularly in its early Germanic form, inheres
throughout twentieth-century modernist art.
For his future career, Grisey never considered being anything other than
a musician, preferably a composer. At seventeen, he already had a relatively
good knowledge of twentieth-century music. As well as traditional reper-
toire like J. S. Bach and Tchaikovsky, the seventeen-year-old knew Ravel,
Messiaen, and serial music. About serialism he was ambivalent. ‘The serial
musician’, Grisey observed, ‘is more an intellectual than a poet.’35 Serialism
had forgotten music’s wellspring in sensory pleasure and the imagination,
Grisey thought, producing a sensually arid idiom. Nevertheless, serialism
was not a lost cause: it was simply waiting for that ‘genius’ who would
‘make it less rational and give it the emotion and tenderness it is lacking’.
The implied candidate for this role is clear. Given what we will see of how
Grisey mastered and passed through serialism in creating his mature style,
Grisey’s remarks were prescient.
This grand ambition was based on Grisey’s musical achievements to
date. Having purchased a Hohner Morino piano accordion from his
teacher Rudi Valli in 1961,36 Grisey was by this stage an accordion
virtuoso. By 1963, the year he began studying harmony with a view to
becoming a composer, Grisey had twice won first prize in the French
national accordion championship; and in June 1963 he was selected for
the finals of the accordion World Cup, for which he travelled to Baden-
Baden. Thus, as he came to the end of his school studies, Grisey’s attention
turned to the practical means of achieving his ambition of becoming a
famous composer. His wish was to study at the Conservatoire National
Supérieur de Musique de Paris (CNSMP; hereafter Paris Conservatoire),
but barriers stood in the way: his parents, he thought, would be unable to
afford funding his studies; he would not be able to raise the money himself
without having received his baccalaureate; and his instrument was the
accordion, hardly the most exalted instrument for a would-be famous
composer entering the august Paris Conservatoire.37 Soon, though, a
solution was found: Grisey would initially study in West Germany at
Trossingen’s Stadtische Musikschule, home of the Hohner accordion acad-
emy. Alongside the prospect of higher accordion studies, Grisey was
particularly excited at the prospect of studying harmony, fugue, and
counterpoint (‘musical science’), though his ambition remained to pass

35
This reference and the next, Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: journal d’adolescence
1961–1966’, 311–12.
36
Goldman, ‘Gérard Grisey, Accordionist’, 14. 37
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
24 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

through Trossingen as a means of gaining entry later to the Paris

Conservatoire. He acknowledged that should his dream of being a com-
poser not be possible, he would still be qualified to become a music teacher,
which convinced his parents to give their blessing to his studies.
As the teenager readied himself to take the intimidating step of immi-
grating to a country in whose language he was not fluent, he took solace in
his faith. ‘God will provide me with all I need. After giving me such a gift,
why would He not provide the material possibilities for developing it?’

Studies at the Städtische Musikschule, Trossingen, 1964–1966

Looking back on his training in the 1980s, Grisey recalled: ‘I trained within
two absolutely different systems: the German system in which harmonic
function is analysed, and the French system which privileges chord progres-
sions.’38 Going further, and no doubt being provocative, Grisey also on
occasion claimed: ‘At base, I’m a German composer.’39 There is little doubt
that the highly schematic approach to musical form that characterises Grisey’s
mature music, if not entirely due to Grisey’s Trossingen education, was
initially fostered by it. Grisey began his studies in Trossingen in February
1964, and they impacted his development in at least two significant ways.
Firstly, Grisey attained a world class level on the accordion, leading to his first
composer–performer collaboration (with the composer Wolfgang Jacobi) and
his first commercially released recording (with Stanley Darrow). Secondly,
and more importantly, under the composer Helmut Degen, Grisey acquired
an early compositional grounding in the traditionally Germanic preoccupa-
tions with large-scale musical form and harmonic function, the legacy of
which is clear in his mature music’s large-scale formal coherence (which
distinguishes it from the music of some of his French spectral peers).
Trossingen was a natural destination for Grisey. As well as being
geographically close to Belfort, it was a centre for the accordion, and at
this stage it was as yet unclear to Grisey whether his future path lay as a
performer, composer or teacher. Trossingen’s heritage as an institution for
accordion studies was tied to its being the home of the instrument-builder
Hohner. Upon arrival in his new home, Grisey was predictably lonely (‘It’s
awful’).40 One of the issues was his poor grasp of German (which improved
over the two years he spent there). Despite or because of his discontent,
and his sense that some of his classmates were jealous of his talent, Grisey

38
Grisey, ‘Paris–Berlin–Berkeley’, 227.
39
Quoted in Hirnsbrunner, ‘Gérard Grisey d’outre tombre’, 226.
40
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 25

immersed himself in his studies, and his time in Trossingen saw the
culmination of his brief career as an accordionist and the beginning of
his longer career as a serious composer (and also heralded the beginning of
his habit of moving abroad for his career).
At the Musikschule, where Grisey studied accordion, piano, harmony,
counterpoint, music theory, and composition, his most important teacher
was Degen. Degen taught Grisey music theory, counterpoint, and compos-
ition (and possibly harmony). Idiomatically Degen’s own music is not far
from that of Hindemith (whose thoughts on using formants and other
spectral phenomenon in composition Alexandra Monchick considers
proto-spectralist); and in 1957, Degen published a music-theoretical trea-
tise, Handbuch der Formenlehre: Grundsätzliches zur musikalischen
Formung (‘Manual on the Theory of Form: Fundamentals on Musical
Forming’), which argues for an approach to the musical work considered
more in its phenomenology than in terms of positivistic analytical categor-
ies.41 With Degen, Grisey analysed nineteenth-century music by the likes
of Beethoven (the Piano Sonata in C minor Op. 111) and Schubert (‘Der
Doppelgänger’) thematically, harmonically, and formally, and made a
schematic analysis of the orchestral Prelude from Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde. Degen’s Tristan analysis was in some way influenced by Alfred
Lorenz’s analyses of The Ring.42 Degen’s formal scheme represented the
Tristan Prelude on horizontal and vertical axes in terms of register and
tessitura (at the top of the page), instrumentation (in the middle), and
overall dynamic (at the bottom of the page). This approach influenced
Grisey: his approach to pre-compositional planning in mature works such
as Dérives is highly schematic and similar to Degen’s analyses.
As well as common-practice music, Degen analysed post-tonal music.
One of these works was Schoenberg’s Farben, the third movement from the
Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16, a work sometimes cited as proto-spectral.
Degen described Farben to his pupils (as per Grisey’s class notes) as a
‘sound surface’ composition, showing composition with static fields and
the attendant problem, related to stochastic music, of composing ‘subtle
colour transitions’, at times through the use of cross-fading. Cross-fades, or
swells from silence, are a common feature of Grisey’s music, from the
opening of Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–2) to the second section of
Partiels (1975–6) to the opening section of Vortex temporum (1994–6), and

41
Monchick, ‘Paul Hindemith’s Trautonium’; Degen, Handbuch der Formenlehre.
On Degen, see Supičić, ‘Instead of an Introductory Word’, 10.
42
Degen also analysed the Tristan chord, discussing the respective interpretations of the
chord by Ernst Kurth, Louis-Thuille, Alfred Lorenz, and Horst Scharschuch. GGCPSF.
26 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

it may be that the technique stemmed from here (though Goldman

suggests that it may have come from Grisey’s experience as an
accordionist).43 More speculative is whether at this time Grisey was
exposed to Stockhausen’s music. In Grisey’s archive at the Paul Sacher
Foundation, a few analyses of Stockhausen’s works are preserved, two of
which are undated. The first is of Kreuzspiel (1951) for six instruments (it
is written on three A4 pages of graph paper and some manuscript paper
featuring the tone rows and other notated excerpts). Grisey’s Kreuzspiel
analysis moves chronologically through the work as if transcribed during a
lecture. The second undated Stockhausen analysis is of Zeitmaße (1955–6)
for five woodwinds. This analysis is twenty-seven pages long and covers all
of Zeitmaße’s serial aspects, with numerous tables of numerals, series,
durations, and rhythms. Stockhausen would become one of Grisey’s main
influences, and Grisey’s Kreuzspiel analysis may have stemmed from
Degen’s class at Trossingen (given how the Farben analysis seemingly
engaged the ideas of Xenakis). In any case, one can safely say that already
a few years before becoming Messiaen’s student, Grisey was engaged with
contemporary composition’s core techniques and concepts.
Alongside the schematic consideration of form, one element of his
Trossingen training that left a mark on Grisey’s future musical thought
was Hugo Riemann’s theory of harmony. The Swiss musicologist Théo
Hirnsbrunner, who met Grisey in the 1990s when Grisey used a house at
Schlanz in the Swiss Alps for composition, relates how Grisey told him how
stimulating Riemann’s thought was for him in this period. ‘That severe
hierarchisation appealed greatly to Grisey’, Hirsbrunner writes. ‘In it, he
saw a tendency little used in France: that of finding an organic connection
between diverse sound objects and establishing, on that basis, a wide and
logical ordering of sound phenomena.’44 Among Grisey’s student notes are
graphs of the Riemannean Tonnetz, showing the relation between triads in a
given key, with the relations between circles colour-coded in red, green, or
black ink. While, given Grisey’s non-tonal idiom, the Riemannean influence
on Grisey was not totally direct, it is tempting to link Grisey’s consistent use
of dualisms in his compositions in part to the early influence of Riemannean
symmetry. When operating with pitch complexes in Vagues, chemins, le
souffle (1970–2) and D’eau et de pierre (1972), Grisey frequently explored
mirror inversions, which have an analogy in the Riemannean Tonnetz; and

43
Goldman, ‘Gérard Grisey, Accordionist’, 24–5. Goldman sees an influence of the
accordion’s acoustical functioning on elements of the harmonic writing in Partiels.
44
Hirnsbrunner, ‘Gérard Grisey d’outre tombre’, 226. For an analysis of Grisey’s harmonic
thought and how it relates to Riemannean theory, see Hasegawa, ‘Gérard Grisey and the
“Nature” of Harmony’, 349–71.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 27

as a theorist Riemann proposed a dualist theory of harmony based largely on

the overtone series and a hypothetical undertone series, which is picked up
in some late Grisey works like Anubis-Nout.45
Trossingen saw the climax of Grisey’s career as an accordionist. Helmi
Strahl Harrington writes that, in regard to the accordion, ‘[a] tremendous
growth in original repertory took place from about 1963, when the
Städtische Musikschule Trossingen sought to expand the presence of
experimental music and atonal styles in its concerts’.46 Two teachers with
whom Grisey studied at this time reflect this effort: the composer
Wolfgang Jacobi (1894–1972) and the accordionist Stanley Darrow.
Grisey may have made Jacobi’s acquaintance in spring 1965 when Jacobi,
who lived in Munich, came to Trossingen for a concert at which Grisey
performed the German composer’s Capriccio for solo accordion (1962).
The two corresponded thereafter, with Grisey asking questions about
certain aspects of the Capriccio, and Jacobi answering in detail and prais-
ing Grisey’s ‘musicality and virtuosity’.47 Grisey advised Jacobi on accor-
dion fingerings in various passages, and this experience was Grisey’s first of
the type of performer–composer collaboration he would experience from
the other side during the 1970s with Ensemble l’Itinéraire. This collabor-
ation between composer and young performer was in view of the upcom-
ing accordion World Cup in Toronto, where Grisey would be performing
the work in question. In 1963 in Baden-Baden, he came ninth overall.
In 1964, having made his first transatlantic journey (comparing himself in
his journal to Saint-Exupéry), Grisey received the bronze medal in his age
category. That Grisey was at this time the third best accordionist in the
world in his age group makes it remarkable that in later life he rarely
publicly acknowledged his successful albeit brief accordion career. Part of
the reason for this reticence has been established. Reporting Grisey’s
comments to a former Trossingen classmate, Goldman tells us that
Grisey was embarrassed to mention his instrument when enrolled at the
Paris Conservatoire, since, among his bourgeois classmates, he feared it
would be met with condescending laughter.48 Since even before even
entering Trossingen Grisey referred to the accordion as an ‘accursed’
instrument, he obviously felt self-conscious about it from early on. While

45
This observation comes from Robert Hasegawa in private correspondence with
the author.
46
Harrington and Kubik, ‘Accordion’.
47
Wolfgang Jacobi, letter to Gérard Grisey, 17 May 1965, GGCPSF.
48
Goldman, ‘Gérard Grisey, Accordionist’, 13. At the accordion World Cup in Toronto,
Grisey met a Quebeqoise teenager called Guylaine Charon with whom he
became infatuated.
28 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

in North America, Grisey stayed in New Jersey for an additional two

months with Stanley Darrow, whose Acme Accordion School was based
in Westmont, New Jersey. It was during this stay that Grisey made a
recording that would be commercially released not long afterwards.
Grisey also had his first music published by the time he left Trossingen:
the Étude en fa majeur (étude pour accordéon no 2), completed in January
1963 and published by Édition Helbling of Zurich in July 1964.
While in later years Grisey did not often mention his accordion training,
in his biographical notes up to 1974 he did still mention Degen as having
been his composition teacher. In this, Grisey evidently acknowledged that
Degen’s teaching had influenced his compositional development.49
Alongside this, and even if the music in question was not the route he
wished to pursue, having a published composition and a commercially
released disc at this age instilled valuable self-confidence.

Preliminary Studies in Paris, 1965–1968

That in later years Grisey declared that the Paris Conservatoire had com-
prised his essential education is in one sense unsurprising. Matriculating in
1965 and graduating in 1972, Grisey spent seven years in all at the insti-
tution, the best part of a decade. Initially he lived on rue de Monceau, in
close proximity to the Conservatoire. At the Conservatoire, he took the
obligatory écriture classes and music history. He considered himself to live ‘a
quasi-monastic life’, and his daily routine was diligent: ‘I get up early and
I go to mass when I’m able. Then from 8.30 to 11.30 I compose. In the
afternoon: accordion, piano, reading, studying scores, counterpoint, etc.
In the evening: letters and listening to records.’50 Such a study regime,
assuming that Grisey maintained it, precluded doing much other than
music. A letter sent to a friend opens a view on Grisey’s view of his art as
he entered his twenties. When his friend Christiane chided him by suggest-
ing that artists by necessity ‘lose their sense of reality’, Grisey wrote her a
letter discussing the vocation of the artist and the role of art in the world.
Arguing that art is no less ‘real’ than the so-called ‘real world’, Grisey writes:
without denying the element of dream, of imagination and of the marvellous
that all art brings with it [. . .] it is clear that the artist, if he wants to realise

49
In the early 1980s, Grisey researched contemporary techniques for the button accordion
with a view to composing a work for the instrument; he also mentioned in a mid-1980s
interview that he would be composing a work for accordion and vocoder (which never
came to fruition). Grisey, ‘[Sur l’accordéon]’.
50
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 29

something, must shut himself away ‘selfishly’ in his art. [. . .] [M]oreover, he

will take refuge in his world, escaping in this way certain ‘realities’ that
preoccupy so many other men. But then, how to do otherwise when one
knows that Art is the only thing which doesn’t deceive, which is stable – not
illusion, but revelation?51

The twenty-year-old’s aesthetic credo is like that of the teenager a few years
earlier and the mature composer a few years later. Grisey’s artistic vision
was unwavering.
The most important event of the 1965–6 period was the beginning of
Grisey’s relationship with Jocelyn Simon, his future wife. Alongside his
studies at the Conservatoire, Grisey spent this early period in Paris getting
to know the city. Scattered events are mentioned in the journal: visiting the
Église St-Gervais-et-St-Protais in the Marais, where he listened to music
performed ‘on that organ at which sat the Great Couperin, and which
doubtless played his two masses for the first time’; discussing the music of
Bartók with a Hungarian barber; debating the existence of God with his
new girlfriend; and eating out at restaurants in the Latin Quarter to
celebrate his and Simon’s respective twentieth birthdays.52 Though
Grisey felt that meeting Simon had given him a happier outlook than that
of his teenage years, he was still at times prone to thoughts on ‘the idea
which haunted my youth: the idea of sublimation by death’. ‘Love and
death’, he wrote, ‘seem to me more and more closely united, like partners.’
The union of a man and a woman was, he proposed, the worldly embodi-
ment of the inherent unity of love and death.53
The prescience of Grisey’s vision has been remarked. Particularly inter-
esting is this regard is a note from this period in which Grisey states what
he wishes to be the key qualities of his music. Having a week earlier
encouraged himself to have a strong work ethic (‘Work, yes, work like a
bee, with diligence’),54 Grisey on 17 March 1966 outlined some of his
compositional goals: to ‘make the synthesis between the cerebral and the
emotional’; to avoid ‘useless vociferation [bavardage] and especially [. . .]
dryness’; to ‘remain natural above all’; to ‘aim for the precision and bright-
ness of Ravel’; and to create music that would be ‘intellectual without that

51
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF. This rhetorical question he paraphrased from Tchaikovsky.
52
All references in this paragraph, GGCPSF.
53
Grisey had expressed the same idea a few years earlier in relation to his then-girlfriend
Bernadette: ‘It seems to me that our love could only find its completion, its sublimation in
death, death in unison, that of Tristan and Isolde, of Pelleas and Melisande . . .’. Grisey,
journal, GGCPSF.
54
Grisey, journal, GGCPSF.
30 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 1.1 Grisey’s Passacaille (1966) for accordion. Reproduced from Jonathan Goldman, ‘Gérard
Grisey, Accordionist’.

intellectualism being apparent’.55 This last point is especially apt for a work
such as Jour, contre jour (1978), the apogee in Grisey of a complex music
that has a smooth, relatively simple surface (in other words, complicated
mathematical calculations and detailed schematisation are undertaken to
create a music possessing hardly any features). The precepts are remarkably
faithful to the style Grisey later created with such success and with
such influence.
At the end of his first academic year in Paris, Grisey was working on two
pieces, a Magnificat for female voices, piano, percussion, and four wind
instruments and a Passacaille for solo accordion. Grisey wrote the
Passacaille (Ex. 1.1) to gain entry to the Paris Conservatoire’s composition
class. Goldman notes that it
more readily recalls the work of a talented apprentice deeply indebted to
Messiaen, despite the fact that he composed it before having set foot in the
Paris Conservatoire [sic], than the influence of his neoclassical composition
teachers at the time. A passage with a bass pedal cantus firmus subtending a
cascade of right-hand chords, for example, is reminiscent of one of Messiaen’s
Sainte Trinité organ improvisations.56
In imitating Messiaen, the apprentice composer pursued a similar strat-
egy to his later friend Tristan Murail, whose piano piece Comme on oeil
suspend et poli par la songe (1967), also composed to gain entry to
Messiaen’s class, similarly contains overt Messiaenesque elements (as will
be seen below).57 While Grisey would later suppress wider publication of

55
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 312.
56
Goldman, ‘Gérard Grisey, Accordionist’, 19.
57
See Cagney, ‘Tristan Murail’s Musical Poetics’.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 31

the Passacaille, claiming to detest it and describing it as a ‘sin of youth’,58 in

showing off his compositional prowess it had the desired effect of gaining
him admittance to his first choice of composition teacher at the Paris
Conservatoire, Messiaen. The Passacaille also marks the threshold between
Grisey’s career as an accordionist and his career as a composer. The
culmination came during Grisey’s first year in Messiaen’s class, when the
American record label Kaibala released recordings that the young accor-
dionist had made following his success at the World Cup in Toronto.
Goldman quotes a 1969 letter that Grisey sent to the Canadian accordion-
ist Joseph Macerollo (with English mistakes): ‘I could never tell to musi-
cians of the Paris Conservatory that I am accordionist without hear them
laughing. Messiaen knows something about electronic accordion but he
doesn’t like it at all [. . .]. I am not playing accordion any more. My way is
another one. [. . .] My style have changed; I am now very close of people
like Ligetti [sic] or Stockhausen.’59
Grisey’s ambition was such that, during the latter months of the 1967–8
academic year, he supplemented his Paris Conservatoire studies by joining
Henri Dutilleux’s composition class at the École Normale de Musique.
Dutilleux’s composition class took place once and sometimes twice a
week,60 and Grisey’s classmates there included Jean-Claude Wolff,
Renaud Gagneux, and Gérard Geay, with each of whom he would remain
in contact subsequently at the Paris Conservatoire. Dutilleux’s course was
divided threefold between analysis, orchestration, and composition proper;
works he typically analysed with students included Berg’s Wozzeck,
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and
Celesta, and Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor Op. 132;61 orchestra-
tion included arranging piano pieces by Messiaen and Prokofiev and
reorchestrating a section of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust; and compos-
ition saw the students ‘asked to write pieces for specific instrumental forces
or to set a particular text’.62 Grisey wrote two works for Dutilleux’s course:

58
Goldman, ‘Gérard Grisey, Accordionist’, 20.
59
Goldman, ‘Gérard Grisey, Accordionist’, 13. 60
See Potter, Henri Dutilleux, 15.
61
Among Grisey’s notes at the Paul Sacher Foundation is an analysis of the Bartók piece,
probably dating from Dutilleux’s class.
62
A year after leaving Dutilleux’s class, while attending the Accademia Chigiana (Chigiana
Musical Academy) in Siena, Grisey sent Dutilleux a letter to update his former teacher on his
recent musical activity. In October 1992, Grisey sent a short letter to tell Dutilleux that he had
just encountered his Cello Concerto, Tout un monde lointain (1967–70). ‘It is an absolute
masterpiece which transcends all the aesthetic categories of our time’, Grisey writes, which
attitude Anderson considers a backhanded compliment. See Anderson, ‘Timbre, Process and
accords fixes’, 448–9, and Cagney, ‘Synthesis and Deviation’, 107–13.
32 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

a setting from Sophocles’ Antigone (1968) for choir and small orchestra,
and the Deux madrigaux (1967) for baritone voice, piano, and percussion.
The latter were dedicated respectively to Jocelyn Simon and Père Jean-
Marie de Miscault.63 De Miscault (1909–90) was a Marianist priest based
at the time at what is now the Institution Sainte-Marie d’Antony, a
Catholic school run by the Marianists in the south-west of Paris in the
Hauts-de-Seine.
It may have been de Miscault who directed Grisey towards the palaeon-
tologist and Catholic mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, part of whose
Hymn of the Universe (1965) Grisey set in the Deux madrigaux. In Paris,
Grisey continued to observe his Catholic faith with intense devotion.
He weekly attended the Greek Orthodox service on rue Daru, since he
found the greater degree of ceremony there preferable to the more modest
ritual of the Catholic service.64 In this regard, Grisey’s interest in Teilhard’s
writings is little surprise. Within the scientific community, Teilhard was
well known as a palaeontologist; alongside this, he was a theologian, and
his mystical poetic writings sought to reconcile the worldview of contem-
porary science with a revised view of the spiritual and its place in life.
Teilhard’s crossover of Catholicism and scientific materialism had a prece-
dent in the work of Henri Bergson; Teilhard stated that his reading of
Bergson’s book Évolution créatrice (1907) was one of the turning points in
his life. That Grisey’s later process-based music should have been charac-
terised as Bergsonian (by Dufourt among others) is in this light unsurpris-
ing. The editor of Teilhard’s Hymn of the Universe summarises the text’s
worldview: ‘If the work of creation is seen as an evolutionary process, then
existence of matter is the necessary precondition for the appearance, on
earth, of spirit: elsewhere Père Teilhard de Chardin speaks of matter in
more exact language as the “matrix of spirit”: that in which life emerges
and is supported, not the active principle from which it takes its rise.’65 The
mystical tenor at times verges on surrealism and certainly suggests spectr-
alism’s valorisation of natural processes:
Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who
unless we fetter you will devour us.
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever
new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us
to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

63
Grisey worked on a third madrigal on Paul Claudel’s ‘La Muse qui est la grace’. Claudel, a
Catholic poet, was a favourite of Grisey’s.
64
Rigaudière, ‘De l’esprit au spectre’, 40. 65
Teilhard, Hymn of the Universe, 67 n.
Grisey’s Early Formation (1960–1966) 33

Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple

abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and
dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the
dimensions of God.66

The tone of rhapsodic, mystic Romanticism appealed to Grisey enough

that he set some of Teilhard’s Hymne à la matière (‘Hymn to Matter’) in
the Deux madrigaux. But further than this, it inspired Grisey’s developing
thoughts on composition and on the relationship between music and its
acoustic material. In a journal entry written at the time of composing the
two madrigals, Grisey describes art and religious faith as indistinguishable
(as had Teilhard). The artwork, Grisey writes, is the ‘sublimation of its
Material [Matière: the French word can mean matter or material]. The
mind in its plenitude transforms it, shapes it, gives to it a sort of pre-
existence, image and prefiguration of the Existence of God that it will reach
at the end of time.’67 For Grisey, following Teilhard, science and art are
alternative modes of apprehending the world: whereas science’s ‘under-
standing’ is limited to a historical world in which it continually evolves,
art’s ‘knowledge’ taps into reality’s empirical immediacy, which is con-
sidered a transcendentally determined truth (a distinction that has shades
of German Idealism). This truth of our reality, writes Grisey, is beyond
measure and beyond language. His view of music as essentially beyond
language would develop over the next few years, informing his aesthetic
aims; arguably, its mature form was the notion of the liminal as theoretical
index of sound’s unrepresentable character on the micro-scale, in regard to
which our conventional musical parameters are only, as it were, rough
reference grids. In his journal from around this time, Grisey also dwelt on
the relation between tonality and atonality in terms suggestive of how his
music would evolve: ‘For me, atonality is non-existent. From the moment
when two different notes ring out one after the other or simultaneously,
a relation is established. All music possesses one or several tonal centres,
veritable poles of attraction.’68 This insistence on harmonicity and poles of
attraction informed how Grisey’s relationship with serialism would evolve.
It is fitting that Schoenberg himself, in his Theory of Harmony, observed
that ‘to call any relation of tones atonal is just as farfetched as it would be
to designate a relation of colours aspectral . . .’.69

66
Teilhard, Hymn of the Universe, 66.
67
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments 1967–1974’, 315.
68
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: trois fragments non datés’, 313–14.
69
Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 432.
 2 Messiaen’s Class and New Music in Late 1960s Paris
(1967–1970)

The French conservatoire system distinguishes écriture, which trains com-

posers, from interpétation, which trains performers. Thus, in late 1965,
when after a wait of a few years Grisey finally enrolled at the Paris
Conservatoire (CNSMP), he initially entered that institution’s écriture
classes, a necessary preliminary to the study of composition with
Messiaen, his ultimate goal.1 Later during Grisey’s studies, he and his wife
Jocelyn moved into the Cité des Arts, where they became friendly with
Grisey’s Greek classmate George Couroupos. Couroupos recalled that in
class Grisey had a ‘shy presence’.2 Michaël Levinas similarly describes
meeting in the Conservatoire’s écriture classes a ‘young man, blond and
mysterious, who was said to have already taken composition lessons at the
École Normale with Dutilleux. But as is well known, this Gérard Grisey
numbered among the best in the counterpoint and harmony classes.
Moreover, he was in the piano accompaniment class, another secular
tradition of the CNSMP reserved for the elite.’3
By all accounts, the écriture classes, comprising tuition in traditional
techniques such as harmony, counterpoint, and fugue, were dull.
Nevertheless, for Levinas, in having produced at the Paris Conservatoire
a lineage of composers with a common predilection for rich harmonies and
timbres, a lineage leading through Berlioz, Debussy, Varèse, and Messiaen,
they played a formative role for the courant spectral.4 Grisey expressed
scepticism about a direct connection between the Conservatoire’s peda-
gogy and the courant spectral, but he admitted that it left its mark on him:
The term ‘French music’ instantly calls to mind the spectre of the Paris
Conservatoire [. . .]. Not so long ago, a mixture of different styles was
produced there, with among other characteristics a strong dose of Fauré;
destined to help one pass the examinations, perfectly anonymous, but
undeniably ‘anonymous, yet French’! It is a tradition which appears to have
been extinguished; but I myself was formed – or should I say deformed – by
this training.5

1
Grisey, ‘Paris–Berlin–Berkeley’, 227. 2
Goldman, ‘Gérard Grisey, Accordionist’, 18.
3
Levinas, ‘Rupture et système’, 32. 4
Levinas, ‘Rupture et système’, 32.
5
Grisey, ‘Paris–Berlin–Berkeley’, 228.

[34]
 New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 35

Figure 2.1 Messiaen’s composition class, 1969–70. From left to right: standing, Michaël Levinas,
Claude Boss, Jacques Petit, Michèle Foison, Gérard Grisey, Iradj Sahbaï, José de Almmeida Prado,
Tristan Murail; seated, George Couroupos, Olivier Messiaen, Jean Koerner. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Switzerland.

Grisey had been determined to study in Messiaen’s composition class

(Fig. 2.1), and as will be seen, Messiaen’s personnages sonores technique,
musical ethos, and analyses of Debussy and Ravel all left their mark on him
as he sought to establish himself in late 1960s Paris.

Messiaen’s Class
The future courant spectral composers attended Messiaen’s three-hour-
long composition class three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday mornings. This thrice-weekly format was divided more or less
evenly between three focuses: analysis, technique (such as Hindu and
Greek rhythms, neumes, magic squares), and showcases of student works.
36 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Murail later gave a testimonial on the nature of Messiaen’s pedagogical

influence on his pupils:
Teaching isn’t really the right word. Of course Messiaen educated me, as with
all of his students, about Greek and Hindu metrics, Gregorian neumes, and so
forth. His manner of analysing the works of the past, too, was very different
from traditional approaches, and was for me a source of reflection upon
music as a phenomenon. But that does not get at the heart of the matter.
Messiaen, as he had done for many others, revealed me to myself, knew how
to tell me, at the necessary moment: that is your path. It is for this reason
I consider Messiaen not simply a professor of composition (a notion which
besides has barely any meaning) but a master, in almost the oriental sense of
that word.6

As a retrospective account of Messiaen’s influence as a teacher, it is a

typical one (similar to those of Pierre Boulez and George Benjamin).7 For
Grisey, Messiaen’s main inspiration lay in his encouraging a sense of
marvel in music, ‘distilled with the candour and naivety of the Sage and
the Infant’, a legacy generally more ethical than technical (indeed, Grisey
was at times frustrated by Messiaen’s hands-off approach).8 Nonetheless,
Messiaen’s openness to music, including non-Western music, and his non-
dogmatic outlook encouraged his students to pursue their own compos-
itional goals.
A short film clip shot around 1971 for Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux
shows Grisey, Michaël Levinas, and the other students in Messiaen’s class.9
The class focus is analysis, and, as always for his analyses, Messiaen sits at
the piano talking to the students seated around him. Typically, Messiaen
would spend the lesson playing through key passages of a selected work –
in this case, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande – providing a verbal, descrip-
tive analysis of the music as he went along. This ‘hermeneutic’ approach to
analysis (as Jean Boivin terms it)10 directed the students’ attention less
towards abstract technical features than towards aesthetic, emotional, and
historical elements. As he sits at the piano, singing and hammering out
chords, Messiaen asks his pupils, gathered around the piano, what colour
the words invoke: this analysis does not, needless to say, call to mind

6
Quoted in Halbreich, L’Œuvre d’Olivier Messiaen, 514.
7
Testimonies collected in Benjamin, Boulez, and Hill, ‘Messiaen as Teacher’.
8
Grisey, [‘Silences de Messiaen’], 215–16.
9
Fano and Tual, Olivier Messaien et les oiseaux.
10
Boivin, ‘Musical Analysis According to Messiaen’, 137–57.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 37

Schenker or Forte (Messiaen never referred to any analytic textbooks).

Asked about the colour of a particular chord, an embarrassed Grisey, hand
at his mouth, shrugs. Yet there is more to this than cajolery. The clip
shows how, in developing these young would-be composers’ musical
sensibilities, Messiaen is concerned to convey to them what is at work
beyond the ‘notes themselves’, something more essential than the dots on
the page.11 One can well see how this cultivated a similar attitude for
Grisey. If one considers the opening section of Partiels only in technical
terms without also taking account of its drama and wonder, one misses
half the work.
Messiaen’s analyses fostered Grisey’s interest in non-Western musics,
such as Tibetan and Indian musics (an element of Messiaen’s teaching
somewhat unprecedented at the time, and which Grisey followed when
he himself later taught composition at the Paris Conservatoire). His
analysis also nurtured a sense of connection to the longer French
classical tradition, which re-emerged in Grisey’s, Levinas’s, Murail’s,
and Tessier’s music in later years. In contrast to Grisey’s Trossingen
lessons with Degen, Messiaen’s classes rarely if ever included analyses of
J. S. Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius, or Schoenberg,
and there was a preference against the motivic-developmental, dialect-
ical forms of the Austro-Germanic tradition (Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony being one exception, another being the proto-spectral
Prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold, to which reviewers would later
occasionally compare the works of Grisey and Murail).12 Boivin writes:
‘The main criteria for selection turned out to be harmonic richness,
exotic modes, colourful orchestration (or imaginative use of timbre) and
rhythmic and melodic resourcefulness.’13 When asked about Debussy,
Grisey would later remark that, beyond his teenage admiration for

11
Messiaen’s avoiding ‘formalistic’ analysis was in part due, Peyser suggests, to a sense of
his shortcomings on such matters by comparison with figures like Leibowitz in the 1940s
or Boulez and Xenakis thereafter (Peyser, Pierre Boulez, 33). Murail said that Messiaen
was intimidated by the technical analyses of Boulez, Xenakis, and others. Rose, ‘Between
the Notes’.
12
Boivin, ‘Musical Analysis According to Messiaen’, 140. Murail said that Messiaen’s lack of
attention to large-scale form in analyses was one of his weaknesses as a composition
teacher. Tristan Murail in interview with Jonathan Cross, Maida Vale, October 2013.
13
Boivin, ‘Musical Analysis According to Messiaen’.
38 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Debussy’s music, the first thing the name brought to mind was
Messiaen’s ‘brilliant analyses’ of Debussy’s music.14 In his class notes,
Grisey’s transcriptions from Messiaen’s class on La Mer take up ten
pages of a small copybook. For each section, Grisey gives a verbal
description which one may assume is a transcription of Messiaen’s
own words; this is instructive for showing how Messiaen encouraged
his students to think about music. Messiaen’s discussion of what the sea
symbolised for Debussy is cogent in light of the ‘poetic’ dimension of
Grisey’s music,15 which, as in D’eau et de pierre, Dérives, and Jour,
contre jour, sometimes uses similarly programmatic themes. Messiaen
analysed Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912) in similar terms, describing
each movement verbally with some analysis of its key motifs.16 It was no
coincidence that in Vortex temporum (1994–6) Grisey would return to
Daphnis et Chloé, evincing the lasting impression Messiaen’s
analysis made.17
For the 1968–9 academic year (Grisey’s first year), one of Grisey’s
fellow students preserved a record of the general topics covered in each
class.18 The techniques Grisey studied are familiar in regard to
Messiaen’s interests: Greek metrics, Hindu rhythms, neumes, and arsis
and thesis, among others, along with discussions of serialism, stochastic
music, magic squares, and other techniques used in the post-war avant-
garde. Some of this had a clear impact. Around this time, Grisey began
using magic squares to structure the durational proportions of his
works. More tenuously, Messiaen’s theory (via D’Indy) of the funda-

14
Grisey, ‘Paris–Berlin–Berkeley’, 230.
15
‘The sea always held a kind of fascination for Debussy. Gravely affected by the illness that
would be his end, he went to it as one goes to a divinity, asking it to help him regain his
energy and creative power. And the sea always helped him.’ GGCPSF. Grisey also quotes
Debussy himself (albeit with a Freudean slip misspelling, La mère): ‘The sea is a child; she
plays; she does not know exactly what she is doing . . . she has a long and beautiful hair;
she has a soul . . . she goes, she comes, she changes constantly.’
16
‘This daybreak, which is nothing more than a mist of arpeggios wherein the freshness of
dawn breathes, remarks Roland-Manuel, is presented as a great descriptive musical
fresco.’ GGCPSF.
17
One of the last works Grisey studied in Messiaen’s composition class was the teacher’s
Turangalîla-symphonie (1946–8). Generally, Messiaen shied away from analysing his own
music; and Grisey felt the event was sufficiently important to date it in his copybook (all
Grisey’s other class notes are undated). GGCPSF.
18
Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 443–6.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 39

mental arsis and thesis pattern underpinning Western melody may have
informed Grisey’s consistent citation of the model of respiration in his
works (beginning in Vagues, chemins, le souffle and continuing through
Périodes and beyond), as well as in Levinas’s Arsis et thesis. Grisey’s
sketches throughout his mature oeuvre show the influence of Messiaen’s
teaching on neumes. Grisey uses neumes as a category in the schema-
tisation of many of his works. In the sketches for Prologue, Grisey refers
to the principal melodic figure as a scandicus flexus, the same classifica-
tion Messiaen gave to the opening flute figure of Debussy’s Prélude à
l’après midi d’un faune when analysing that work in class (as per
Grisey’s class notes, wherein Grisey labels his sketch of Debussy’s
melodic contour ‘2 neumes interlinked’).19
Sometimes for his technique classes Messiaen would have one of the
Conservatoire’s performance students come in and present his or her
instrument. Louis Roquin remembered: ‘One day, Oliver Messiaen entered
our trumpet class and asked if someone would agree to come and present
the instrument before his young composition students. Among those
students were Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey.’20 These instrument
presentations were intended to make up for the fact that, at this time, the
composition students at the Conservatoire had no separate instrumenta-
tion lessons. In this way, too, composition students had the opportunity to
make direct contact with their performance colleagues, for whom they
might subsequently compose music to be performed at the Conservatoire’s
composition concerts. Grisey would later ask Roquin, with whom he
became friendly, to record trumpet sounds for spectrogram analysis.21
Such contacts, too, allowed Tessier and Murail, when envisaging the
creation of a new musical collective, to draw on a network from the
Conservatoire (Ensemble l’Itinéraire initially comprised mostly Paris
Conservatoire graduates).

19
GGCPSF. Boivin elaborates: ‘[F]ully documented sessions on neumes provided both
composers and performers with a codified lexicon of almost every possible melodic
motion. [. . .] Rather than proceed to a thorough melodic analysis of a complete piece,
Messiaen aimed straight at the heart of a specific line or theme and justified its beauty, its
effectiveness, by means of various combinations of neumes. This search for the hidden
neumes allowed him to isolate melodic signatures, such as the scandicus flexus frequently
found in Debussy.’ Boivin, ‘Musical Analysis According to Messiaen’, 146.
20
Roquin, email to the author, 18 July 2014.
21
Roquin, email to the author, 18 July 2014.
40 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

In the third type of lesson, the class would listen to music by one of the
students. In order to have a work performed, the student would either have to
play it himself or herself or arrange the performers (recording it was another
option). During the 1968–9 academic year, Murail was the student whose
music was most often discussed in class. Murail’s works at this stage,
Couroupossaid, ‘already appeared very highly developed, and the first who
was interested by them was Messiaen himself’.22 Messiaen also on occasion
invited composers such as Xenakis, Berio, and Stockhausen to present their
music in class. These visits had a strong impact on Grisey, and in Stockhausen’s
case, as will be discussed in Chapter 4, led Grisey to what would be a crucial
technical breakthrough, the degree of change applied as a measure for the
evolution in time of statistically defined ensemble sound figures.

Grisey’s camarades de classe

The generational aspect of the courant spectral was key: a group of
composers who for the most part had studied under Messiaen and wanted
to move on from their serialist forebears. I here discuss briefly a few of
Grisey’s camarades who later became allies.

Tristan Murail
Murail grew up in the coastal city of Le Havre until his family relocated to
Paris in 1963, when he was fifteen.23 There, he enrolled at the Lycée
Charlemagne to prepare for his baccalaureate (which he passed at the
age of sixteen). Murail showed a particular aptitude for languages, studying
Latin, Greek, and Arabic and becoming fluent in English (though, given his
later compositional method, he regretted not having studied mathematics
to a higher level). Murail’s father Gérard Murail, a journalist by profession,
was a poet and painter, and at various stages of his career Murail named
works after themes from his father’s poetry.24 Murail’s mother Marie-
Thérèse was a novelist, and his brother Lorris and two sisters Mari-Aude
and Elvire all later became writers. Though Murail came from an artistic
and intellectual family, his father directed him to study ‘a real subject’.
Accordingly, Murail took a licence in economics from the Sorbonne and a
diploma in Classical and Maghreb Arabic (none of which was of much use

22
Couroupos, email to the author, 16 April 2013.
23
This biographical sketch is indebted to that in Alla, Tristan Murail.
24
For example, Couleur de mer (1969) and the later Portulan chamber cycle (1999–2018),
inspired by the eponymous book of poetry by his father.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 41

for a career as a composer) at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales

Vivantes.25 If the wide-eyed young Grisey viewed composition as his
destiny, for Murail the route was less certain. At the Paris Conservatoire,
as mentioned above, Murail was regarded as Messiaen’s top student, but
before this it was unclear whether he would become a composer: when at
the age of twenty Murail enrolled at the Conservatoire at the start of the
1967–8 academic year, he simultaneously enrolled at the Institut d’Études
Politiques (IEP, the prestigious Science Po) to study political science.
When Murail’s family moved to Paris, his parents bought him a record
player, and at this point he discovered new music (having previously
known music only as recent as Milhaud). He listened to the radio and to
records borrowed from a disc library, discovering the music of Boulez and
Messiaen. He took organ lessons with Jean Fellot, working on some of
Messiaen’s music, sometimes accompanied the services at the Église de
Saint-Mandé, and played more often in synagogues. Tellingly for this
composer who would revolt against academic serialism, the teenage
Murail when learning the piano was not drawn to the music of the classical
repertoire, finding the Handel and Beethoven that his piano teacher
prescribed ‘horrible’ and only Chopin, when he was eventually introduced
to his music, in some way acceptable.26 It was a specific interest in
electronic sound and new music, Murail said, that led him to contact
Jeanne Loriod in order to enquire about learning the ondes Martenot (he
had first considered the Hammond organ but did not like its sound).
Despite this interest in music, Murail was not projecting a career as a
composer. His enrolment at the Paris Conservatoire was prompted by his
meeting Messiaen in 1966, when with Jeanne Loriod he visited the
Conservatoire to perform as accompanist at a concours. Messiaen,
encouraging the young performer, suggested that Murail might consider
taking the concours d’entrée to join his composition class at the
Conservatoire. Murail had little formal background in composition, so
in preparation for the concours d’entrée he took private lessons in coun-
terpoint and harmony from Julien Falk (a composer of atonal but not
serial music who in 1959 had published a composition treatise). The
entrance examination for the Conservatoire’s composition class com-
prised the writing of a fugue (exposition and stretto), an exercise lasting
five hours, along with another day-long test (6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.)
wherein the candidate had to harmonise a chorale, write variations for

25
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
26
Murail later connected this distaste to the music’s being in equal temperament. Dahan,
‘Tristan Murail’.
42 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 2.1 Murail’s Comme un œil suspendu et poli par le songe (1967) for piano. © Copyright
Editions Henry Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.

string quartet on the chorale theme, and freely develop a given theme for
the piano. Having passed this concours, Murail, unlike the other com-
posers herein considered, was able to enter Messiaen’s composition class
directly without having to take the écriture classes (he later dismissed the
study of traditional counterpoint and harmony as akin to doing cross-
word puzzles), though he did study music history (which he hated) and
ondes Martenot (in which, obviously, he excelled). Murail did not meet
his future co-founder of l’Itinéraire, Roger Tessier, in Messiaen’s class,
since by this time, Tessier had already completed his studies, but it was
Tessier and Murail’s partnership that was later decisive in the establish-
ment of l’Itinéraire.
In order to be able to choose which of the Conservatoire’s three com-
position professors he would study with (Tony Aubin, André Jolivet, or
Messiaen), Murail also had to submit an original composition. The piece in
question, Comme un œil suspendu et poli par le songe (1967, Ex. 2.1) for
solo piano, as well as displaying Murail’s precocious talent and tendency to
name works after lines from his father’s poetry, in its occasional
Messiaenesque phrases and chords shows his brilliant gift for absorbing
stylistic elements from others and reformulating them in his own voice.
Boivin, leaving his source anonymous, writes that on Murail’s entry to
Messiaen’s class the young composer ‘composed in style, we are told, very
close to that of Messiaen, which bothered the latter quite a bit. “I cannot
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 43

say to him that he writes badly, since he writes my music!” [Messiaen]

supposedly declared one day to a student in private.’ Though we may
doubt the veracity of this remark (Murail’s being the top student doubtless
elicited jealousy), Murail readily admitted the similarity of his first official
composition and Messiaen’s style.27

Roger Tessier
Roger Tessier, like Murail, was born into an artistic milieu. He followed his
father in training as a cellist, studying at the Conservatoire of Nantes and
the Conservatoire de Saint-Brieuc in Brittany before moving to Paris in
1959 to study at the Conservatoire. There, he entered Messiaen’s analysis
class (the latter was not yet teaching composition) as well as taking courses
in harmony (with Henri Challan), fugue (Alain Weber), and conducting
(Eugène Bigot).28 For Tessier, when he considered how the courant spectral
came about, ‘Messiaen was the centre’.29 In the 1960s, Messiaen appeared
to the young Tessier as the composer who more than any other sustained
the French tradition in the post-war avant-garde period, successfully fusing
the heritage of Charpentier and Rameau with the exigency of new musical
idioms (Tessier cited in this respect the Debussyean lineage of Messiaen’s
Préludes).30 This nationalistic aspect of Messiaen’s compositional practice,
Tessier thought, was key in drawing young French composers to study in
his class. Himself raised a Catholic, Tessier was impressed by his first
hearing in 1961 of Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine
(whose avant-garde approach to sacred music caused a scandal on its 1945
premiere).31 Tessier was also much taken, in the Trois petites liturgies, with
the ondes Martenot, for which he would compose various works inthe
1970s, notably Héxade (1978) for six ondes Martenots, commissioned by
the French Ministry of Culture for the fiftieth anniversary concert of the
instrument (discussed in Chapter 7).
More than any of his compositional peers in l’Itinéraire, Tessier would
base his career as much in institutional and pedagogical matters as in
composition, as director of the Musiques du XXe Siècle festival in Angers
and subsequently of the Conservatoire du 14e Darius Milhaud in Paris.

27
Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 387.
28
This biographical sketch is indebted to the one in Stévance, Roger Tessier.
29
Tessier, interview with the author, Paris, 27 February 2014.
30
Tessier, interview with the author, Paris, 27 February 2014.
31
For a detailed account of the so-called ‘cas Messiaen’, see Hill and Simeone,
Messiaen, 148–53.
44 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

This is one reason why his music is less well known outside France.32 This
engagement on Tessier’s part began in the 1960s, following his graduation
from the Paris Conservatoire, when he worked in Paris in the conserva-
toires of the fifteenth and sixteenth arrondissements, teaching analysis,
écriture, and solfège. It was at that time, when they were both teaching
‘drab solfège classes’ in the conservatoire of the fifteenth arrondisement,
that Tessier made the acquaintance of another young composer, Gérard
Grisey, and the two of them discussed possible music projects together.33
This would first come about with the Point-radiant recording project in
1970 and afterwards, in a different way, with l’Itinéraire.

Michaël Levinas
Where Tessier is the eldest, Michaël Levinas is the youngest of the com-
posers of the courant spectral, though he was also the first to enter the Paris
Conservatoire, at the age of ten. Levinas’s father was the philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas, and Levinas was raised in an intellectual milieu;
Jacques Derrida, for example, was a family friend when Levinas was
growing up (there is a photograph of the two together in Benoît Peeters’s
biography of Derrida).34 Emmanuel Levinas had little time for music, but
Levinas’s mother Raïssa Levinas (née Levy) had a musical background,
having as a young woman studied piano and singing in Vienna and, later,
piano at the Paris Conservatoire under Lazare Lévi (1882–1964).35 Raïssa
Levinas was warm and amiable but fastidious about her children’s educa-
tion, in particular that of her son. Michaël Levinas received his earliest
musical training from her: ambitious for her son, she began Michaël’s
piano training when he was aged four and attended to his progress ‘from
day to day’. This ambitiousness was also true of Emmanuel Levinas.
According to Evelyne Méron, whose father Dr Henri Nerson was one of
Emmanuel Levinas’s closest friends, Levinas père was ‘demanding with his
son, who was obliged from a young age to spend long hours each day at the

32
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014. For Tessier’s views on the
composer’s responsibility regarding transmission and pedagogy, see his ‘Note pour une
réflexion sur la communication’ and Castanet, ‘Roger Tessier’, 125–48.
33
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 191. Grisey taught solfège at the conservatoires of
the fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements from 1969 to 1972 and also taught at the
Sorbonne between 1971 and 1972. Gérard Grisey dossier, Centre de Documentation de la
Musique Contemporaine, Paris (hereafter CDMC).
34
Peeters, Derrida: A Biography.
35
This biographical sketch is indebted to Malka, Emmanuel Levinas. All quotations in this
paragraph are from the chapter of that book focused on Michaël Levinas, pp. 254–70.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 45

piano’. Méron said that Emmanuel Levinas was an ‘elitist’ who ‘divided the
world into the geniuses [. . .] and the others’, and who looked down on
those he considered to be working in lower professions. Accordingly,
Emmanuel Levinas paid close attention to his son’s musical progress and
was always anxious to ask Michaël’s teachers whether or not he should
continue pursuing his musical studies. That Michaël showed an aptitude
for the piano, improvising from the age of five, was important in his
father’s decision to allow him to pursue music.
If his parents’ high standards on the one hand meant pressure for the
young musician, they also cultivated in him a sense of entitlement which
(whether one likes it or not) often counts for much in establishing an
artistic career. Denis Smalley, who audited Messiaen’s composition class in
1970–1, thought that Levinas at the time was ‘somewhat arrogant’.36
Emmanuel Levinas’s work ethic and combination of writing with teaching
set a model for his son; Michaël Levinas would balance careers as a
performer, composer, and teacher in a similar way. The focus within the
family on Michaël’s musical career, alongside his talent as a pianist and
consequent winning of prizes, bred a self-confident young musician.
In Messiaen’s composition class, Levinas would invariably be seated at
the piano to the right of the elder composer, positioning himself with
priority in relation to his fellow classmates. Nevertheless, Couroupos
remembered that Levinas seemed more of a pianist than a composer: ‘As
for Levinas in those days, he was always very brilliant, but his talents as a
pianist seemed more important than his authenticity as a composer.’37
Of capital importance in the development of Levinas’s compositional
aesthetic was his engaging with his father’s philosophy. Having up to the
age of thirteen shared his father’s work space, he experienced in documentary
detail the process of writing Totality and Infinity, seeing how such a grand
work obscured a messy and fractured writing process (as is often the case).
Once he had entered Messiaen’s class and begun to take composition more
seriously, Levinas drew both from his father’s thought and from his working
method. ‘This presence of the writer, of the philosopher, in the same room, in
the living room where musical labours took place, the torn papers, the terror
at the end of a day that had been fraught with impasses: all of that obviously
had a considerable musical presence’, Levinas remembered.38 Principles

36
Smalley, email to the author, 6 March 2013.
37
Couroupos, email to the author, 16 April 2013.
38
Levinas, ‘Mon père pensait une esthétique de l’extraordinaire’, 49. For a detailed
exploration of Levinas’s music and aesthetics, see Campbell, ‘Timbre, Technology and
Hybridation in the Music of Michaël Levinas’.
46 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

inspired by his father’s philosophy would later appear: a music where studied
naivety combines with violence; a foregrounding of art’s relation to the
‘extraordinary’ or the outlandish; conceptual borrowings such as the appel
or the catechretic ‘a music of musics’ (both used in titles of early works by
Levinas); and an aversion to systematisation, which would lead Michaël
Levinas to inherently mistrust the notion of musique spectrale once it had
arisen. Lastly, where Emmanuel Levinas was something of a philosophical
outsider – a philosopher with no followers or school – Michaël Levinas in a
similar way appears to be something of a musical outsider, ‘to one side’, as he
put it, of the courant.39

Serialism and Beyond

When he was teaching these student composers, Messiaen’s attitude
regarding serialism was ambivalent. With the second of his Quatre études
de rythme, he had been an unwitting inspiration for the project of the post-
war generation of Boulez, Stockhausen, et al. Although, as his remarks
about the Webernian idiom underline, he did not much like the music, he
communicated to his pupils the view that this was nonetheless still the
most sophisticated compositional technique and encouraged them to pass
through serialism to something else. By the 1960s, the generation of 1925 –
Boulez, Stockhausen, Barraqué, et al. – had creatively developed the serial
method in line with their own particular aesthetic aims; in particular, as the
next chapter will show, serialism among these composers in the 1950s had
developed towards a statistical conception, which Grisey would adopt.
Following this, by the 1960s in France, a younger group of composers,
the generation of 1935 – Éloy, Amy, Guézec, Méfano, and others – had
emerged, which, in finding its feet, used the serial method in a less
adventurous way. The group’s figurehead was Boulez, by now the most
influential composer in France. In a 1966 interview with The New York
Review of Books, Stravinsky was aware enough of this to note: ‘There is a
new French school, and a good one, judging by levels of skill. Boulez is the
father figure, naturally.’40 These young composers had for the most part
undertaken Boulez’s composition masterclass in Basel (which ran between
1960 and 1963), where they got a grounding in Boulez’s version of serial-
ism. In Basel, Boulez gave his students the same tone row, instructed them

39
Levinas, ‘La Migration des âmes’, 67.
40
Stravinsky, ‘Stravinsky on the Musical Scene’. Pierre Souvchinsky remarked: ‘What
Boulez has done is to make a school, build a base. It remains intact as a kind of
academicism.’ Quoted in Peyser, Boulez, 149.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 47

in techniques such as isomorphism and chord multiplication, and oversaw

their subsequent composition of faintly Boulezian works.41 The best of
those works were then promoted through Boulez’s Domaine Musical
concert series. Alongside the publication of two books of Boulez’s writings
in 1963 and 1966 (supplanting Leibowitz’s earlier guides to the twelve-tone
method), this saw serialism in France reach peak visibility in the mid- to
late 1960s through Boulez’s influence on younger composers (despite the
fact that he no longer lived there).42
However, the exact sense of the term ‘serialism’ was equivocal, and in
discussing serialism in France at this time, one must distinguish between a
more open concept of serialism and a more academic concept of serialism.
Boivin highlights how, when it began to be taught at the Paris
Conservatoire, serialism became academicised:
It was thus strangely at the moment when composers were beginning to give
up on serialism, at least in its ‘hard’ form, that the enclosure of the [Paris]
Conservatoire, formerly rather sealed against modernity, showed itself
capable of being permeated. In the footsteps of Boulez, whose Penser la
musique aujourd’hui appeared in 1964 [sic], a new group of students insisted
on the incontrovertible character of this mode of thought. Grudgingly, one
would think, the écriture professors let them say so.43

Murail, Grisey’s classmate from 1968 to 1971, recalls peer pressure among
composition students to compose in this sanctioned avant-garde idiom44 –
more a question of having a superficial atonal idiom than of the actual
means used to compose it (which did not have to be serial). When Murail’s
Altitude 8000 (1970) for string orchestra, a Ligeti- and Xenakis-influenced
work, was premiered in January 1971 at a Conservatoire concert, a section
of the audience booed, disapproving of the work’s occasional consonances
and moments of unabashed beauty. This signified for Murail that, although
Boulez had replaced Fauré at the Conservatoire as a sanctioned model, the
underlying stifling academicism remained.
Levinas states that Messiaen, by contrast, ‘seemed in favour of an
audacious, iconoclastic spirit, so necessary to permit the birth of new,
singular features in a landscape that he himself deep down found too

41
See Éloy, ‘Dix ans après’, III–XXXVI.
42
The first monograph published on dodecaphony in French was Leibowitz, Introduction à
la musique de douze sons.
43
Boivin, La Casse de Messiaen, 164. Among Grisey’s documents is a twelve-tone row
exercise, probably from his Paris Conservatoire écriture class. GGCPSF.
44
‘Around 1967–8 at the Conservatoire, the serial atmosphere prevailed.’ Murail quoted in
Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 164.
48 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

corseted by the “academicism” of integral serialism’.45 Messiaen approved

of Murail’s Altitude 8000, and he encouraged his students to engage with
electroacoustic music. Although Messiaen’s own single foray into musique
concrète, Timbres-durées (1952), was not successful, he was intrigued by
Schaeffer’s work, and when Schaeffer and Reibel began a class at the
Conservatoire in 1968–9, Messiaen encouraged his students to take part.
That year, Messiaen gave over an entire three-hour class to listening to the
entirety of Schaeffer’s newly released Solfège de l’objet sonore. The
following year, determined to develop his knowledge in this area, Grisey
supplemented his Conservatoire studies with a course in electroacoustic
music at the Schola Cantorum under the microtonal composer Jean-
Étienne Marie. This gave him a grounding in mathematical calculations
that was useful in his mature practice. Outside Messiaen’s class, Grisey
pursued his own studies. Reading books by Stockhausen, Stravinsky,
Leibowitz, and Boulez and analysing many scores, he worked to absorb
the state of the art. When, as occasionally happened, Messiaen was other-
wise engaged, the composer Betsy Jolas deputised for him. ‘[A]ll the
students he had then have become famous since’, Jolas remembered.
‘They represented a very interesting tendency. In my generation, we were
brought up sort of in twelve tone, post-war, around Boulez and domaine
musical, and these men and women – there were some women, too – were
not interested in that anymore.’ For Jolas, this group represented a new
energy, though it would take a few years to be felt.46

The Paris Conservatoire after May ’68

Given how these composers emerged with a collective vision after studies
in the late 1960s, the question inevitably arises of whether their work is
soixante-huitard. The May ’68 événements, during which striking students
and workers brought Paris to a standstill and almost brought down the
French government, are emblematic of the 1960s counterculture in France.
Pierre Albert Castanet has called French spectral music an ‘emancipatory
echo’ of May ’68,47 while Eric Drott has argued that the later theoretical
texts of the courant spectral composers exhibit ‘rhetorical turns’ used
deliberately because of their resonance with similar expressions from
post-May ’68 leftist discourse.48 A May ’68 slogan such as ‘structures don’t

45
Levinas, ‘Rupture et système’, 34. 46
Jolas, ‘A Conversation with Bruce Duffie’.
47
Preface by Castanet in Alla, Tristan Murail, ii.
48
Drott, ‘Timbre and the Cultural Politics of Spectralism’.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 49

go down into the streets’49 could be tied to what Grisey called these young
composers’ common ‘mistrust of abstraction’.50 Such speculations, while
tempting, are mostly unfounded. The more mundane truth is that, though
Grisey did in some way become involved in the student protests, the
Conservatoire was largely untouched by May ’68.51
May ’68’s more direct impact at the Conservatoire was to prompt curricu-
lar reforms. These reforms, whose chief motivation was to appease students
about their future prospects following graduation, were introduced after the
formation of a staff–student committee. The committee comprised the three
composition teachers – Tony Aubin, André Jolivet, and Messiaen – along
with one student from each of their classes, Raymond Gagneux, Gérard Géay,
and Grisey.52 Three main reforms impacted upon Grisey’s composition
studies. The first was the revision of the Prix de Rome. Traditionally, the
Prix de Rome had been awarded following an examination in classical
composition techniques such as fugue and cantata (candidates going to a
lodge in Fontainebleu to compose these); by the late 1960s, this no longer
seemed a valid assessment of compositional merit. Accordingly, from the
1969–70 academic year onwards, the Prix de Rome in music was awarded for
a portfolio of compositions assessed by a jury of two distinguished composers
(usually Messiaen and one other). The first- and second-place ranking was
also scrapped.53 The two winning students received a year’s stipended
residency at the French Academy in Rome, with the option of renewal for
a second year. The second post-May ’68 reform was the establishment from
1968 to 1969 onwards of a course of training in electroacoustic composition.
Entitled ‘Recherche musicale fondamentale et appliqué à l’audio-visuel’, this
course was initially coordinated by the founder of musique concrète,
Schaeffer, along with Guy Reibel. Given Schaeffer’s establishment status at
the national broadcaster, the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française
(ORTF), and the 1966 publication of his magnum opus the Traité des object
musicaux by Éditions Seuil, the Conservatoire’s striking up a partnership
with him at this time is unsurprising, and the creation of the course reflected

49
The slogan was prominently left on a blackboard in the Sorbonne in May ’68. Ross, May
’68 and Its Afterlives, 193.
50
Grisey, ‘Devenir du son’, 343.
51
See Lefebvre, ‘Mai ’68 au Conservatoire’ and Drott, Music and the Elusive
Revolution, 51–2.
52
See Terrien, ‘‘André Jolivet l’enseignant’, 363–4, Glayman, Henri Dutilleux, 61, and
Gagneux, ‘PODCAST: le mai 68’. Levinas said that Messiaen, who was disturbed by the
événements, was nervous that he might lose his job (Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen,
n. 159).
53
See Louvier, ‘L’Évolution des classes’, 362.
50 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

the pragmatic reality of the need for musical training to take account of the
increasing prevalence of electroacoustic music in composition, film sound-
tracks, and elsewhere.54 Grisey did not take this course, opting instead to
study with Marie. The third reform was the establishment of a regular
concert series for the Conservatoire’s composition students. These concerts
were relatively high-profile, with money allocated to pay the performers as
professionals; they initially took place in the Salle Gaveau and were recorded
for broadcast on Radio France. The period after the May ’68 événements in
Paris saw a decided increase in public interest in contemporary classical
music, and the Conservatoire concerts tapped into this; after a while, they
assumed the countercultural name ‘Action musicale’. Murail said that, not-
withstanding these three changes to the composition curriculum, ‘at a deeper
level, I’m not sure things changed that much’, a view with which Levinas
agrees.55 Nonetheless, a utopian air did filter into this new generation as it
sought a new musical direction.56

Point-radiant
Partaking in the new student concerts gave the future l’Itinéraire members
important early experience in running events. In 1970, during the com-
poser concerts’ second year, some of the Conservatoire’s composition
students decided to organise a recording project. They called it Point-
radiant (‘Radiant Point’, an astronomical term). Murail said that Point-
radiant came about after ‘we did a few concerts in a cultural centre outside
Paris’ with most of the instrumentalists who would feature on the two
Point-radiant EPs: ‘people from the Conservatoire, of course, and formerly
from the Conservatoire’.57 Having hatched the idea of doing a recording
project, Murail thought of involving his fellow composer Fernand
Vandenbogaerde, a teacher at the Schola Cantorum.58 The project was

54
On the institutional background to this, see Robert, Pierre Schaeffer, vol. 1. Schaeffer’s
Traité des objets musicaux sought to establish the terms of a pedagogical solfège of
acousmatic music.
55
Murail in interview with Jonathan Cross, Maida Vale, October 2013; Levinas quoted in
Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 159.
56
See Castanet, ‘1968: A Cultural Survey’ and Delannoi, Les Années utopiques.
57
This quotation and the next one from Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16
January 2014.
58
Some of the recordings were made at the Schola Cantorum. For others, the young players
and composers, along with their engineer, took themselves off to the town of Rocheton,
sixty kilometres south of Paris, where Murail’s parents lived, the reason for this being,
Vandenbogaerde said, that Murail’s parents ‘had the possibility of a quiet room in which
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 51

achieved piecemeal. ‘We did it completely in a very artisanal [home-made]

way’, Murail remarked. When the two EPs were released in February 1971,
there were one or two mishaps. ‘I didn’t put the disc on sale in shops in
Paris’, Roquin said, ‘as the number of sleeves printed was less than the
number of discs pressed.’59 Point-radiant’s musical content (featuring in
part the type of electronic and aleatoric music associated with the under-
ground) and the record sleeves’ garish, swirling designs give the project a
soixante-huitard tenor, as Vandenbogaerde noted: ‘Without a doubt, there
was a post-’68 aspect in this approach, releasing records at our own
expense, without a distributor, and also to raise awareness of the works
of composers who were younger than thirty, which only had a very rare
chance of being performed at the time.’60 A small notice in the journal
Musique en jeu announced the imminent release and reproduced some of
the group’s mission statement:
an interesting effort: noting that ‘it is very difficult for young composers to
make their music known, and difficult, too, for amateur musicians to acquaint
themselves with new music’, a group of young musicians has decided to create
a sort of cooperative for the production of records, which will operate without
a commercial goal (that goes without saying) and ‘without discrimination as
to style or aesthetic’. The records promise to be of excellent quality.61

Despite its brief life, Point-radiant had a legacy in initiating a sense of

collaborative venture among its participants, which would be channelled
into l’Itinéraire.
The next step was an extension of the Conservatoire concerts entitled
‘MATH 72’. Murail and Tessier met in 1971 through the intermediary of
the composer and accordionist Alain Abbott, who featured on Point-
radiant.62 Along with Abbott and another young composer, Jean-Paul
Holstein, the composers decided to unite because of their shared frustra-
tion at a lack of opportunities. Tessier states:
Things must be seen in their context: the Domaine Musical only performed
serial composers; the Radio always programmed the same composers; and the

we could do rehearsals and recordings, notably on Sundays!’ Vandenbogaerde, email to

the author, 14 August 2013.
59
Roquin, email to the author, 18 July 2014.
60
Vandenbogaerde, email to the author, 30 October 2013. See also Kowalczyk, Roger
Tessier, 22.
61
Notice in ‘Chroniques’ (1971), 127.
62
Abbott was another ex-student of Messiaen’s who had won the old Prix de Rome in 1968.
An accordionist, he gave seminars at Émile Leipp’s Laboratoire d’Acoustique Musicale
(hereafter LAM) in 1972 on his music and on the acoustics of the accordion.
52 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Conservatoire was under the rod of Tony Aubin and a few others. For one
who wasn’t a member of one of these three schools, the possibility of
expressing oneself involved by necessity the creation of a
new independent ensemble.63

In late 1971, with Messiaen’s support, the four composers organised two
concerts for the new year. The name of their concert organisation, MATH 72,
was formed by their four surnames. The two concerts were held in February
1972, ‘with more or less the same group of players’,64 said Murail, as had
performed on Point-radiant around a year before. Murail pointed out that he
was not the initiator of these two concerts (‘I was in Rome at that time’); the
main initiator was Tessier. The first concert took place on 2 February 1972 at
the Salle Cortot, in front of an audience including MATH 72’s président
d’honneur Messiaen. The programme comprised Murail’s Mach 2 and Ligne
de non retour, Abbbot’s CosMogrammes and Poèmes de C. Dobzynski,
Tessier’s Alternances and Mouvements II, and Holstein’s Fondus
enchaînés.65 The young instrumentalists and singers were conducted by
Daniel Chabrun of the ORTF, who in 1974 would become director of music
at the French Ministry of Culture. It was perhaps through this connection that
the first concert was broadcast in a special hour-and-a-half-long radio pro-
gramme, which helped establish the group of composers as a presence within
the new music community;66 Tessier states that both concerts played to full
houses.67 Following the two successful concerts, the four composers were
interviewed in the Nantes-based daily newspaper Presse océan. In general in
his works, Murail said, there was ‘no distinct structure or apparent architec-
ture. The music essentially comes out of nuances and slow evolution, where
processes of “tiling” or of “weaving” (if one can put it that way) are the basis of
the language.’ Alluding to the serialism, Murail spoke of the sense of freedom
involved in this music’s abandoning ‘rules set as imperatives’.68

Trends in New Music in France in 1969

We felt free. We didn’t ask for anything [. . .] read Playboy, Lui, Barbarella, Le Nouvel
Observateur, Teilhard de Chardin, Planète [. . .]. Now, everything once considered
normal had become the object of scrutiny. 1968 was the first year of the world.69

63
Tessier, ‘Portrait: Roger Tessier’, 12.
64
This quotation and the next one from Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16
January 2014.
65
Castanet, ‘Roger Tessier’, 127. 66
Kowalczyk, Roger Tessier, 22.
67
Tessier, ‘Portrait: Roger Tessier’, 12. 68
Pote, ‘‘Un Nantais, Roger TESSIER’.
69
Ernaux, The Years, 86–104.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 53

At the Conservatoire concerts, states Levinas, there held sway an atmos-

phere of ‘everything is permitted’, composers having licence to be confi-
dent in experimentation.70 This reflected the better-defined youth culture
that was an aftermath of May ’68 from a socio-cultural point of view,
whereby even Messiaen was considered by some to be compromised as a
result of his proximity to the French state.71 This experimentation also
reflected the state of new music in the era, whereby, with the decline of the
serialist narrative, an openness to fusion between different musical genres,
and the renewed possibilities of electroacoustic means, musical compos-
ition had opened up in a perhaps unprecedented way. Couroupos
remarked: ‘during these Parisian years I was truly changed, thanks first
of all to Messiaen himself, but also thanks to the general atmosphere of the
years following ’68 at the Paris Conservatoire – an extremely agitated and
creative one’.72 This was a world that felt as though it was ‘en pleine
mutation’, as it was put in the first editorial of the new music journal
Musique en jeu, which was launched in 1970; a world with less strict
obeisance to the post-war musical vedettes; a world in which it was ‘deri-
sory to think in terms of schools, tendencies, or cliques. The task [enjeu] is
what’s most important’, the editorial continues, ‘and we’re no longer in
1955–60.’ That Musique en jeu, which aimed to set the new musical agenda
for the times, mentioned ‘the miniskirt’ and ‘almost all the Beatles’ albums’
as things it approved of, as well as ‘contemporary music’, ‘Leiris’, and
‘Artaud’, evinces the cultural brew of the times.73 Dufourt’s recollection of
Murail and Grisey when he knew them in the mid-1970s shows how this
extended, too, to fashion:
[Murail] was very much infused by [rock music], as he sometimes showed on
stage. He played wearing neon outfits, fluorescent – absolutely the rock artist.
Physically, it looked good. As for Grisey, he walked and walked around always
with a wide low-cut shirt. So, he looked like a clone of Stockhausen. Grisey
was a caricature of Stockhausen, physically speaking, and Murail was a
caricature of a rock artist. That’s just the physical appearance – it wasn’t true
in itself.74

70
Levinas, ‘Rupture et système’, 33.
71
For Gagneux and other leftist student composers, Messiaen’s composing Et exspecto
resurrectionem mortuorum (1964) for the French state at the request of General
De Gaulle (via Malraux) identified him definitively with the establishment. Gagneux,
‘PODCAST: le mai 68’.
72
Couroupos, email to the author, 16 April 2013.
73
‘Editorial’ (probably by Dominique Jameux and Jean-Pierre Derrien).
74
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
54 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Walter Boudreau recalled, in the same period, being impressed that Murail
owned an American car.75
The late 1960s in French new music saw the rise of the festival. Three of
Grisey’s significant early 1970s works – Vagues, chemins, le souffle, D’eau et
de pierre, and Dérives – would be commissioned for or premiered at new
music festivals, as would significant works by Dufourt and Murail. Up to
this point, new music had been centred on the Domaine Musical. Founded
by Boulez in 1954, the Domaine Musical was in its first decade one of the
only forums for new music in France; under Boulez’s direction, it estab-
lished itself as the stronghold of serialism, and also, through the lack of
other such platforms (the GRM excepted), of musique savante per se. Jean-
Claude Éloy remarked: ‘the “Domaine Musical” [. . .] was THE great
adventure of the ‘50s and ‘60s in Paris, together with the other great
adventure which was the beginning of the “musique concrète“ at the
French Radio’.76 By the late 1960s, however, although the Domaine
Musical still enjoyed pre-eminence in French new music, it was no longer
the sole forum for ambitious composers, and festivals were springing up.
One such new music festival in the capital was Maurice Fleuret’s Journées
de Musique Contemporaine. In October 1968, the Journées’ exclusive focus
on new music (Varèse, Henry, Xenakis, and Berio as the featured com-
posers) did nothing to dissuade a massive attendance (10,500 by Fleuret’s
generous estimate), with critics noting the connection between the music’s
popularity and the post-May ’68 atmosphere.77 The success of the Journées
(which would in 1971 merge with the newly-founded Festival d’Automne à
Paris) reflected a surge in interest in new music among Parisian youth at
this time, who aligned this ‘strange music’ with a form of liberation and a
critique of the social status quo.78 Most of the festivals took place away
from the capital (except for the Journées and Festival Estival, directed by
Jean-Louis Petit), a tendency which represented a deliberate policy on the
part of the French Ministry of Culture in favour of decentralisation. These
festivals provided avenues for young composers to gain commissions
and confidence.

75
Boudreau, interview with the author, 15 December 2022.
76
Éloy, email to the author, 28 August 2014.
77
See Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution, 208.
78
‘The Quatuor Perrenin in 1964 had attracted around twenty spectators in the Temple [at
Royan]. Five years later, the same quartet filled the conference hall of the Municipal
Casino, where the young audience were seated everywhere, at the podium, in front of and
around the rows of seating down to the bottom of the hall. Even the access corridor was
occupied, rendering any traffic impossible.’ Besançon, Festival d’art contemporain de
Royan, 43.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 55

The most important of the regional festivals was the Festival d’Art
Contemporain de Royan.79 It was for the Royan festival that would be
programmed Grisey’s Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1972), Murail’s Sables
(1975), and Dufourt’s Erewhon (1977). Founded in 1964 on the initiative of
municipal leaders in conjunction with the Minister of Culture André
Malraux, the Royan festival (in a seaside town at the time housing only
12,000 inhabitants and no regular concert hall)80 was envisaged as a French
answer to the Donaueschingen Festival. Following a relatively low-key
programme in the first two years, the second of which in 1965 featured a
backward-facing focus on Webern, it achieved a comparable prominence
to Donaueschingen on the European level from 1966 onwards with the
successful premieres that year of Xenakis’s Terretektorh for orchestra and
Penderecki’s De natura sonoris (whose title would be adapted a few years
later by Bernard Parmegiani). This success was due more to young com-
posers flocking to the seaside town during the festival’s week in Easter than
to any significant local interest.81 Royan’s comité d’honneur comprised
Messiaen (who ran a piano concours there), Georges Auric, and Maurice
Le Roux; the artistic director was Claude Samuel (replaced in 1973 by
Harry Halbreich); ensembles performing at the festival included the
Orchestre Philharmonique de l’ORTF, the Ars Nova Ensemble (also tied
to the ORTF), the Percussions de Strasbourg, and, initially, the orchestra of
the Domaine Musical; and one of the concert programming focuses was
new commissions from young composers.82 In the late 1960s, Royan was
competing with the Domaine Musical for French premieres by the main
names in composition; the rise of these regional festivals – festivals in
Metz, Avignon, Orléans, and La Rochelle in addition to Royan – led the
Domaine Musical’s director Gilbert Amy to coin the term ‘Parisian pre-
miere’ for works that had already been performed first elsewhere and only
afterwards at the Domaine Musical.83 It also signified that France’s musical
directorship was attempting to compete internationally with Darmstadt.
The increase in new music concert activity was matched in the establish-
ment of new ensembles. Roquin, a friend of Grisey’s, pointed out that the
successive creation of ensembles and collectives in this period – such as the
Ensemble Ars Nova (directed by Marius Constant), the Ensemble Musique

79
On the Royan festival, see ‘1964–1977 Festival international d’art contemporain’.
80
Mesuret, ‘Une exception culturelle’, 13. 81
See La Roux, La Musique, 196.
82
Performances at Royan of music by the composers of the courant spectral included
Murail’s Lovecraft in 1972 and La Dérive des continents in 1974, Levinas’s Musique et
musiques in 1975, and Dufourt’s La tempesta d’après Giorgione and Erewhon in 1977.
83
Quoted in Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 352.
56 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Vivante (1966, directed by Diégo Masson), the Groupe d’Étude et

Réalisation Musicale (GERM, 1966, led by Pierre Mariétan), the
Ensemble Instrumental de Musique Contemporaine de Paris (directed by
Constantin Simonovitch), Paul Méfano’s 2e2m (1971), the collective
Musique Plus (1973), and eventually l’Itinéraire (1973) – ‘evinced the
expansion of musical thought and the multiple influences which were
happening for a good number among us’.84 The GERM, of which
Roquin was a member (alongside, from 1970 on, Grisey’s former classmate
at the École Normale Renaud Gagneux), was symptomatic of this climate: a
collective performing music that at times straddled the border between
improvisation and composition, free jazz and contemporary classical, and
an early performer of American minimalist music in France (in 1970 releas-
ing an LP on Actuel Records of a performance of Terry Riley’s Keyboard
Study 2).85 When Éloy, who had been one of French music’s brightest
prospects, returned to Paris in 1969,86 he was pleasantly surprised by the
change: in comparison to the early 1960s, many new options were avail-
able: ‘When I came back here I found mainly now the situation much more
open, aesthetically and on the point of view of public [sic]. Much more
public is listening to modern music.’87 This array of options for having
music performed facilitated the move away from pointillist serialism.
In the French scene, the two dominant personalities at this time were
Boulez and Xenakis. Boulez was for the most part absent from France in the
late 1960s, having ceremoniously cut his ties with France’s musical insti-
tutions following the ‘Malraux affair’ in 1966, when Boulez’s proposals for
reforming France’s musical institutions were passed over by the Ministry of
Culture in favour of the instatement of the conservative composer and
administrator Marcel Landowski as musical director.88 The repercussions
of this affair would be far-reaching, and it was Landowski’s appointment,
and his clear opposition to Boulez, that would lead in 1973 to the awarding
of a generous state subsidy to Murail and Tessier’s new music collective
l’Itinéraire, which deliberately presented itself to Landowski as antithetical

84
Roquin, email to the author, 18 July 2014.
85
Mesías Maiguashca, a member of the Oelforf group, said that ‘this type of free-lance
groups were “in the air” at the time [sic]’ and led to experimentation with ‘spectral’ ideas.
Maiguashca, email to the author, 23 February 2014.
86
Éloy had left France in 1965 following a ‘J’accuse’ article aimed at Malraux that was
published in the Nouvel observateur, criticising the lack of funding for composers in
France, one of the spurs for Malraux to finally appoint a director of music in 1966. See
Éloy, ‘J’accuse’, 40–1.
87
Amirkhanian, ‘Ode to Gravity: Jean-Claude Eloy’.
88
See Boulez, ‘Why I Say “No” to Malraux’, 441–4.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 57

to Boulez’s closing Domaine Musical. Though he had been active since over
a decade earlier, Xenakis’s rise to prominence in France occurred in the late
1960s when Boulez was absent; that rise followed the publication of Musique
formalisé in 1966, the active support of Maurice Fleuret (whose Journées
festival in 1968 featured a day of Xenakis’s music) and the advocacy of the
Royan director Claude Samuel (with premieres at Royan of Terretektorh in
1966, Nuits in 1968, and Nomos Gamma in 1969), as well as the outstanding
quality of Xenakis’s music. Murail said that Boulez and Xenakis represented
the main political ‘polarisation’ in French new music at the time (though he
added, ‘[w]e were not part of these political struggles’).89
The fashionable trends in new music in France in the late 1960s
were aleatoricism, group improvisation, and music theatre. One of the most
influential composers was André Boucourechliev (1925–97); though he
was relatively unknown elsewhere, in France his prominence was such
that Jean-Pierre Derrien called the period ‘the Boucourechliev years’.90
Boucourechliev’s aleatoric music usually saw a multitude of notated passages
distributed across a large score, the performer’s navigation from one extract to
another being determined by the mood of the moment. The most famous
instance of this is Boucourechliev’s Archipels series, each of the works being
composed for different forces and most of them premiered at Royan, from
Archipel I for two pianos and percussion in 1967 to the final Archipel V
(Anarchipel) in 1972. ‘One awaited the Archipels as one awaited, let’s say, the
Messiah’, Derrien remarked, ‘or the rain, depending on your disposition.’ For
some, Boucourechliev’s music represented the latest advance in the Western
art-musical tradition.91 The popularity of this music at this time – despite its
first having arisen a decade earlier with the notion of the open work encour-
aged by Boulez, Stockhausen, and others – was related to the late 1960s
countercultural ideals of liberation and spontaneity; its practitioners associ-
ated aleatoricism as a basis for composition with a utopian vision of social
relations;92 related to a redressing of the imbalance of the composer-
performer creative partnership; and related to the necessity for music to be
freed from preoccupation with conceptual abstractions such as the ‘note’,

89
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
90
This quotation and the next one from Donin, ‘Le Moment Musique en jeu’, 28.
91
Reviewing the premiere of Boucourechliev’s Archipel II for string quartet at Royan in
1969 (performed by the Quatuor Parrenin), Fleuret placed the work on the level of the
quartets of Bartók: ‘Boucourechliev does more than enrich the string quartet literature.
He rethinks it from the inside and gives it a new meaning. [. . .] This mature music marks
a date: after it one can no longer compose, play or listen as before.’ Fleuret, Chroniques
pour la musique, 55–7.
92
Lonchampt quoted in Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 383.
58 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

returning to the primacy of the ear. In this latter point there is a commonality
between aleatoricism and the courant spectral. In regard to Vagues, chemins, le
souffle in 1972, Grisey would instruct his listeners in hippyish fashion to
‘dream’ on the sounds he had created. Similar sentiments can be found in
some of the discourse surrounding electroacoustic composition at the time; in
a belaboured metaphor, François Bayle of the GRM stated, ‘The musician’s
inkwell has been overturned, a salutary sneeze has freed the respiratory paths
obstructed by caution, doctrines, models and other bad companions.’93
As an impressionable student, Grisey, as well as studying Xenakis and
Stockhausen, fell under the spell of post-serial aleatoricism. All of Grisey’s
scores from Mégalithes in 1969 to D’eau et de pierre in 1972 feature prom-
inent aleatoric elements (something that caused problems when it came to
the premiere of Vagues, chemins, le souffle for two orchestras at Royan in
1972). Such was Grisey’s identification with the aleatoric movement in Paris
that in May 1971 he took part in a panel discussion on aleatoricism with
Boucourechliev and other composers, following a concert at which his own
Initiation (1970) for trombone, baritone voice, and double bass was per-
formed alongside Boucourechliev’s Archipel II (1969) for string quartet and
works by Michel Zbar (a student in Tony Aubin’s class) and Couroupos.94
Grisey was also taken with the music theatre current in vogue in Paris at that
time, whose figureheads were Schnebel, Berio, Kagel, Alsina, and
Globokar.95 Grisey’s early interest in music theatre survives in Les Espaces
acoustiques, whose music theatrical elements are similar to those used by
other composers active in the late 1960s French scene. Costin Miereanu’s
Espaces au-delà du dernier (1968), which Grisey may have seen performed at
the Domaine Musical, has an ending familiar to those who have witnessed
Les Espaces acoustiques in concert: at the end of Miereanu’s score, the
conductor is directed to slowly raise their arms aloft, as if about to usher
in a final crashing chord, before instead the venue lights suddenly go out:
this is nearly identical to the end of Grisey’s Partiels, in which the percus-
sionist, raising their cymbals, slowly brings the cymbals apart as if to make a
final crash, before the lights suddenly go out (the cymbal crash belatedly
comes during the second half of the concert).96

93
Quoted by Castanet, ‘1968: A Cultural Survey’, 37.
94
GGCPSF. Messiaen played Boucourechliev’s music for his composition students.
95
Each of these composers was featured at Royan and the Domaine Musical, and Fleuret
hyperbolically declared Berio’s Laborintus II (1965), commissioned by the ORTF, to be
the first opera of the new musical era, as significant in its time as was Orfeo in
Monteverdi’s time. Fleuret, Chroniques pour la musique, 50–1.
96
Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 378. The theatrical end of Partiels, where the performers and
conductor ‘pretend’ to have finished the piece before it actually ends, may have been
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 59

Messiaen’s personnages sonores as the Roots of Grisey’s

Spectral Figures
Much of Grisey’s mature music involves the presentation of a distinct
musical figure which, over time, with successive iterations, gradually
mutates and ultimately dissolves. This idea underpins the first section of
Partiels, in which an ensemble harmonic aggregate modelled on a trombone
spectrum is repeated thirteen times with its profile progressively altered; the
first section of Transitoires, where three sound figures alternate in increas-
ingly disordered ways; and most of Prologue, wherein an initially simple
melodic gesture becomes more and more distorted and inharmonic. In this
sense, to the degree that it can comprise a well-defined sound figure, Grisey
called the harmonic spectrum a neutral sound archetype.97 The first work in
which Grisey uses a quasi-spectral chord as such an archetype is D’eau et de
pierre, but the roots of the idea are in Messiaen’s notion of personnages
sonores. (I use the term ‘figure’ to denote, within a musical composition, a
sonic object that appears in a way that is dramatically significant.
An example of such a sound figure is the synthetic chord played, in sequen-
tial iterations, in the opening section of Partiels. I favour ‘figure’ over ‘object’
because the latter is too formalistic. A sound figure is a thing that appears
before us with characteristic behaviour: the term comprehends not only the
harmonic aggregate used to generate its pitches but also the sensation it
makes on our senses; it includes not only a sound object but the projection of
a dramatic image by way of that sound object.)
Though the personnages concept is not discussed in Messiaen’s
Technique de mon langage musical (1944), it is discussed in various places
in his posthumously published Traité de rythme, de couleur et d’ornitho-
logie (1949–92). Messiaen’s favoured way of describing the technique was
not formalistic but in terms of dramatic imagery:
In theatrical language, when a person by his feelings or actions influences the
feelings or actions of the others, we say that he ‘dominates’ the stage. If this
first person strikes a second person, then the first one is acting and the second
one is acted upon or moved by the first. The first assumes an excessive
importance; the second declines. Imagine a third character – impassive,
motionless – that looks at and witnesses the conflict without intervening,
remaining backstage, so to speak, and we have the three principal attitudes
possible on stage.

borrowed from an untitled work of Alsina’s, premiered at the Domaine Musical in 1968
(described in Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 372).
97
Grisey, ‘Did You Say Spectral?’, 3.
60 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Transpose all that to the rhythmic sphere: three rhythms that repeat
alternately. At each repetition the first rhythm has increasingly numerous
values and longer durations: it grows. This is the ‘dominating’ character.
At each repetition the second rhythm’s values become less and less, with
shorter and shorter durations: it decreases. It is the person taken from, acted
upon, moved and dominated by the other. At each repetition the third
rhythm remains identical: it never changes. This is the motionless character.98

Messiaen’s concept of personnages derives from his analysis of Stravinsky’s

Le Sacre de printemps, specifically Stravinsky’s technique therein of
expanding and contracting rhythmically defined musical cells. Messiaen
adapted this technique in his own music, developing it in works composed
between 1945 (Harawi) and 1951 (Livre d’orgue) and expanding it from
the rhythmic domain to the domains of melody and harmony. Grisey did
not copy Messiaen’s personnages sonores technique faithfully but, as with
the techniques he adopted from Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Boulez,
adapted it creatively. The essence of the personnages technique resides in
the compositional construction of a brief (and importantly when we
consider Grisey’s music, repeated) sequence of audibly distinct acoustical
‘characters’: an ordinal sequence of a finite number of discrete musical
units which, whenever that sequence is repeated, always tend to behave in a
characteristic way in relation to each other. In Messiaen’s example above,
the characteristic behavioural tendencies are activity, passivity, and neu-
trality. In this way, into the musical material is injected a logic of relation,
and form can be generated through the dynamic interactions of the
material’s constituent elements. Technically, this might be described as
the operation of reciprocal permutation between cells.
This technique has two implications for Grisey’s oeuvre. The first is the
sequential repetition of a musical ‘scene’ whereby each repetition entails a
gradual variation of that scene’s elements; the second is the notion of
influence whereby the presence of one musical element has the power to
affect the auditory nature of another (that is, to incite mutation). Both of
these would be important in D’eau et de pierre. Both can also be found in
Stockhausen’s Stimmung, a key work for Grisey. Grisey’s student notes
include a detailed analysis of Messiaen’s Livre d’orgue (1951), and it may
have been through that analysis, in addition to Messiaen’s in-class analyses,
that Grisey learned about the idea and began to experiment with it.99

98
Messiaen, Traité, 112, quoted in Healey, ‘Messiaen and the Concept of “Personnages”’, 10
(translation modified).
99
The personnages idea also informs Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X (1961). Stockhausen
probably took the idea from Messiaen, and he adapted the idea again in Mantra (1972).
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 61

In any case, the idea of sonorous personnages clearly appealed to the

student composer, whose ideas about music tended towards the mystical.
An early use of personnages sonores is in Charme for solo clarinet. Grisey
composed Charme in August 1969 at the Academia Chigiana summer
school in Siena, for the clarinettist Jesus Villa-Rojo, and until the mid-
1970s it would be his most performed work. The sketches for Charme
include a table of durational values that closely resembles the graphic score
for Messiaen’s Timbres-durées (another Messiaen work whose premise, the
linking of timbre and duration, resonates with Grisey’s mature compos-
itional practice).100 In Charme, Grisey does not use the personnages in the
strict sense outlined by Messiaen but more loosely as a means of defining
antithetical musical figures whose ‘conflict’ or interrelation describes the
piece’s form. Grisey’s score is also aleatoric. The first personnage in Charme
is in fixed score, and initially comprises the behavioural characteristics of
discursivity, discontinuity, and aperiodic rhythms. The second personnage
is in ‘mobile’ scoring – an aleatoric reservoir of notated cells from which
the player is instructed on occasion to select – and comprises the behav-
ioural characteristics of extended notes with variable timbre and dynamics
(Ex. 2.2). The third personnage is silence, comprising the rests that occur in
the score with increasing frequency as the piece progresses.
Grisey’s programme note for Charme changed over the years. When
l’Itinéraire performed Charme in January 1974 in Paris, Grisey’s pro-
gramme note indicated the connection between Charme and Grisey’s
breakthrough work D’eau et de pierre:
Written in 1969, Charme reflects my preoccupations at that time, which were
to treat a few sonorous archetypes as living characters [personnages]. The
other distinct feature of this piece, taken up later in D’eau et de pierre, is
duality. [. . .] The title Charme is intended in the archaic sense of a ‘magic
spell’ (in Latin, carmen: magical song) and the enchantment is created here
between the two characters [personnages] of this little drama.101

Whereas Messiaen’s use of personnages involves operations of reciprocal

augmentation and diminution, Grisey’s personnages are more loosely
defined as antithetical acoustic figures (or archetypes) whose occurrence
is successive and dialectical. The occurrence of personnage 2 in Charme
alters the subsequent appearance and behaviour of personnage 1:
following the occurrence of personnage 2, personnage 1 starts to become

100
As reproduced in Hill and Simeone, Messiaen, 198.
101
Grisey, programme note for Charme, 1974. The revised programme note included in
Grisey’s Écrits was written for a performance at Royan in 1976 and used thereafter.
Example 2.2 Grisey’s Charme (1969) for clarinet. © Copyright Casa Ricordi. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed by
permission.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 63

somewhat like the former for a while, before gradually returning to its
original form. In this way the distinction in Charme between the two
audible personnages is all but impossible to perceive for the listener, since
personnage 1 enters into a becoming with personnage 2 after any state-
ment of the latter (Grisey’s performance directions indicate that it is the
performer’s responsibility to vary dynamics in such a way as to maximise
the auditory distinction between personnages 1 and 2). Primarily, then,
the personnages process is at this early stage in Grisey’s work a means for
generating form. In D’eau et de pierre, the first personnage would be a
quasi-spectral chord and the second personnage a chaotic aggression.
This element of Grisey’s spectral style has its roots in his adaptation of
Messiaen’s personnages technique. The significance of personnages would
come into its own once Grisey infused it with psychoacoustic principles
and Xenakisean process form. Following D’eau et de pierre, the spectral
chord became for Grisey a ‘sound archetype’: audibly identifiable for
the listener and upon which operations may occur that the listener
can follow.

Grisey’s Student Works

The teenager who dreamed of being that saviour who would infuse serial-
ism with poetry worked during his student years to master serial tech-
niques. A cursory hearing of works such as Perichoresis and Mégalithes,
idiomatically uncharacteristic of his later music though they are, reveals a
precocious student working within serial thought.
Échanges (1968) was composed between leaving Dutilleux’s class and
entering Messiaen’s. Although traces of Dutilleux in Échanges are scant, the
piece does show the twenty-two-year-old Grisey experimenting with har-
monic resonance for the first time. In the opening bars (Ex. 2.3), the pianist
plays a repeated low B, initially quasi-periodically and then accelerating,
with the finger of another performer placed inside the piano pressed
against the corresponding string, gradually changing the string’s harmon-
ics with each strike of the piano key. This motif, a repeated note sounding a
harmonic, occurs occasionally throughout Échanges, though the general
texture is for the most part post-serial in character and foregrounds the
performers’ quasi-discursive interaction (the double bass part in one place
has the performance direction ‘Quasi recitatio’, foreshadowing Prologue for
solo viola). Dutilleux calls resonance ‘a constant that can be heard in most
of my music’; regarding the composition of Figures de résonances (1970,
rev. 1976) for two pianos, Dutilleux said he ‘wanted to direct pianists’
attention to an aspect that was sometimes neglected, namely, a more subtle
64 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 2.3 Grisey’s Échanges (1968) for prepared piano and double bass. © Copyright Casa Ricordi.
All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed by permission.

appreciation of timbres and their harmonic complexes’.102 Aspects of

Échanges circulate in this orbit.
Grisey’s first work completed in Messiaen’s class was Mégalithes (1969)
for fifteen brass instruments (dedicated to the victims of the Biafran war; its
epigraph from Lanza del Vasto comments on ‘that sort of artificial idolatry
by which one perpetuates the use of human sacrifice’). Mégalithes has a ‘free’
late 1960s air, and Xenakis’s Eonta, which Grisey studied, is an influence.103
Its surface style, informed by its brass instrumentation, is reminiscent of free
jazz, the collective improvisations of groups such as New Phonic Art, and
recordings of contemporary performances of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben
Tagen. Within Grisey’s oeuvre, Mégalithes is significant as the first work to
feature players spatially distributed around the hall, which would reach its
apogee in Vagues, chemins, le souffle and would resurface in Tempus ex
machina (1979). Mégalithes’s score is in the aleatoric fashion of works such
as Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata (1957, a score Grisey studied);104 its nine
contrasting sections, each defined by its rough duration, can be arranged in
one of nine possible arrangements. The spatialisation of the instruments,
combined with the bizarre, jabbering sonorous discourse of the titular brass
‘megaliths’ (which frequently act in call-and-response patterns and use
extended techniques such as blowing and speaking through the instru-
ments), also has a music-theatrical effect. At the beginning of the section
marked ‘3700 ’, Grisey indicates that, should this section be selected as the
work’s opening, the first player, a tuba playing a sustained low B flat, should
if possible begin playing without any sign from the conductor while

102 103 104

Glayman, Henri Dutilleux, 72. GGCPSF. GGCPSF.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 65

members of the audience are still talking (an idea re-used in Jour, contre jour
(1978), wherein the tape part starts imperceptibly while members of the
audience are still talking). An underlying personnages conception is sug-
gested in the repetition of well-defined melodic units, which alternate with
other such personnages. All nine possible arrangements of the piece end with
the same short final section (Ex. 2.4): a drone wherein eleven of the fifteen
instruments play a long cluster based on eleven pitches of the chromatic
scale. The use of a static chord for a work’s conclusion would be important
as Grisey’s style developed.
Grisey had a propensity to frame his music in mystical terms, as is
apparent in two other student works. Initiation for baritone voice, trom-
bone, and double bass was composed between August and October 1970,
and as with Charme (the title meaning a magical amulet) and Mégalithes
(hieratic standing stones), its conception is quasi-ritualistic. Grisey
described the work as ‘an initiation by way of music into that which in
music is most sacred, that transcendent energy that, more or less faith-
fully, the musician captures. Apprehending the Essential by the magic of
sound; penetrating further into the mysterious layers of being: such are
the ends this short piece pursues.’105 They are no small ends, and an
incident recounted by George Couroupos shows how seriously Grisey
took them.106 Idiomatically, Initiation is an Aperghis-esque piece of
absurdist music theatre. Around this time Grisey studied scores by
Berio, and in the margin of a sheet of class notes from Messiaen’s class
he has written out a string of phonetics, indicating that he studied this
too.107 Initiation’s composition is highly schematised, and its score
(which is unpublished) is complex. As well as the precise technical
indications for each of the players, there are numerous aleatory options
for how the piece may be performed. Grisey used a magic square to
calculate temporal proportions and the changing density of acoustical
events. He would use a magic square for the same purpose in Vagues,
chemins, le souffle and D’eau et de pierre (as their sketches show) before,
from Dérives onwards, switching to using the numerical proportions of

105
Grisey, ‘Initiation’, 129.
106
The baritone Spiro Sakkas had not prepared sufficiently, and during a rehearsal Grisey
claimed that he did not sing the notes written. Couroupos had to intervene. ‘Gérard
wasn’t disposed to letting the slightest fault pass. I understood then that for Gérard,
every detail was very important, as if it might destroy the whole conception of the piece
[if it were ignored].’ Couroupos, email to the author, 28 April 2013.
107
GGCPSF.
66 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 2.4 Grisey’s Mégalithes (1969) for fifteen brass. © Copyright Casa
Ricordi. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed by
permission.

given spectral frequency complexes.108 Another compositional conceit

suggests that Grisey was by this stage aware of Stockhausen’s Stimmung:
alongside non-semantic vocables, the baritone enunciates the names of
gods from various religious traditions.
A mystical programme similarly informs Perichoresis (composed between
July 1969 and March 1970 and premiered at the Paris Conservatoire com-
poser concerts on 16 June 1970). In Christian theology, ‘perichoresis’ signifies
the mutual interpenetration of the members of the Trinity: musically again,
there is a personnages element, and Perichoresis’s twelve players are divided
into three groups. Perichoresis is also typical of Grisey’s music in this era in
striking a balance between the portentous and the absurd. The absurd is
expressed in the humorous noises that at times are emitted by the instru-
ments; the portentous is expressed in Grisey’s programme note, wherein the
title is said to signify ‘mutual exchange, deep relation, beyond language and

108
For an account of Grisey’s use of the proportions of frequency spectra, see Féron, ‘The
Emergence of Spectra’.
New Music in Late 1960s Paris (1967–1970) 67

thought, between two or several people’.109 Perichoresis sees Grisey engage

with the pointillistic atonality of the post-serial phase; as in Mégalithes, the
wind and brass players at times speak through their instruments; and in the
opening section, the wind and brass players blow through their instruments,
creating ‘coloured silence’ (Stockhausen’s term) in the same manner as at the
beginning of the fourth of Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.
Perichoresis opens with a Boulezian strike-and-resonance chord, an idea the
development of which was important in Grisey’s move to a static style in
D’eau et de pierre and Dérives. It also contains strikingly quasi-tonal passages,
and these evince Grisey’s tentative efforts to reinsert harmony into the post-
serial idiom. The second section of Perichoresis opens with a continually
iterated minor third interval, sounded by clarinet, flute, and harp both
horizontally as an ostinato and vertically as a chord, in which obtains a
distinct tonal centre,110 before bit by bit this swirling figure is eroded and
the music dissipates back into atonality. On a few occasions in the second half
of the work, static chords, sometimes triggered by a strike on tubular bells,
obtain among several of the ensemble’s instruments, the static chord on each
occasion becoming longer. Out of the last statement of this chord emerges a
prolonged perfect fifth on clarinet and viola, which, held for a minute or so,
concludes the piece with a sense of unity and stability. As with Mégalithes, this
strategy of articulating a prolonged ‘home’ chord at the end of his works
would inform Dérives and Périodes, and thereby the passage between Grisey’s
student works and his mature idiom. The incorporation of such resonance
chords into his music, too, would play an important role in the emergence of
Grisey’s mature style, even if his works at the time bore little relation to what
came later. This programmatic theme of the interpenetration of identities may
have been prompted by a personal event: in 1970, Grisey married his girl-
friend Jocelyn Simon.
By 1970, Grisey was being discussed in French new music as an up-and-
coming prospect. At the end of that year, he was awarded the prestigious
prix de la Vocation at a lavish ceremony at the Maison de l’ORTF. The
Fondation de la Vocation’s honorary president was Claude Pompidou, wife
of the President of the Republic, who handed the twenty-four-year-old
Grisey his award on stage before the assembled dignitaries. ‘I have the

109
‘The title means mutual exchange, deep relationship, beyond language and thought,
between two or more people.’ Grisey, ‘Perichoresis’, 127. The note continues: ‘three
groups, three personnages, three colours, three rhythmic cells confronted . . .’.
110
This was in keeping with a changing musical climate in which, for example, Terry Riley’s
music was becoming widely known through the commercial release of A Rainbow in
Curved Air (1969).
68 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

impression’, the foundation’s President Bleustein-Blanchet told the audi-

ence, ‘of having pressed a stethoscope to the heart of French youth and of
having heard its beatings’. Absent from the pomp and high society were
Grisey’s parents, who remained in Belfort. Grisey let them know about the
award by letter. ‘It’s brilliant for him’, they told a local newspaper. ‘He has
dedicated himself to music and we’re happy that his gifts should be
recognised. Although we’re not musicians, we helped him as much as we
could to succeed, and it’s with joy we note that his talent and his desire to
succeed in his vocation are today recognised.’111 The financial award, of
course, did not go amiss, but no less of an effect was the significance of the
award for the young composer’s confidence and public profile. With the
award ceremony having been covered in the national media, Grisey was
marked as one of the most promising young composers in the country, and
a subsequent commission for France’s main new music festival in Royan
gave him a chance to prove himself on a grand scale.112

111
‘Deux Francs-comtois lauréats’, GGCPSF. This is the only published commentary from
Grisey’s family on his music, as far as I am aware.
112
A couple of years later, Perichoresis won Grisey a prize at the Paris Biennale.
 3 Statistical Serialism and Vagues, chemins,
le souffle (1970–1972)

In Messiaen, Grisey had identified that ‘Master’ who would show him his
proper way. During their one-to-ones, being ‘attentive to the least word of
encouragement or the most challenging criticisms’, Grisey was often dis-
appointed when, after presenting the teacher with his latest scores,
Messiaen simply leafed through the pages, mumbled ‘a few sibylline
words’, then allowed his student to leave. The frustrated young composer
would travel home with the impression of having spent time in front of a
mirror.1 This, though, was Messiaen’s standard practice in one-to-one
tuition, where he generally avoided giving students concrete recommenda-
tions about what to compose. He would not look at a work until it was
complete, and he was often unforthcoming with critical comments or
analysis.2 Although dissatisfied at the time, later Grisey more charitably
framed this as a zen approach to guiding a young artist towards self-
realisation.3
Messiaen’s influence was more immediately profitable in regard to
professional connections. As mentioned, Messiaen was on the comité
d’honneur of France’s main new music festival in Royan. He promoted
his composition students’ interests to Royan’s artistic director Claude
Samuel. In June 1971, Samuel telephoned Messiaen to ask his advice
regarding the programme for the 1972 Royan festival, which, he said,
was to have the theme ‘Jeunes générations’. Writing a letter in reply,
Messiaen suggested nineteen composers: the first was Scelsi (which tells
us that Messiaen had also probably spoken of Scelsi in his composition
class);4 the last, mentioned in a postscript, was Grisey. ‘He is preparing a

1
Grisey, [Silences de Messiaen’]’, 215.
2
Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 102. Xenakis recalled a similarly dissatisfying experience:
‘Once I finished Metastaseis I showed [Messiaen] the score. It had already been some time
since I’d left the class. It was at the end of his class; he put the score on the closed piano;
and his only remark was, “Ah . . . one would have to be up in the clouds to read it!’ And
that’s all he said to me about it.’ Quoted in Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 101.
3
Grisey, [‘Silences de Messiaen’], 215. Grisey observes that Messiaen’s relative degree of
formality indicated which students were his favourites.
4
Murail and Grisey alike claimed to have been unaware of Scelsi until they met him as Prix
de Rome scholars, though as I discuss later, Murail’s Où tremblent les contours (1970) for
two violas suggests otherwise.

[69]
70 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

work of spatial character’, Messiaen wrote, ‘which seems to me very

extraordinary in conception and which one could give very well at
Royan, in the hall where Xenakis’s Terretektorh was given.’5 Duly taking
Messiaen’s advice, Samuel pencilled in Grisey’s spatialised orchestral work
as a possibility, though the important premiere was not officially confirmed
until later in the year.6
In January 1972, several months later, giving a lecture at the Rennes
Maison de la Culture, Grisey proudly announced to the audience that he
had found a way of unifying sound’s separate parameters: spatialisation, a
fifth, hidden parameter of sound. ‘It is thrilling indeed for a composer to
imagine that a new field of investigation has opened before him’, Grisey
said, ‘and that henceforth he can compose a rhythmics expressed by other
means, for example by changing pitch or loudness.’7 Grisey felt he had
found his proper style and path: spatialised music, which, during the
lecture, Grisey described in detail. Scheduled as it was for March 1972,
the Royan premiere would come more or less at the end of his time as a
student at the Paris Conservatoire and express his arrival as a composer;
the concert would be broadcast on national radio and covered by the main
national newspapers. Unfortunately, things did not work out that way.

5
Quoted in Samuel, Permanences d’Olivier Messiaen, 158. Messiaen also promoted Murail,
who had just won the Prix de Rome: ‘Tristan Murail [. . .] who has just finished a very
original work for large orchestra, with a very new orchestral atmosphere, entitled Altitude
8000. I showed this score to Iannis Xenakis who fully shares my opinion. (There are some
beautiful pages in it!).’
6
Messiaen wrote to Grisey on 30 October 1971:
Dear friend,
I was thinking of paying you a visit at the clinic, but I see at the top of your letter that
you are no longer there. How did the operation go? How are you holding up? And how is
your wife?
Do not, of course, come to class until such time as you can do so without fatigue: you
are excused!
With regard to Royan, I will not be there this year, and the piano competition is going
to be replaced by a flute competition, for around this time I will have a long tour of
competitions in the USA. However, bring me your new work when it is finished, and I will
speak of it in any case with Claude Samuel to speed things up.
See you soon, I hope! And all my wishes for a prompt recovery for your wife
and yourself.
With warmest embraces,
Oliver Messiaen (GGCPSF)
Messiaen usually ran the piano concours but was absent in 1972, when he was in the USA
composing Des canyons aux étoiles.
7
Grisey, ‘Musique et espace’, GGCPSF.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 71

Figure 3.1 Grisey’s rough sketch of the floor plan for the layout of the orchestra in
Vagues, chemins, le souffle. The clarinet stands at the centre; strings radiate
outwards towards the peripheries, followed by winds and brass, and percussion on
two platforms on opposite sides of the hall. The audience is bunched in two groups
inside each curve. Used with the permission of Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel,
Switzerland.

Typically for a student composer, the work in question, Vagues, che-

mins, le souffle, tries to do too many things at once. The score is ninety-one
A3 pages long, and a performance lasts thirty to forty minutes. Grisey splits
the orchestra in two, effectively writing for two separate orchestras playing
concurrently, the work requiring two conductors, like Xenakis’s works
Duel (1959) and Stratégie (1962). The double orchestra is spatially distrib-
uted around the hall among the audience in an ‘S’ shape (Fig. 3.1); on a
stage at the centre of the ‘S’ stands the solo amplified clarinettist; the strings
radiate out from the centre towards the peripheries; at the end of each of
these curves are the winds and then the brass; and between two platforms,
one at each periphery, are the seven percussionists. Naturally, too, specific
lighting effects are also called for, a different colour (red and blue) being
shone onto each of the orchestral groups. And if that was not quite enough,
the score contains aleatoric elements, whereby the two conductors and
various members of the two orchestras have to make decisions about
the order in which they play ‘mobile’ parts of the score. The absurdly
72 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

over-elaborate score may have played a part in the Orchestre

Philharmonique de l’ORTF going on strike and the concert being cancelled.8
But despite its failure, and despite its being almost entirely uncharacteristic
of Grisey’s mature style, Vagues, chemins, le souffle marks the tentative
introduction of key musical ideas he would develop: schematic pre-
compositional planning by way of the ‘global’ sound parameters; the com-
position of auditory processes; the sequential repetition and variation of an
audibly distinct sound figure; chords imitating harmonic spectra; and the
composition of a ‘timbral mirror’, whereby an ensemble chord is conceived
as a macroscopic simulation of a microscopic instrumental tone – which
latter element, once Grisey adopted spectral harmony, would form the basis
of instrumental synthesis. These developments cannot be understood with-
out attending to Grisey’s engagement with serialism, which gradually
worked itself out through Vagues, chemins, le souffle, D’eau et de pierre,
and Dérives. This in turn requires an understanding of serialism’s evolution.

Serialism’s Move towards Statistical Thought

Historically, the serialist project is distinct from dodecaphony.
Dodecaphony was the technique, established by Schoenberg, that under-
pinned the musical output of the so-called Second Viennese School (and
which, through it, influenced composers such as Stravinsky). Serialism, by
contrast, was the creative reinterpretation of dodecaphony by Boulez and
his colleagues, whose goal was to push Schoenberg’s method towards a
radical redefinition of musical composition. Schoenberg’s dodecaphony
was a framework for organising pitch material outside any principal tonal
pitch centre, making possible a supposed continuation of the common-
practice tradition; Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg accordingly used dode-
caphony with traditional forms such as the symphony, the sonata, and the
concerto. Serialism, by contrast, meant extrapolating a system of musical
organisation from the internal structure of sound itself. For Boulez, writing
in a polemical vein, Schoenberg’s attachment to outmoded forms was
fatally misguided: music must have new forms appropriate to its new
vocabulary. To insist on the historical distinction between serialism and
dodecaphony is not to claim that, from an acoustical or analytical point of
view, there is some absolute distinction between, say, Webern’s Variations

8
One of the conductors, Michel Tabachnik, in an interview conducted at Royan and
published shortly afterwards, pointedly criticised orchestral aleatoric music. Quoted in
Walter, ‘Trois jeunes chefs rencontrés à Royan’. In the same issue, Walter says that it had
been hoped that Grisey would be ‘the new musician revealed by Royan 1972’.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 73

for Piano and Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke. Rather, to distinguish dode-

caphony and serialism as historical movements is to insist that, behind the
music’s surface similarity, each should be understood in terms of what
motivated each movement.9
Serialism as a movement began in the mid-1940s. A new generation of
composers, initially led by Boulez and including Stockhausen and
Goeyvaerts, became acquainted with and began rethinking dodecaphony
under the influence of René Leibowitz and Herbert Eimert. M. J. Grant
describes Eimert’s thought in his 1924 treatise on twelve-tone music and
how it diverged from Schoenbergean dodecaphony:
The Atonale Musiklehre [. . .] is interesting in several respects. Eimert’s
discussion centres not on Schoenberg’s idea of ‘twelve notes related only to
one another’, but twelve notes which are ‘beziehungslos’ (unconnected) and
‘selbstständig’ (independent): ‘Atonal material is thus not based on a sequence
of tones (scale), but on a number of tones (complex), in fact on the greatest
possible number of different tones, i.e. the twelve-tone complex’. This attitude
stemmed from Eimert’s belief that music should be grounded on logical
rather than natural processes, a distinction which would set him apart from
some other theorists of the time whose work also influenced him. [. . .]
Eimert’s discussions of the methodological background to atonal music
indicate how his thinking would develop in the 1950s: in the place of the
tension between consonance and dissonance on which tonality is founded,
atonal music’s ‘mechanical rotation of the twelve-tones [sic]’ indicates that its
principle is ‘the absolute purity of the sounds and their connections’.10

This reinterpretation of the twelve-tone method towards the revelation of

sound’s autonomy is the back story of French spectral music. In the initial
post-war period, it informed Stockhausen’s ‘point music’ in Kreuzspiel
(1951) and Boulez’s desire that sound’s inner structure should determine
its musical form. Having begun exploring the twelve-tone method in his 12
notations for piano (1945), Boulez soon ‘broke with the “concept” of the
Schoenbergian series’ in his Second Piano Sonata (1948), around the time
when he was engaging with the work of visual artists such as Klee and
Mondrian. He remarked: ‘Probably influenced by the whole Viennese
school, which wanted to try to recover [the sonata’s] former strengths,

9
This distinction was maintained by many at the time. For example, writing in 1961,
Lutosławski described how his recent music had ‘nothing in common with either twelve-
note technique or with serial music’ (Whittall, The Cambridge Introduction to
Serialism, 158–9).
10
Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics, 44.
74 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

I attempted the experiment of destroying them altogether.’11 Following the

example of ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’ from Messiaen’s Quatre études
de rythme (1949), the young serialists experimented with applying serial
ordering analogously to sound’s other ‘parameters’, loudness, duration,
and register; this short-lived enterprise is often referred to as integral or
total serialism, and it is what people often think of as serialism per se.
However, after this moment, serialism continued to evolve, and during the
mid- to late 1950s among its initiators serialism morphed into a statistical
conception of acoustical material; the notion of the series itself, as the
essential element of serial music, morphed into a general attitude towards
material, sound, and form. Through Grisey’s development of his personal
style, this statistical serialism, once it integrated spectral harmony and
periodicity, evolved into French spectral music.
The mid- to late 1950s saw the appearance of Xenakis and Ligeti, who
each critiqued serialism. Nonetheless, as Jennifer Iverson shows, the
sound-mass music associated with these composers should not be under-
stood in opposition to serialism: ‘statistical form represents a second stage
of serialism, during which many of the Darmstadt composers used tools
from electronic music and information theory to move away from pointil-
lism and towards denser textures and more perceptible Gestalten’.12
Stockhausen contributed to this shift with his 1953 analysis of Debussy’s
Jeux, his 1957 essay ‘. . . How Time Passes . . .’, and the 1955–7 orchestral
work Gruppen. It was Stockhausen’s studio experiments in electronic
sound synthesis, combined with Meyer-Eppler’s teachings on information
theory, that led him towards this statistical reformulation of serialism, such
as characterises works like Plus-Minus, Stop, and Stimmung. Part of the
rationale for this reformulation is outlined in Xenakis’s essay ‘Crise de la
musique sérielle’ (1954), which critiques pointillist serialism: ‘Linear pol-
yphony destroys itself by its very complexity; what one hears is in reality
nothing but a mass of notes in various registers. The enormous complexity
prevents the audience from following the intertwining of the lines and has
as its macroscopic effect an irrational and fortuitous dispersion of sounds
over the whole extent of the sonic spectrum.’ Xenakis saw in serialism ‘a
contradiction between the polyphonic linear system and the heard result,
which is surface or mass’. What mattered now was less the old rules
derived from tonal and modal music than a model acknowledging
and comprehending ‘the statistical mean of isolated states and of

11
Both Boulez quotations from the booklet for Boulez, Oeuvres complètes, 145–6.
12
Iverson, ‘Statistical Form’, 343. See also Iverson, Electronic Inspirations.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 75

transformations of sonic components at a given moment’,13 since the

statistical mean and its transformation are what the listener actually
perceives.
In Gruppen, Stockhausen organises groups of notes in terms of density
sequences; nonetheless, while perceptibility is under consideration, the
result ignores the harmonicity of the sound groups (as, for the most part,
does Xenakis’s music). For Grisey, who since his teenage years had found
serialism harmonically wanting, and who considered atonality ‘non-
existent’, this was conceptual short-sightedness. Grisey’s critical view is
evinced in the marginal notes and underlinings he made in his edition of
Stockhausen’s Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik (1963).
As he did with Boulez, Grisey studied Stockhausen’s thought and music
closely and, in reading the essay ‘. . . How Time Passes . . .’, as well as cross-
referencing Stockhausen’s statements with Gruppen, Grisey pointed out
what he considered to be faults in Stockhausen’s thinking. Notably, Grisey
highlights a contradiction between how Stockhausen appealed to acoustical
reality in his arguably metaphoric use of terms like ‘formant’, ‘envelope’,
and ‘partials’ for large-scale organisational techniques and his ignoring of
sound’s harmonic reality – for example, by using the equal-tempered
octave as the model of serial pitch organisation.14 In his reading of
Stockhausen’s ‘Musik im Raum’, Grisey approves of Stockhausen’s revi-
sions to earlier conceptions in the light of his electronic music experiences
and points out where Stockhausen seems to make mistakes in his acous-
tical knowledge: ‘l’amplitude d’un son n’est jamais fixé, elle varie au cours
de sa transmission jusqu’à nous’, Grisey notes beside a passage where
Stockhausen seems mistakenly to consider a sound’s amplitude constant.
In short, Grisey identified a discrepancy in serialism between the concept
and what one actually heard. Nonetheless, Grisey’s remarks do not show a
fundamental opposition to serialism; rather, they show his effort to
observe, more closely than his elders, serialism’s ideal of a mode of
compositional organisation based on sound’s inherent structure.
In mid- to late 1970, as he was beginning work on what would become
Vagues, chemins, le souffle, Grisey wrote some notes on how one might
compose music on the basis of what is ‘directly perceptible’.15 One way
such perceptibility could be achieved was when a sound parameter was

13
Xenakis, ‘Crise de la musique sérielle’, partly reproduced in Xenakis, Formalized Music, 8.
14
For example, one of Grisey’s marginal notes reads: ‘Voir aussi la 3o contradiction: sons et
durés fondamenteaux < clavier tempéré, chromatisme sériel, ‟l’artifice”; Sons et durés
formantiques < spectre d’harmonique, non tempéré, ‟la nature”.’ GGCPSF.
15
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments 1967–1974’, 315.
76 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

pushed to its limit, making it transform into a different parameter and

requiring an equivalent conceptual reformulation. These are what he
would later call ‘liminal’ transitions (since they occur at a pre-conscious
level on the micro scale). The ‘harmonic hypertrophy’ of Wagner and
Debussy, Grisey wrote, eventually led to dissolution in the notion of colour
and timbre (as in Schoenberg’s Farben). The ‘rhythmic hypertrophy’ of the
post-war music of Boulez and others led to dissolution into the notion of
rhythmic density (as per Xenakis’s critique). In this way, traditional con-
cepts had to be revised in light of the acoustical evidence and replaced by
more appropriate ones: musical concepts must be reformulated to be
brought closer to perception. Grisey later called one of the chief starting
points of his music the wish to find ‘greater adequation between concept
and percept’;16 and later it will be seen how Grisey adhered to this principle
in leading the colouristic harmonic complexes of Boulez towards
spectral organisation.
Stockhausen explained how, in later serial thought, parameters had
come to be applied to groups of sounds rather than to the single sound:
Parameters, which I had previously used only for the description of individual
sounds, I now introduced for whole complexes of sounds, or masses of
sounds. A mass has a certain density, it has certain tendencies, it has shape
[. . .]. In statistical compositions [. . .] the individual components enter into
textures that have their own overall characteristics and become new units
which are treated as sounds, but they have an inner life, which is composed.17

In Vagues, chemins, le souffle, this serial attitude manifests itself in the

thorough schematisation of the composition. In planning the work, Grisey
charted the concurrent activity at any given time of the various parameters
of the orchestral sound: for example, rhythm, rhythmic density, density of
instrumental timbre, space, dynamic of intensities, pitches, and general
dynamic curve. Following this planning and calculation, Grisey would then
write the notes in the score. Though at this point the method was not
refined, it led towards his mature framework.

Boulez as Threshold
As both figurehead and gatekeeper, Boulez had a strong influence on
French composers. Alongside serial music’s development, though, his
notion of the series had concomitantly changed. The series was initially
conceived, following dodecaphony, as an ordering governing the

16
Grisey, ‘Interview with David Bundler’. 17
Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations, 69–70.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 77

distribution of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. By the time of his
Darmstadt lectures at the beginning of the 1960s, though (subsequently
published as Penser la musique aujourd’hui), and at the time of Pli selon pli
(1957–62) and Figures, doubles, prismes (1964–8), Boulez gave a remark-
ably different, more theoretically open definition of the series:
What is the series? The series is—in very general terms—the germ of a
developing hierarchy based on certain psycho-physiological acoustical
properties, and endowed with a greater or lesser selectivity, with a view to
organising a FINITE ensemble of creative possibilities connected by
predominant affinities, in relation to a given character; this ensemble of
possibilities is deduced from an initial series by a FUNCTIONAL generative
process (not simply the consecutive exposition of a certain number of objects,
permuted according to restrictive numerical data).18

Needless to say, this qualification-laden definition requires more than one

reading to grasp its main point: the series is a means of generating
hierarchies immanent to a specific musical composition’s sound material.
Having thus defined the series as material, Boulez describes its formal
rationale:
Consequently, all that is needed to set up this hierarchy is a necessary and
sufficient premise which will ensure the total cohesion of the whole and the
relationships between its successive parts. This premise is necessary, because
the ensemble of possibilities is finite when it observes a controlled hierarchy; it
is sufficient since it excludes all other possibilities. If the hierarchisation of
one of the given aspects of the sound entity is determined by this necessary
and sufficient premise, the other phenomena are free to integrate themselves
or, simply, to co-exist with it; in other words the principle is one of the
interaction or interdependence if the various sound components.

Next comes a parenthetical comment using the indivisibility of sound’s

acoustic envelope as a theoretical reference:
(Acoustic phenomena are organic examples of this principle: a sound –
generally defined – is, in fact, a sum of frequencies observing in their
relationships proportions – variable or not – that are fixed in quality and
number, and have a coefficient of dynamics – variable or not. Frequency in
itself being a function of time (cycles per second), the sum of the frequencies
is subject to a collective dynamic envelope, also a function of time. Thus, from
the very start, the complete sound-entity is the result of the interaction of
vibration, time and amplitude.)

18
This quotation and the following three from Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, 35–6.
78 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

This non-user-friendly definition of the series is rounded off by touching

on how sub-series may be logically derived from the initial series:
This interaction or interdependence does not function by means of
arithmetical addition, but as a vectorial compound, each vector having, from
the nature of its material, its own structural properties. Thus there can be
either a principal (or primordial) organisation, with secondary (or
supplementary) organisations, or a global organisation which takes account of
the various categories. Between these two extremes are the various levels of
predominance of certain organisations in relation to others, in other words, a
dialectic with a vast field of action between liberty and obligation (between
free and strict writing).

Boulez goes on to elaborate practically his version of serialism, which by

this stage involved isomorphism and chord multiplication to generate a
reservoir of material from the initial series (such ‘multiplication’ being
another sense of the title Pli selon pli). It is not possible to unpack fully
Boulez’s precis of serialism here, but the most relevant points can be
summarised. Serialism for Boulez by 1960 is: (1) a means of deriving
musical composition from the nature of sound; (2) a means of generating
hierarchies that are immanent to that sound material, thus allowing for
contrast and tension; and (3) a means of integrating all sound phenomena,
including noise, on the basis of acoustical reality. These principles are not
dissimilar to those of spectral music.19
It is no coincidence that, like Stockhausen, Boulez by the late 1950s was
using micro-scale acoustical terms such as ‘formant’ metaphorically to
describe macro-scale aspects of musical organisation (as in his Third
Piano Sonata, 1955–7, rev. 1963). Neither is it an accident that Boulez’s
works from this time, such as Pli selon pli, Figures, doubles, prismes, and
Cummings ist der Dichter (1970, rev. 1986), at times sound similar to
Grisey. Boulez by this time was giving more scope to harmonic beauty
(of a complex type) and admitting that the initial post-war serialist period
had been overly dogmatic and naive: that it had privileged an image of
‘what might seem to be a perfect “technological” rationality but was in fact
a monumental absurdity’.20 In his Darmstadt lectures from this time,
Boulez frequently takes aim at technicism, the reduction of the musical
work to a nuts-and-bolts abstraction; against this tendency, like
Schoenberg before him, Boulez promoted thought and idea as categories

19
On the congruences between Boulez and spectral music, see Goldman, ‘Boulez and the
Spectralists’, 208–32.
20
Boulez, ‘Putting the Phantoms to Flight’, 66.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 79

of primary import in analysis and artistic creation. He considered that

‘juggling with numbers surely reveals a lack of confidence, an impotence
and a lack of imagination’; that the instant of imagination comes, rather,
from ‘an indestructible kernel of darkness’ (a phrase adapted from André
Breton’s ‘infracassable noyau de nuit’); and that ‘[a]ll reflections on musical
technique must be based on sound and duration, the composer’s raw
material’.21 Such should be the aims of the contemporary composer
engaging serialism in a creative, properly artistic way, he suggested.
An important, scattered nexus within Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship
charts Boulez’s reflections over the period from Le Marteau sans maître
(‘Recherches maintenant’) to Pli selon pli (‘Tendences de la musique
récente’). In these essays, while still referring to Webern as the ‘threshold’
whose music passes onto ‘a new mode of musical being’,22 Boulez had
begun to give greater emphasis to sound complexes,23 to chordal sound
blocks whose internal organisation is modelled on resonance (after Varèse,
the 1954 premiere of whose Déserts in Paris seems to have influenced
Boulez as well as Dutilleux),24 to the sequential generation of chords of
variable density one from another,25 to the notion of l’objet sonore (recently
coined by Abraham Moles and adopted by Schaeffer) and the pivotal
importance for its identity of its specific surrounding context,26 and, in
general, to the priority of perception over abstraction. The application of
these ideas is clear in the acoustical character of Le Marteau (particularly
the last movement, ‘Bel édifice et les pressentiments’), Poésie pour pouvoir
(1958, since withdrawn), and the Improvisations sur Mallarmé (later
incorporated into Pli selon pli). Following a performance of the latter on
BBC television some time in 1964, when asked how audiences should
understand his musical language, Boulez replied, ‘Just forget all about
explanations and just hear’; and a couple of years later, again on the BBC,
when discussing Éclat, Boulez gave a similar insight on his aesthetic: ‘When
I am hearing a combination of tones which sounds good I can just let the
sound die, and I can appreciate the sound until the last moment. One is not
in a hurry to hear the music, but one can just wait his own pleasure [sic].’27
These empirical views are far from the rationalism with which Boulez is

21
Boulez, ‘Putting the Phantoms to Flight’, 73. Boulez considered Leibowitz such a number-
juggler (‘imprisoned by academic techniques [. . .] he could see no further than the
numbers in a tone row’) and held such academic composition in low regard; quoted in
Peyser, Boulez, 39 and 44.
22
Boulez, ‘Incipit’, 215. 23
Boulez, ‘Possibily . . .’, 135.
24
Boulez, ‘. . . Near and Far’, 152. 25
Boulez, ‘. . . Near and Far’, 153.
26
Boulez, ‘Corruption in the Censers’, 21.
27
Both Boulez quotations from ‘But Is It Music? 1945–1989’.
80 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

often stereotyped and are similar to remarks made around the same time by
Murail.28 They further suggest how elements of Grisey’s style would
develop through engagement with Boulez’s music and writings. Grisey
stripped away what was unnecessary – like the principle of non-repetition –
while keeping much of the framework.
Boulez’s analytic attitude encouraged composition students not simply
to ape but to creatively reinterpret past compositional approaches, includ-
ing his own.29 It was through analysing a composition as closely as possible
that a composer realised the ‘NECESSITY’ – or otherwise – of the decisions
made therein and of the techniques the composer had used.30 This is how
Boulez himself had approached Schoenberg,31 and though he may have
been ambivalent about it, this is how he expected his students to approach
him, not as epigones but as creative artists: the composer as seer, scouring
the past’s bloody entrails in envisioning therein the future.32 While Boulez
knew by this stage that the utopian ideal of serialism as a general compos-
itional language was untenable, he nonetheless considered that the next
stage of music could only be an outgrowth of serialism (Messiaen held a
similar view).33 Grisey bore out that intuition. If the motivating ethos of
Boulezian serialism was the bracketing out from composition of everything
that was unnecessary, and the derivation of one’s compositional frame-
work from the internal nature of sound itself, Grisey simply applied this
principle more deeply than did Boulez himself. In this regard, as someone
adhering to certain elements of Boulez’s music while doing away with that
in it which he deemed superfluous (what Baillet terms Grisey’s ‘rejection of
the arbitrary’),34 Grisey was faithful to Boulez as teacher through being
unfaithful to Boulez as compositional model.

28
Murail, quoted in ‘Répétition publique et débat’.
29
‘It is very wrong to confuse the value of a work, or its immediate novelty, with its possible
powers of fertilisation.’ Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, 16–18. See also Éloy, ‘Dix ans
après’, XI.
30
See Walters, ‘The Aesthetics of Pierre Boulez’, 160–98: ‘[i]n order to overcome the
inherited material, Boulez proposes that the composer must challenge all concepts’,
relating this to Descartes’s method of doubt’.
31
That is, by adopting Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method while ignoring Schoenberg’s
inherited tonal forms. See Boulez, ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, 209–14.
32
A large part of Webern’s importance lies in his stripping away all extraneous elements:
along with Debussy, ‘he reacts violently against all inherited rhetoric, and aims instead to
rehabilitate the power of sound’. Boulez, ‘Incipit’, 215.
33
See Boulez, ‘Putting the Phantoms to Flight’, 78–9. On Boulez’s writings and the
generality of their application, see Goldman, The Musical Language of Pierre
Boulez, 54–6.
34
Baillet, Gérard Grisey: fondements, 39–46.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 81

In his early journal, Grisey had characterised serial music critically as

bavardage, a too-voluble chatter in which little was said. It was too
intellectual, and the serial musician too much a savant, not enough a
poet.35 This did not preclude Grisey, as a student of Messiaen’s, composing
works in the pointillist serial idiom and engaging closely with serial
thought. In an interview in later years, Grisey summed up his earlier
attitude to serial thought:
[F]or a number of my contemporaries, the blackness and complexity of a
score is as determinant for their judgement as the ear. This is what I call the
perverse effect of compositional writing [l’écriture]. My generation was
brutally confronted with this dilemma: should we continue along the path of
extreme combinatorial complexity of our elders or rather search for more
comprehensibility and transparency? The taste for combinatorial games and
abstraction, alongside a certain intellectual elitism, had very naturally brought
the 1950s towards perversion: ‘the map for the territory’. In music, nothing
prevents a composer from multiplying structures on to infinity, for one can
always accumulate; all that’s needed is a bit of patience. What will make us
stop? Nothing, unless the listener rightly feels ridiculous at the ‘fourth
retrograde inversion of a fragment of the series multiplied by itself’. From the
1970s, my obsession was: what of all that do I actually perceive? What
remains out of that complexity? I always had this desire to imagine what
I called ‘the skin of time’, this immediate zone of contact between the listener
and the music, in searching for an extreme limpidity. My ideal is that the
complexity of structures does not serve to take away from audibility, but to
underlie an event that is simple in appearance.36

In late 1960s France, Grisey was not alone in this ideal. After Boulez had
begun to put more emphasis on harmonic lustre, some younger composers
like Éloy followed suit. This was in line with Boulez’s own observations on
how composition evolves: ‘I am convinced that however perceptive the
composer, he cannot imagine the consequences, immediate or ultimate, of
what he has written.’37
These comments certainly apply to Boulez’s Pli selon pli. In May 1969,
Boulez brought the BBC Symphony Orchestra to Paris for the second
French performance of that work. Fleuret’s review in Le Nouvel
Observateur indicates the impression the work made on many.

35
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: journal d’adolescence 1961–1966’, 312.
36
Grisey, ‘Les dérives sonores de Gérard Grisey’, 235–6. One of Grisey’s regular themes in
discussing his music was that it was a music in which compositional complexity is used to
produce an ostensibly simple surface; see, for example, ‘Le simple et le complexe’, in
Grisey, [‘Réflexions sur le temps’], 40–1.
37
Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, 18.
82 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Describing Pli selon pli as a decisive move beyond ‘post-Webernian rar-

efaction’, Fleuret gushes:
Nothing is gratuitous: not the durations, not the attacks, not the volumes, not
the dynamics, not the timbres. All participate in the perfect, fragile
equilibrium that the work succeeds in maintaining for more than an hour on
the clock. [. . .] It is as if sound, in being forced to discover the hard heart of
its substance, opened up a universe truer and more vibrant than the real.38

Éloy described the work’s fascination from the point of view of a young
composer:
In listening to Pli selon pli, I was struck by a phenomenon that was
compositionally new in that period. Zones of relative stability frequently
seemed to be established for quite long periods, creating these sorts of
‘polarisations’, the sudden discovery of which fascinated me. I had, indeed,
become more and more bothered by the permanence and rapidity of
information in the earlier serial works. [. . .] This obsession with a dimension
that would be capable of organising the mobile and the immobile, ‘stasism’
and ‘dynamism’, became essential for me.39

Grisey had a similar impression. Whether he attended the Paris perform-

ance of Pli selon pli or was influenced by it indirectly (through discussion
in Messiaen’s composition class or the concert’s broadcast on French
Radio), it spurred him towards exploring resonance chords and other
germinal features of spectral music in more detail. Grisey bought the score
of Boulez’s Don (1960–2, rev. 1989) for soprano and orchestra, Pli selon
pli’s opening movement.40 His copy of Don bears witness to his study and
analysis of the work, an analysis conducted not in terms of the compos-
ition’s discrete series but in terms of its surface resonant sonorities and the
interactions between the subdivisions of the ensemble: just the type of
creative analysis that Boulez as teacher prescribed. At different passages on
pages 10, 18, and 19 of the score Grisey notes: ‘Klangfarbenmelodie issuing
from the resonance of a melody.’ These sections (which include the
opening line sung by the soprano) feature blocks of colour that bleed
across the ensemble in reaction to the ‘pressure’ of a melodic line.
On page 2 of the score, where the ensemble is divided into three groups,
Grisey notes some of the characteristics of how the groups interact: ‘The
high and low groups imitate the principal instrument of the central group
(attack and resonances).’ In other words, a sub-ensemble of players

38
Fleuret, Chroniques pour la musique, 61–4. 39
Éloy, ‘Dix ans après’, XI–XII.
40
Grisey’s annotated copy is in the GGCPSF.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 83

Figure 3.2 Sketch showing Grisey’s intention that the chords in ‘Le Souffle’ be
modelled on resonance and the spectre harmonique. Used with the permission of
Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Switzerland.

produce a complex sonority – a type of harmony-timbre – in imitation of,

and in reaction to, a strike on one of the resonant instruments of the
central group.
Grisey adopted this principle of microscopic/macroscopic simulation in
the closing movement of Vagues, chemins, le souffle. Resonance chords
feature midway through Grisey’s second movement, ‘Chemins’ (‘Paths’),
and at the opening of the third movement, ‘Le Souffle’ (‘Breath’). The
sketches show that in ‘Le Souffle’ the chords are conceived as imitating the
internal structure of clarinet intonations from the opening of the piece;
Grisey writes ‘spectre harmonique’ beside the initial sketch for the chords
(Fig. 3.2).41 Grisey’s study of resonance chords in Boulez’s Don seems to
have inspired the idea; moreover, in keeping with how Grisey adhered to a
liberal treatment of Boulezian serialism up to Dérives, the chord is a
vertical arrangement of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (Ex. 3.1).
An earlier passage in Vagues, chemins, le souffle also features static reson-
ance chords. On pages 40 to 43 of the score there is a passage where

41
See Cagney, ‘On Vagues, chemins, le souffle’.
84 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 3.1 Opening of final movement of Grisey’s Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–2) for two
orchestras and amplified solo clarinet, featuring three resonance chords. © 1974 Gérard Billaudot
Editeur SA, Paris. Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.

silences alternate with swelling chords whose activity is set off each time by
a strike on a gong. Grisey’s rough sketch, headed ‘Blue’ for the group of
instruments, indicates a static vertical chord for winds and brass, with a
parallel string pizzicato chord also sketched. Though the chord is disson-
ant, the notes of the chord are supposed to sound, Grisey writes in his
 Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 85

Example 3.1 (cont.)

86 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

sketches, ‘like harmonics’. (Below this are complicated instructions

regarding the variation and interaction of the different musical param-
eters.) And on another sketch, written on manuscript paper headed
‘ROUGE’ (indicating which orchestra it is written for), Grisey writes:
Resonances: determined for every group
+ aleatoric colouring of one or two of the composants
by a fl., a viola or a clarinet multiphonic
ob " "
fl. " "42

Again, this indicates chords wherein the higher pitches are conceived as
high spectral ‘colourations’ of the lower ‘partials’.
Vagues, chemins, le souffle thus contains the first significant pseudo-
spectral chords in Grisey’s work (though they are not actually modelled
on specific frequency spectra). Ex. 3.1 shows an extract from the opening of
‘Le Souffle’: the first of a series of ensemble chords which sound as if
resonating from a brief attack on a percussion instrument. In the given
chord, the attack comes from a tubular bell, and the ensemble comprises the
strings of one orchestral unit; moreover, in keeping with Boulezean serial-
ism, the resonance chord’s notes are a vertical arrangement of the twelve
notes of the chromatic scale. The idea is the same as the opening measures of
Don (Ex. 3.2). Grisey’s borrowing from Boulez is even clearer when one
compares the respective opening chords of Don and Dérives (1973–4) for
orchestra and amplified ensemble. The opening ideas are identical: a tutti
strike at the top of the dynamic range, followed by a resonance chord; but
whereas in Don the resonance chord dies out within seconds, in Dérives it is
extended for several minutes. In this way, we see how Grisey fashioned core
elements of his style through creatively modifying elements of Boulez’s
music.43 The tripartite title of Grisey’s orchestral work seems to have been
chosen with an eye to attracting Boulez’s attention; as Piencikowski pointed
out, it could not fail to have brought to mind Boulez’s Figures, doubles,
prismes, and Grisey used the term ‘prism’ for his pitch organisation model in
the sketches for Dérives.44 It is also worth noting that Grisey’s next work,
D’eau et de pierre, was programmed at the Domaine Musical in January
1973, and that Grisey was one of the first French composers commissioned
by Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain, composing Modulations
(1976–7) as a result.

42
GGCPSF.
43
Grisey also analysed this attack-and-resonance pattern in Domaines (1961–8) for clarinet
and ensemble and the Third Piano Sonata.
44
Piencikowski, private conversation with the author.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 87

Example 3.2 Opening chord of Boulez’s Don from Pli selon pli (portrait de
Mallarmé) (1957–62) for soprano and orchestra. © Copyright 1989 by Universal
Edition (London) Ltd. London/UE 31538. Reproduced by kind permission of the
publisher.

The stereotype of Boulez’s post-war music as an aggressive extension of

post-Webernean pointillism is inaccurate, and is belied by certain
moments, for example, in the early piano Notations, wherein notes are
often allowed to resonate and slowly decay. Le Marteau sans maître
88 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

expands this with scoring for exotic resonant percussion, and from Pli
selon pli onwards Boulez often creates synthetic chords simulating reson-
ance. These chords are linked to Boulez’s formulation around the same
time of the notion of smooth time. Jonathan Goldman writes:
The fundamental dichotomy which obtains in Boulez’s work [. . .] opposes
pulsation to resonance. [. . .] Boulez famously distinguished between ‘smooth’
and ‘striated’ time. An alternation between a pulsed, rhythmic conception of
musical discourse and another, in which musical time is undifferentiated and
continuous, remains the key to Boulez’s sound world. Smooth time amounts
to spinning out a sound’s resonance in all its unpredictability, from its initial
attack through its resonance and ultimate decay. Striated time, on the other
hand, is the succession of accents that create sharp, audible discontinuities in
the musical fabric.
Part of Boulez’s fascination with these resonating instruments surely lies in a
desire to let these instruments ‘sound’ without any human intervention. [. . .]
This fascination with resonance is a constant in Boulez’s oeuvre, and contains
within itself the seeds of aleatoric composition: [. . .] In the moments in which
he lets these instruments resonate, the listener can suspend structural or
analytical listening, and abandon himself to hearing the sounds produced
without human intervention, in an aesthetic experience not unlike the
universe of John Cage. This ‘sono-centrism’ is a constant counterpoint in
Boulez to his preoccupation with global organization.45

Boulez’s conceptual opposition of smooth and striated time from around

this point indicates his engagement with the statistical conception of
complex sounds, and would crop up in Grisey’s next, threshold work,
D’eau et de pierre.

Xenakis’s Influence on Grisey

Grisey became interested in Xenakis’s music around the time of the
October 1968 festival Journées de Musique Contemporaine de Paris, at
which many of the Greek composer’s works were performed. Xenakis also
gave a talk on his music to Messiaen’s composition class, as Murail
recalled:
I remember seeing and speaking with Xenakis in Messiaen’s class. Xenakis
had brought some of his big orchestra pieces – Metastaseis, Pithoprakta – and
he explained them. I was quite impressed by his approach, which was very
different from what you were taught at the conservatories. You were taught

45
Goldman The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez, 12–13.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 89

melody, harmony, counterpoint, etc.; while Xenakis thought of sound masses,

in which individual lines — i.e., the notes played by the performers – were not
necessarily that important. What was important was the structure of the mass
of sounds.46

As previously mentioned, Vagues, chemins, le souffle features a spatialised

orchestra, and its main models in this regard were Xenakis’s Terretektorh
and Jean-Étienne Marie’s Concerto ‘Milieu divin’ (named after a book by
Teilhard). Terretektorh was premiered at the Royan festival in 1966, and
like Grisey’s composition, it features the orchestra distributed around the
hall among the audience. This orchestral layout in Vagues, chemins, le
souffle allows the composition of processes of sound movement: ‘numerous
forms of sound shifting (continuous–discontinuous, at even speed, accel-
erating or decelerating) as well as the superimposing of different speeds
and the variability of spatial density (in other words, the breadth of the
sonic layer being shifted)’.47 One of Grisey’s aims in this way was to create
a hypnotic effect on the audience; to this end, he considered calling the
work Transe before opting for its eventual tripartite title (which reflects its
tripartite structure).48 Grisey outlined his rationale in his programme note:
The particular layout of the orchestra allows me:
(1) To envelop the listener in the sound, each listener having a different
listening experience according to the place he or she has chosen.
(2) To use numerous forms of sound shifting (continuous–discontinuous, at
even speed, accelerating or decelerating) as well as the superimposing of
different speeds and the variability of spatial density (in other words, the
breadth of the sonic layer being shifted).
(3) To spatially realise (though this happened completely unconsciously) the
form itself of the triptych piece: static, dynamic, static.49

Grisey’s score makes liberal use of mass string glissandi, whose trajectory
Grisey mapped out using the same orange A3 graph paper used by Xenakis.
In his later sketches for Dérives, Grisey’s drawings of processes of

46
Murail, ‘Lecture at Ostrava Days’.
47
Grisey, ‘Vagues, chemins, le souffle’, programme booklet, 1972. On Xenakis’s spatialised
works, see Harley, ‘Space and Spatialization’, 279–300.
48
GGCPSF. Jonathan Harvey, reviewing the premiere (the first discussion of Grisey’s music
in English), described the effect of Grisey’s spatial shifting of sound: ‘a sensation of
musical dizziness with string glissandos turning round a false axis as if in a distorting
mirror, the wind instruments taking off from the glissandos’ point of arrival with their
own material.’ Harvey, ‘The ISCM Festival’, 33. Harvey and Grisey first met on this
occasion (GGCPSF).
49
Grisey, ‘Vagues, chemins, le souffle’, programme booklet, 1972.
90 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

metamorphosis are nearly identical to Xenakis’s sketches for Metastaseis,

which presumably Xenakis showed to Messiaen’s composition class.
Grisey’s plotting of vectors passing through registral space over time, in
combination with his plotting of the speed and trajectory of each sound
movement throughout the three-dimensional space of the hall, evinces a
desire towards a totally ‘comprehensive’ composition of sound experience.
As was his wont, Grisey linked spatialised music to the transcendental.50
These spatial ideas are at once of historical interest in illustrating an aspect
of the milieu of French new music at this time (a time when Xenakis’s
music was becoming more and more popular) and of theoretical interest in
regard to Grisey’s oeuvre. They are the source in Grisey’s music of the
composition of processes, a salient attribute of his mature style. Baillet
states the matter succinctly: ‘In Grisey’s music, processes of transformation
are omnipresent, constituting the foundation of his compositional
methods. These processes are easily perceptible, systematic, and quasi-
mechanical in character, single-handedly outlining the formal architecture
of the work.’51 While Grisey would for the most part subsequently aban-
don sound spatialisation (with occasional exceptions, such as Tempus ex
machina, 1979), he would retain the approach of composing musical
processes. This continuity is underlined by comments Grisey makes about
Xenakis’s music in ‘Music and Space’:
Seen under a microscope, certain sections of Xenakis’s works tend towards
conjuration; or if one prefers, they try to hypnotise the listener. Taking off
from a precise material, they generate a totally other material in a few
seconds. This metamorphosis is very progressive, without any rupture; if one
abandons oneself to its play, it is sometimes very difficult to become aware of
it [. . .]. This is an instance of the method of continual transformation.52

In the 1978 lecture published later as ‘Devenir du son’ (‘The Becoming of

Sound’), Grisey said that such continuous transformation was the core
principle of his music: ‘The different processes of mutation of one sound
into another sound or of a group of sounds into another group constitutes
the very base of my compositional method – the primary idea, the germ of
all composition.’53 A concept of Xenakis’s that Grisey adopted at this point
was that of the métabole or sound ‘metabolism’ – a process of change, often
within a particular parameter, and a key factor in his planning the process-

50
In his January 1972 Rennes lecture, Grisey cited the Upanishads on this topic. GGCPSF.
51
Baillet, ‘Des transformations continues’. See also Baillet, ‘Processus et forme’, in Gérard
Grisey, fondements, 65–74.
52
Grisey, ‘Musique et espace’, manuscript GGCPSF. 53
Grisey, ‘Devenir du son’, 27.
Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 91

based aspects of Vagues, chemins, le souffle and D’eau et de pierre.54 One

such metabolism occurs at the pening of Vagues, chemins, le souffle. The
clarinettist plays twelve ‘waves’: twelve instances of a note swelling up from
silence, the sound quality of which gradually becomes more and more
cracked and distorted (for example, moving from a clean tone to a multi-
phonic). This is the same idea of ‘metabolism’ as occurs with a spectral
chord at the opening of Partiels (in which case the sound figure occurs
thirteen times).55
Grisey’s absorption of Xenakis’s influence was facilitated by his 1969–70
studies in electro-acoustics and applied mathematics. Having decided to
complement his composition classes with Messiaen with studies elsewhere,
Grisey enrolled at the Schola Cantorum for a year-long course in ‘radio-
phonic production, sound engineering, applied acoustics, and the analysis
of experimental music’ run by the composer Jean-Étienne Marie; this was
his first introduction to the physics of sound and electronic composition.
Although Grisey never mentioned his studies with Marie in later inter-
views, Marie’s teaching probably had a crucial impact on him at the time.
For instance, Grisey studied the different types of sound wave (sine, saw-
tooth, square), signal processing effects (such as filtering), ring modulation
(RM), reverb, tape loops and tape delay, the multi-oscillator synthesiser,
frequency modulation (FM), and amplitude modulation (AM). This over-
view of studio techniques set the ground for a future instrumental music
using several of them as models; in D’eau et de pierre, for instance, Grisey
conceives changes to the work’s spectral chord in terms of formants and
filtering. When Grisey gave his first presentation on his mature music, at
Darmstadt in 1978, he notably referred to the new current in France of
which he was a part as one based on the application to instrumental
composition of ideas and techniques from the electronic music studio.56
During this course of studies, Grisey made a concerted effort to improve
his mathematical knowledge and abilities, covering, for example, math-
ematical sequences and series, arithmetical and geometrical progressions of
rhythmic values (and the distinction between their respective representa-
tions as curves on X–Y axis graphs), logarithms, exponentials, and the

54
Metabolae are discussed in Xenakis, Formalized Music, 190–4.
55
Baillet, Gérard Grisey, fondements, 49–50. Stockhausen uses the term phase in his essay
‘. . . How Time Passes . . .’, 10.
56
Grisey, ‘Devenir du son’, 342–3 (edited out of the original published essay). On Grisey’s
studies with Marie, see Cagney, ‘Synthesis and Deviation’, 191–201. Marie probably
introduced Grisey to Deleuze’s writings, about which he was enthusiastic. Murail also
created a tape work at Marie’s studio, Lovecraft (1972).
92 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

application of the golden section to durations. In this, too, Marie’s classes

were instrumental; in one of them, for instance, he had demonstrated how
he used Pascal’s triangle in his recent composition Tlaloc (1967), the
opening section of which, a progressively densifying orchestral texture, is
a clear antecedent of Grisey’s own process forms.57 This training encour-
aged Grisey towards the later writing of tables of frequency spectra and
resultant tone harmonies, as for instance in his Jour, contre jour or Tempus
ex machina, the sketches for which illustrate the large amount of math-
ematical calculation in Grisey’s mature method.58 During the same period,
Grisey also started reading up on acoustics and perception, including
Gestalt theory, purchasing introductions to these topics in the ‘Que sais-
je?’ series (primers in the style of ‘A Very Short Introduction’). It is likely
that this was under Stockhausen’s influence (‘The statistic, the aleatoric,
always applies to the small elements within larger gestalten’).59 The
Gestaltist distinction between synthetic and analytic attitudes appears in
Grisey’s later description of his music as synthetic as opposed to the
predominantly analytic music of serialism.60 Arguably even more crucial
for the development of spectralism was the concept of figure in Gestalt
theory. Since Charme, Grisey had been exploring a modified version of
Messiaen’s personnages sonores, and a renewed effort to compose percep-
tually distinct auditory figures would underpin the composition of his first
tentatively spectral work, D’eau et de pierre.
One begins to see this with the ending of Vagues, chemins, le souffle,
which features the repetition and variation of a sound archetype, the
‘Breath’ of the work’s title. Vagues, chemins, le souffle’s form is ternary.
The first movement, as has been seen, opens with the solo amplified
clarinet playing a series of long, swelling notes, the ‘Waves’ of the title,
which become more dissonant and noisier over successive iterations; the
last movement, ‘Le Souffle’, ends with a series of antiphonal swelling
chords sounding over and back across the hall on winds, brass, and
percussion as the strings play glissandi that move in waves across the
two orchestral sections. In this way the ending is conceived as an orchestral
simulation of the solo clarinet beginning. The aforementioned micro-
scopic/macroscopic simulation – a precursor of spectralism’s technique
of instrumental synthesis – is found in the relation between the work’s

57
GGCPSF.
58
For two indicative accounts, see Baillet, Gérard Grisey, fondements, 167–76, and Féron,
‘Gérard Grisey: première section de Partiels’.
59
Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations, 71–2.
60
Grisey, ‘Vers une écriture synthétique’, 224.
 Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972) 93

Example 3.3 Final movement of Grisey’s Vagues, chemins, le souffle. © 1974 Gérard
Billaudot Éditeur SA, Paris. Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.
94 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

beginning and ending. The closing antiphonal swelling chords alternately

sound two major-third dyads: a C and an E followed by a G♭ and a B♭, the
overlap of which creates a chord that in tonal harmony might by classified
as an inverted French sixth chord or a dominant seventh with a flattened
fifth. The chord is thus analogous to the chord that ends Dérives (a chord,
in that work, modelled on the harmonic spectrum), and the sensory
impression of the Dérives chord, a sensuous lounging within a spectrally
rich harmony, is also applicable to ‘Le Souffle’ (Ex. 3.3). Grisey’s pro-
gramme note states: ‘The third movement, “Breath”, is a sort of timbral
mirror of the first [movement], being likewise made up of swaying motion;
this time, waves of breath.’61 Grisey’s sketches show that he conceived this
gradual evolution of a synthetic sound figure as a ‘metabolism of timbre’.62
Grisey filtered this concept through his own imagination rather than
simply seeking faithfully to imitate Xenakis’s usage. It points the way
towards Grisey’s mature dynamic approach to acoustic material generating
musical form.

61
Grisey, programme note for Vagues, chemins, le souffle, 1975.
62
Although the word métabole also served as the title of one of Dutilleux’s orchestral works,
Grisey was using the term in Xenakis’s sense (albeit more loosely), to denote the process
of mutation of a parametrically defined sound complex.
 4 On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972)

D’eau et de pierre for two ensemble groups is Grisey’s last student work
and first idiomatically spectral work, albeit in a tentative way.
In comparison with Grisey’s previous works, D’eau et de pierre is radically
stripped down. Like Charme, it is based on the interrelation of two
antithetical musical personnages – here, two separate instrumental groups,
which are now audibly distinct. The first group plays a static chord
inspired by (but not modelled on) a harmonic spectrum on F, with
‘colouration’ by high string harmonics suggestive of resultant tones (again,
not modelled on them). This static personnage comprises the core material.
The second, antithetical group appears at intervals playing sporadic,
aggressive rhythms that ‘disturb’ the first group, like the surface of a pool
disturbed by a projectile stone. As the work progresses, each aggression
disturbs the first group more and more, making the chord consequently
more and more inharmonic, until in a chaotic middle section the two
groups fuse in a squall of sound. Eventually, the calm, static chord of the
outset returns. The work thus has a ternary form, and it lasts around
twenty minutes in performance. Here, in nascent form, we find several
features characteristic of spectral music: a well-defined auditory figure
modelled on the harmonic spectrum; a process of gradual deviation by
which a given sound figure changes in appearance; a dualistic conception
whereby one sound figure influences another sound figure; and a ternary
form, starting from relative harmonic simplicity and moving into har-
monic complexity before returning again to harmonic simplicity.
Needless to say, when the Ensemble Européen de Musique Contemporaine,
conducted by Michel Tabachnik, premiered D’eau et de pierre on
26 November 1972 at Metz’s Théâtre Municipal, nobody, least of all Grisey,
considered it the beginning of a new current in music, since the work was
quite in key with other so-called ‘meditative music’ from around this time –
but so it proved.

The Compositional Process

At the end of June 1972, Grisey received a telegram at his home at the Cité
des Arts with welcome news:

[95]
96 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

HAVE WON THE PRIX DE ROME COME WITH MADAME<+TODAY

10:30 CHINESE RESTAURANT <=1/BIS RUE JEANMERMOZ<=PARIS
8 BEST WISHES<= MESSIAEN<=1

The Prix de Rome news was probably unsurprising for Grisey, given that
he could submit in his composition portfolio Vagues, chemins, le souffle
(commissioned for the Orchestre Philharmonique de l’ORTF), Initiation
(winner of the Prix de Composition at the 1973 Biennale Internationale de
Paris), and Perichoresis (subsequently winner of the Prix Hervé Dugardin
awarded by the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique
(SACEM)). Nonetheless, it was a relief, enabling Grisey to relax in the
knowledge that for the next two years he would be sponsored to develop
his craft as a pensionnaire at the Villa Medici in Rome. Grisey’s two-
member Prix de Rome composition jury consisted of Messiaen and
Xenakis. Meeting Grisey for the first time, Xenakis was impressed, subse-
quently (in a letter of reference) calling the young Frenchman ‘an out-
standing imagination in new music and [. . .] one of the most gifted young
French composers that will count in the development of this art’ – an
assessment partly due to Grisey’s having been generous enough to take on
board Xenakis’s influence.2 Grisey and his wife would move to Rome in
September 1972, joining his former classmate Murail and the other French
prospects at the French Academy.
At the close of the 1971–2 academic year – Grisey’s seventh year of
studies at the Paris Conservatoire – Messiaen granted his composition
students an analysis class on his own Turangalîla-symphonie (1946–8).
At the time, following the disappointment of his cancelled premiere at
Royan in March and informed by his electroacoustics lessons with Marie,
Grisey was working on a composition for clarinet and tape, and Messiaen’s
archetypal male/female dualism in Turangalîla fed Grisey’s imagination as
he developed what was another dualism-based work. Grisey was also
looking ahead to attending the Darmstadt Summer Courses for the first
time, as Messiaen had helped him and Levinas to do (by writing letters of
recommendation),3 where Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Ligeti, among
others, would be holding seminars. Having by January 1972 finished
Vagues, chemins, le souffle, Grisey had been sketching his projected clari-
net and tape composition. At the Pantin Conservatoire, to which Marie’s
Centre International de Recherche Musicale (CIRM) and its electroacous-
tic studio had relocated, Grisey made recordings of different types of
clarinet sound. There is a possibility that a clarinet spectrogram in

1 2 3
GGCPSF. GGCPSF. Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 97

Grisey’s possession dated 1973, whose provenance is unknown, may have

been linked to this research. Grisey’s concept was of an electroacoustic
piece pitting the sound of a live clarinettist against pre-recorded clarinet
sounds played over a PA system. Grisey recorded and categorised seven
different types of clarinet sound:
I. Multiphonics [Doubles sons]
II. Multiphonics with split tones fff
III. Mouthed sounds [Trait]
IV. Glissandi
V. Bisbiglando [an enharmonic trill between two fingerings for the same note]
VI. Uncharacteristic timbre [Détimbré]
VII. Breathed notes

It is notable that each of the sound types identified by Grisey is an unstable

sound of the type that Dufourt would discuss in his essay ‘Musique
spectrale’.4 Having conceived a dualistic piece wherein, as in Charme,
mobile score elements would be associated with periodicity and fixed score
elements with aperiodicity, Grisey developed and refined the concept
towards what would become D’eau et de pierre.5
In personnages sonores fashion, Grisey envisaged two sound figures
exerting on each other mutual influence that modifies each other’s sonorous
character. In this regard, Grisey conceived a cause-and-effect logic under-
pinning the work, based on the acoustical material characteristic of each
personnage. This is significant, for now the drama enacted between the two
musical elements is generated by the constituent nature of those two elem-
ents: that is, the material produces the form; this would be a key character-
istic of Grisey’s mature style. In his initial sketches, two things stand out:
first, Grisey’s attempt to define in the piece two acoustical constants, one
associated with periodicity and the other with aperiodicity; second, a desire
that the form should comprise one sound type reacting to the other sound
type, a drama initially pitting against each other live clarinet and taped
clarinet. Grisey sketches graphics of these ‘reactions’ (for example, a stream
of taped sound which reacts to events on the clarinet). Consistent with his
dualistic conception and mythopoeic vision, Grisey came to associate the

4
Murail remarks that the exploration of strange sounds was characteristic of many young
composers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, following the collapse of serialism. Quoted in
Boivin, La classe de Messiaen, 163.
5
Theatricality would feature, too: as in the opening of Vagues, chemins, le souffle, in this
projected work the clarinettist walks around the stage. Grisey probably took this idea from
Boulez’s Domaines.
98 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

musical personnages with two deities from Hindu theology: Purusha and
Prakriti. Grisey indicates that a transformation occurs ‘when Prakriti
reaches a maximum, and he transforms Purusha up to the point that he
becomes in his turn Prakriti’. Grisey retains these names in the programme
note for D’eau et de pierre: the one element stable and calm, the other
unstable and aggressive. Here, Grisey extensively explores for the first time
the composition of auditory process. Through auditory process – periodic
waves provoking reactions and distortions – material and form are united.
Grisey conceives a form where a ‘constant’ element A (the personnage
played by the live clarinet) is altered in appearance, at first slightly, then
more and more. This alteration is to be achieved through controlled vari-
ation of the acoustical parameters that measure it. Grisey writes how the
change is to be effected: ‘One parameter, then two, then three, then four, etc.
Degrees of variation in relation to A [that is, the constant]. Growing density,
more and more frequent change, and in all the parameters . . .’ There is a
prominent statistical serialist element to Grisey’s vocabulary.
Earlier in the 1971–2 academic year, Messiaen had invited Stockhausen
to give a presentation to his composition class. The occasion was the
premiere of Trans (1971) for orchestra at Fleuret’s Journées de Musique
Contemporaine festival in October 1971, and as well as Trans, Stockhausen
discussed in Messiaen’s class Carré (1959–60) for orchestra. Stockhausen
was one of Grisey’s main artistic role models, and in a later interview
Grisey suggested the impact Stockhausen’s presentation had on his musical
thought:
What is happening when I inscribe a timbre or chord on the paper? I had to
go back to zero, make a sort of tabula rasa of all my knowledge. And when
one considered the foundations of perception, one quickly arrived at the
phenomenon Stockhausen called the degree of change, which originates in
Information Theory. Stockhausen had spoken about it at length when he had
come to Messiaen’s class to analyse Carré. He said, ‘When I wrote a chord,
then another, I wonder what has changed between the two.’ In other words,
what it important is not that the chord be constituted by such and such an
interval but that it engenders the degree of change.6

6
‘Quoted in Cohen-Levinas, ‘Gérard Grisey: du spectralisme’, 53. On Grisey’s use of the
degree of change in Partiels, see Féron, ‘Gérard Grisey: première section’, 88. A roughly
contemporary recorded lecture by Stockhausen at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
London gives an idea of what Grisey heard Stockhausen say in Messiaen’s class: ‘the degree
of change is a quality that can be composed as well as the characteristics of the music that
is actually changing. I can compose with a series of degrees of change, or we can call them
degrees of renewal. Then I can start with any musical material and follow the pattern of
change, and see where it leads, from zero change to a defined maximum.’ Quoted in Loco
Nordin, ‘Stockhausen Edition No. 7 (Momente)’.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 99

It is in D’eau et de pierre that Grisey introduces for the first time the degree
of change as an acoustical control. Alongside the use of a quasi-spectral
harmony and the principle of recurrence and deviation, it is the technique
of measuring degrees of change or modification that gives D’eau et de
pierre the recognisable auditory quality of Grisey’s mature ensemble music.
Using the degree of change is a key way of achieving symmetry between
concept and percept: between the concept in the score and what the
listener actually hears. In Grisey’s mature style, change is always achieved
through a steady acoustical frame of reference (or Gestalt).
Grisey’s dualistic conception was guided as much by a vision of onto-
logical sound types as by their specific acoustical make-up. Before deciding
to model the first instrumental group on a quasi-spectral chord, Grisey
simply had the idea for what he termed an ‘absolute sound’:
1. Take off from the principle of an absolute sound without any event,
which directs itself a little
2. Research a mouth sound pp sempre, monochrome, featureless [sans
allure], smooth [lisse]
3. Simultaneous activation [action]
sound { rhythm
4. Think the progressive separation [éloignement] of an absolute sound in
one or several parameters simultaneously
5. The sections are determined by the action on one or more given
parameters and by the degree of separation from the absolute sound7

Describing element A, an absolute sound, Grisey wrote: ‘Smooth sounds pp

sempre, slow metabolism of pitches and of colours’. In speaking of a son
lisse, he was drawing on Boulez; in speaking of a métabole lente, he was
drawing on Xenakis. It was through a synthesis of diverse statistical
serialist thought that Grisey’s mature écriture was developing.
Around this time, in the wake of the Royan festival and Vagues, chemins, le
souffle’s premiere at Royan, Grisey received a commission to compose a new
work for large ensemble. The work was to be premiered at a new festival: the
Rencontres Internationales de Musique Contemporaine de Metz, whose
inaugural edition would be held in November and which over the next decade
would become one of the main contemporary music festivals in France.8
Given that the Royan festival took place in March, that Grisey began work

7
GGCPSF. For a fuller discussion of Grisey’s sketches, see Cagney, ‘Synthesis and
Deviation’, 265–76.
8
The Metz festival of new music owed its existence to Claude Lefèbvre (one of Boulez’s ex-
students in Basel), Fernand Quattrochi, and Claude Samuel (who had just left his role as
artistic director of Royan).
100 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

on this new ensemble piece in April (as is noted in its score), and that Claude
Samuel was involved in the artistic direction of both Royan and Metz, it seems
likely that Samuel offered the new commission to Grisey as a gesture of
compensation for the cancellation of his Royan premiere. In any case, it was
by this turn of events that Grisey reformulated the projected piece for clarinet
and tape towards a work for ensemble. Grisey’s concept for D’eau et de pierre
was thus largely already in place prior to the summer of 1972. The only
missing element was what material would embody the ‘absolute sound’.

Meditative Music in 1972

Grisey’s proclivity for harmony was long-standing, as was his distaste for
bland academic serialism. A journal entry from the late 1960s expresses his
views on the matter: ‘For me, atonality is non-existent. From the moment
when two different notes ring out one after the other or simultaneously, a
relation is established. All music possesses one or several tonal centres,
veritable poles of attraction. [. . .] Music must not follow a pre-established
system. The rule must be deduced from the example.’9 To recap, the first
significant use of harmonic centricity is in Perichoresis, which contains a
section prominently featuring minor triads and an ending based on a long
perfect fifth. This element is expanded in Vagues, chemins, le souffle into an
ending based on one prolonged consonant chord. Given this past engage-
ment with harmonicity, and given that Grisey had recently used Boulezian
resonance chords in Vagues, chemins, le souffle, it is unsurprising that in
his next composition Grisey should have explored harmonicity in more
detail. Moreover, the idea of a work based on Hindu principles and
droning chords had countercultural currency.
In early 1972, Grisey wrote a short text detailing his view of the musical
work, ‘Rétrouver une function musicale’ (‘Rediscovering Music’s
Function’). 10 Music, Grisey writes, unfortunately no longer has a social
function other than as a type of entertainment that one all but forgets after
leaving the concert hall. As background noise, it is used to stave off silence.
The job of the composer, accordingly, is ‘to recover Silence, first of all: then
music, as a sublimation and transfiguration of the Material [Matière]’.

9
Grisey, ‘Pages du journal: trois fragments non datés’, 313–14.
10
He probably wrote this text for projected inclusion in the 1972 Royan festival booklet,
though it remained unpublished until 2008. Grisey, ‘Rétrouver une fonction musicale’,
171. All quotations in this paragraph are from that source.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 101

Here again, as he had in a 1967 journal entry,11 Grisey expresses a view of

music as a pseudo-divine sublimation of acoustic matter, a view resonating
with Teilhard. Grisey concludes in a messianic tone:
Music will only find its place to the extent that musicians [by which he means
composers as well as performers] become aware of their leading role. They are
the custodians of a current with the power to transform the world, beginning
by transforming themselves, accustomed as they are to this tide of
unconscious rhythms – to those vibrations coming to us from far off.

‘Rediscovering Music’s Function’ finishes by positing two alternative views

of the musical work. Music, says Grisey, can be imagined as either a ‘Lotus
Flower’ or a ‘Cathedral’, and it is up to the composer to opt for one or the
other, or to make an optimal synthesis.
Grisey’s language is of its time: in Hinduism and Buddhism, the lotus is
a sacred flower, associated with Brahma and symbolising purity and
detachment. Such countercultural ideas were voguish, and Indian thought
was cited by Stockhausen, Messiaen, La Monte Young, and Éloy among
others. Grisey’s aims for his meditative music, a sort of surrogate for
religion, are also similar to Mark Rothko’s aims for his paintings.12
It was not for nothing that years later, in the context of a ‘serious’ music-
theoretical article, Grisey cited Carlos Casteneda’s The Teachings of Don
Juan, a book popular in the 1960s counterculture that in part discusses
psychedelic drugs and spirit journeys.13 (Grisey envisaged Vagues, che-
mins, le souffle as a ‘journey’ and would do likewise with Dérives.) In these
ways, the post-1960s countercultural outlook is an element in spectral
music’s provenance, evidently influencing Grisey’s conception of the music
he wished to compose. Notwithstanding their surface differences, Vagues,
chemins, le souffle is a ‘trance’ work whose spatial processes aim to
hypnotise the listener, while Grisey’s mature so-called spectral music is
‘characterized by the hypnotic power of slowness and by a virtual obsession
with continuity’.14
A composer whose aesthetic Grisey was aware of at this time was Éloy.
In the early 1960s, Éloy had been a protégé of Boulez’s and one of the

11
In this journal entry, Grisey describes art and religious faith as indissociable. Art, he
writes, is the ‘sublimation of Material [Matière]. The mind in its plenitude transforms it,
shapes it, gives to it a sort of pre-existence, image and prefiguration of the Existence of
God that it will reach at the end of time.’ Grisey, journal entry, 9 October 1967, in ‘Pages
de journal: fragments 1967–1974’, 315.
12
Grisey’s friend Gérard Zinsstag recalls discussing Rothko’s art with Grisey when they lived
in Berlin at the beginning of the 1980s. Zinsstag, ‘Grisey: chronologie des souvenirs’.
13
Cited in Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 259. 14
Grisey, ‘Did You Say Spectral?’, 2.
102 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

most promising young composers in France. Having returned from the

USA to France in 1969, Éloy was by 1972 one of the big hitters in France,
and throughout the 1970s he received commissions for large-scale works
from most of the new music festivals in France. Éloy’s aesthetic, as
Grisey’s would, focused on extended durations, electroacoustics, and
the integration of non-Western thought into Western music. In the early
1970s, Éloy directed a number of programmes on French Radio on Indian,
Japanese, Balinese, and other musics,15 and he contrasted his critical
engagement with these non-Western musics with the risible French
tradition of exoticism and Orientalism, which amounted, he said, to
‘intellectual colonialism’.16 By 1972, this engagement had produced
Faisceaux-diffractions and Kâmakalâ (1971), both of which were per-
formed in October 1971 at the Journées de Musique Contemporaine, as
part of a ‘Journée Jean-Claude Éloy’. Were it not that Grisey was already at
the time near finishing Vagues, chemins, le souffle, one would suspect
some influence of Kâmakalâ on the younger composer’s work. ‘Kâmakalâ’
is a Sanskrit word taken from the Tantric Shivaism of India meaning ‘the
Triangle of Energies’. ‘[The word] is expressed here’, Éloy writes, ‘in the
sense of the manifestation of energy, erotic, and cosmic energy (Kama);
that which allows Shiva, by his union with Shakti (feminine energy) to
create all the subdivisions of himself (Kala) and therefore to progressively
generate all of the universe’s complexity’.17 The entire work is a process
(comprised of smaller, sectional processes) moving from a low register to
a high one, ‘a music enlarging itself very slowly’. Kâmakalâ opens with
several minutes of slow vocal intonations sung at the lowest point of the
bass register. The vocal intonations of Kâmakalâ’s opening (Ex. 4.1),
arriving periodically in successive waves, degenerate over time towards
noise, and in performance this opening sounds similar to the opening of
Vagues, chemins, le souffle: the slow, periodic repetition of these bass
‘mantras’, which gradually mutate over quarter of an hour or so, is
analogous to the slow clarinet intonations of ‘Vagues’. For the last several
minutes, there is a constant layer of upward-moving vocal glissandi,
reminiscent of the last region of Stockhausen’s Hymnen and not unlike
the very end of Dérives. This use of simple processes, drones, periodicity,
and mystical imagery shows that Éloy’s music was a precedent for what
Grisey was exploring in D’eau et de pierre. Éloy’s use of extended dur-
ations and periodic repetition reflected an aim to integrate into Western

15
Some of this is captured in Éloy, ‘Musiques d’Orient’.
16
Quoted in Halbreich, ‘Semaines musicales internationales de Paris’.
17
This quotation and the next one from Éloy, liner notes to Kâmakalâ.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 103

Example 4.1 Éloy’s Kâmakalâ (1971) for choir and orchestra. © Copyright by
Universal Edition A.G., Vienna/UE 15912. Reproduced by kind permission of the
publisher.

art music an Eastern conception of time, using repeated auditory events

‘following [a] very, very slow transformation’.18 In California, Éloy had
got to know Stockhausen and heard the music of Young and Riley, and
when asked his opinion of Young’s music in 1972, Éloy said he approved
of it: ‘[b]ecause I have personally this tendency to like extreme slow
process, extreme length of time [sic]’. Speaking of the opening of
Kâmakalâ, Messiaen remarked that it sounded like Tibetan music ‘to
the point of obsession’.19 One of the main issues critics discussed in
relation to the work was its use of extended durations (which would over
the 1970s become longer and longer in Éloy’s music, peaking with Gaku
no michi’s four hours). Another similarity with Grisey lies in Éloy’s
experimentation with spectrographic analysis as a compositional aid: just
as Grisey would later, in 1971 Éloy visited Leipp’s acoustics laboratories at
the Faculté des Sciences of the University of Paris, where, with Leipp and
Michèle Castellengo, Éloy used the laboratory’s sonograph to analyse the
acoustic structure of the voice in Indian singing, which he used in
researching Kâmakalâ.20 Resonances with Grisey are also found in
Éloy’s Faisceaux-diffractions (‘Rays/Diffractions’, 1970) for twenty-eight
musicians. The title Faisceaux-diffractions is intended at once in a phys-
ical and a spiritual sense. The conductor Boris de Vinogradov, conductor
of the French premiere and later l’Itineraire’s first conductor, sums up the
physical sense: ‘Éloy took inspiration from physical phenomena to evoke

18
This quotation and the next from Amirkhanian, ‘Ode to Gravity: Jean-Claude Eloy’. That
the interviewer probes Éloy’s opinion of Young is evidence that Young’s music was a
topic of conversation in new music circles in Paris in 1972.
19
Éloy, ‘Mémoires sur ‟Kâmakalâ” . . .’. 20
Éloy, ‘Mémoires sur ‟Kâmakalâ” . . .’.
104 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

them musically. Usually when composers aim at such a project, the music
they produce is dry. But here, the music is sublime and gives the impres-
sion of a ray of sunlight diffracting on the surface of the ocean.’21 This
image, modelled on natural phenomena, would be close enough to
Grisey’s imagery, even were it not for the fact that diffraction is the same
process referenced by Grisey in D’eau et de pierre (diffraction as the
pattern of turbulence in a pool of water when a stone is thrown in).
That Éloy’s mature music in part takes off from Boulez’s use of resonance
chords in Pli selon pli (which, as seen, was an influence on Grisey) again
makes Éloy an important reference in a consideration of the historical
context of French spectral music. For a brief period in the early 1970s, this
was the orchestral music at the crest of the avant-garde wave, open to non-
Western influences and utopian visions. Grisey’s two 1972 works are
cousins of Kâmakalâ, Trans, Terretektorh, Marie’s Concerto ‘Milieu
divin’, and Young’s psychoacoustics-informed drones.
It was in May 1972, as Grisey was converting his clarinet and tape
sketches into plans for an ensemble piece, that La Monte Young had his
first concert in Paris. Young and Riley – whose music was at this point not
yet called minimalism, or musique repetitive, but was rather referred to as
‘underground music’ – first performed in France in July 1970 at Nuits de la
Fondation Maeght in the south of France, a festival organised by the artist
Daniel Caux (who had known Young since the early 1960s through having
been a satellite member of Fluxus) and Aimé Maeght, a millionaire art
collector. Caux was the main figure in the introduction of this music to
France. As well as programming Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, he helped
organise the release of portrait LPs of Young, Riley, and Reich on the
Parisian Shandar Records label and from 1973 onwards programmed
American minimalist music at the Paris Festival d’Automne (at which
the Philip Glass Ensemble performed in 1973). Some idea of the growth
in interest in this new American music is in early 1970s is given in the fact
that when Cathy D’Arcy, head of Shandar Records, organised a concert of
Reich’s music in Cannes in 1971, three hundred people attended, whereas
when Reich performed at a festival in the south of France in 1973,
supposedly three thousand people attended.22 On 21 June 1970, Caux
hosted a three-hour radio programme on France Culture focused on
Young (featuring contributions from Cage and Riley), during which at
one point a half-hour-long excerpt from Young’s drone music was

21
Quoted in Madurell, L’Ensemble ars nova, 194.
22
Amirkhanian, ‘Ode to Gravity: Shandar Records’.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 105

played.23 The Paris concert in May 1972 featured Young, Zazeela, Pandit
Pran Nath, and Riley. The event was listed as ‘not to be missed’ in the
Nouvel observateur, with Young described as ‘the most esoteric of contem-
porary music’s sorcerers’, and it had a high attendance.24 Particularly
suggestive, given the techniques Grisey explored for the first time in
D’eau et de pierre, is a publication released to mark Young’s Paris visit, a
Caux-edited special issue of the magazine Chroniques de l’art vivant on
Young’s music.25 In it, Caux wrote an overview of Young’s musical devel-
opment and detailed his aesthetics, discussing the complex mathematical
basis of Young’s ostensibly simple music, wherein the combination of
extended durations and a flux of psychoacoustic identity is based on close
attention to and manipulation of the mechanics of human auditory per-
ception.26 Certain of Young’s compositions for Fluxus were published
(including the famous Composition 1960 No. 7, a graphic of a perfect fifth
with the instruction ‘to be held for a long time’) as well as a fragment of
Young’s ‘Lecture 1960’, the final lines of which discuss the notion of
‘entering into the interior of sound’27 – a phrase that would be consistently
used for spectral music by its practitioners. One of Grisey’s main harmonic
techniques, used in the second section of Partiels, is the modelling of
ensemble harmonies on sum and difference tones, and there is a hint of
resultant tone harmonies in the high string ‘colouration’ of the static
spectral chord in D’eau et de pierre. In this context, it is suggestive that
in the interview between Caux and Young published in Chroniques de l’art
vivant, Young talks in detail about the sum and difference tone principle
and its systematic exploration in his music. Young and Zazeela performed
a Sound and Light concert in Paris on 30 May 1972. Alongside this, Pandit
Pran Nath gave three concerts, where he was accompanied by Young,
Zazeela, and Riley, over the weekend of 28–30 May at Le Palace on rue
du Faubourg-Montmartre. Grisey was interested in Indian classical music,
and if he was in Paris at this time he may have attended one of these
concerts. While all this is suggestive, Grisey made no notes which state that
he attended this event or that he knew Young’s music from having heard it

23
The programme was entitled ‘La Monte Young: One Sound’, and full details are available
on the personal website of Daniel Caux, accessed 1 January 2015, www.jacquelinecaux
.com/jacqueline/en/daniel-caux-radio-la-monte-young-one-sound-2.php. It has been
uploaded to YouTube (with an erroneous date) as ‘La Monte Young - music +
interviews - 1977 - part 1’, accessed 1 November 2022, https://youtu.be/rCeChTbwFVg.
24
Amirkhanian, ‘Ode to Gravity: Shandar Records’.
25
Caux, Chroniques de l’art vivant, No. 30, special issue on La Monte Young.
26
Caux, ‘La Monte Young: créer des états psychologiques précis’.
27
Young, ’Lecture 1960’, 25.
106 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

on French Radio. A definite catalyst, though, was Stockhausen’s Stimmung,

to which Grisey was exposed at Darmstadt.

Darmstadt Summer Courses 1972

Grisey’s notes from Darmstadt in 1972 show his engagement with and
occasional dismissal of ideas set forth by Xenakis, Stockhausen, Ligeti, and
others. That year was the first in which Xenakis was invited to teach at
Darmstadt. This invitation, and the fact that the summer courses opened
that year with concerts solely programming Xenakis’s music, reflected his
growing status in France and abroad. As has been seen, Grisey was
immersed in Xenakis’s music around the time of his studies with Marie:
Xenakis had influenced Vagues, chemins, le souffle and its spatial and
process elements, and Grisey had recently met Xenakis when he sat on
his Prix de Rome composition jury. The summer courses opened on
Thursday 20 July with two concerts of Xenakis’s music at the Städtische
Sporthalle,28 and on the same day Xenakis’s seminars began, running for
three days. Grisey’s notes from Xenakis’s seminars are more extensive than
his notes for Stockhausen’s and Ligeti’s respective seminars, though this is
probably due to Xenakis’s seminars having taken place first and Grisey’s
enthusiasm for note-taking having waned. Bálint András Varga states that
during Xenakis’s composition seminar the Darmstadt students had diffi-
culty in understanding what the Greek composer was talking about. Baillet
similarly claims that Grisey was ‘repelled by the mathematical parapher-
nalia [Xenakis] deployed there’,29 though he is probably only partly cor-
rect; Grisey was equipped to understand some of Xenakis’s mathematical
models, but he was critical of their application. It is indicative of Grisey’s
viewpoint that he would later criticise the Greek composer’s distinction
between hors temps and en temps. A few of Xenakis’s topics are worth
noting. The statistical serialist parameters Grisey uses in D’eau et de pierre,
for example, follow those of Xenakis as discussed in this seminar: in
addition to the usual pitch, duration, intensity, and so on they include
density, granularity, and entropy (order/disorder). Xenakis discussed com-
posing relative degrees of order and disorder (not dissimilar to
Stockhausen’s degrees of change), which, again, are used by Grisey and
discussed in the essay based on one of his own 1980 Darmstadt seminars,

28
In the afternoon, Syrmos (1965), Hiketides (1964), and Synaphaï (1971); in the evening,
Anaktoria (1969).
29
Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, 125, and Baillet, ‘Des transformations
continues’, 237.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 107

‘Tempus ex machina’.30 Another crossover is in Xenakis’s pointing out the

simultaneous coexistence of three different scales in acoustic-
compositional material: the macro scale (‘stochastic process, structured
elements’ and so on), the medium scale (‘pitches, time, intensity’), and
the micro scale (Fourier analysis, ‘Atmospheric pressure X variations in
time’)31. These are, again, similar to Grisey’s three temporal scales: those of
whales, humans, and insects.
Ligeti gave nine composition seminars in total, which on alternating
days were delivered in German, English, and French. Grisey showed Ligeti
the large score of Vagues, chemins, le souffle; Ligeti remarked that although
it had a certain maladie, it was not yet Grisey’s own particular maladie.
According to Levinas, Ligeti then made two recommendations: that Grisey
study Chowning’s use of resultant (sum and difference) tones and that he
read Berlioz’s thoughts on musical acoustics as recorded in his Grand traité
d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes.32 At the Paul Sacher
Foundation are additional sheets of paper seemingly from this Darmstadt
seminar. On two sheets of manuscript paper (headed ‘LIGETI Lontano
(canons)’) Ligeti provides a harmonic reduction of that piece, with instru-
ment family names written beside different sets of notes. Along with these,
Ligeti gave out a photocopied page from a German book, again featuring a
notated harmonic reduction (labelled: ‘Abb. 8: G. Ligeti, Lontano für
Orchester, Tonhöhen-Netz’). And Ligeti also analysed the different
sections of Lontano, with another hand-out in English featuring commen-
tary (for example, ‘GRADUAL ACCUMULATION OF INSTRUMENTS /
FULL ORCH. PRESENT / EXCLUSIVELY STRINGS TEXTURE (PLUS 1
CLARINET)’). Grisey was in fact already familiar with Lontano and owned
a copy of its score.33 Ligeti also analysed Ramifications (1968) for strings,
Melodien (1971) for orchestra, and the two Études for organ (1967 and
1969); the organ works were also performed in concert by Gerd Zacher.34
A final piece of advice Grisey gleaned from Ligeti’s seminar would prove
revelatory: to educate himself further on psychoacoustics by reading Fritz
Winckel’s 1960 book Phänomene des musikalischen Hörens. D’eau et de

30
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 244.
31
From Grisey’s handwritten notes from Xenakis’s seminar, GGCPSF.
32
Levinas, ‘Rupture et système’, 36. Féron writes: ‘Ligeti talked about the use of
combination tones in his Ten Pieces (1968) for wind quintet and made reference to
publications in the area of acoustics.’ Féron, ‘Spectra as Theoretical and Practical Models’.
33
GGCPSF.
34
Aspects of Grisey’s Modulations resemble Ligeti’s Melodien, the French premiere of
which took place at the Domaine Musical on the evening Grisey’s D’eau et de pierre
was performed.
108 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

pierre would use a formant model for the quasi-spectral chord, the gentle
start of Grisey’s exploration of psychoacoustical models.
Not among Grisey’s notes is an article Ligeti wrote describing a proto-
spectral conception almost identical to that of D’eau et de pierre in its
finished form: ‘States, Events, Transformations’.35 This essay was first
published in 1960 as ‘Zustände, Ereignisse, Wandlungen: Bemerkungen
zu meinem Orchesterstiick Apparitions’ and then appeared revised in
1967 as ‘Zustände, Ereignisse, Wandlungen’.36 Using Apparitions as an
example, Ligeti describes a cause-and-effect conception whereby the
music’s form is generated from its material as the textural transformation
resultant of the impact of one type of musical material upon another –
precisely as happens with the static and aggressor groups in D’eau et de
pierre. In Ligeti’s essay, the first musical element is a smooth, synthetic
sonic mass (or, as Ligeti puts it, a ‘resonant texture’; again, a similarity with
Grisey) whose dimensions take up the entirety of the heard acoustic space.
The second element is described as sounds which ‘emerge suddenly, as
resonant phenomena, and disappear for the most part just as quickly’.37
The periodic, sudden appearance of this second type of sound causes ‘a
disturbance of the original planelike sound [. . .], almost as if the disturb-
ance were transformed into a vibrating mass’.38 Each action of sound type
2 causes an equal and opposite reaction in sound type 1: the greater the
dynamic of the aggression, for instance, the greater the disturbance in
sound type 1. Eventually this leads to a tipping point whereafter the work’s
texture changes radically. While D’eau et de pierre does not follow these
prescriptions to the letter, its formal conception – that of a static pool of
water whose surface is periodically disturbed by stones – is remarkably
similar.
Before I turn to Stockhausen’s seminars on Stimmung and Mantra, three
other presences at Darmstadt in 1972 are worth touching on in brief: John
Chowning’s computer sound synthesis, the Romanian spectral music of

35
Grisey and Ligeti corresponded sporadically up to the 1990s, mainly at Grisey’s
instigation, with the younger composer regularly sending the elder composer tapes of
his latest works. Ligeti said in the 1990s that spectral music had influenced him (as is
explicit in the Hamburg Concerto), and in 1997, Grisey told Ligeti that Ligeti’s recent
music had influenced Vortex temporum. Grisey compared their relationship to that of
Haydn and Mozart: ‘I like this ball game: as did Haydn and Mozart, they say. However,
I don’t know if you are Haydn – but in any case, alas, I am not Mozart!’ Gyorgy Ligeti
Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation.
36
Ligeti, ‘Zustände, Ereignisse, Wandlungen’, in Melos, no. 34 (1967), 165–9.
37
Ligeti, ‘States, Events, Transformations’, 169–70.
38
Ligeti, ‘States, Events, Transformations’, 169–70.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 109

Octavian Nemescu, and the texture-based ‘sound plasma’ music of

Horațiu Rădulescu.
On the second day at Darmstadt, Chowning gave a public showcase on
frequency modulation (FM) synthesis and sound spatialisation in discus-
sion with Ligeti. Chowning’s talk was entitled ‘New Experiments with
Sound Generation and Sound Motions in Imaginary Space’. Chowning
had invented FM synthesis in 1967. Following upon the work of Max
Mathews and Jean-Claude Risset at Bell Laboratories, FM synthesis
revolutionised computer sound synthesis, offering a computationally
economical formula for the generation of electronic sounds that convin-
cingly emulated the richness of acoustic instruments. The micro-
polyphony of Ligeti’s early sound mass works such as Apparitions
(1958–9) and Atmosphères (1960–1) had been inspired by Ligeti’s experi-
ence in the electronic studio at Cologne working on additive synthesis,
and as someone who made a point of keeping abreast of developments in
computer music, Ligeti recognised the potential of Chowning’s new
technique. Grisey had been introduced to principles of electroacoustic
composition at the CIRM, and it is possible that he was already aware by
this stage of Jean-Claude Risset’s work in computer music composition,
work with which Grisey’s mature style has much in common. Risset’s
computer composition Mutation (1969), often cited as a precursor of
spectral music (not least by Dufourt),39 explores, as its title suggests, the
common perceptual ground between harmony and timbre through the
varying articulation of complex sounds. On 3 June 1970, Risset had
presented a seminar at the Paris Conservatoire,40 at which he discussed
his new method of computer sound synthesis and its wider implications
as a model for how the human auditory apparatus perceives sound.
(Risset had made a similar presentation the previous year to Émile
Leipp’s Parisian acoustics laboratory on ‘The Computer as a Musical
Instrument’.) One might detect a hint of influence on Grisey in the fact
that Risset’s focus at Bell Laboratories was on the synthesis of brass
sounds, for which he analysed the transient envelope of complex tones
determinant for our perception of its timbre, resulting in a catalogue of
synthetic brass tones,41 while Grisey’s first spectral musical simulation
was, likewise, of a brass instrument – the low E of a trombone, in the

39
See, for example, Dufourt, ‘Les Bases théoriques et philosophiques de la musique
spectrale’, 385–6.
40
See Robert, Pierre Schaeffer, vol. 1, 251–2, which draws on Rissin, ‘Séminaire du 3 juin
1970’, as cited in Schaeffer, De l’expérience musicale, 97.
41
Risset, An Introductory Catalog of Computer-Synthesized Sounds.
110 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

so-called instrumental synthesis sections at the end of Périodes and the

start of Partiels.
Following Chowning and Ligeti’s discussion, an evening concert took place
at the Sporthalle featuring an ensemble from Bucharest, Musica Nova, per-
forming a programme of recent Romanian music. Of particular interest is
Octavian Nemescu’s Concentric (1969). Along with Corneliu Cezar, Nemescu
is one of the founders of the spectral current in Romanian music, which
developed prior to and independently of the spectral current in France.
Concentric is scored for ensemble (clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano) and
tape. After an opening with a synthetic gong tone, there follows the entry in
the tape part of a pedal drone of harmonic overtones entering and disappear-
ing over a continuous fundamental. The acoustic instruments enter sporadic-
ally, playing agitated bursts in contrast to the continuity and stability of the
tape’s spectral drone. Nemescu remarked of this Darmstadt 1972 concert:
On the same occasion Stockhausen presented and extensively commented his
piece “Stimmung“. This is a work raised around a major 7th and 9th chord,
which can be seen as spectral music, too. Many comments were made on the
resemblance but mainly on the differences between the 2 works. It seemed
like a new aesthetic direction appeared: the recovery, from a different
position, of something long forgotten (the consonance).42

On 21 and 22 July, Horațiu Rădulescu gave the presentation ‘The Theory

of My Plasma Music: Certainty and Uncertainty in Free Cooperation’.
Some of what Rădulescu said on this occasion is similar to his 1975 treatise
Sound Plasma’s first section, ‘ENTER THE SOUND’: ‘The sound in itself is
an endless ocean of vibrations. [. . .] Although the vulgar trend has been
towards a primarily rhythmic music, and the “modern” music meant an
exaggerated use of percussion, the field of pure music has acquired more
continuous “sound beings” such as Ligeti’s Atmosphères and especially
Stockhausen’s Stimmung.’43 Grisey attended Rădulescu’s talk and did not
buy what Rădulescu was selling, and nor did the rest of the audience, who
became restless as it went on.44 Nemescu said: ‘He preached in Darmstadt
the idea of “plasmatic music”. He was living in Paris while I still lived in
Bucharest, as I do now. I think I met then Grisey, too. We were still young,
not yet acknowledged composers.’45 On the final evening of the summer

42
Nemescu, email to the author, 22 June 2014. Some remarks on Nemescu’s music are
found in Beimel, ‘Such nach dem Einklang’. See also Surianu, ‘Romanian Spectral
Music’, 24.
43
Rădulescu, Sound Plasma. 44
See Heaton, ‘Horatiu Rădulescu’.
45
Nemescu, email to the author, 22 June 2014.
 On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 111

Example 4.2 Levinas’s Arsis et thesis (1971) for amplified solo bass flute. The circled notes are half
pitched, half breathed. © Copyright Editions Henry Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by kind permission of
the publisher.

courses, Saturday 5 August, Rădulescu’s piece was performed at the

Kompositionsstudio: Flood for the Eternal’s Origins (Conclusive Text –
Evo-Involution – Everlasting Music), for four soloists, groups, or ensembles.
The performers were, alongside Rădulescu, Christel Kopp, Kevin Volans,
Vivier, Richard Shaer, Elias Dahlhaus, and Dan Lustgarten. The piece was
paired with a performance earlier in the evening of Stockhausen’s
Kontakte. Grisey and a Vietnamese mistress had travelled to Darmstadt
with the Quebecois composers Walter Boudreau and Claude Vivier
(Boudreau had met Grisey in 1971 when he sat in on some of Messiaen’s
composition classes at the Paris Conservatoire). Boudreau commented:
‘[we] concluded rapidly that this guy was some sort of a musical
“Raspoutine”, a con artist. Vivier had to play the gong with his big toe
during the performance of an utterly stupid composition by Rădulescu.’46
Also performed in the Instrumentalstudio was Levinas’s Arsis et thesis
for amplified solo bass flute (Ex. 4.2), which Pierre-Yves Artaud had
premiered in Paris in 1971. Levinas said: ‘From 1969, the encounter with
the GRM and Stockhausen determined everything [for me]. In 1971, using
space and amplification with Arsis et thesis, I wrote that it was the revela-
tion of the hidden dimensions of the instrument – and this was before
Darmstadt 1972 with Stimmung and Mantra.’47 This work was also
inspired by his listening to his father’s laboured breathing during a grave

46
Boudreau, email to the author, 5 July 2014.
47
Levinas, email to the author, 16 December 2022.
112 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

illness.48 Although Boudreau thought the work of little merit at the time,
the respiratory theme connects with that of Grisey’s Périodes (notwith-
standing the completely different music).
Finally, I come to Stockhausen. Stockhausen analysed two works in
detail during his Darmstadt seminars, Mantra and Stimmung; alongside
this there was a performance of Stimmung on 6 August given by the
Collegium Vocale Köln (who had already performed Stimmung three times
in Paris). Though Stimmung premiered in 1968, it seems more in key with
the compositional atmosphere of 1972, an atmosphere it helped bring
about through its consonant narcosis, its relative rhythmic simplicity,
and its extended duration, all of which were becoming more broadly felt
in new music moving further into the 1970s.49 Of the Stimmung seminar,
Levinas writes: ‘Stockhausen clearly formulated the relations between the
original sound, its internal texture, and the deployment of a form, with
amplification and space revealing this spectral texture.’50
Stockhausen’s main enthusiasm was reserved for his recent work
Mantra (1972) for two pianos and ring modulator. He analysed Mantra
in detail, giving several pages of hand-outs containing charts and notated
examples.51 Some of these detail the thirteen-note row, or mantra, under-
lying the composition, with mirror mantras also noted in different-
coloured ink (the latter may have influenced Grisey’s pitch complexes in
D’eau et de pierre, some of his sketches exploring mirror forms). One of the
most telling notes Grisey took at Darmstadt is a brief one. Beside the
details he dutifully transcribed from Stockhausen on the expansion, con-
traction, and repetition of the thirteen original forms of the mantra, Grisey
writes: ‘Voir relation réalité <—> œuvre’. Here, in four words and a
symbol, is Grisey’s pithy judgment on the abstract compositional appar-
atus Stockhausen lays out in Mantra, emblematic of the abstractions of the
immediate post-war avant-garde: despite its seductive elegance, that appar-
atus is for the most part abstract, and one can barely perceive it in the
resultant music. The distinction between Mantra’s thirteen different ges-
tures and the repetition of the mantra across different scales in the work
(macro and micro) are for much of the time not perceptible. Grisey was

48
Levinas, ‘La Chanson du souffle’.
49
‘A major event: Stimmung. The harmonious chord, the birth of spectral music. Sounds
with an organic relation between themselves; a new conceptual energy; form self-
generating in the logic of timbre. A modernism that is resolutely post-serial.’ Levinas,
‘Discours de M. Michaël Levinas’.
50
Levinas, ‘Rupture et système’, 35–6.
51
All references to this seminar and Grisey’s response to it, GGCPSF.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 113

decisively set on moving away from this tendency towards symbolic

abstraction; he would later remark, ‘I am tempted to paraphrase St. Just
(“Revolution must stop at the perfection of happiness!”) by saying that
structure, whatever its complexity, must stop at the perceptibility of the
message.’52 In D’eau et de pierre, Grisey’s compositional parameterisation
is always geared towards the sound’s perceptibility, or, as he later put it,
obtaining the closest possible adequation between concept and percept.
Grisey was much more taken with Stimmung. According to Boudreau,
he, Boudreau, and Vivier lay on the floor during the evening performance
by the Collegium Vocale Köln, and they were subsequently almost kicked
off the Darmstadt tram for doing an impromptu rendition each day when
travelling.53 Levinas added that at one point during the performance, as the
choir droned, an aeroplane flew overhead, adding a counter-drone.54
Grisey’s notes from Stockhausen’s Stimmung seminar illustrate how cer-
tain elements of his subsequent compositional practice derive from this
Stimmung analysis. A first element is Grisey’s use, from Dérives onwards,
of the intervallic proportions of the harmonic spectrum to determine at
once a work’s harmonic content and its durational proportions:55 in
Stimmung, as Grisey notes, the small portion of the harmonic spectrum
used by Stockhausen determines both the relation between the sung
pitches and the relations between tempi. A second element is the view that
the harmonic series and periodicity are the same principle applied in
different domains. A third element is the notion of a work as auto-
engendering itself.56 For Grisey, the latter would create, from D’eau et de
pierre onwards, a style in which sound is always in flux, in which, as he
writes in his programme notes for Modulations, ‘all is in motion’, a music
of dynamism and radical transience.57 This auto-engendering of form from
material is also something achieved by Chowning’s FM synthesis (to
spectacular effect in Chowning’s work Stria). It should be noted that this
was already one of the underlying formal aims for Grisey’s projected
clarinet and tape piece sketched in the spring (albeit expressed in different
terms), so the influence did not only come from Stimmung. In the
following excerpt from Grisey’s Stimmung notes, he links periodicity and

52
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 257. 53
Boudreau, email to the author, 5 July 2013.
54
Levinas, telephone interview with the author, 9 December 2022.
55
For a description of Grisey’s method in this regard, see Féron, ‘The Emergence of
Spectra’, 343–75.
56
Discussed by Baillet in ‘La Musique comme auto-engendrement’, in Gérard Grisey:
fondements, 43–5.
57
Grisey, ‘Modulations’, in 138.
114 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

the harmonic spectrum, as he would in his own music from Dérives

onwards, and he links form and material through the principle of auto-
engenderment, which would also characterise his mature style (as in his
use of resultant tone harmonies):

2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 7 . 9 : same relationship1) between the tempi* as between the harm[onics]

2) between the numbers of units of a certain tempo ‘‘ ’’
* tempi = periodic beats = pitches = harmonics
Broadening the range of compositional possibilities by means of the accel. [speeding up] or rall.
[slowing down] of materials, the result of which will be a new timbre. The work auto-engenders
itself by means of compression.

Grisey had been seeking a musical style that would be more perceptually
based, and Stimmung became a reference in this regard. The terms in
which he speaks of Stimmung in his Darmstadt lecture ‘Tempus ex
machina’ show the role it played for him in validating the use of relatively
simple, perceptually immediate periodic rhythms: ‘Stimmung for six vocal-
ists by Stockhausen (1969) shows us that only some elementary, even
primary rhythms give us the very clear possibility of perceiving the tempo
of these rhythms.’58 This was an intuition Grisey had already had since
1970, as his journal shows.59 Stimmung’s perceptibility, encompassing
harmony and rhythm alike, suggested a whole ‘other approach’ to com-
position, as Grisey would say in a 1974 radio interview: ‘Stimmung [. . .]
leads us to listen to the interior of sound.’60 Nevertheless, in his 1980 epis-
tolary exchange with Dufourt, Grisey was at pains to distinguish his own
dynamic ‘liminal music’ from the static ‘spectral music’ of Stimmung.
No less important in Stimmung is the fact that, from a formal point of
view, summed up in the notion of ‘attunement’ or accordage, Stockhausen
extols a new set of compositional values having priority over the older,
post-war ones: values of immanence, tendency, attraction, communication,
and dynamic mutability, considered as the regulative values of a musical
work wherein, as in Dufourt’s idea of spectral music, form is an expression
of the material (rather than being the developmental elaboration of motivic
cells). Another insight lent by Grisey’s Stimmung notes is that, although he
was at this point aware of the harmonic spectrum, his knowledge of
acoustics was weak. Grisey notes – presumably because it was new to

58
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 242. Éloy also uses simple, periodic rhythms in Kâmakalâ.
59
‘Concerning form: never construct a form solely on abstract rhythmical structures, but
also on directly perceptible sonorous impacts (rhythm, intensity, timbre, etc.).’ Grisey,
‘Pages de journal: fragments 1967–1974’, 315.
60
Grisey, ‘Vers une écriture synthétique’, 224.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 115

him – that a fundamental frequency’s partials are found by multiplying

that fundamental frequency by the series of integers 1, 2, 3, and so on.
Grisey also wrote a note for himself to check Stockhausen’s hand-out to see
what rank of harmonic partial each of the six respective sung pitches
corresponded to (‘Voir le carré phonétique dans la partition, où sont
indiqués aussi le no des harmoniques’). Finally, Grisey also took from this
seminar a phrase of Stockhausen’s that stayed in his memory. In his short
1979 essay ‘À propos du son’, Grisey writes that our sense of hearing is ‘the
mystical sense par excellence; the one that seems to connect us towards the
“beyond” of all possible perception’.61 During his Stimmung seminar,
Stockhausen made the same point to his students: that music was by
essence mystical because one could not explain it with words:
The essential aspect of my music is always religious and spiritual; the
technical aspect is mere explanation. I have often been accused of vague
mysticism. These days, mysticism is easily misunderstood as something
vague. But mysticism is something that cannot be understood with words,
that is: music! The purest musicality is also the purest mysticism in a modern
sense. Mysticism is a very incisive capacity to see right through things. To this
end, the intellect is a piece of equipment that serves intuition. Intuition,
clearly, is not innately present in man, but constantly infiltrates him, like the
rays of the sun. Thinking is a way of formulating things, of translating
intuition in terms of our equipment, and our practical world – an application
to the realms of perception.62

Grisey’s notes seem to record this exchange: ‘‟Je ne peux parler que de ce qui
est exprimable’’ (réponse à une question: Pourquoi parler de Simmung comme
d’un transition/transistor que l’on démente et éviter l’important : la significa-
tion religieux, la cérémonie).’ This was in line with Grisey’s own interests.63
This account of the historical context has shown that D’eau et de pierre’s
aspect as a work of prolonged duration with few features – a piece of
‘meditative music’ – was in the spirit of the times, in sympathy with similar
works by Stockhausen, Éloy, and Young in one respect, by Ligeti,
Chowning and Lucier in another (albeit Grisey never mentions Lucier’s
work, nor that of Radigue), and by Rădulescu and Nemescu in another,
with a dash of Boulez’s resonance chords and attack–reaction pattern. The
composition of such a work is not surprising given the climate. Secondly,
while Grisey’s use of the harmonic spectrum as the basis for his ‘absolute
sound’ personnage was probably encouraged by his study of Stimmung, it

61
Grisey, ‘À propos du son’, 172. 62
Kurtz, Stockhausen: A Biography, 199.
63
GGCPSF. For more on Grisey’s music and Stimmung, see Noh, ‘Gérard Grisey et la
naissance de la musique spectrale’, 233–6.
116 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

may also have been informed by Young, linking the concurrent rise of
American minimalism and French spectral music.

D’eau et de pierre
Example 4.4 shows the opening of D’eau et de pierre. A static quasi-
spectral chord in the first instrumental group fades in from silence: the
‘absolute sound’ Grisey had conceived. A flurry of notes by the second
group can be seen in Ex. 4.4; a corresponding distortion of the first group
can be seen in Ex. 4.5. As has been seen, Grisey had early on conceived that
the respective stasis and aggressor personnages would represent Purusha
and Prakriti, antithetical cosmic principles in Hindu theology. In the
summer of 1972, he hit upon another programmatic image: the image of
a pool of water into which a stone is thrown at regular intervals; hence the
work’s title, ‘Of Water and of Stone’. Each time the stone is thrown into the
pool – in other words, each time the ‘aggressor’ element appears – the pool
becomes more and more disturbed. To create the synthetic chord and
measure its mutation, Grisey parameterised the compositional material
statistically to encompass rhythm, density, pitch, register, timbre, granu-
larity, intensity, profile, and the degree of integration of the instruments of
group 1 (in other words, their relative degree of harmonic agreement or
fusion). Grisey seems to have made a full schematic outline of the work as a
preliminary to setting down its notes, with the listed parameters arranged
in horizontal rows and the different sections of the work arranged in
vertical bars. In one of his sketches, Grisey specifies: ‘travailler les S.T.A.
! spectres harmoniques’.64 This can be seen in Ex. 4.3,. When the music
emerges at the beginning from silence, a major third sounds in the low to
middle range between the double bass and viola. This is a fragment of a
harmonic spectrum on low F: the fundamental (41.2 Hz) along with the
fifth partial (220 Hz). The continual appearance and disappearance of
pitches over this fundamental for the first few minutes of the work
seemingly simulates the filtering of different frequencies in the manner
of a vocal formant.
In his ‘Musique et espace’ (‘Music and Space’) lecture the previous
January, Grisey had alluded to spatialisation as affording the composer
the possibility of linking the different acoustic parameters. That linking,
Grisey suggested, came about through the progressive transformation of
one parametrically defined acoustical figure into another: for example, the

64
GGCPSF. I am unsure what ‘S.T.A.’ means here.
 On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 117

Example 4.3 Grisey’s D’eau et de pierre (1972) for two instrumental groups.
© Copyright Casa Ricordi. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.
Printed by permission.
118 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 4.4 One of the second group’s aleatory events in D’eau et de pierre. © Copyright Casa
Ricordi. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed by permission.

gradual modification of a predominantly rhythmic figure by stressing more

and more its latent harmonic profile while simultaneously diminishing its
rhythmic profile, in this way transforming a ‘rhythm’ into a ‘harmony’.
Grisey first alluded to this possibility in journal notes written in summer
1970,65 and the development of the idea in 1972 is evinced by a table
sketched in his ‘Music and Space’ lecture notes:
Interactions of parameters between themselves:

Rhythm ! growing rhythmic density ! grain of sound colour

Pitch – minimum difference between two sounds ! beating, therefore a certain Rhythm
frequency = number of beatings
Pitches – mixings of greater and greater complexity ! Colour
Intensity (attack or dynamic) ! Colour
Space ! Colour and intensity66

65
See Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments 1967–1974’. 66
GGCPSF.
 On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 119

Example 4.5 First reaction of group 1 in D’eau et de pierre. © Copyright Casa Ricordi. All Rights
Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed by permission.

Dufourt would later describe a starting point of spectral music as the

mutability, one into the other, of acoustic parameters; here, the principle
nascently appears in Grisey’s music. Grisey uses these categories – har-
mony, colour, pitch, and so on – in the schematic planning of the acoustic
profile of the ‘static’ personnage. The concrete technical measure by
which transformation between parameters is effected is found in tables
measuring what Grisey alternately calls the degree of change or modifica-
tion (when referring to a given sound figure) or the degree of evolution
(when referring to the overall trajectory of group 1). The parameters are
united through the ubiquitous element of change, as the following notes
show:67

67
GGCPSF.
120 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

1) Progressive modification of pitches (within a sustained note) => rhythmic modifications

=> colour modifications
oo max. distantiation: glissando (continuous change)
2) Progressive modification of volume/intensity (within a sustained note) => modification of colours
=> modification of rhythms
oo max. < and > everywhere (continuous change)
3) Progressive modification of colours (held sound) [erased: => modification of intensities]
=> rhythmic modifications
oo
4) Progressive modification of rhythmic density/isolated sounds => change of colours
=> change of intensities
oo: fluttertongue
tremolo
growl
mouthed

This, then, is the first instance of a principle that Grisey would consider
fundamental to his music: the principle that any given sound can be
mutated into any other sound through (a) comprehensive statistical para-
meterisation of the sound and (b) progressive modification of those par-
ameters. Grisey said in 1978 that this principle of mutation forms ‘the very
basis of my compositional approach [écriture], the primary idea, the
genesis [gène] of all composition’.68 His table (above), his schematisation
of all the possible parameters, and his use of degrees of change in principle
establish a virtual continuum linking all sounds to each other and, more
specifically, establish a means for plotting the relative deviation of the
‘absolute’ sound (group 1). In a liminal zone, one perceptual category, or
parameter, changes into another one. A given sound element that starts off
by being measured, for example, by a rhythmical value, might at a certain
point, when the rhythmical profile fades reciprocally with the increase in
profile of another parameter, become better measured by a density value;
and thereafter of harmonicity, or of noise, and so on. Within that so-
constituted sound, the acoustical parameters cannot be mutually extri-
cated; yet at the same time, the holistic sound in question is not reducible
to those parameters: the parameters are merely the means of constituting
and altering the sound. The sound itself is not the sum of its parameters
but rather a synthesis they plot. It is not a sound object but a sound figure
(since it is not reducible to the parameters which define it); not an objective
signal described by its parameters but the perceptual sign that that signal
produces for the ear. This is a very important point which suggests how the
music should be analysed: not only in terms of the sketches and score, but
also in terms of what those coordinates produce (the distinction Grisey
makes between the map and the territory).69

68
Grisey, ‘Devenir du son’, 27. 69
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 240.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 121

In his sketches, Grisey describes the form as a sequence of ‘coloured

silences’ (the order of which is permutable). ‘Coloured silence’ is
Stockhausen’s term for the sound made when instrumentalists play their
instruments without sounding a distinct pitch (a clarinettist simply making
a blowing sound through their instrument, for example). Grisey would later
refer to the harmonic spectrum, or any other such memorisable figure, as a
‘neutral sound archetype’, a denomination in which the notion of person-
nage sonore still discreetly resides.70 This ties D’eau et de pierre to the sense
of the mystical alluded to by Stockhausen at his Darmstadt seminar, and to a
remark made by Stockhausen on BBC television in the early 1970s: ‘I find it
just marvellous that nowadays we can create sounds that we have no names
for. It means that all the magic that had been lost comes back.’71 The idea
whereby one musical element exerts a force of influence upon another
musical element, thereby transforming it, is also used by Stockhausen in
Stimmung. On sixty-six occasions during Stimmung, a magic name is
shouted by one of the six vocalists: following the shouting of this magic
name, the other singers begin to mutate their respective vocal parts to
integrate the particular magic name just enunciated. This integration occurs
gradually and by a process of mutation. In his essay cited earlier in this
chapter, Ligeti relates this to Einsteinian relativity, whereby acoustic matter
can no longer be considered distinct from the space it occupies; the quasi-
gravitational force of attraction exerted by any musical object on another
also fits this analogy. It recalls Grisey’s late 1960s journal entry cited earlier
on polar harmonic attraction and atonality’s non-existence:72 This is a
formalisation of atonality and the establishing of a new system of relation
between sounds. For Grisey it would lead, from Dérives onwards, to a style
whereby sound is always in flux. All acoustical identities, through the fields
of attraction in which they exist, eventually transform into something else.
This would describe the entire form of Périodes, a recurring process of
stability, dissolution, dispersion, reintegration, stability, and so on.
D’eau et de pierre received its premiere on Saturday 26 November 1972
in Metz’s Théâtre Municipal (Fig. 4.1). The concert was the inaugural one
of the Ensemble Européen de Musique Contemporaine (EEMC), on this
occasion conducted by Michel Tabachnik, who as mentioned had been due
to co-conduct the premiere of Vagues, chemins, le souffle before its cancel-
lation. As with Royan the previous Easter, then, the world premiere by this
recent graduate from the Paris Conservatoire had a prime slot in the

70
Grisey mentions composition with archetypes in several places: for instance, Grisey, ‘Did
You Say Spectral?’, 3.
71
Quoted in ‘‘But Is It Music? 1945–1989’. 72
See n. 9 above.
122 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Figure 4.1 Grisey’s programme note for D’eau et de pierre from the Metz 1972 booklet.
On the Threshold: D’eau et de pierre (1972) 123

festival; also on the programme were the Czech composer Marek

Kopelent’s Intimissimo (1971), Xenakis’s Linaïa-Agon (1972), and
Méfano’s Signes/oublie (1972), with Grisey’s work performed last. Samuel
organised a public discussion for the morning of the concert in which some
of the festival’s composers discussed their works in the plush environs of
the Metz hôtel de ville, the aim of which was ‘to cross the wall of sounds’
separating new music from the wider public. Seated with Grisey were
Méfano, Tabachnik, Darasse, and Boucourechliev. A reporter from the
local newspaper L’Est Republicain, noting approvingly that there was
‘nothing academic nor archly “salon” in this free discussion between the
public and the composers’, described how the assembled musicians,
watched over by the cameras of the ORTF and the local West German
Saarland television, debated ‘the wall of incomprehension’ which allowed
music-lovers of the general public unfortunately to hear ‘only noise’ when
they listened to recent twentieth-century music.73 Grisey – ‘twenty-six
years old, blue eyes, clean-shaven, speaking straightforwardly and without
affect’ – told the audience about his work, using the same non-technical
description as in his programme note. ‘I was inspired by a few principles
from Hindu philosophy’, Grisey said. ‘I wanted to express two natures: a
stable, unchanging base, and, on the other hand, all the drives of life. Still
water represents the base. A first group expresses this, blurred, distant, very
calm. The second group is very aggressive, brutal, hoarse, abrupt. And the
first group reacts to the shocks of the second.’74
This was Grisey’s highest-profile concert to date, and the critical
response to D’eau et de pierre was mostly positive. Fleuret, writing in the
Nouvel observateur, described the ‘concentrated, spell-binding poetry of
Grisey’s play of sonorous materials’.75 Antoine Goléa, writing in Carrefour,
thought D’eau et de pierre displayed rich invention, ‘and something like a
vague idea of a musical form, of a musical structure, something that is itself
rarer and rarer in our musical days, where approximation and monotony
occupy the whole terrain of what one often hesitates to call musical
composition’; however, he had some reservations: ‘Grisey’s work sins by
being over-long, which leads to boredom, the worst enemy of all musical
audition.’76 The composer Claude Pascal, writing in Le Figaro, called it ‘a
considered work’; Grisey’s music, he wrote, ‘denotes a subtle sensibility.
Underneath a high-pitched, long pedal, whose mystery penetrated us,

73
This and the rest of the quotations in this paragraph from Loridan, ‘Musique
contemporaine à Metz’.
74
G.M., ‘L’Ensemble européen de musique contemporaine’.
75
Fleuret, ‘La Siège de Metz’. 76
Goléa, ‘Les Clowns étaient au rendez-vous’.
124 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

explode to a further and further degree the desperate barking of the brass and
the cruel laughter of the percussion.’77 Rudolf Hohlweg in the Süddeutsche
Zeitung described it not disapprovingly as ‘a symphonic poem’:78 a denomin-
ation that would often be made of Grisey’s and Murail’s music, not without
justification. Some critics were less impressed.79 But in any case, interest grew
in the young Prix de Rome scholar, who by this time was in Rome, develop-
ing his understanding of psychoacoustics.
With this, the basic foundations for Grisey’s mature style were established;
the bases, too, albeit tentative, of a wider musical movement whose com-
posers would come to be organised around the activity of the performer-
composer collective l’Itinéraire, a platform in France for their new music.
Accordingly, hereafter my narrative shifts to the broader courant spectral.

77
Pascal, ‘Metz: nouvelles rencontres’. 78
Hohlweg‚ ‘Das europäische Ensemble’.
79
When Jésus Aguila was researching his book on the Domaine Musical in 1988, Grisey
dismissed the only work of his that was performed there as ‘juvenilia’. Aguila, Le
Domaine musical, 391.
 

Spectral Music
 5 Psychoacoustics and the New Compositional
Framework (1973–1974)

French spectral music, framed as a compositional attitude drawing on

instrumental synthesis and the inspiration of electroacoustic studio tech-
niques, was by the late 1980s squarely associated with the twin figureheads
Grisey and Murail.1 Grisey had been acquainted with Murail when they
were students in Messiaen’s composition class. But it was not until their
Prix de Rome periods overlapped that they became friends. Grisey later
recalled that it was when he and his new friend were passing the time in the
Villa Medici’s palatial gardens in 1973, towards the end of Murail’s Rome
sojourn, that Murail mentioned to him his intention to start a new musical
collective upon his return to Paris.2 Murail’s aim, he told Grisey, was that
the collective would ensure the creation and promotion of the music of the
youngest generation, something he felt was not happening with the
Domaine Musical. Although Grisey turned down the invitation to join
what became l’Itinéraire, he retained a close association with the collective,
and this period in Rome was decisive for that connection, as well as being
the time when Grisey and Murail first exchanged ideas related to psychoa-
coustics in music. The Villa Medici is a time-honoured setting in the
creation myths of young French composers, and the appearance here of
this trope underlines the institutional infrastructure in place for young
composers in France. Murail stayed at the Villa Medici from 1971 to 1973;
Grisey stayed there from 1972 to 1974; for each, the period as a stipended
pensionnaire, coming immediately after the end of his student days,
afforded a period of reflection and research, free from financial worries,
ahead of launching himself professionally.

Life at the Villa Medici

The Prix de Rome is awarded not only to composers but to artists in
various artistic media. The rationale behind the prize is that the best young
French artists in their fields be given a period of research in which to focus
solely on harnessing their craft without having any other distractions.
It also allows network-building. Resident at the Académie de France in

1
For a detailed reception history of spectral music, see Cagney, ‘Synthesis and Deviation’.
2
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 191.

[127]
128 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Rome as well as composers were writers, photographers, film-makers, and

restoration artists.3 In all, around twenty-five artists were in residence at
the Villa Medici at any given time, and Murail recalled the setting as
sociable and inspiring: ‘The place where we lived, the Villa Medici, was
incredible. There are huge gardens – from one end to the other it’s around
one kilometre – and it’s in the very centre of Rome.’4 In an informal setting
the artists working in different media discussed their respective métiers
and the possibility of collaborations: ‘There was a sculptor’, Murail
recalled. ‘And my neighbour was a scenarist, a movie maker.’ Along with
this female sculptor, her husband (a landscape architect), and others,
Murail went on a trip to Indonesia. ‘[T]hat was very nice. But it was not
really a holiday; it was a study trip. We received some money: they gave us
a budget for going “somewhere”. It was intended in the past to go to “the
origins of civilisation”, like Egypt or Greece, but we decided we would
rather go to Indonesia.’ The director of the Villa Medici at the time was the
controversial painter Balthus; he was the brother of the writer Pierre
Klossowski, with whom Boulez was acquainted, and a friend of the first
Minister of Culture André Malraux, who gave him the job. Murail said that
the young composers had little interaction with him (‘He was rarely there,
actually’). While in Rome, Grisey read Rilke, though it is unclear whether
he knew of the connection between the modernist poet and Balthus’s
family (Rilke had an affair with Balthus’s mother, Baladine Klossowska).
Rome’s new music scene had a lot of activity, owing in part to the various
international academies in the Italian capital, which housed young com-
posers from around the world. It was as a pensionnaire in Rome that
Murail first heard the music of Salvatore Sciarrino, and although he said
he did not meet Sciarrino then, Sciarrino’s music sufficiently impressed
him to be programmed by l’Itinéraire when Murail was back in Paris.
Grisey befriended the German composer Jens-Peter Ostendorf, who was
resident at the German Academy. Later in the 1970s, Ostendorf was based
for a time in Paris, and his music, a relatively unique mixture of
Andriessen-esque minimalist pulsation and spectral harmonies, was pro-
grammed and commissioned by l’Itinéraire (for example, Fondamental
(1975) for solo viola, Vorwärts zur Unzeit (1978) for chamber orchestra,

3
Following changes instigated by Malraux, the atmosphere at the Villa Medici changed
somewhat from 1971 onwards, with a greater number of exhibitions, concerts, colloquia,
and film screenings being held than was previously the case. See Rémy, Villa
Médicis, 19–20.
4
This remark and the next two from Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16
January 2014.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 129

and Tanz ohne Worte (1982) for three electric guitars, synthesiser, and
percussion). Musica Elettronica Viva (founded in 1966) was based in
Rome, and the avant-garde gallery of the artist Fabio Sargentini,
L’ATTICO, hosted interesting events. As was the case in France at the
same time, namely with Daniel Caux’s festivals at the Fondation Maeght
and the output of Shandar Records, alongside jazz and improvised elec-
tronic music at L’ATTICO was performed the music of the new American
current as yet to be called minimalism. The reception of American min-
imalism in Italy began at roughly the same time as in France. In 1969,
Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela were invited over to
perform at L’ATTICO, and in the early 1970s, Glass, Reich, Palestine, and
other members of the downtown New York City music scene followed suit.
It was in this way that Young and Scelsi came to meet at the end of the
1960s, though of what happened during their meeting, which Murail
mentions, little is known.5 Murail was acquainted with the music of
Reich and Riley, and the influence of the return to tonality in these
composers’ work seems to appear in Murail’s La Dérive des continents
(1973, discussed below). ‘I was interested by the fact that these people were
making a completely different music from serialism and all these things,
that they were using triads [. . .] But I was not so impressed by the music
itself’, Murail said. Another resident at the Villa Medici from October 1973
(during Grisey’s second year) was the poet Christian Gabrielle Guez
Ricord, with whom Grisey and Jocelyn struck up a friendship. Like
Grisey, Ricord would over the course of the 1970s achieve some renown
within France, though he was beset by mental ill-health, and Grisey would
remain in contact with Ricord sporadically throughout the 1970s, project-
ing a collaboration. A couple of postcards sent from Ricord to Grisey,
written in messy handwriting, whose cryptic prose contains, among other
things, allusions to heterodox Christianity and Rosicrucianism, gives us an
idea of his and Grisey’s topics of conversation, and one of the postcards
mentions that the two were planning to collaborate on a project.6 Following
Ricord’s death in 1988, Grisey belatedly realised the collaboration by setting
the first of his Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil to a lyric from Ricord’s
late collection Les Heures à la nuit (1987).7 Pierre Rigaudière writes that it
was at this time that Grisey’s Catholic faith lapsed for good, although his
general spiritual outlook remained.8 Grisey’s reading while in Rome
included, on the one hand, the Catholic mystics, the fourteenth-century

5
Murail, ‘Scelsi, De-Composer’, 174. 6
GGCPSF.
7
For a discussion of the text setting, see Sullivan, ‘Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants.
8
Rigaudière, ‘De l’esprit au spectre’, 42.
130 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

‘Fioretti di San Francesco’ (‘Little Flowers of St. Francis’, a series of stories

about the life of St Francis of Assisi), Catherine of Siena, and Teilhard de
Chardin and, on the other hand, literary texts by Rilke, de Beauvoir,
Malraux, Carroll, Joyce, and Butor. At this point Grisey also ‘immersed
himself in the thought of Deleuze’ (whose writings he was probably
acquainted with through his teacher Marie), and references to Deleuze
pop up throughout Grisey’s later writings.9 The microtonal composer
Pascale Criton, a student of Grisey’s, introduced Grisey’s writings to
Deleuze in the 1980s, remarks Dosse: ‘Griset [sic] had his preferred author,
the only philosopher whose writing helped him think about music, and it
was Deleuze.’10 Although he received a recording of Modulations, Deleuze
seemingly never returned the favour of paying Grisey’s work any attention.
In November 1972, the Metz Festival featured the premiere of D’eau et de
pierre, and the following month, along with the other new composition
pensionnaire, Michel Zbar, the young Prix de Rome composers organised a
concert of new French music at the French Academy. The programme
comprised five works: Michel Zbar’s Jeu 2 (1972) for flutes and electric guitar,
Grisey’s Charme and Initiation, Didier Denis’s Lèvres, rouge (1972) for solo
viola, and Murail’s Ligne de non-rétour for flute, clarinet, viola, harp, percus-
sion, electric guitar, and double bass. Though this concert was not a signifi-
cant one, it is of interest inasmuch as, aiming to pinpoint for the audience the
aesthetic climate in new music at the time, its programme note indicates how
these young composers viewed the state of new music in late 1972: ‘A concert
of contemporary music? It might be more accurate to speak, in the plural, of
contemporary musics, as this evening’s concert exemplifies. Indeed, despite a
certain number of common concerns, each of the four composers pro-
grammed here has his own style and language. Thus, the attraction of timbres
and of unusual combinations.’11 As the uninspired note indicates, ‘plurality’
was acknowledged as the order of the day, in which sense the note reads
much like l’Itinéraire’s early aesthetic statements. Alongside this openness,
however, there is a turn towards a focus on timbre.
Institutionally, change was afoot. In February 1973, Grisey went to Paris
for a performance of D’eau et de pierre at the Domaine Musical.12 This

9
Rigaudière, ‘De l’esprit au spectre’, 42.
10
Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 446.
11
Concert programme, Concert de Musique Contemporaine, Villa Medicis, Académie de
France, Rome, 14 December 1972.
12
Grisey returned to Paris a month earlier for one the two performances of Momente at the
Domaine Musical, which took place on 21 and 22 January. Aguila, Le Domaine
musical, 417.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 131

event was significant for Grisey’s career, since it marked his biggest Paris
concert to date and an embrace by the avant-garde stronghold founded by
Boulez. Like all of the Domaine Musical’s concerts at this time, it took
place at the Théâtre de la Ville, and some in attendance were curious to
find out whether Grisey’s talent merited his reputation. On the programme
along with D’eau et de pierre were Ligeti’s Melodien, Alsina’s Omnipotenz,
and the Swiss-Chinese composer Tona Scherchen’s Sun, and the reviews of
this performance of D’eau et de pierre were again mostly positive. In Le
Monde, despite the concert’s seeing the French premiere of Melodien, it
was Grisey who received most column inches – ‘a talent is revealed’, the
review announced. Lonchampt praised Grisey’s ‘play across the grand
surface of time’, though he added that ‘interest wanes bit by bit as the
work sinks into hypnosis’.13 In Combat, Marcel Schneider wrote that
Grisey’s work stood out for its clear formal conception, though again he
thought D’eau et de pierre’s effect weakened over its duration (‘since the
possibilities a composer has of suggesting a stone thrown into water are not
unlimited’).14 A predictably dissenting view came from Musique en jeu,
whose review (presumably by Jameux) was unfriendly to this young
composer’s too-heterodox idiom: ‘And what of the world premieres fea-
turing the youngest composers? The eagerly awaited Grisey resorted
decidedly to a certain neo-academicism: finely-crafted [bel artisanat], of
course, but not in the least bit furious . . .’15
Symbolically, this arrival of nascent spectral music turned out to be one
of the last acts of the Domaine Musical. In 1969, Boulez had been invited to
the Elysée Palace to have dinner with President Georges Pompidou, on
which occasion Pompidou offered to give Boulez the new musical research
centre he had been pitching since the mid-1960s.16 By early 1973, rumours
were building about Boulez’s return to France. In an article published in
1972, in the journal Preuves: cahiers mensuels du Congrès pour la liberté de
la culture, Boulez announced that he was to return to French musical life: ‘I
have accepted in principle the directorship of the centre for acoustic
research planned at Beaubourg, in Paris, purely in order to attempt a

13
Lonchampt, ‘Ligeti, Grisey, Alsina’.
14
Schneider, ‘Premières auditions au ‟Domaine musical”’.
15
‘Chroniques’ (June 1973).
16
Boulez states that he was initially promised the centre in West Germany as part of the
Max Planck Institute before an economic depression scuppered the idea (Jameux, Pierre
Boulez, 218). One can imagine why it appealed to Pompidou, since Boulez pitched it as
the most advanced centre for music research in the world, a cultural asset for
France internationally.
132 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

radical reconsideration of the world of music as it now stands.’17

In modestly announcing this ‘radical reconsideration of the world of
music’, alongside characteristically sweeping criticisms, published contem-
poraneously, of almost all other music being composed in France at that
time, Boulez was enacting his rebellious persona of twenty years earlier, but
in reality he was at the centre of the establishment. Given the restrictive
academicism that serialism eventually descended into in the 1960s,
Boulez’s fellow musicians in France were not overly enthusiastic about
the prospect of Boulez’s becoming director of such a handsomely funded
institution, under the aegis of the French state. Boulez elaborated upon the
aims of his centre:
Those who believe that I am prejudiced against Paris and against working in
France are mistaken. What I cannot tolerate is the mediocrity of narrow-
minded and incompetent officialdom wasting money and blandly
proclaiming that everything in the garden is lovely. In three years’ time the
Beabourg experimental centre will be examining all the possibilities in the
instrumental and electronic fields. We shall aim at a permanent alliance of
musicians and scientists such as exists in a number of American universities.
My object is to create an organization modelled on the Max Planck scientific
institutes in Germany, based entirely on the principle of research. The present
musical crisis is due to the fact that our ideas are more advanced than the
sound material required to realize them.18

In publicly declaring a crise, and in publicly denouncing the work of the

youngest generation as néant,19 Boulez was showing he was out of touch
with the newest trends, which in a few years would coalesce into a new
movement and, initially, IRCAM’s young competitor.

Murail’s Student Compositions

Murail’s receiving the Prix de Rome in 1971 was no surprise, since he was
regarded as Messiaen’s star pupil. He received his first proper commission
in 1969, Couleur de mer for fifteen instruments, which led him to postpone
his political science examinations at the Institut d’Études Politiques for a
year and in the end marked a definitive orientation towards a career in

17
Boulez, ‘Freeing Music’, 481; originally published in Preuves, the journal of the CIA’s
Congress for Cultural Freedom.
18
Boulez, ‘Freeing Music’, 484.
19
‘The music I receive is not nothing, but it is very close.’ Quoted in Lonchampt, ‘Un
entretien avec Pierre Boulez’.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 133

music.20 Couleur de mer evinces the tension in Murail’s early student

works between the dominant serial paradigm and the music he wished to
compose.21 Although its style is for the most part post-tonal and ‘serial’
(the quotation marks indicating that the idiomatically ‘serial’ sounds are
not, in fact, composed serially), it is clear in places that Murail is pushing
the available compositional framework in a different direction.
In retrospect, one can see in nascent form in this earliest of Murail’s
ensemble works some features of his mature music:
(1) A compositional focus on colour, an intuitive sound category straddling
harmony and timbre, in which Messiaen’s influence is apparent, and
which would later be formalised in the category of harmony-timbre.
(2) The use of an electroacoustic component, in the form of a Hammond
organ part.
(3) A programmatic focus on natural imagery, here a maritime scene.
(4) A degree of autobiographical allusion, both in the programmatic
focus – the maritime scene is that viewed from the port of Le Havre,
where Murail grew up – and in the title and the epigraphs to each
movement in the score, which are drawn from the poetry of
Gérard Murail.
(5) In the final movement (Ex. 5.1), the composition of slow-moving,
static textures.
Couleur de mer is ’written in a style that does not correspond to its musical
and poetic ideas’, Murail remarks.22 ‘When I wanted to continue writing
works with the same type of language, it didn’t work. [. . .] And I said to
myself that it was necessary to find a technique for what I really wanted
to express.’23
The challenge for Murail was to develop a personal compositional
framework that corresponded to his aesthetic aims. This desire is evident
in the terms in which Murail described Couleur de mer to the audience
during the premiere’s pre-concert talk: ‘One shouldn’t try to “understand”
the music of today’, he said, ‘since it isn’t charged with a “message”, even
one of intellectual pretensions.’ Murail stressed instead the freedom of the
composer in his sound-associations and the necessity for the listener ‘to

20
Couleur de mer was commissioned by the Maison de la Culture in Le Havre, whose
president from 1964 to 1968 was the composer and pedagogue Max Pinchard, a friend of
Murail’s father Gérard Murail.
21
‘Couleur de mer recuperates the stylistic elements of that epoch (12 tone scales,
fragmentation, certain abuse of the percussion instruments . . .) but recycles and
subverts them for other purposes.’ Murail, ‘Couleur de mer’.
22
Murail, ‘Couleur de mer’. 23
Murail, ‘Entretien’, 32.
134 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 5.1 Murail’s Couleur de mer (1969) for ensemble. © Copyright Éditions
Henry Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.

receive the work in a “state of abandon”, without reference to the frame-

work of previous centuries, the best recipe for welcoming it as an “ear to
the world” surrounding us’.24 A review in the Le Havre presse pre-echoes
the type of remark often made in relation to spectral music. ‘[T]he work
possesses its unity in a great variety of invented timbres. [. . .] Sonorous

24
Quoted in ‘Répétition publique et débat’.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 135

Example 5.2 Murail’s Altitude 8000 (1970) for strings. © Copyright Éditions
Transatlantiques – Rights transferred to Première Music Group. All Rights
Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed by permission of Chester
Music Limited.

aggregates that are refined [. . .], complex and rigorous weave the fabric of
a music that breathes in life.’25
A first step towards the development of a compositional framework
amenable to his desired artistic expression came with the aforementioned
visit to Messiaen’s class by Xenakis. The influence on Murail of Xenakis’s
sound mass conception resulted in Altitude 8000 (1970) for small orchestra,
premiered at the Conservatoire in January 1971 by a student orchestra.
Departing from serialism and establishing a style Murail would pursue over
the next few years, Altitude 8000 features a continuous string surface with
few distinct events; the percussion section is reduced to vibraphone; there
are pentatonic harmonies and octaves; and the score calls for traditional
articulation like vibrato. At first, Murail’s composition teacher was uncon-
vinced. ‘When I showed Messiaen the score he didn’t understand what I had
been trying to do. [. . .] I had removed all events, like percussion and even
[. . .] pizzicati. I had rubbed all that out, which made certain passages sound
like electronic textures.’ After the premiere, however (which was booed by
some of Murail’s fellow students), Messiaen changed his mind. ‘He said to
me: “You have found your way, there it is – continue.”’26 That was a decisive

25
‘Semaine musicale O.R.T.F.’ Couleur de mer was Murail’s first work to be performed in
the United States, in April 1978: see Davies, ‘Music: The Perspective Encounter’.
26
Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 386–7.
136 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

moment for me. If he hadn’t said that to me, I would have been perhaps
asking myself questions, if only for the diverse reaction which the piece
aroused.’ Xenakis, too, was impressed: along with Messiaen he sat on the
jury for the 1971 Prix de Rome, when Murail’s composition portfolio won
him the prize and two years at the Villa Medici in Rome.27
Clear in Altitude 8000 is not only Murail’s penchant for vivid colours but,
through this, for creating a sense of beauty (Ex. 5.2). The opening chord on
violins and violas is quasi-tonal (C, E, F, F♯, G, coloured by harmonics); in
general, the dynamic is soft and the harmonies not overly dissonant; on page 21,
in contrast to the prevailing academic serialism, there is a direction to play
legato; and on page 43 – more contrary still – Murail tells the players to ‘[l]ook
for the beauty and precision of the sound (‘classical’ sound, with vibrato for those
instruments having vibrato)’.28 A similar vaunting of sonorous beauty appears
in parts of Cosmos privé (1973) for orchestra, wherein (Murail writes in the
score) ‘generally speaking, the beauty of the sound should be sought after both
individually and collectively, within the character of each instrument’.29 In this
manner, and through the technique of sound mass construction – a precursor of
the eventual use of spectral models – Cosmos privé aims not for clarity but in a
quasi-Symbolist way for evanescence. ‘Often things are merely suggested, or at
most, stated’, Murail writes, ‘like an eroded bas relief seen through a curtain of
fog’ (calling to mind Mallarmé’s ‘le sens trop précis rature / Ta vague littérature’).
This quasi-Symbolist ethos was also present in Couleur de mer; in the latter score
one of the epigraphs taken from Gérard Murail’s poetry reads:
. . . the space, reproduced in the lamp’s pollen and decaying the azure
windowpanes, I hold it in my sea-coloured thought . . .30

Quasi-Symbolist aesthetics would endure in Murail’s oeuvre, fusing pro-

grammatic imagery, compositional material, and aesthetic effect (as in Le
Lac (2001) for ensemble).
Rome gave the final two impetuses in the development of Murail’s mature
compositional framework. The first was the meeting with Scelsi, the encoun-
ter with whose music was emboldening.31 That Murail should have valorised
Scelsi is little surprise, given the similarities between Scelsi’s music and that of

27
‘I think I won because of Altitude 8000. I remember Xenakis was very positive about it.’
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
28
Murail, Altitude 8000 (Paris: Éditions Transatlantiques, 1970).
29
This quotation and the next from Murail, Cosmos privé (Paris: Éditions Rideau Rouge)
(since withdrawn). The work was premiered on 30 June 1973 in Rome by the RAI
Symphony Orchestra conducted by Boris de Vinogradov.
30
Reproduced in Murail, ‘Couleur de mer’.
31
Murail first met Scelsi when Murail wrote and performed a piece for ondes Martenot for
the well-known French-American dancer Muriel Jaër; during the same programme she
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 137

Ligeti and Xenakis,32 and a sort of pre-existing kinship between the ondist
Murail’s music and that of the ondiolinist Scelsi. Noteworthy in this regard is
Murail’s Où tremblent les contours (1970) for two violas, which, as well as
having a faintly esoteric title, in a style not dissimilar to the Italian composer
presents two violas blending in and out of each other, often orbiting the same
pitch centre while deviating from it through glissandi (by that time, Messiaen
may have introduced Scelsi’s music to his composition class). Scelsi’s music
combines a historical erasure of inherited post-tonal rhetoric with a relatively
unique vision whereby music is organised in terms of the inherent dynamism
of sound. Whereas, from Bach to Boulez, the axiomatic basis of écriture was
the progressive addition of note to note, in Scelsi’s work – and subsequently
that of Murail – écriture starts at a stage anterior to this, decomposing a given
note and musically exploring its interior (with the caveat that all the écriture in
Scelsi’s music was done by his ‘assistant’ Vieru Tosatti). Here, material is
generated not through abstraction and construction but through sounding
and deviation; form, not through development but through distortion; con-
trast, not through combination but through reciprocal interferences. Based as
it is at this anterior level of sound, Scelsi’s music, in a way analogous to that of
Xenakis, transgresses the boundaries between the traditional categories of
harmony, noise, timbre, and rhythm, all of which become secondary to the
primacy of sound’s continual self-differentiating. ‘For centuries, different
grids were placed on top of acoustical realities’, Murail later wrote in a grand
register; ‘now we are in the processes of liberating ourselves from that
approach. Once music has been unloosed from all those fetters, we will have
returned once more to the very beginnings of music – what vertigo!’33 Just as,
for the serialists, works such as Webern’s Symphony Op. 21 (1927–8) and
Concerto for Nine Instruments Op. 24 (1934) represented a threshold into ’a
new mode of musical being’, for Murail (and soon his l’Itinéraire colleagues)
works such as Scelsi’s Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959) for chamber
orchestra and Anahit, poème lyrique dédié à Vénus (1964) for violin and
eighteen instruments similarly represented a threshold into a new mode of
musical organisation.34 It was a refreshing artistic freedom and validated
Murail’s aesthetic instincts. Murail’s works from this period, just prior to his

danced to Xynobis (1964) for solo violin by Scelsi, who was in attendance. Alla, Tristan
Murail, 20. See also Jaër, ‘Entendre la danse avec Giacinto Scelsi’, 8.
32
The sketches for Ligeti’s Cello Concerto (1966) show that that work’s first movement was
partly inspired by Scelsi’s Quattro pezzi su una nota sola. See Steinitz, ‘Genesis of the
Piano Concerto’, 174–5.
33
Murail, quoted in de Saint Vulfran, ‘Tristan Murail: perspectives’, 13.
34
See Boulez, ‘Possibly . . .’, 135, and Boulez, ‘Incipit’, 215. Robert Piencikowski notes that
Scelsi played the same role for the courant spectral as Webern played for the serialists
(private conversation with the author).
138 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

integration of spectral models, evince a continuously flowing, ’magma music’

style not dissimilar to that of Scelsi:35 for example, Mach 2,5 (1971) for two
ondes Martenots, Au-delà du mur du son (1972) for orchestra, and Les Nuages
de Magellan (1973) for two ondes Martenot, electric guitar, and percussion.
A tentative step towards reintroducing harmonic hierarchy within this style
of continuous sound flows was taken with La Dérive des continents (1973) for
viola and string orchestra. Composed for the Royan festival a year before
Murail began using spectral resonance models, La Dérive des continents opens
with a long low pedal E on cellos and double basses over which a static minor
chord gradually unfolds. As with Grisey’s chronologically proximate D’eau et
de pierre (premiered a few months earlier in November 1972), one reviewer
compared it to ‘the Prélude to Das Rheingold to the extent that the entire work
seems to flow from the harmonics of a fundamental’.36 Nowadays Murail
thinks little of the work. But like Couleur de mer, La Dérive des continents
from a historical point of view shows how the desire for a different type of
aesthetic preceded the development of the technical framework that allowed it
to come into being. The final step towards that framework arrived when
Murail became friends at the Villa Medici with Grisey, his ex-classmate, who
arrived in late 1972. ‘Grisey arrived the year after [me], and we had lots of
conversations. We started seriously speaking at that time.’ These conversa-
tions, Murail said, ‘were more technical than theoretical’.37

Grisey’s Rome Sketches

For Grisey’s part, despite the successful reception of D’eau et de pierre and
his increased profile in French musical life, he was initially artistically
unsettled in 1973. A journal entry from January of that year describes his
sitting up all night listening to Mozart’s Idomeneo, ‘without hope’, and
being taken with the ‘mad’ urge to fall back into prayer.38 This was related
to his private life and marital strife but was also perhaps linked to a feeling
of a lack of direction musically. Grisey may well have viewed D’eau et de
pierre as a stylistic one-off in the same way as Stimmung in Stockhausen’s
oeuvre is a one-off (Sternklang notwithstanding).

35
Baillet, ‘L’Esthétique musicale de Tristan Murail’, 8.
36
‘Musique d’aujourd’hui au Festival de Royan’. The programme note indicates the
tentative orientation towards spectral process: ‘The viola is like a skin, a bark on the
outside of the orchestral mass. To the movements the orchestra sets into motion, it first
opposes its inertia, then reacts at a delay, reproducing the orchestra’s subterranean
tremors and develops them, sometimes amplifying them up to a paroxysm.’ Quoted in
Alla, Tristan Murail, 79.
37
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
38
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments 1967–1974’, 317.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 139

As was the case after Vagues, chemins, le souffle, following D’eau et de

pierre Grisey sketched ideas for different potential works.39 He briefly con-
sidered composing two more pieces using the name D’eau et de pierre as parts
II and III of a cycle. On an A4 sheet of paper headed ‘PROJET JEUX
PUBLIC’, Grisey drew an image of D’eau et de pierre II for nine instruments
and a group of dancers, and of D’eau et de pierre III for chamber orchestra
and tape. Each work was to feature coloured lighting à la Stockhausen’s Trans
and complicated structural correspondences between the colours and the
musical material. That the concept for D’eau et de pierre III was a ‘mixed’
electroacoustic work suggests Grisey thought he could make a tape at Marie’s
studio in Pantin (as Murail recently had with Lovecraft). The concept for
D’eau et de pierre II, a ballet, suggests that Grisey may have had in mind a
collaboration with other residents at the Villa Medici (or possibly Muriel
Jaër), or perhaps the influence of Maurice Béjart’s contemporary dance
versions of Stimmung and Le Marteau sans maître, both of which premiered
at La Scala in 1973. Prior to the composition of what would be the first work
composed for Les Espaces acoustiques, Grisey was actively seeking to create a
cycle.40 Two other sketches likely to date from this period are a one-page
sketch of a piece for orchestra and a two-page sketch of a piece for string
quartet. The orchestra sketch is a verbal synopsis and describes a work where,
again, the orchestra would be divided in two (adhering to Grisey’s regularly
dualistic conceptions), with one of the orchestras on stage and the other
orchestra hidden behind the stage (an idea inspired by Stockhausen’s Trans).
As with D’eau et de pierre, the projected form of this orchestral work is that of
a series of actions and reactions between the two groups: here, though, the
action is the articulation of a sound in one orchestra that is subsequently
‘echoed’ in the other orchestra, these echoes over time deviating in character
from their source up to a catastrophic ‘paroxysm’ (the same word Grisey uses
in the sketches for D’eau et de pierre) in which the two orchestras fuse
together. This ‘echo’ form is not dissimilar to the form of Murail’s
Mémoire-érosion.41 Grisey’s string quartet sketch is of interest in light of his
never having composed a string quartet for the repertoire. The sketch can be
dated to this period because of references to modelling harmonies on sum

39
All sketches cited in this paragraph, GGCPSF.
40
As mentioned in his programme booklet for Sables for Royan in 1975, Murail also
projected a cycle of three works around this time.
41
Grisey subsequently made extensive notes for a work based on this idea, a projected
ensemble work that he workshopped with Ensemble l’Itinéraire based on sounds and
echoes (at the Paul Sacher Foundation, the sketches for this ensemble work are entitled
‘Atelier I – Appels’). One can conjecture that perhaps Grisey projected this second work
when he received a commission from l’Itinéraire at the start of 1974 (the work he
eventually composed was Périodes).
140 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

and difference tones and to composing ‘musique pour une méditation’; the
latter post-1960s phrase was Stockhausen’s description of Stimmung, and
Éloy also called his long work Shânti (1972–3) ‘meditation music’ (Grisey
applied the term to D’eau et de pierre). The brief sketches on manuscript
paper show a process-based work where the instruments are spatially distrib-
uted: one note of quaver duration (G) rotates around the string quartet; as the
process progresses, quarter-tone variations gradually slip in, as well as har-
monics, occasional sweeping arpeggios on the overtone series, and sum and
difference tones. This conception is analogous to that of Prologue (1976) for
solo viola. Grisey stipulates that the piece be ‘synthetic’ in style, with the
quartet’s already restricted palette still more restricted so that the four
instruments blend together: ‘work on the basis of the material, the timbre,
and their evolution under a microscope’, Grisey writes.
The character of this string quartet sketch – based (initially at least) on
one note – suggests that by this stage, like Murail before him, Grisey had
encountered Scelsi. Grisey later claimed that he did not meet Scelsi until
May 1974 at the premiere of Périodes, towards the end of his stay at the
Villa Medici (Féron has established that this is untrue).42 At the premiere
of Périodes, Grisey states, the ‘small, white-haired man with blue, painful
eyes’ who was accompanying Murail at the concert complimented Grisey
on his new work and invited Grisey to visit his apartment.43 Grisey states
that soon afterwards he obliged, taking the ‘rickety old lift’44 to the top
floor, where he was welcomed by Scelsi and sat down on a sofa facing out
onto the spectacular view. In this room, among the various Asian instru-
ments, ondiolas, and a Bechstein grand piano, Scelsi played ‘crackling
recordings’ on an old Grundig tape deck of his String Quartet No. 1
(1944) and Anahit, poème lyrique dédié à Vénus (1964) for violin and
eighteen instruments. Listening to these works and their ‘radical different-
ness’, Grisey states, ‘confirmed’ him on the musical path on which he had
already set out; by this stage (summer 1974) he had already composed
D’eau et de pierre and Périodes and had almost finished the composition of
Dérives. Grisey repeated this version of events in an interview in the 1990s:
‘Later on, I met Giacinto Scelsi, but Scelsi didn’t influence me really
because I had already several pieces – it was more of a meeting.’45

42
See Féron and Cagney, ‘Spectral Harmonies’.
43
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 191–2. 44
Buzzard, ‘Giacinto Scelsi’.
45
Grisey, ‘Interview with David Bundler’. Grisey states that after their initial meeting in
May 1974, he visited Scelsi several more times, since the two had a good rapport. Scelsi
was inclined towards monologues, recounting ‘in perfect French’ his memories and
morsels of Eastern wisdom in the manner of a ‘guru’ (though Grisey notes he
‘thankfully’ was not without a sense of self-deprecating humour). See Grisey,
‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 191–3.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 141

Nonetheless, Grisey was deliberately downplaying Scelsi’s impact, as to

varying degrees he did with Dutilleux, Boulez, and Marie. While there does
not seem to be any major influence of Scelsi on Grisey’s music, there are
certain minor technical similarities, mainly pertaining to string writing.
In his tactfully titled article ‘Scelsi et l’Itinéraire: influences, coïncidences et
correspondences’, Julian Anderson usefully records and categorises many
technical crossovers between works by l’Itinéraire-associated composers
and the Italian.46 In Grisey’s case, these include, in Périodes, the use of
‘beating’ between two strings sounding the same pitch before one string
gradually deviates; heavy pressing of the bow on the strings to transition
from pitch to noise and vice versa; and scordatura. On this last point,
Anderson comparatively reproduces an extract each from the scores of
Anahit and Périodes in which scordatura has been scored, with each string
having its own stave and sounding the same pitch; since Grisey had never
used this technique in any works before Périodes, this suggests he had seen
Scelsi’s score. Correspondence at the Paul Sacher Foundation backs this
up. In the Grisey Collection are two letters from Scelsi to Grisey. Each is
written on the front and reverse sides of an A4 sheet; both are unfortu-
nately undated, and one of the outstanding qualities of each is the poor
quality of the handwriting: the script is written in biro in very large, joined-
up handwriting that looks as if it were written by a child (the letters also
lack the usual stylistic conventions of sender’s and recipient’s addresses
and so on):
Dear friend –
Thank you for your letter and for your invitation. Tristan Murail is kind
enough to bring you the scores which you have requested from me. I include a
small catalogue. With thanks and in waiting to hear from you. Best wishes,
Giacinto Scelsi47

It seems likely that the letter dates from Grisey’s period in Rome and was
sent just after Scelsi and Grisey’s first meeting, since Murail was evidently
in Rome at the time of writing and it is likely that Grisey was, too. The
string quartet sketch and aspects of Dérives and Périodes in this case betray
Scelsi’s influence.

Psychoacoustics and the Mutation of Statistical Serialism

into Spectralism
More significant was Grisey’s independent study of psychoacoustics, which
brought about a decisive step beyond serialist techniques and their

46
Anderson, ‘Scelsi et l’Itinéraire’, 149–56. 47
GGCPSF.
142 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

replacement by psychoacoustical models, which latter corresponded more

closely to the physiological reality of musical sound. Grisey had already
used basic resonance models as a student in Perichoresis and Vagues,
chemins, le souffle, as auditory beacons. Following his studies with Marie,
the advice of Ligeti, and the relative success of D’eau et de pierre, which
drew on formant elements, Grisey concluded that during his Rome resi-
dency he should develop his knowledge. He bought and studied two books
on acoustics: Fritz Winckel’s Vues nouvelles sur le monde des sons and
Émile Leipp’s Acoustique et musique.48 Given Grisey’s propensity towards
schematisation and parametric composition, he thrived in the technical
data set forth in these acoustics treatises, and many of his subsequent
musical ideas and theoretical concepts are drawn from these two books.49
When the impact of these books on Grisey is considered, a relevant point is
that, as well as being acousticians, Winckel and Leipp were both actively
interested in musique expérimentalle (as it was called in the 1950s and
1960s), and that as well as having contacts with each other, each had
contact with Schaeffer and Abraham Moles. Leipp discusses Xenakis and
Risset in Acoustique et musique, while Winckel uses a quotation from
Schoenberg as the epigraph to Vues nouvelles. Their respective tomes were
written with an ideal future reader of Grisey’s type in mind, and in this
regard it is little wonder that they should have had such an influence
on him.
A description that Grisey later applied to his music (which he used twice
for the titles of theoretical essays) is that of music as the becoming of
sounds. An apposite image for Grisey’s music, first used in the score for
Périodes to denote a music based on audibly perceptible processes of
mutation,50 the image is adapted from the first page of Winckel’s Vues
nouvelles, where Winckel, analogising the situation of contemporary music
with that of biology, suggests that, as with the microscopic study of an

48
Winckel, Vues nouvelles. Although he signed and dated the Leipp book ‘1972’ and the
Winckel book ‘1973’, I believe that Grisey read Winckel first, since that book is heavily
underlined while the first 100 pages of the Leipp book are blank.
49
Féron briefly discusses Grisey’s having read these texts in ‘Gérard Grisey: première
section’, 79–80. Féron notes that they were the first two dedicated books on the subject
for musicians published in French. Another volume that Grisey purchased in 1974 was
Burghauser and Spelda’s Akustische Grundlagen des Orchestrierens.
50
In the programme note included in the Périodes score (published in 1974), Grisey
combines a few of his influences (Winckel, Xenakis, Stockhausen) in one sentence: ‘[I]f
music is the becoming of sound rather than the sound object itself, it will be necessary to
control its metabolism; what I call its “degree of change” – in other words, its journey in
time, its adventure.’ Grisey, programme note in Périodes.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 143

isolated dead cell, a ‘microscope’ focused on an isolated dead sound tells us

next to nothing: ‘it is not the sonorous object itself, but its becoming that
matters to us: music, too, is living’.51 Grisey uses not only the same word,
‘becoming’ but the same image of the microscope and the same analogy of
sound with living cells.52 Another phrase that Grisey often used is that
every sound is a being with a birth, a life, and a death. This is adapted from
Leipp’s book, wherein Leipp several times refers to sound as a living being,
at one point, for example, telling the reader, ‘we know what a traditional
musical sound is: a living being, never identical with itself’;53 this chimes,
too, with Grisey’s compositional focus on the degree of change as the
proper measure of musical time. In Winckel’s Vues nouvelles, Grisey, as
his underlining and annotations show, read closely the sections on form-
ants, resonance, resultant tones, beating, spectral decomposition, and
transients. In Leipp’s Acoustique et Musique, as well as the sections on
formants, he read closely the sections on the acoustics of specific instru-
ments (stringed instruments and clarinet).54 The latter had been one of
Grisey’s main instrumental focuses up to this point, while the former
would figure prominently in Dérives and Périodes (which Grisey was
composing at the time). Leipp focuses on several specific technical terms
that Grisey ‘dramatised’ in his subsequent works: for example, transients
(Transitoires), partials (Partiels) and the insight that in nature, mathemat-
ically perfect periodicity does not exist, periodicity always being slightly
loose. Winckel specifies how, in any given sound, all of the parameters are
linked and cannot be mutually extricated, which, as has been seen, is one of
the basic principles underlying Grisey’s transition beyond statistical serial-
ism in the composition of D’eau et de pierre and Dérives. Winckel states
that any given sound demands a certain duration for our ear to understand
it, since the onset of a sound is often characterised as noise before settling
into a stationary phase wherein the spectra are relatively stable; Grisey

51
Winckel, Vues nouvelles, 1. In Winckel’s first book translated into English (which Grisey
also read), the following sentence is found: ‘The building-up of the complex sound, its
“becoming”, is of significance aesthetically; the end product of the completely built-up
sound is less interesting.’ Winckel, Music, Sound and Sensation, 2.
52
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 259. Sounds ‘are alive like cells, with a birth, life and death,
and above all tend towards a continual transformation of their own energy’. Grisey,
‘Tempus ex machina’, 268.
53
Leipp, Acoustique et musique, 302. There is also an echo of Messiaen in Leipp’s further
extrapolating from this that a musical work should be compared to a theatrical mise-en-
scène ‘whose actors are sounds’ and wherein ‘every actor is only defined by his or her
relation with the other actors’: the principle Grisey explored with the two contrasting
personnages of D’eau et de pierre. Leipp, Acoustique et musique, 300, 302.
54
Grisey’s copies of the two books are in GGCPSF.
144 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

would adapt this notion of the inherent link between his techniques of
harmonic modelling and his music’s slow duration, underlining that his
music’s starting point is temporal.55
What Winckel outlines here in 1960, avant la lettre, is the so-called
‘spectral attitude’. This is the attitude that says that sounds cannot be
shuffled around like neutral beads but each have an individual birth, life,
and death. In doing so, Winckel is dismissing a long-standing musical
Platonism: the notion that there exists in some ideal realm the note C, and
that every individual instance we hear of the note C is a mundane realisa-
tion of this ideal note. Within most musical analysis and theory, that
presupposition works well: it may not be totally accurate (given how
specific sounds relate to their contextual harmonic fields and registral
distribution), but it allows us to talk about music. Where it runs into
trouble, in post-tonal music, is where composers start to treat this ideal
realm as something that actually exists, as happened in dodecaphony and
serialism. Winckel points out that even the notion of a sine wave is purely
theoretical: a perfect sine wave does not exist in reality, because in reality
every sound has a beginning and an end. Illustrating this, Winckel, as
Grisey would do, refers to biology and the life cycle: a musical composition
‘thus becomes an immediate image of life’.56 From here, it is not far to an
attitude viewing musical sounds, inasmuch as they may be employed as
compositional material, in ecological terms. This is not mere rhetoric; it is
a radical effort to establish a new conceptual paradigm adequate to the
reality of musical sound as shown by contemporary science. In this way,
Winckel and Grisey as music-acoustical thinkers were following in the
spirit of Bergson, whose aim had been in part to formulate metaphysical
concepts adequate to the revised worldview of modern physics.57 French
spectral music, for Dufourt, would precisely be this conceptual renovation
in the domain of musical composition. Along these lines, Winckel makes a
thinly veiled critique of serialist methodology:
In the fields of music theory and musicology, both simple and compound
sound are treated as concrete building material having differing valences.
In this way a ‘function’ is ascribed to each building block with respect to the
others, whereby a distinctive architecture is formed, possessing a singular
tonal character. Music, however, is a multiform complex function of sound
series, only certain aspects of which have been known to us up to this time.
We have become far too accustomed to compute isolated partial functions
schematically and to assume a corresponding validity for the whole, without

55
Grisey, ‘Interview with David Bundler’. 56
Winckel, Music, Sound and Sensation, 25.
57
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 199.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 145

continuous attentive listening, which would test the results. As we shall see, it
is not admissible to consider simply the printed value of a note (for example,
one having a duration of one second) as sufficient representation of the
functional event of this as opposed to other musical notes. The intoned
individual sound alone has such a dynamic life that after a lapse of one second
both form and necessarily also timbre will have changed. The effect of one
sound complex on the following one does not depend upon the intervallic
tension alone, but also upon the changes occurring in time during the
intoning of the individual sounds. The series of phonemes in language
operates similarly.58

This view is consistent with Dufourt’s view of spectral music as a music

that is based on ‘dynamic continuity and thinks of music as a network of
interactions [. . .] Spectral music is based on a theory of functional fields
and an aesthetic of unstable forms.’59 Winckel’s text informs Grisey’s
formation of a compositional attitude putting acoustical priority not on
identity but on difference, and the key points here are ones Grisey would
repeat: erroneous belief in the primacy of the printed score over the heard
sound (‘the map over the territory’); the hidden internal complexity of
every sound, with its birth, life, and death; and the irreversible flow of time
as the true condition of musical sound in its unfolding. Winckel’s carefully
worded description of musical composition as connecting together ‘sound
series’ hints that one should examine more closely, in this conceptual
revaluation, the evolution from serialism.
It is uncertain who rebranded dodecaphony as serialism. Boulez is a
plausible candidate, given his initial leadership of the post-war serialist
project (he descried the term dodecaphony’s ‘garden of Greek roots’) and
the way in which he rebranded Cage’s chance composition as ‘aleatorism’.
As mentioned earlier, Schoenberg wrote that ‘to call any relation of tones
atonal is just as farfetched as it would be to designate a relation of colours
aspectral [. . .]’;60 it is important to remember, though, that dodecaphony
and serialism had distinct aims. Dodecaphony was centred on the Second
Viennese School and desired a re-engagement with tradition on revised
terms; serialism centred on the post-war generation and desired to refor-
mulate musical composition from the ground up, deriving its rules from
the internal structure of sound. In choosing the name ‘serialism’, the post-
war generation alluded to the principle of organising the different
acoustical-compositional parameters in scales on the model of pitch

58
Winckel, Music, Sound and Sensation, 1.
59
Dufourt, ‘Musique spectrale’, in Musique, pouvoir, écriture, 338.
60
Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 432.
146 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

organisation in dodecaphony. The commonplace understanding of the

term ‘series’ is that it refers to the twelve notes of the chromatic scale
distributed (in terms of their intervals) in a specific order to which, in a
given composition, the composer adheres (with certain conventional trans-
formations allowed). This was done to eliminate repetition and traditional
melodic figures, and to allow sound to be liberated from outworn historical
determinations. The notes are supposedly ordered in a series, and their
ordering is thus said to be serial. Strictly speaking, this is a misnomer: the
ordering of the twelve chromatic notes expresses the attributes not of a
series but of a sequence. This is not semantic nitpicking: it is a theoretical
misunderstanding. Given that the name ‘serialism’ is supposed to express a
definite concept (the compositional method’s adherence to the innate
reality of sound), the difference between a sequence and a series allows
one to discern part of what is acoustically mistaken in serialism and how
spectral music corrects it. Sean Bowden, in his book The Priority of Events:
Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, describes two attributes of a series:
First of all, a series is composed of terms which relate to one another
‘reciprocally’, which is simply to say that each term is what it is in the series
because of its ‘position’ relative to all of the other terms of the series.
Secondly, this ‘positional relation’ between the reciprocally determined terms
constituting a series is itself determined with reference to (at least) a second
series of reciprocally determined terms of a heterogeneous ‘type’ [. . .]61

An example of a series in nature is waves on a shoreline: each member of

the series (each wave) is reciprocally determined by the iterative principle
that also causes the next member (the next wave), and so on, individual
identity being generated by a differential rule. Moreover, that specific series
is a series precisely due to the existence of different series which, nonethe-
less, betray the same principle. This is an immanent view of series referring
to a metaphysics of difference rather than of identity. In Grisey, the
principle of seriality accounts for his musical framework’s twin compos-
itional poles: harmonicity (serial distribution of frequencies) and period-
icity (serial distribution in time). French spectral music consistently
referred to itself in these terms, as, for example, in this quotation from
Murail: ‘Speaking of harmonic fields, here is an idea currently shared by
several musical styles: proposing a certain congruence between the vertical
and the horizontal. Like a series – or some type of cell that hatches chords
as well as melodies – a spectrum can be exploited both vertically and
horizontally [. . .]’.62 Drawing on psychoacoustics, the young generation

61
Bowden, The Priority of Events, 6. 62
Murail, ‘Target Practice’, 156.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 147

realised Boulez’s aim for a series-based approach to musical composition

exploring immanent properties of hierarchisation. Simultaneously, they
left behind what in serialism was arbitrary or of limited application (such
as the use of the equal-tempered scale’s twelve chromatic pitches, or the
prohibition on repetition). Frequency aggregates, in Grisey’s and Murail’s
music, comprise immanent series; applied to pitches, they furthermore
have a property of self-similarity across scales (micro and macro are a
series, and series thus occur in parallel). Frequency aggregates, between
themselves, are distributed serially along the spectrum of potential sounds
(complex wave forms). The spectralist technique, too, of repeated iter-
ations of a given sound figure, each time slightly differentiated (as at the
opening of Gondwana or Partiels), is the serial repetition of difference. The
compositional framework Grisey was developing was in this way a new
écriture based on the immanent reality of sound, replacing serialism by a
stricter adherence to its principles.

The Composition of Dérives

Dérives is one of Grisey’s biggest single compositions. The published score
measures 95  61 cm and is forty pages long, and the work was one of
Grisey’s first to be released on a commercial recording (an Erato LP along
with Partiels).63 In performance, Dérives lasts up to half an hour. The
dossier of Grisey’s Dérives sketches runs to 219 pages, many of the sheets
being very large in size, and my overview here is only of some salient
points. Dérives was initially envisaged as a series of waves, each a ‘reaction’
to some acoustic event. Out of these waves would come processes of
transformation or sound ‘metabolisms’ (Fig. 5.1). The formal basis, too,
positing two opposed instrumental forces – the one an orchestra, the other
an ensemble of amplified soloists64 – picks up from D’eau et de pierre.
In the course of composition, however, Grisey abandoned the opposition
of the two groups in favour of their alternation and eventual fusion:
appropriately enough, a ‘drifting’ of acoustic activity from ensemble to
orchestra and back again, the surface of the music being for the most part
continuous. Dérives is made up of eight such ‘drifts’, each of which focuses
on a different acoustic parameter, though in a concert, given the

63
Grisey, Dérives and Partiels, Erato STU 71157 (1981).
64
The small ensemble comprises flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, accordion, two violins, viola,
and two double basses. In pitting a small ensemble against an orchestra Grisey may also
have been influenced by his former teacher Dutilleux’s Second Symphony, ‘Le Double’,
which does the same.
148 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Figure 5.1 An early outline sketch for Grisey’s Dérives. Note the term métabole used in a few places.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Switzerland.
 Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 149

Figure 5.1 (cont.)

150 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

consistency of the overall musical surface, the audience may not notice the
transitions from one drift to another. Chapter 3 above showed how Grisey
was inspired by Boulez’s Don in composing resonance chords in Vagues,
chemins, le souffle. Grisey returns to this influence at the beginning of
Dérives, and in this way Dérives can be considered a hybrid of Boulez’s Don
and Stockhausen’s Stimmung. Dérives opens with a fake tuning-up of the
orchestra à la Varèse (which Grisey scores), before the instruments drop
out one by one, leaving a solo violin (Ex. 5.3). This solo violin iterates
timbral variations on a single note several times (with Scelsi-esque scoring,
a stave for each string) before a sudden strike across the orchestra, Tutti
fffz, sets off, as if by resonance, a static spectral chord in the amplified
ensemble. This sudden, loud tutti strike, followed by a resonant chord
acting as the resonance of that strike, is like the gesture that opens Boulez’s
Don and Figures, doubles, prismes. But where in those works the chord lasts
a few seconds, in Dérives it lasts over ten minutes, drifting from ensemble
to orchestra and back in a play of sensuous instrumental colour.
Under Dérives’s ostensibly simple surface is a forbiddingly complex
composition. Grisey made tables and schemata measuring the activity
and change in various parameters throughout the work. Seemingly every
aspect, dimension, and parameter was planned out in advance of the
score’s having been written: besides harmonic and durational aspects, there
are also schemas of, for example, silences and the distribution of inten-
sities. Grisey uses the degree of change to measure the ongoing differenti-
ation of the acoustical material from what went before, and prior to
working out a more accurate calculation of the degree of change, he drew
a graphic image of how the material transforms, an image very similar to
Xenakis’s graphic images for Metastaseis. To achieve this seamless trans-
formation of one state of the material into another state, Grisey, as in D’eau
et de pierre, investigates what might be called the ‘phase transitions’ linking
the different acoustical parameters: timbre, intensity, pitch/timbre, grain/
speed, rhythmical density, complex sounds, and sonorous mass. The static
chord in Dérives is initially similar to the opening chord of D’eau et de
pierre; it features the lower partials of a harmonic series on E♭ and high
harmonics acting as ‘colourations’ on top. But Grisey’s harmonic compos-
itional planning is much more sophisticated in Dérives than in the previous
work. As Féron has shown in detail, Grisey bases the harmonic content of
Dérives on what he terms in his sketches a prisme harmonique (‘harmonic
prism’; Fig. 5.2), a pitch aggregate comprising a vertical arrangement of the
twelve chromatic notes in such a way that they model selected partials of
the harmonic spectrum of the low E♭. Furthermore, from each of the
twelve component pitches, Grisey creates an additional ‘sub prism’ using
 Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 151

Example 5.3 The first page of Grisey’s Dérives (1973–4) for orchestra and amplified ensemble,
showing the solo violin with Scelsi-esque scoring, following by the orchestral strike reminiscent of
Boulez’s Don. © Copyright Casa Ricordi. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.
Printed by permission.
152 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Figure 5.2 Grisey’s ‘harmonic prism’ determining Dérives’s pitch content and temporal proportions.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Switzerland.

that pitch as another quasi-fundamental. These sub-prisms Grisey categor-

ises as follows: anti-prisms, made up only of notes outside the fundamental
frequency E♭’s harmonic spectrum; complete (enriched) prisms, which
include additional notes from the set of natural harmonics; prisms made of
complementary harmonics, made up solely of spectral harmonics absent
from the initial prism; contractions of the original prism around each of its
constituent notes; and reversals around the prism’s notes’ axis.65
Not only does this give some idea of how complex Dérives’s composition
is; it also indicates Grisey’s continued use of quasi-serialist thinking. Féron
considers the prism a ‘spectral metaphor’;66 in fact, it is more likely that
Grisey was using the term ‘prism’ in a specific technical sense following
Boulez’s use of the term in Figures, doubles, prismes. In Boulez’s

65
Féron, ‘Emergence of Spectra’, 349. 66
Féron, ‘Emergence of Spectra’, 352.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 153

composition, as here, the prism is the pitch corridor linking one ensemble
to another. Thus, in Dérives, spectral music is mutating into existence by
way of statistical serialism. The main harmonic prism is an axis or thresh-
old that Grisey uses to link the material of the small ensemble and the
orchestra throughout; successive sections with alternate instrumental
groups are for the most part linked seamlessly by this pivot. Moreover,
Grisey also uses the relative proportions of the harmonic spectrum to
determine the durations of Dérives’s different sections (its eight ‘drifts’).
In this, Grisey uses, on the one hand, numerical values corresponding to
the intervals between the pitches of the prism (these are listed to the left of
the prism in Fig. 5.2) and, on the other hand, numerical values corres-
ponding to the number and rank of each partial (listed to the right of the
prism). This follow’s Stockhausen’s approach in Stimmung. Henceforth in
his oeuvre, Grisey would often use spectra in such a way to structure
durations (replacing the magic squares used for this purpose in his student
works). In using the harmonic prism and its sub-prisms as the basis for all
acoustical material, and in using open-ended process as form, Grisey pre-
defines the harmonic space within which his music moves (the movement
always being either ‘tendency towards’ or ‘deviation from’). This is an
immanent compositional approach: the material and form and reciprocally
determined, two aspects of the temporal process. The prism and its sub-
prisms are virtually present throughout the first ten minutes of Dérives
regardless of what is actually sounding. This is a radical move, one at once
of radical reduction of material and of radical totalising of material:
reduction because the smooth, floating, synthetic sound, blurring harmony
and timbre, is entirely lacking in features; and totalising because that sound
is macroscopically ‘blown up’ to comprise the totality of what is heard.
To this music, the traditional concepts of melody, rhythm, and harmony
are barely applicable:67 the music is denuded of tangible features and is
denuded of anything one might say of it. The notion of the drift is choice.
Spectral composition as practised here by Grisey is precisely the setting up
of a situation of a consistent surface whose processual metamorphosis will
always elude the listener’s grasp. Differentiation rules over identity.68

67
‘Spectral music essentially represents a change in our modes of thinking music. It is no
longer a music founded on traditional, well-separated categories like melody,
counterpoint, harmony, or timbre. Spectral music is on the contrary a music of mixed
categories and hybrid objects.’ Dufourt, ‘Questions en pointillés’, 33.
68
A fragment of the original programme note, found among Grisey’s sketches, reads: ‘It is
about immediately perceiving the relationship between sounds. [. . .] This does not
prevent us from controlling the nature of the sound object; it acts on what is really
perceived by humans, and not on some abstraction.’ GGCPSF.
154 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Appropriately for this recrafting of serial thought, some of what Deleuze

says of Boulez here applies to Grisey. Deleuze describes in Boulez the
invention of ‘a variable, which is developed in the autonomous dimension
of time, [which] will be called a “block of duration”, a “ceaselessly varying
sound block”’;69 this describes accurately the ten-minute opening chord of
Dérives, not only harmonically but in regard to the temporal dilation it
effects. Here is the slowing down of chronometric time and the opening up
of another, ecstatic temporality, the time of the artwork. ‘From the stri-
ated’, Deleuze writes, ‘a smooth or non-pulsed space-time detached itself in
turn, one which no longer refers to chronometry except in a global
fashion.’70
The final point of note concerns the ending of Dérives, its eighth
sequence or drift. Grisey here revisits his idea for the ending of Vagues,
chemins, le souffle. In that work, the ending was envisaged programmatic-
ally as ‘peace recovered in the eternal light of Unity’,71 which was in
practical terms achieved by a massive consonant chord in the orchestra.
In Dérives, the ending is similarly envisaged as a return home following the
drifting journey of the work: this is achieved by the orchestra and small
ensemble finally fusing and sounding a massive consonant chord, which
evolves over two or three minutes (rehearsal marks 40 to 44), a chord now
modelled on the harmonic spectrum. Grisey considered this closing
sequence the first instance in his oeuvre of the technique of instrumental
synthesis: the spectral harmonic technique of modelling an ensemble
harmony on a given frequency complex. This technique, Grisey states,
‘gives us to perceive a synthetic, fused image in which the different
orchestral layers disappear in favour of a sound that is unique as well as
strongly complex’.72 Nonetheless, no specific instrumental spectral models
are used, just a harmonic series. Grisey would shortly afterwards reformu-
late this ending for Périodes, wherein he would for the first time ‘orches-
trate’ a spectrogram. Dérives is music for the listening experience, and the
programme note written for Dérives’s premiere does not dwell on the
work’s technical aspects. This avoidance of technical language is consistent
with Grisey’s practice in Vagues, chemins, le souffle, where he makes a tacit
distinction between what is important for the composer and what the

69
Deleuze, ‘Boulez, Proust and Time’, 70. On Boulez and Deleuzean thought, see Campbell,
Boulez, Music and Philosophy.
70
Deleuze, ‘Boulez, Proust and Time’, 71.
71
Grisey, ‘Vagues, chemins, le souffle’, programme booklet, 1972.
72
Grisey, ‘Structuration des timbres’, 91–2.
Psychoacoustics and the New écriture (1973–1974) 155

listener can hear.73 In his original programme note, Grisey states that the
work ‘resembles the course of a boat which, wanting to go from one point
to another one, sees itself ceaselessly obliged to correct its route’.74
Dérives consolidated the experiment of D’eau et de pierre and showed
Grisey his way forward. It was premiered at a Musique Plus concert as part
of the 1974 Festival d’Automne. Founded in 1972 with the intention of
establishing in the French capital a competitor to the respective Biennales
of Berlin and Venice, the Festival d’Automne in Paris was initially artistic-
ally directed by Michel Guy, and President Pompidou founded the festival
at roughly the same time as he gave the green light to what would later
become the Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou (the
Pompidou Centre). Given Dérives’s situation at the base of Grisey’s mature
style it is worthwhile to consider how it was received by contemporary
critics, prior to the notion of musique spectrale. The other works on the
programme at Dérives’s premiere were Schoenberg’s Vier Lieder für Gesang
und Orchester Op. 22, Ligeti’s Requiem, and Castiglione’s Inverno in ver
(1973, rev. 1978). Most of Paris’s new music community was in attendance
(Murail said that he attended and enjoyed the concert).75 In an unlikely
turn of events, there was a possibility that the concert would be cancelled,
as had happened for Grisey at Royan in 1972 with the same orchestra:
again, the orchestra, at the outset of the new season, was threatening
industrial action. But Pierre Vozlinsky, a senior member of the Radio
France hierarchy and himself a musician, ‘in extremis’ ordered the players
to carry out their responsibilities, and unlike with the ill-fated concert at
Easter 1972, Grisey’s premiere went ahead.76 In Le Monde, the premiere
was reviewed by the musicologist and critic Anne Rey. Rey wrote that
Dérives ‘is a continuation of the “play on the grand surface of time”
inaugurated in D’eau et de pierre (performed in 1973 [sic] at Metz, then
at the Domaine Musical).’ She was positive about the twenty-eight-year-
old’s new piece: ‘This acoustic experience begins on the impassive rivers
[fleuves impassibles] of a long continuum. Then it drifts by slow drives or
by violent rebounds to pass along through sonic chasms.’ Rey recognised
that a salient point is how the acoustic material generates the work’s form.

73
‘Any attempt to reduce music to language is bound to fail, and I much rather allowing the
listener to dream upon the sounds with which I present him rather than imposing in
advance a perspective that concerns no-one but me.’ Grisey, ‘Vagues, chemins, le souffle’,
programme booklet, 1972.
74
Grisey, programme note for Dérives, October 1974, Festival d’Automne, Paris, in
Écrits, 129.
75
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
76
Rey, ‘Des débuts prometteurs’.
156 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

‘The route develops thanks to the dynamism of the timbres but immobil-
ises the duration of the successive states of equilibrium and of mutation.
This anthropology applied to the constitution of orchestral complexes
aligns itself perhaps quite closely to the approach of composers of
electroacoustic music.’77
Samuel Butler wrote: ‘The first undertakers in all great attempts com-
monly miscarry, and leave the advantages of their losses to those that come
after them.’78 With Dérives and its sister work Périodes (discussed in the
next chapter), Grisey reformulated statistical serialism’s techniques, such
as the degree of change, towards what would come to be called spectral
music. Towards the end of the composition of Dérives, Grisey signed a
contract with Casa Ricordi, which thereafter was his publisher.
On 13 September 1974 (the day his journal says he finished the work),
he signed a contract for Dérives, one of his last actions before returning to
Paris. (Grisey also canvassed on Scelsi’s behalf with Casa Ricordi, but
Ricordi declined to publish the Italian composer because, Grisey writes,
of the rumour in Italian new music that Scelsi was not the real composer of
his music.)79 A brief journal entry marks the day Grisey finished work on
the score and acknowledges the perceptual focus of his new style: ‘Dérives
finally complete . . . or rather not incomplete like all my other works.
Understand what Marcel Duchamp means: “The artwork is not finished
by the artist.”’80

77
Rey, ‘Des débuts prometteurs’. 78
Butler, ‘Virtue and Vice’, 345.
79
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 193. See Drott, ‘Class, Ideology, and il caso
Scelsi’, 80–120.
80
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments 1967–1974’, 317.
 6 L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976)

Levinas called the composer-performer collective l’Itinéraire ‘the ensemble

that founded the story of spectral music’.1 L’Itinéraire was created in
January 1973 by Murail and Tessier. Their motivation was not solely
aesthetic but one that has become time-honoured for composition gradu-
ates: to create a collective that would ensure that its founders’ music, and
the music of their peers, could be heard by the listening public. The
collective’s founding set the basis for the wider compositional movement:
Périodes, for example, Grisey’s breakthrough work alongside Dérives, was
commissioned by the collective in its first season. Throughout the 1970s,
l’Itinéraire premiered several other celebrated early works of the courant
spectral, such as Levinas’s Appels, Grisey’s Partiels, Murail’s Mémoire-
érosion, Tessier’s Clair-obscur, and Dufourt’s Saturne. It was through
Ensemble l’Itinéraire that these works received regular concert perform-
ances in France and abroad, contributing significantly to the courant
spectral becoming known, and it was with the help of these players that
the composers knew what they could write in their scores. At Darmstadt in
1982, the first major international presentation of the French spectral
aesthetic, it was under the common designation l’Itinéraire that Grisey,
Murail, Dufourt, Tessier, and Levinas presented their ideas and music.
However, while spectral music was one of l’Itinéraire’s focuses, l’Itinéraire
was not solely identified with this music.

The Domaine Musical’s Demise and l’Itinéraire’s Rise

In France, the lineage of composer collectives goes back to Les Six by way
of La Jeune France and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. As was seen
in Chapter 2, forming a collective was in keeping with the post-1960s
climate in new music, and by the early 1970s the perceived failure of any
new grand figures to emerge comparable to the likes of Boulez,
Stockhausen, and Xenakis had led to suggestions in some quarters that
the period of vedettes had passed and a period of collectives begun.
Changes were proposed to what had become a ‘grand composer’ format

1
Quoted in Gervasoni, ‘Musique spectrale’.

[157]
158 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and young musical collectives were

founded in various countries: in Italy, Musica Elettronica Viva, including
the composers Alvin Curran and Fred Rzewski; in West Germany, Vinko
Globokar’s New Phonic Art as well as the Stockhausen performing group,
whose members, including Eötvös, Maiguashca, and Fritsch, went on to
form their own collectives named after the Oeldorf locality and Feedback
Studios; in England, the Scratch Orchestra, founded by Stockhausen’s
erstwhile assistant Cornelius Cardew; and in France, the GERM, founded
in 1966. It is a measure of the currency this view had at the time that even
Boulez, not the most altruistic of composers, was regularly speaking of the
need for collective musical research, which, he suggested, had superseded
the old view of the individual composer working alone (even if, of course,
he had his own agenda in this regard). L’Itinéraire was in keeping with this
1960s composer–performer model, and contemporaries included 2e2m
and Musique Plus.
If this climate was the context for l’Itinéraire’s birth in 1973, the
collective’s membership, experience, and ambition had their basis in the
two Paris Conservatoire-era projects mentioned earlier, Point-radiant and
MATH 72. Despite the MATH 72 concerts’ success, Murail said that he
‘very quickly saw the limits’. MATH 72’s most obvious limitation was the
small number of personnel involved, and the four composers discussed
recruiting other people. ‘I said, “Well, you know, we have to open up and
do other things, accept new composers.” And this is how l’Itinéraire was
born. Then I spoke to Grisey and I asked him if he wanted to be part of the
adventure, but he didn’t want to.’2 Walter Bouldreau, who had dinner with
Grisey and Murail when he visited Paris in the 1970s, said that among their
generation there was wide dissatisfaction with the Boulez-dominated
scene.3 Murail said that while still resident at the Villa Medicis in Rome
he sent Tessier a letter proposing the creation of new musical collective
expanding on the MATH 72 model.4 Since the composer Monique Cecconi
Botella says she received a telephone call from Murail in late 1972 asking if
she would be interested in joining the new collective, this letter to Tessier
was probably sent in late 1972 (around which time he had helped organise
a young composers’ concert at the Villa Medici).5 No doubt a spur for
Murail was the prospect of soon returning to Paris with no job and limited
outlets for his music. Murail told Cecconi Botella that the new project

2
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
3
Boudreau, interview with the author, 15 December 2022.
4
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
5
See Cagney, ‘Synthesis and Deviation’, 338.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 159

would entail that the members ‘as a group decide the dates of the concerts,
establish pointedly new programmes, bring together musicians, pro-
gramme concerts, organise rehearsals and coordinate performers [. . .]
make posters, make programmes, carry around music stands, stir up
interest in the press, and so on’.6 Murail and Tessier invited some of the
personnel from the Conservatoire concerts, Point-radiant, and MATH
72 to be involved, among them the conductor Boris de Vinogradov and
the violist Geneviève Renon, one of Murail’s dedicatees for his then-recent
work Où tremblent les contours for two violas and, like Murail, a champion
of Scelsi’s music.7 Tessier points out that the majority of the composers
involved were associated with Messiaen’s class and that all of the perform-
ers were graduates of the Paris Conservatoire.8 This fed into l’Itinéraire’s
sense of shared identity.
The collective officially came into existence in January 1973. Though it
clearly represented an attempt to create a younger, more inclusive alterna-
tive to the Domaine Musical, Murail denied that that opposition was
intentional. Nevertheless, the name chosen for the enterprise attests other-
wise. ‘[The name] was my idea’, Murail said. ‘I wanted something which
was opposite to “Domaine“: “domaine” is closed and “itinéraire” is open.’9
As well as symbolising a different attitude to the territorial ‘domain’ (with
its cognates ‘dominion’ and ‘domination’), ‘itinerary’ also has the late
1960s youth-cultural air of ‘journey’. Of Grisey’s declining to be part of
the ‘adventure’, Murail commented: ‘I think he didn’t want to be engaged
in anything. He didn’t want to be compromised.’ Grisey probably did not
want to risk being in Boulez’s bad books, and he would not have any
involvement in l’Itinéraire’s operation until the very end of the 1970s,
when he briefly became a member of the programming committee.
As had been the case for MATH 72 the previous year, two initial concerts
were organised. Murail remembered that for these two concerts the col-
lective had ‘absolutely no money, no resources, nothing, except for some
money from the French Radio, who recorded the concert’. Nevertheless, an
amenable venue was found: the Carré Thorigny, a venue founded in
1972 by the actress Silvia Monfort, a contact instigated by Murail (‘my

6
Cecconi Botella, [‘Untitled témoignage’], 227–8.
7
Rénon met Scelsi in Rome in 1971, on which occasion Scelsi gave her a score of his two-
movement work Manto, which Rénon performed at a l’Itinéraire concert in Paris in 1975
(apparently the world premiere).
8
Tessier, ‘Tristan Murail et la genèse de l’Itinéraire’.
9
All quotations in this paragraph from Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16
January 2014.
160 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

parents knew her for some reason I don’t remember’). There, on 1 May
and 4 June 1973, around the time of Murail’s return from Rome,
l’Itinéraire’s debut took place. On the first concert, information is unfortu-
nately scarce, but the programme did feature Tessier’s Triedre (1973) for
accordion (Alain Abbot), flute (Patrice Bocquillon), and vibraphone
(Michel Gasteau), and one would suspect that works of Murail and
Cecconi Botella were also programmed. At the second concert, the pro-
gramme featured Iranian music by Djamchid Chemirani, works by Jolivet
and Berio, and Levinas’s Clov et Hamm (1973) for tuba (Fernand Lelong),
bass trombone (Marcel Galiegue), percussion (Francis Brana), and two-
track tape. Clov et Hamm, named after the characters in Beckett’s Fin de
partie/Endgame, is an early example of Levinas’s propensity for bizarre and
dramatic spectacles in his music. This was the beginning of Levinas’s
association with Murail and Tessier’s activity, and Levinas would be a core
member, and eventually the director, of the collective. Following these two
modestly successful concerts, the rest of the summer of 1973 involved no
further activity. Elsewhere in the new music scene, though, things took a
fortuitous turn.
The Domaine Musical had been running since 1954. In August 1973, the
Domaine Musical’s subscribers received a letter from the director, Gilbert
Amy. ‘It is with some sadness that today I tell you that next year there will
be no Domaine Musical at the Théâtre de la Ville. For multiple reasons,
I am forced to end this series, despite your help and loyalty. [. . .] It remains
for me to offer you once again, without euphoria but also without bitter-
ness, my grateful thanks.’10 There is no consensus on the exact reason for
the Domaine Musical’s closure in 1973, after almost twenty years as the
main new music forum in France. Robert Piencikowsi has suggested that
Amy had been looking for a way out of the directorship.11 Despite suc-
cesses such as the production of Stockhausen’s Momente in January 1973,
there were budgetary problems and low turn-out for some of the concerts
featuring less well-known composers. In June, Amy was offered the pos-
ition of music officer at the ORTF, and he accepted. More important,
though, was the backdrop of Boulez’s return to France. In summer 1973,
Boulez convened the first meeting of the future heads of department of
IRCAM at Senanque Abbey in Provence; this was, as Aguila notes, pre-
cisely the moment when Amy sent the letter announcing the Domaine’s
cessation. Murail suspected that Amy’s closure of the Domaine Musical
followed Boulez’s wishes. ‘I suppose he had received orders from Boulez.

10 11
Quoted in Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 418. Private conversation with the author.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 161

Boulez wanted to clean the landscape. [He probably] had in his mind
already the Ensemble Intercontemporain.’12 At all events, a month after
Amy’s letter to the Domaine Musical’s subscribers the news was
announced in the French press.
Jacques Lonchampt was the first to break the news publicly in Le Monde,
taking a tone by turns laudatory and morose (‘Amy has faced up to
responsibility. His decision, which keeps the reputation of this grand
period intact, brings the musical world face to face with the reality of its
situation. It signifies that it will have to invent another instrument for
another epoch’).13 Lonchampt thought that it would be worrying if the
Domaine’s demise did not provoke an invigorating jolt to the new music
community. This it did, and it was expressed in the Parisian fashion of
political daggers and newspaper polemics. Considered alongside the
marked non-emergence of any new musical vedettes, the Domaine
Musical’s closure was taken to signal a crisis. Fleuret, an ally at the time
of Boulez and a powerful figure in his own right as a critic, radio presenter,
and festival director, used the opportunity to pile blame on Boulez’s enemy
Landowski at the Directory of Music, hinting that without swift and proper
measures, he might resign from his directorship of the Festival d’Automne
(which by this stage had taken over from the Journées de Musique
Contemporaine). Fleuret melodramatically claimed that the Domaine
Musical’s disappearance now marked ‘the death of Paris as a permanent
centre of creation and diffusion of living music’.14 These sentiments had
been in the air for a while. Reviewing the 1972 Royan festival, for which
Samuel had selected the theme ‘The Young Generation’, Fleuret was less
than encouraged by the young generation presented; their discarding of the
models of yesteryear in favour of a rawness and spontaneity betokened for
him reactiveness, ‘taking revenge on the theoreticians of yesterday’.15
While in Paris to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra in January
1974, Boulez took time to slur the youngest generations of composers in
France, describing a situation of ‘stagnation’ and of young composers with
‘no personality’.16 Much the same position was taken by Musique en jeu
and by some other journalists. An essential fear, and not an unfounded
one, was that, since the Domaine Musical as an institution was emblematic

12
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
13
Lonchampt in Le Monde, 23 September 1973, quoted in Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 418.
14
Quoted in Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 418.
15
Fleuret, ‘La Siège de Metz’. Musique en jeu’s assessment of Royan 1972 was along the
same lines.
16
Quoted in Lonchampt, ‘Un entretien avec Pierre Boulez’.
162 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

of the post-war avant-garde project and of that project’s general relevance,

the Domaine’s closure, and the lack of any replacement, might be taken as
a sign of the historical contingency and failure of the post-war avant-garde
project, whose self-indulgent experiments might accordingly be consigned
to oblivion. ‘The future of contemporary music in France is at stake’,
Lonchampt wrote in this spirit in Le Monde.17 Landowski, feigning encour-
agement to Amy to consider reopening the Domaine, at the same time
gave the musical public his assurance that, were the Domaine not to
reopen, another similar organisation, and an organisation more in tune
with the times, would take the Domaine’s place. ‘[W]hatever happens’,
Landowski wrote, ‘contemporary music, perhaps animated by a new
breath, more spiritual and less formal, carries within itself a force and a
vitality that will not cease.’18
‘In French we say “reprendre les flambeaux”’, Murail remarked. He and
Tessier read Landowski’s remarks in Le Monde with no little interest and
felt that l’Itinéraire fitted the bill of a concert organisation that could ‘carry
on the flame’.19 There is disagreement about which of them made contact
with Landowski. Murail said that he wrote Landowski a letter, while
Tessier, from his pedagogical activities in the 1960s, already knew
Landowski and recalled that it was he who made the contact.20
A meeting was proposed between the young directors of l’Itinéraire and
the Director of Music, which Landowski accepted. Tessier and Murail
entered the meeting at Landowski’s office on rue Saint Dominique having
prepared their pitch, but in the end (and without casting any doubt on the
merit of their proposals) their old institutional connections from the Paris
Conservatoire proved key: as well as by the young composers and
Landowski, the meeting was attended by Messiaen. Tessier remarks that
‘the active support of Oliver Messiaen was a determining factor with the
Directory of Music’.21 It turned out that Landowski had already made up
his mind. ‘I think he had spoken with Messiaen’, Murail said, ‘and
Messiaen had really been of course very supportive. Landowski immedi-
ately promised to give us money.’22 To succeed in the long term, whatever
one’s field and regardless of one’s talent, one needs not only connections

17
Lonchampt, ‘Aucun requiem pour la Domaine musical’.
18
Quoted in Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 420.
19
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
20
Tessier, interview with the author, Paris, 27 February 2014.
21
Tessier, ‘Tristan Murail et le genèse de l’Itinéraire’.
22
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014. Murail continued: ‘he
promised more money than he actually gave in the end. But that I understood, because
I spoke with the director of the Conservatoire, who told me, “Be careful”! [laughs].’
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 163

but a touch of fortune. So it was here. Founded in 1973 in decided

opposition to Boulezean serialism and its power over what music was
performed in Paris, l’Itinéraire happened to coincide with the Ministry of
Culture’s need to fund a new organ for contemporary musical creation in
Paris, an organ, if possible, unaffiliated with Boulezean exclusivity, which
the Director of Music deplored. Shortly after his meeting with the two
young composers and Messiaen, his choice of words doubtless informed by
those used by Tessier and Murail in pitching their musical project,
Landowski wrote in the Guide musical that no single aesthetic current,
simply through chance circumstance, should now have the power to declare
itself implicitly favourable over all others. ‘One must have the decency and,
I would say, the courage not to manifest a preference and to give every
opportunity to those who are working’, Landowski wrote.23 In making this
inclusive statement he was preparing the musical public for l’Itinéraire,
whose government stipend would be revealed in the coming weeks.24
Since l’Itinéraire’s receiving a state subsidy depended to some extent on
Landowski’s animosity towards Boulez and serialism, some background to
that animosity will be helpful here. In 1965, the director-general of arts and
letters Gaëton Picon, supported by his administrator Émile Biasini,
encouraged the Minister of Culture André Malraux to adopt Boulez’s
recommendations into the ministry’s programme for the reform of
France’s musical institutions. Picon had got to know Boulez at the salons
of Madame Tézenas, where many of Paris’s literati spoke to each other and
which crossed over with Boulez’s Domaine Musical (which Madame
Tézenas funded). By contrast, Malraux had attended the Domaine
Musical concerts only twice and did not know Boulez well. Malraux’s
choice of Landowski for the new role of Music Director, and his ignoring
of Boulez’s recommendations, were swayed in part by a letter from the
Comité National de la Musique, a new group chaired by Jacques Chailley,
professor of musicology at the Sorbonne, whose most prominent members
included Dutilleux and Milhaud, and which made plain that in its view
Boulez was not to be given too much power. Éloy said that Boulez wanted
someone in the job whom he could control (‘to govern through his
shadow’); this way of operating later became clear in the political situation
Boulez achieved by the end of the 1970s, when the Director of Music was
Jean Maheu – co-founder of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and later
head of the Pompidou Centre – and Maheu’s assistant had previously been
treasurer of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a remarkable conflict of

23
Quoted in Lonchampt, ‘Aucun requiem’.
24
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
164 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

interest.25 The choice of Landowski as first Director of Music, was, it

turned out, a good one. Though as a composer he was conservative, as
an administrator he was experienced, having been director of the
Conservatoire de Musique Boulogne-sur-Seine, and the programmes
Landowski set in place as Director of Music for the creation of regional
orchestras and opera houses in France, his creation of the Orchestre de
Paris, his reform of the tuition of music in France’s schools, and his
allocation of funding to l’Itinéraire all proved successful. Landowski pre-
sented the alternative between his vision for music in France and Boulez’s
as being that between inclusiveness and elitism. Landowski announced the
general outline of his plans in 1966, and in July 1969 published his ‘Plan de
10 ans pour l’organisation des structures musicales francaises’, his legacy as
Director of Music, which in part, as Eric Drott notes, called for more
musical ensembles to be subsidised.26
It was in this context that l’Itinéraire appeared. Following their successful
meeting with Landowski, Tessier and Murail drafted a programme for a full
concert season in Paris to take place over the coming year. This, alongside
other relevant information, they submitted to the Directory of Music. In the
first week of November, l’Itinéraire sent out a press release announcing its
upcoming concert season. Over six concerts to be held in Paris between
12 November 1973 and 17 June 1974, there would be fourteen world pre-
mieres; the focus would be music by the youngest generation of French
composers. L’Itinéraire’s slogan, used in its press release, was ‘La Jeune
Musique en France’, its composers aligning themselves with their teacher
Messiaen’s 1930s group La Jeune France. That this parallel was deliberate is
further evinced by repeated references to ‘spirit’ in l’Itinéraire’s manifesto
(Baudrier and Messiaen used the words ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ in regard to
La Jeune France’s musical project) and in l’Itinéraire’s presenting itself as a
positive force of youth rising up against the negative strictures of officialdom
(as, analogously, had La Jeune France).27 As sponsors of the new initiative,
Tessier and Murail had assembled some names in Paris music and arts: Marius
Constant, Antoine Goléa, Betsy Jolas, André Jolivet, Olivier Messiaen, Silvia
Monfort, Claude Roland-Manuel, Francois Serrette, Philippe Soupault

25
Éloy, email to the author, 2 August 2014. Landowski’s account of the affair is in his
memoirs: Landowski, La Musique n’adoucit pas, 112–15. Boulez’s broadside against
Landowski can be found in Boulez, ‘Why I Say “No” to Malraux’. See also Drott, Music
and the Elusive Revolution, 215–16.
26
Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution, 215–16.
27
‘La Jeune France proposes the dissemination of works [that are] youthful, free, [and] as
far removed from revolutionary formulas as from academic formulas.’ Quoted in Hill and
Simeone, Messiaen, 63.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 165

(a member of James Joyce’s circle in the 1930s), Rémy Stricker, Antoine Tisne,
and Iannis Xenakis. They had also commissioned a logo (designed by Éloy’s
sister, Maryse Éloy)28 and written a rousing manifesto, which was published
alongside the programme for the 1973–4 concert season:
Has the spirit of creation abandoned Paris?
For several years now, most of the most important contemporary music
events have been taking place in the rest of France, leaving in Paris a more
and an increasingly deep emptiness.
Indeed, it is a long time since young music has found a way through the
existing structures, perhaps because of the lack of a common project.
This is why we founded l’Itinéraire in January 1973, bringing together a
number of composers and instrumentalists of the new generation.
The recent events [a reference to the closure of Domaine Musical] in no way
affect our initial goal: to put the emphasis on young music in France.
This means that, alongside established talents and works, little-known names
will appear on the programmes. It also means that we will often take risks,
risks inherent to any truly innovative enterprise.
Thus, we hope to create a place where new music and new personalities will
be revealed, a place for the future, a place above all open, a place where the
spirit of adventure will always be present.29

It was not by chance that Murail and Tessier, who co-wrote the mani-
festo,30 chose to open with the question of spirit: as well as being a key term
for La Jeune France, this was the specific quality that Landowski stated in
Le Monde on 26 September he hoped the Domaine Musical’s successor
would possess. The press release was duly reported by Le Monde, Combat,
and the Associated Press France, and in an article in Le Monde, still
bemoaning the Domaine Musical’s cessation, Lonchampt stated that there
were two alternatives: either form an organisation featuring some of the
more dynamic elements of the last generation of the Domaine Musical,
with an ensemble and conductor; or give the subvention to a totally new
group, in which latter connection he mentioned l’Itinéraire – unaware that
Landowski had already made his decision.31 The late 1960s counterculture
influenced l’Itinéraire’s aesthetic brand, as displayed in its promotional

28
Éloy, email message to the author, 9 August 2014.
29
Most of l’Itinéraire’s 1973–4 programme booklet is reproduced in Cohen-Levinas, ed.,
Vingt-cinq ans, 368–83.
30
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
31
Lonchampt, ‘Aucun requiem’.
166 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Figure 6.1 Promotional material from l’Itinéraire’s debut season, 1973–4.

material. Just as, in the 1920s, the composers of Les Six were influenced by
jazz, and, more recently, the saturationists in Paris were influenced by
noise music like Merzbow, so in the early 1970s the composers of
l’Itinéraire were influenced by the imagery of rock concerts and rock
posters (see Fig. 6.1). Satirical posters, collage techniques, a ‘funky’ font,
the group’s members standing in silhouette, psychedelic images of musi-
cians with instruments for heads: all this seems to have been designed to
align l’Itinéraire with soixante-huitard counterculture, to make its music
less forbidding to the public than the highbrow Domaine Musical. It is a
strategy pursued by similar young new music groups up to the present day.
 L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 167

Figure 6.1 (cont.)

The first concert of L’Itinéraire’s debut season saw a good attendance.

Among the audience were the members of the press, eager to size up the
new pretenders and to cast their judgement. Fleuret, at the time an ally of
Boulez, gave the concert a rambling negative review. ‘We were numerous
in attendance the other evening’, opens the review, ‘at the venue of the
indefatigable Silvia Monfort, to await at the opening concert of l’Itinéraire
something that, by the evidence of what followed, they were unable to
168 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

deliver.’32 Murail said that Fleuret’s hatchet job had an opposite effect than
that intended: ‘Fleuret came to the concert and did two extremely critical
reviews in the Nouvel observateur, with photos and everything. And it was
extremely helpful for us, in fact, because the next concerts were full because
of his bad [review]!’33 Grisey recounts another instance of Fleuret’s oppos-
ition to l’Itinéraire:
An interview on Radio-France with Tristan Murail and myself by F. [almost
certainly Maurice Fleuret]. After an exchange of questions and responses,
throughout which total incomprehension reigns: ‘So if I understand correctly,
what you are doing is exactly what has already been done by the GRM?’ Then
an even more perverse question: ‘Do you not find yourselves in l’Itinéraire
lacking a true personality, in the mould of a Stockhausen, Boulez,
or Xenakis?’34

When the interview was broadcast, Grisey noted later, Fleuret’s provoca-
tions were edited out. Between this first concert of the season in November
and the second one in January, l’Itinéraire’s state subsidy was made public.
On Tuesday 18 December 1973, at a press conference headed by the then
Minister of Culture Maurica Druon, Landowski announced a three-point
plan for the development of contemporary music in France, following on
from the ten-point plan he had laid out a few years previously; the third
point was that the state would allocate funding to two avant-garde music
groups, Musique Plus and l’Itinéraire. Chatter ensued in the press and in
the new music community. Musique en jeu, in a long editorial, took a
caustic view:
L’Itinéraire all in itself symbolises and syncretises those impasses in which
French music desperately searches and into which it sinks further, ever since
it decided to rest on its weaknesses instead of striking out. A half-dozen polite
young people, one foot in the Conservatoire and the other in the Villa Medici,
attempting in 1974 to reconstruct Les Six! Such pretention and derisory
impudence . . .35

Messiaen, having been instrumental in l’Itineraire’s receiving the state

subsidy, countered with a public endorsement:
I greatly support this movement which has taken the name l’Itinéraire . . .
It represents the future.

32
Fleuret, ‘Itinéraire sans horizon’.
33
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
34
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 194.
35
‘La vie en rose’ (probably by Dominique Jameux).
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 169

Its tendency? To pledge allegiance to none of those currents which have

made martyrs of us and posed problems to many of my colleagues. As you
know, it was the serial movement that said: ‘Outside me there can be no
salvation’; then came the aleatory movement, collages, and collective
improvisation. All of these experiences were useful. They even gave birth to a
few masterpieces, but they seem to have had their time. The new young
musicians no longer want to be slaves, nor to worry themselves with
interrogations as to which school they adhere to. They simply do what they
want to do; and what they want to do is something more generous, more
sensitive, and even (and here I risk an adjective that I feel obliged to place in
parenthesis) more ‘beautiful’. They have no use any more for music that is
cerebral, abstract, and forbidding.
These are people with love for music, sincerity, and heart. I believe that it is
in this that the revival inheres.36

His choice of words suggested that l’Itinéraire represented the beginning of

a new phase in new music, in which judgement history showed him to be
correct.

The Premiere of Grisey’s Périodes (1974)

At the outset of its first season, l’Itinéraire announced that it would present
fourteen world premieres. One of these, Grisey’s Périodes, premiered at the
close of the 1973–4 season and was one of l’Itinéraire’s early successes. With
historical perspective, it is now as appropriate to designate Périodes an
emblematic classic as it is, in another French period, the Prélude à l’après-
midi d’un faune. It is in Périodes that Grisey’s perceptual focus and compos-
itional techniques first come together in an optimal way, and it is in Périodes,
more than in Dérives, that Grisey truly manages to exclude from his music
everything that might be considered arbitrary and unnecessary (all post-
tonal ‘bavardage’, as he had put in in the 1960s in his journal) in favour of a
seamless, harmonically rich, formally elegant work. For a composer who was
still only twenty-seven years old, it is a remarkable achievement, signalling at
once a creative re-invention of harmonic function in a post-tonal context
and the inadvertent catalyst of a new compositional movement. As well as
setting a template for Grisey’s subsequent 1970s music, Périodes set a
template for many composers at work up to the present day.
In Périodes, as in the previous two works D’eau et de pierre and Dérives,
Grisey conceived a work wherein a static sound figure would be presented

36
Messiaen, quoted in Cohen-Levinas, ed., Vingt-cinq ans, 7.
170 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 6.1 Grisey’s Périodes (1974) for ensemble. © Copyright Casa Ricordi, Milan. Reprinted by
kind permission of the publisher.

that would undergo a gradual process of deviation and, eventually, trans-

formation. As in the two previous works, in Périodes the static figure is
embodied by an ensemble chord whose harmonic make-up is modelled on
the harmonic spectrum (Ex. 6.1); but whereas in D’eau et de pierre Grisey’s
model was rudimentary, and whereas in Dérives the harmonic prism
related spectral frequencies to equal-tempered chromatic pitches, in
Périodes Grisey models the chord’s pitches more closely on their corres-
ponding frequencies (Fig. 6.2), using quarter-tones and sixth-tones where
necessary, taking as starting point a low E0 (41.2 Hz). The result is a more
accurate simulation of the harmonic spectrum, a graphic of which Grisey
includes in his preliminary note in Périodes’s score (published in 1974).
New in Périodes is a cyclical ternary form (Fig. 6.3). The work follows a
repeated sequence of presentation, deviation, dissolution, and return, the
titular periods. D’eau et de pierre, as has been seen, uses the overall ternary
 L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 171

Figure 6.2 Grisey’s illustration of the harmonic spectrum upon which Périodes’s harmonic content
is based. © Copyright Casa Ricordi, Milan. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.

Figure 6.3 Grisey’s graph of Périodes’s formal process. As in Vagues, chemins, le souffle, ‘the breath’ is
a reference point. The graph makes clear the similarity to D’eau et de pierre’s process of deviation (and
it looks curiously similar to Scelsi’s signature). © Copyright Casa Ricordi, Milan. Reprinted by
kind permission of the publisher.

format ABA. In Périodes, Grisey combines this format with a cyclical

principle whereby after each dissolution come reintegration and the eventual
emergence of a new static figure: the resultant form is thus A1B1C1 | A2B2C2 |
A3B3C3 . . . and so on. Using the same terms as Winckel, and re-using the
concept of the last section of Vagues, chemins, le souffle, Grisey describes this
ternary form by analogy with the respiratory process: inhalation, exhalation,
and repose. When the score for Périodes was published in May 1974, Grisey
prefaced it with a long programme note in which he described the work’s
formal principles. Grisey obviously felt sufficiently confident that he had
found his musical style and wished to elucidate its principles. ‘Four long
periods’, he writes, ‘are articulated around a series of harmonics which have
172 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

E as the fundamental note.’37 It is in this note that Grisey uses the term
‘devenir sonore’ (‘sonorous becoming’) for the first time. Périodes, too, is the
first work in which, as in Stimmung, periodicity (representing stability)
functions as the corresponding principle in the domain of rhythm to the
harmonic spectrum in the domain of harmonicity (though Grisey had also
sketched heartbeat rhythms for sections of Dérives).38 Perhaps most import-
antly. the ending of Périodes witnesses Grisey’s first use of a sonogram to
create an acoustical model. Following his practice to date in works such as
Échanges, Perichoresis, Vagues, chemins, le souffle, D’eau et de pierre, and
Dérives, Grisey ends the piece with a strongly asserted stable, consonant
chord. Where in Dérives this chord was modelled loosely on the harmonic
spectrum, for Périodes Grisey seems to have obtained from the Laboratory of
Musical Acoustics (LAM) at the Faculté des Sciences de Paris of the
Université Paris VI in Jussieu, where Émile Leipp was based, a spectrographic
analysis of a low E0 played by a trombone.39 Grisey then ‘orchestrated’ the
computer’s representation of the spectral structure of the trombone note.
This is the technique of instrumental synthesis for which arguably Grisey and
Murail became best known. In using the model of a concrete actual sound
rather than an abstract spectrum, it replaces the Platonic idealism of pitch
classes with the immanent material of an actualised sound aggregate. Grisey
subsequently re-used and significantly expanded the closing section of
Périodes as the opening section of his next piece, Partiels, leading to the
creation of a cycle, Les Espaces acoustiques. Grisey recorded his thoughts in
his journal on finishing Périodes. Palpably excited, he chose his words
carefully enough to suggest he was recording this moment partly with future
readers in mind (and indeed, the tone is not so different from Schoenberg’s
diary entries upon finishing certain of his own works).40
Today, 11 May 1974, I finished my piece Périodes after three months of
suffering and torture! No other work up to now has cost me so many tears.

37
Grisey, programme note in score of Périodes, translation modified (the English text
erroneously translates mi as C).
38
GGCPSF.
39
At the Paul Sacher Foundation, there is a trombone sonogram with a date handwritten at
the top, ‘29 November 1973’ (GGCPSF).
40
For example: ‘Yesterday, (12th) I wrote the first of the Pierrot lunaire melodramas.
I believe it turned out very weIl. This provides much stimulation. And I am, I sense it,
definitely moving towards a new way of expression. The sounds here truly become an
animalistically, immediate expression of sensual and psychological emotions. Almost as if
everything were transmitted directly. I am anxious [to see] how this is going to continue.’
Schoenberg, ‘Attempt at a Diary’, 40–1.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 173

For three months, I’ve been isolated and have done nothing but work on this
score from morning until evening [. . .] killing myself. But it is done, and its
import is great, since I’ve finally come back to an awareness of the importance
of the Ternary in duration (tension and fall; or insp., expir., repose), of the
heartbeat (quasi-periodicity) and of the spectrum of harmonic partials
(regulating prism, Alpha and Omega).

By using the terms ‘prism’ and ‘Alpha and Omega’, Grisey situated himself
at once in the lineage of Boulez and Schoenberg, as their self-anointed
successor.41
Ensemble l’Itinéraire premiered the work at the Villa Medici. Grisey
recalled awaiting the concert on a hot summer’s evening in Rome, the
audience members fanning themselves in the heat, as the academy’s
director Balthus swanned in wearing a pair of sunglasses (‘which I only
ever saw him wear at concerts of contemporary music’).42 The high ceiling
of the Villa Medici’s performance hall meant a long reverb, and conse-
quently the ensemble performed the piece more slowly than intended by
around a third: ‘My already slow music spread out and bogged down’,
Grisey said, though he was happy with the performance. Also on the
programme was a second world premiere, Claude Ballif’s Solfegietto for
solo oboe, Solange Ancona’s Slantzé II for soprano and ensemble;
Stockhausen’s Spiral, and, in a third world premiere to close the concert,
Tessier’s Un instant, et encore un instant. In the interval, Murail and Scelsi
complimented Grisey on his work, Scelsi overtly, Murail more discreetly;
the latter suggested that the music-theatrical element Grisey included
towards the work’s end (in which the violist with deliberate exaggeration
retunes their instrument for comic effect) was an extravagance that ought
to be cleansed from the work (an anecdote illustrating Grisey’s and
Murail’s different aesthetics). Nonetheless, Murail was sufficiently struck
by Grisey’s work and its lucid programme note for their influence to start
appearing soon afterwards in his own music. It was fitting, too, that French
spectral music’s proper public debut should occur at the same setting as
Murail and Grisey’s earlier acoustics discussions. A few days later Paris saw
the French premiere of Périodes. Following the cancelled premiere of
Vagues, chemins, le souffle at Royan in 1972, D’eau et de pierre’s

41
Grisey, ‘Pages de journal: fragments 1967–1974’, 317. Grisey’s reference to the harmonic
spectrum as Alpha and Omega echoes Schoenberg as quoted in Chapter 1 above:
‘[Tonality] is Alpha and Omega . . . [T]o call any relation of tones atonal is just as
farfetched as it would be to designate a relation of colours aspectral [. . .].’ Arnold
Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 128 and 432.
42
This and other details of the premiere from Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 191–2.
174 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

performance at the Domaine Musical in February 1973, and Grisey’s

winning first prize at the Paris Biennale in September 1973, Grisey’s name
was established, though this did not stop Gérard Mannoni, reviewing the
concert in Le Quotidien de Paris, from getting that name destructively
wrong (‘Gerard Brisey’). Périodes’s French premiere was a success. Though
Mannoni echoed some of the complaints issued at D’eau et de pierre in
finding Périodes ‘too formal at the beginning’, thereafter he considered
Périodes to contain ‘a very rich sound world’, with ‘meditative periods
which recall certain pages of Mahler’ alternating with ‘swift explosions’.
It was, Mannoni wrote, ‘a concert fascinating in its totality, which will
encourage us to look forward to the return of Boris de Vinogradov and his
musicians’.43 Coming at the end of the collective first season, it set a tone
of optimism.
Shortly after the Périodes premiere, Murail composed Tigres de verre
(1974) for ondes Martenot and piano for a Paris Conservatoire con-
cours. Although holding a relatively minor place in Murail’s catalogue,
Tigres de verre is the first instance of Murail organising harmonic
material using the twin acoustical poles of spectral harmonicity and
periodicity. The opening of Tigres de verre (Ex. 6.2) presents a cres-
cendo on a low A at the bottom of the ondes Martenot’s range, which,
upon reaching peak loudness, activates, as if by reaction, an E two
octaves up on the same instrument, which sounds (says the score) ‘like
a harmonic resonance of the A’ This is followed by a loud cluster on
the piano; then the sequence begins again. This figure repeats several
times, with the pitch range of the rudimentary harmonic spectrum each
time expanding; after this opening section the work’s style reverts to
that of Murail’s previous works such as Mach 2,5. ‘The resonances of
the initial A diverge, then recompose other objects’, Murail writes in his
original programme note. ‘After several avatars, the piece comes back
almost to its point of departure. One could play it in a loop, eter-
nally.’44 In this there is a resemblance to Périodes. Another composer
who discussed music with Grisey during this period was his Greek
friend and ex-classmate Couroupos. ‘[Gérard] often spoke to me [. . .]
of the interest which composers like Xenakis and Risset represented for
him’, Couroupos recalled. ‘He even informed me of his own researches
on the harmonic spectrum and how it could be exploited for a new
concept of composition.’45

43
Mannoni, ‘L’Itinéraire: toujours des créations’. 44
Quoted in Alla, Tristan Murail, 81.
45
Couroupos, email message to the author, 16 April 2013.
 L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 175

Example 6.2 Murail’s Tigres de verre (1974) for ondes Martenot and piano. The alphabetic
symbols refer to instrumental parameters such as loudspeaker (+D1) and addition of harmonics
(G, ‘grand gamba’).
176 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Psychoacoustics, Information Theory, and Synthetic Music

Upon moving back to Paris in autumn 1974, Grisey and his wife took an
apartment at 21 rue Daval, near the Place de la Bastille, and there they
would live for the rest of the decade, with Grisey renting a separate
composition studio nearby. The memories of visitors to Grisey’s apart-
ment indicate his openness in talking about his musical ideas. The
composer and trumpeter Roquin, who, like Grisey, was interested in
Eastern philosophy, said that he, Grisey, and Roquin’s partner Michèle
Métail discussed the crossovers between different artistic media, the
conversation ‘bouncing from music to dance, from dance to painting,
from painting to poetry’.46 Consistent with the programmatic content of
Grisey’s music until then, the conversation often dwelt on Eastern
thought. ‘G[erard] G[risey] and T[ristan M[urail]47 were very much
attracted to Eastern philosophies’, Roquin recalled, ‘and along with
Michèle Métail, who was also present, I suggested that we make a journey
to the Gobi [desert] (in China), in the region of the Mogao Caves.
We met up together two or three times with maps of China under our
eyes with the aim of planning the project. In the end it never happened.’
One of spectral music’s signature sonorities, common to Grisey’s Vagues,
chemins, le souffle, Dufourt’s Erewhon, and Murail’s Gondwana, is the
resonance of a bell strike, and when in 1975 Roquin composed
Fatamorgana for brass ensemble and mobile carillon (the instrument in
a church bell tower comprising many bells at different pitches), a work
which won him an award from the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et
Éditeurs de Musique (SACEM), he borrowed bells from Grisey, who, he
said, owned many:
G[risey] had a beautiful collection of bells, large and small, and he lent me a
certain number of them, which resonated in Aix en Provence as part of the
festival Musique dans la Rue [Music in the Street]. When I returned all the
instruments to [Grisey] we spent a lovely evening talking about the Mudras in
the Eastern tradition. [. . .] Towards the end of the evening I made the
comparison of these systems of signs with the famous Guidonian hand
employed from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in the West in the
tuition of music, where the designation of the joints and the phalanxes of the
thumb and the fingers determined the relation between the pitches
of sound.48

46
This quotation and the next from Roquin, email to the author, 13 August 2014.
47
Roquin was here mistaken, as Murail told me he had no interest in Eastern thought at all.
48
Roquin, email to the author, 13 August 2014.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 177

This mid-1970s period in French new music was characterised by an open

attitude to artistic media and ways of thinking about music, often influ-
enced by non-Western musics. Boudreau, along these lines, said that the
retrospective tendency to view Murail and Grisey as a sort of ‘Laurel and
Hardy’ double act is inaccurate, as many young composers of their gener-
ation were exploring the harmonic spectrum in their music.49 Nonetheless,
with the spread of the new ideas concerning spectral models and a
perception-based écriture, there came a concomitant effort to begin for-
mulating theoretical principles.
By the time Dérives premiered, Grisey had new thoughts on his aesthetic.
These he aired in a radio interview with Fleuret conducted on the occasion
of that premiere. By turns articulate and critical, Grisey bats away the
suggestion that his music’s harmonic character is similar to neo-tonalism,
on which topic his hauteur is not unlike prime Boulez (‘That doesn’t interest
me at all; collages are probably a sign of decadence’), while elsewhere he
shows his theoretical nous. Distinguishing Dérives’s style from the pointil-
listic serialism of previous generations, Grisey underlines that his music
nonetheless would not have been possible without serialism, ‘which in
isolating the parameters taught us better to understand them’, nor without
the electroacoustic composition pioneered by the likes of Risset, which
‘directed us towards synthesis’. The harmonic spectrum, Grisey suggested,
could serve as a virtual measure by which the composer could, on paper,
control the relative degree of difference between one sound and another
sound (one of his main takeaways from statistical serialism):
What we perceive isn’t the sound object in itself but its evolution. We never
measure the pitch, duration, or intensity of a given sound but rather perceive
immediately the difference between this sound and the preceding one retained
in our memory. I no longer compose the object but the passage from one object
to another or from one structure to another – what I call the degree of change.

Summing up the difference between his music and the post-serialism that
had been pervasive for years, Grisey offers a succinct antithesis: ‘After a
long analytical night, we are moving towards a synthetic organisation.’50
In his programme note for the 1975 premiere of the orchestral work Sables,
and at his 1980 lecture at Darmstadt, Murail also referred to his compos-
itional approach as a synthetic one.51 Grisey’s mentioning of a new

49
Boudreau, interview with the author, 15 December 2022.
50
Grisey, ‘Vers une écriture synthétique’, 224.
51
‘To this sort of listening necessarily corresponds a synthetic method of composition,
whereas, as a consequence of an analytic conception, one listens to the “epiphenomena”,
178 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

synthetic music relates to his awareness of Risset’s and Chowning’s

respective achievements in creating viable synthesis techniques for elec-
tronically generated music (in Chowning’s case, FM synthesis). The new
electronic synthesis techniques allowed continuous, evolving textures in
contrast to earlier electronic music’s ‘point’ music, and as already men-
tioned, since 1969 Risset had been giving talks in France on his innovative
research in computer music; that research had originally taken place at Bell
Telephone Laboratories in the USA under Max Mathews and in contact
with James Tenney (the latter of whom then developed his own spectral
music, at times remarkably similar to Grisey’s, without any contact with
the Paris Conservatoire composition students of the late 1960s).52
In the development of psychoacoustics away from the inaccurately static
Helmholtz model, the principal insights were the hitherto neglected
importance for a sound’s character of its attack and decay phases and the
simultaneous temporal evolution of the frequency components. ‘The
model of reference is no longer that of Helmholtz but that of Risset’,
Dufourt said of the sound model underpinning spectral music:
For Helmholtz, it was sufficient to emit simultaneously several harmonics of
the same fundamental note producing several independent oscillations of
concomitant manner and to control their respective levels in order to make a
reasonably good reproduction of instrumental timbre. For Risset – who
applied to music Mathews’s principles of numerical synthesis – this definition
of timbre by the spectrum of frequencies in a stationary state of sound omits
two important factors: it neglects, firstly, the variations in time of the
frequential content of the acoustic spectrum, and secondly, the amplitude
evolutions of each partial during the attack and decay of the sound. [. . .]
Music has changed paradigm, in the sense of Kuhn.53

Bell Laboratories was where the transistor was developed and where
Claude Shannon invented information theory. Risset’s primary research
there was in the computer synthesis of convincing brass sounds; it is
unclear whether it was just by coincidence that, when Grisey introduced
instrumental synthesis in Périodes and Partiels, it was by having an ensem-
ble simulate the low E of a trombone.54 Risset had explored this and other

and not the phenomena. [. . .] We do not perceive absolute objects, but the relations
between things, the differences.’ Murail, ‘Sables’, programme booklet, 1975. ‘In his lecture
Murail called this type of composition “synthetic composition”.’ Heaton, ‘30th
International Ferienkurse für Neue Musik’, 34.
52
See Wannamaker, ‘James Tenney and the Theory of Harmony’.
53
Dufourt, ‘Les Bases théoriques et philosophiques de la musique spectrale’, 400.
54
Risset, An Introductory Catalog of Computer-Synthesized Sounds.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 179

techniques in his synthetic electronic works Computer Suite from Little Boy
(1968) and Mutations (1969) and had discussed them publicly. At a
conference in 1970, he mentioned his ideas concerning parallel structures
in harmony and timbre:
I would like to mention, by way of an example, a procedure for harmonic
development used in my piece ‘Mutations’. The mutation stops on an organ
make harmonic addition possible. The computer can of course control
harmonic addition in a very much more elaborate manner. The ‘spectral
analysis’ of a chord might be developed; first of all only the fundamental
component of the chord is presented, then the 2nd and then the 3rd
harmonics [. . .]. The sonic development can be carried out in a more
complex manner starting with a harmonic structure; such a structure can be
used to reveal a quantification of pitch space, and a natural scale more
condensed in the high register than in the low. One might end up with sonic
tissues for which harmonic development determines the melodic aspect as
well as the timbre.55

The translation is unclear, but this alludes to how at the beginning of

Mutations, a scattering of resonant percussion notes is heard, followed by a
gradually swelling chord; the chord is a large-scale harmonic simulation of
those notes’ timbres (i.e. their small-scale structure). This is the same
technique of simulation and temporal evolution exploited so marvellously
at the start of Partiels in the ensemble’s simulation of a trombone note.
Dufourt attributes this signature technique of spectral music to Risset:
In 1969, Jean-Claude Risset pointed out in the programme note for his work
Mutations [. . .] that the harmonic structure of a sound could be extended into
the timbre. [. . .] Risset formulates here one of the most characteristic
aesthetic ideas of today’s music. He was the first to convert this idea into a
programme and a technique. The mutation of harmony into timbre, the
germination of textures which are born of harmonic structures and which,
gradually becoming more and more closely related in frequency, go on to
form a sliding continuum, are a conquest of computer science, a specific
conquest, based on the decoupling of the musical characteristics of a sound.56

55
Risset, ‘Synthesis of Sounds’, 127–8. Risset also writes, as per Dufourt above: ‘Computer
sound synthesis provides an immediate demonstration of the invalidity of the classical
conception. If one uses the physical descriptions of instrumental sounds that are to be
found in the textbooks, the sounds obtained generally have little connection with the
instrumental sounds desired.’ Risset, ‘Synthesis of Sounds’, 126. During his early training,
Risset studied with Jolivet, Varèse’s student, and when he moved to the USA in 1964 to
work at Bell Laboratories, he met Varèse himself.
56
Dufourt, ‘Les Bases théoriques et philosophiques de la musique spectrale’, 385.
180 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Mutations was premiered at a GRM concert at the Halles Baltard in Paris

in February 1971. A press review held at the CDMC in Paris, of unknown
authorship and publication, is probably a report on this event: under the
headline ‘La Musique synthetique’, it describes Risset’s work with Mathews
on the MUSIC V programme, then states: ‘The user of Music V behaves
like a composer and makes synthetic music. [. . .] One can also realise
complex sound developments, by which emerges, from the harmonic
structure, a quantification of the pitch structure: J. C. Risset took advantage
of this in “Mutations i” [. . .].’57 Whether or not Grisey attended this
concert, he may have come across Risset’s work at the Paris
Conservatoire, and if not at Risset’s presentation there in 1970 then per-
haps in Messiaen’s class, since a record had been released of Risset’s
synthetic sounds and Messiaen was prone to give classes over to listening
sessions, as he had for Schaeffer’s Solfège LP. Dufourt said that Risset’s
advances were being widely spoken about in French musical circles in the
late 1960s. He added that his meeting with Risset around 1975 (when
Dufourt relocated to Paris from Lyon)
was absolutely decisive. We became acquainted. But I already knew Risset’s
work by the word going around in 1969–70 of this amazing researcher in the
United States, French, who created paradoxical sounds and so forth. I said to
myself that it was the find of the century: as someone who knew
electroacoustics well, I knew it was not possible to do such things with
electroacoustics. I said to myself he was very far ahead, twenty years ahead of
everything we knew. So, when I met Risset, it was really with a passionate
interest to know what he did. And it was the same a little later with
Chowning. I met them and the discussions were exceptionally decisive
for me.58

Risset later said that he and Chowning were much impressed by Dufourt
and his thinking, ‘this luminous intelligence which mastered concepts, and
his comprehension of these concepts, which encouraged us. [. . .]
He realised the deeper implications of this computer work.’59
Grisey, summarising the best-known French spectral technique, said:
‘Instrumental synthesis offers a simultaneous treatment of instrumental

57
Anonymous press clipping contained in a dossier on Jean-Claude Risset, Mutations,
CDMC.
58
Dufourt, interview with the author, 20 February 2014. After Risset returned to France in
1969, he gave presentations on computer sound synthesis, at Orlay (1970–1) and at the
Laboratoire de Mécanique et d’Acoustique (LMA) of the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS) in Marseille (1972–5). Risset, biographical note.
59
Risset, ‘Table ronde’.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 181

timbre and pitches. Without entering into the complex details, let us say
that it is a matter of making fusion out of that which a priori furiously
resists it, that is, a collection of different instruments each having its own
characteristic acoustic profile.’60 In instrumental synthesis perhaps more
than anywhere else is made clear the distinction between the notes on the
page and the sound we hear: where the notes are heterogeneous in origin,
the heard sound is synthetically unified by the ear. It can be difficult fully to
appreciate by listening to a recording, but in concert, the synthesis of the
instrumental sounds has an effect akin to an auditory gleam of light, a
singular psychoacoustic phenomenon. Grisey suggested that this synthe-
sised spectre was a sonorous freak, neither this nor that: ‘We have created a
hybrid being for our perception, a sound which, without being a timbre, is
already no longer quite a chord – a sort of mutant of the music of today.’61
What the ear perceives should therefore be considered more a sound image
than a sound object, in which regard there is some crossover with
Schaeffer.62 Statistical serialist techniques showed Grisey how to unite
the parameters by creating a synthetic sound, and how to set that sound
in temporal motion using the degree of change. Moreover, Grisey realised
that by using statistical modelling, one can map micro-scale phenomena –
too transient and too small to be considered identifiable objects at all –
onto the macro scale, thereby deconstructing (voiding the supposed self-
presence of ) musical pitches.
In 1974–5, Grisey consolidated these ideas by enrolling in a diploma
course in musical acoustics at the LAM at the Université Paris VI,
Jussieu.63 The LAM was headed by the French authority in the field,
Émile Leipp, a CNRS researcher and author of one of the acoustics books
Grisey had read in Rome, who also had founded there the Groupe
d’Acoustique Musicale. The Groupe d’Acoustique Musicale was not just
concerned with scientific research but also with experimental approaches
to musical composition, and its regular seminar often welcomed com-
posers, working to some degree in parallel with the research that
Schaeffer headed at the French Radio with the GRM. In 1960 Leipp,
Winckel, and Schaeffer had been among the participants (Moles was

60
Grisey, ‘Les dérives sonores de Gérard Grisey’, 239.
61
Grisey, ‘Structuration des timbres’, 101.
62
The concept of the acousmatic, Schaeffer wrote, ‘marks the perceptive reality of sound as
such, as distinguished from the modes of its production and transmission . . .’ Schaeffer,
‘Acousmatics’, 77.
63
For more on Grisey’s work at the LAM, see Féron, ‘Spectra as Theoretical and
Practical Models’.
182 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

another) at a conference where a need was identified to introduce musi-

cians to acoustics. The conference participants insisted ‘on the necessity of
renovating the teaching of acoustics in schools and institutes of music, in
terms of subjective elements, far from those which only interest instrument
builders. François-Bernard Mâche benefited, too, from this meeting, con-
demning “the abstract idealism and anthropocentrism which continues
[. . .] to be at the basis of official teaching”’.64 Schaeffer’s Traité des objets
musicaux, published a few years later in 1966, was part of this impetus to
drastically revise our musical categories in light of technological develop-
ments and advances in the sciences of acoustics and psychoacoustics. (It is
worth pointing out here that Dufourt’s definition of a musique spectrale
explicitly states that this notion is tied to a requirement for the reformu-
lation of our general music-analytic concepts, the traditional notion of the
note being no longer tenable.) Owing to its institutional affiliation, the
LAM was well funded, and Leipp was able to invest in up-to-date technol-
ogy such as the sonograph, the first of its kind in the country.
In Acoustique et musique, Leipp had written of the potential for musical
interpretation of the new technology of the sonograph, which had been
developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1940s and 1950s: ‘This document is a
veritable musical score with exactly the same information as the classical
score, but with the difference that it is possible to measure precisely the
frequency and duration of each note, as well as its dynamic evolution. With
a certain amount of training, one can read and whistle this score directly.’65
Seemingly the first composer to explore using the sonograph in musical
composition was Mâche in 1964 with Le Son d’une voix; he was followed by
Éloy and Grisey.66 Mâche’s work involved the icophone, a speech synthesis
device that Leipp developed and that operated on the basis of spectro-
graphic analysis of the human voice (to which Grisey later returned when
developing a work at IRCAM with the programme CHANT).
During his diploma studies at the LAM, Grisey studied with the acous-
tician Michèle Castellengo – with whom a couple of years later he would
embark on a project of analysing brass, wind, and percussion sounds

64
See Robert, Pierre Schaeffer, vol. 1, 186.
65
Leipp adds, from the opposite point of view: ‘In short, this method shows us that a
musical sound is not an “object” but a “living being” in continual change. But the
diagrams do not allow us to grasp right away this living being.’ Leipp, Acoustique et
musique, 86.
66
‘Professor Emile Leipp told me: “The acoustic model chosen by the West is the angel’s
voice: that is to say, the pure sound, the sinusoidal sound, without any accident. That is to
say, a sound that after a few seconds is no longer interesting because there is no renewal of
information.”’ Éloy, ‘Mémoires sur “Kâmakalâ” . . .’. See also Mâche, ‘Itinéraires’, 245–9.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 183

towards use in his compositions – and he was also introduced to the work
of Abraham Moles concerning the application of information theory to
music. Moles had received two PhDs, one in physics and one in philoso-
phy; was one of the main disseminators of both information theory and
psychoacoustics knowledge in France during the 1950, translating both
Claude Shannon and Fritz Winckel; and, in the early 1950s, had worked
with Schaeffer as a membre associé of the GRM. In 1952, Schaeffer and
Moles together began ‘theoretical research on sonorous characterology’ (it
was from this period of research that Schaeffer’s Traité des objets musicaux
grew). It was also alongside Moles that Schaeffer put forward the notion of
experimental music in 1953, with a special issue of La Revue musicale
dedicated to the subject; and it was supposedly Moles’s information theory
input that inspired Schaeffer to coin the term objet sonore. Moles’s ideas
made a similar impression on Grisey. Information theory allowed Grisey to
formalise his intuitions regarding the use of perceptibility as the governing
principle of his musical écriture; afterwards, he would refer to the har-
monic spectrum not as an object but as a ‘neutral sound archetype’, and to
periodicity not ‘as either basic material nor as the unit of rhythmic
structure, but [as] the most simple, most probable phenomenon [. . .] as
an ideal point of reference for the perception of time, as is a sinusoidal
sound for the perception of pitches, but not at all [as] the a priori founda-
tion of a hierarchical system’.67 The composer’s real material, Grisey said
using Moles’s information-theoretical terms, was ‘the degree of pre-
audibility’, with which the composer, educated in psychoacoustics and
writing in terms of the perceptual faculties, could manipulate the listener’s
ear and expectations and generate form from content:
By including not only the sound but, moreover, the differences perceived
between sounds, the real material of the composer becomes the degree of
predictability, or better, the degree of ‘preaudibility’. So, to influence the
degree of preaudibility we come back to composing musical time directly –
that is to say perceptible time, as opposed to chronometric time. Karlheinz
Stockhausen had already anticipated the importance of this by using for
certain works (Carré for four orchestras and four choirs, 1971) what he called
the degree of change (Veränderungsgrad) (1963, 1967, 1971, 1978). This
notion is itself the direct outcome of information theory. [. . .]
Let us imagine a sound event, A, followed by another event, B. Between
A and B exists what one calls the density of the present, a density which is not

67
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 245. Moles called for ‘an ecology of signs’, an expression
not far from Grisey’s call for ‘an ecology of sounds’. Moles, ‘The Legibility of the
World’, 121.
184 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

a constant but which expands and contracts according to the event. In effect,
of the difference between A and B is virtually nil, in other words if the sound
B is entirely predictable, time seems to move at a certain speed. By contrast, if
the sound B is radically different, and virtually unpredictable, time unfolds at
a different speed. [. . .] A law of perception therefore comes into play which
could be formulated thus: the acuity of auditory perception is inversely
proportional to that of temporal perception.68

Building on the tentative experiment of D’eau et de pierre and the subse-

quent exploration of Dérives, Grisey’s mature, self-confident extolling of
perceptual laws in music was squarely based on these studies in psychoa-
coustics and information theory. The Moles book that Grisey read at this
time, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, is comparable to the
Bauhaus’s research earlier in the century and is a music-compositional
equivalent of, say, Josef Albers’s book for visual artists Interaction of Color.
Some of Moles’s relevant ideas in Information Theory and Esthetic
Perception include a technical definition of music as an acoustical message
comprising ‘an ordered set of elements of perception drawn from a
repertoire and assembled in a structure’;69 a definition of redundancy as
the expression of ‘what is superfluous in the message, the waste of symbols
caused by defective coding, at least from the viewpoint of transmission
efficiency’ (which has obvious implications for the serial formulation of
sound and its frequently consequent non-tonal idiom);70 the measure of
difference in sensory excitation in ‘a certain percentage [of increase] called
the difference threshold or limen’, inspiring Grisey’s later naming of his
compositional framework écriture liminale;71 and the equation of infor-
mation with originality – in other words, with novelty and the unforeseen.
‘[I]nformation or originality is a function of the improbability of the
received message’, writes Moles. Moles’s book, which privileges musical
composition throughout, also impressed on Grisey the relevance of Gestalt
thinking in regard to musical figures, and it has a chapter on ‘Periodicity
and Elementary Structures’ covering pre-audibility (the English translation
of the book gives it as ‘foreseeability’). Among Moles’s conclusions in
regard to periodicity are:
Every form is the expression of a statistical predictability measured by a
degree of coherence, more precisely, by the autocorrelation of the sequence of
elements. To be perceived, the message requires the functional existence of a

68
Grisey, ‘Tempus ex machina’, 258–9.
69
Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, 9.
70
Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, 54.
71
Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, 9.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 185

memory in the received. [. . .] Periodicity is not only the continuity which

conveys a form, but is also foreseeing what comes on the basis of the past.72

This passage underlines how French spectral music represents instrumen-

tal music for the information age.
Shannon, in inventing information theory, wrote: ‘The fundamental
problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either
exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently
the messages have meaning.’73 The pertinent of this quandary for the post-
tonal composer – who wants to obtain an optimal correspondence between
their conception of the score and the audience’s perception of the musical
event – is clear. Moreover, Shannon’s theory was never meant to be limited
to areas like computation or engineering: on visiting Bell Laboratories in
1943, Alan Turing remarked: ‘Shannon wants to feed not just data to a
Brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!’74 Grisey,
absorbing the mid-twentieth-century scientific advances in psychoacous-
tics and information theory, harnessed their artistic potential.

A New Musical Movement

By the spring of 1976, the musical style was becoming a wider one.
In retrospect, two world premieres performed in twenty-four hours by
Ensemble l’Itinéraire heralded the emergence of this new current.
On Thursday 4 March at Sylvia Monfort’s Nouveau Carré in the Marais in
Paris, Grisey’s Partiels (1975) was premiered; the next day, Friday 5 March, at
Jean-Étienne Marie’s Semaines Musicales Internationales festival in Orléans,
Murail’s Mémoire-érosion (1975–6) was premiered (under its initial name,
Feedback). The two works are early classics of French spectral music. ‘It was
never anything planned or conscious’, Murail said of the common movement
that became the courant spectral; ‘it just happened.’75 While there was
undoubtedly an element of happenstance – Murail and Grisey, with similar
interests, meeting in Messiaen’s class, the Domaine Musical folding and
Ensemble l’Itinéraire appearing at just the right moment to take over its state
subsidy, and so on – nonetheless, the historical circumstances were right for
such a movement. An important factor was the legacy of serialism: on the one

72
Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, 75.
73 74
Quoted in Gleick, The Information, 230. Quoted in Gleick, The Information, 8.
75
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014. For a detailed discussion of
Grisey and Murail’s spectral techniques and their attendant psychoacoustic principles, see
Fineberg, ‘Appendix I’, and Pressnitzer and McAdams, ‘Acoustics, Psychoacoustics and
Spectral Music’.
186 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

hand, derided for how it misconceived sound, neutralised harmony and

encouraged academic formalism over freer artistic imagination; on the other
hand, instilling in Grisey, Murail, and others an insistence on technical rigour
in developing not simply a set of novel techniques and effects but an
internally consistent écriture. ‘“Spectral” doesn’t mean using the harmonic
series’, Murail said: ‘spectral means working on the sound, and frequencies,
and techniques like frequency modulation . . . [W]hen I have used the spectra
in my music most of the time they were created by calculation, not by
imitating any sound.’76 This frequential conception of harmony, alongside
periodic repetition, was the basis of Murail’s mature music.
Sables is the transitional work into that period, following the tentative
Tigres de verre. Commissioned by Halbreich for the 1975 Royan festival
(where it was performed by the Orchestre National de France conducted by
Lukas Vis), Sables, like some of Murail’s earlier works, is based on a continu-
ous texture without distinct sections; now, though, the texture is clarified in
places through the use of a simple harmonic series (Ex. 6.3). Sables opens
with a long string crescendo, with divisi strings in thirty-six parts in a cluster
moving by glissando; after two minutes, the cluster clarifies into a spectral-
harmonic chord on a low E fundamental in the double basses. After this
spectral chord has been sounded for a minute or so, an ascending movement
continues in much of the orchestra, and the spectral chord all but liquidates
in a flurry of tremolo. ‘I attempted a global sound with the orchestra’, Murail
wrote. ‘The individuality of the instruments vanished completely into the
fused sound of the orchestra. In a certain sense, this piece was made up of a
single sound that lasted for the duration of the piece. Here, one can begin to
see the connection with Scelsi’s music.’77 At Royan, responses varied.
Audience members lauded the work as a new approach to orchestral
composition (Levinas),78 saw in it an overt association with the French
tradition (Roger Tellart),79 praised its ‘mysterious timbral variations’ and
‘cosmic majesty’ (Jacques Lonchampt),80 and bemoaned its lack of thematic
material (Albin Jacquier).81 Dufourt recalled:
I was struck not so much by the content as by the formal structure. In other
words, one already saw the paradigm of what Murail was doing, a time

76
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
77
Murail, ‘Scelsi and l’Itinéraire’, 182.
78
‘I remember about Sables [Levinas] said, “It’s a very new thing”, you know, “It’s a new
way of orchestration”, or whatever. Which I thought was a bit exaggerated.’ Murail,
interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
79
Tellart, ‘Festival de Royan’. 80
Lonchampt, ‘Festival de musique contemporaine’.
81
Jacquier, ‘Un départ sans bousculade’.
 L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 187

Example 6.3 Murail’s Sables (1975) for orchestra. © Copyright Éditions Henry
Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.
188 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

folding back on itself that developed in a spiral. He did the same thing in his
chamber music. There is a kind of cumulative time holding onto itself, like a
circle that never returns to its point of departure. There is a contraction of the
material by acceleration, density. It has a form, one can say – because for the
critics of the era, the form was so elementary that they did not understand it.
It was this spiral time, which made him do all the rhythmic calculations.
He had a vision. The treatment of the orchestra was not bad at all. And then,
it was out of the ordinary, because you have to remember, this was the era of
Halffter, Alsina, the English too.82

Pierre Petit wrote that, while Murail’s work was pretty, sensitively and
finely composed, these touches were wasted on a ‘demented immobility’;
he ended his review by saying that ‘one might be inclined to attribute this
music to a Tristan Grisail [sic] . . ..’83 Grisaille in French means ‘grey’ or
‘colourless’, but the ellipsis suggests he is conflating Murail and Grisey.
Grisey’s orchestral work Dérives was a high-profile premiere at Paris’s
Festival d’Automne six months earlier, performed by the same orchestra,
and the opening section of Sables and the closing section of Dérives, each
based on the spectrum of a low E, sound similar.84 Murail simply remarked
that ‘as usual some people criticised the piece and others loved it. I think
for lots of people, this sort of music was shocking.’85 Dufourt – whose
music was also performed at the festival that year – adds that Halbreich,
whom he met through Halbreich’s then-assistant (and future director of
the Centre de Documentation de la Musique Contemporaine Marianne
Lyon),
reacted very positively to my music, while he always hated the music of
l’Itinéraire. It is very difficult to say why. Because Grisey, even his early works,
they’re masterful. He was not a late musician. When one hears [an early
Grisey work like Perichoresis and Mégalithes], if I were the director of a
festival, I would programme it right away. I think Halbreich was still stuck in
what I would call traditional modern structures, as in the Ferneyhough
paradigm. And the only one who found favour in his eyes in [a different]
direction was Rădulescu, who was his God in the field of sound synthesis,
instrumental synthesis. He never understood Grisey or Murail or Levinas. So,
for him, l’Itinéraire was nothing.86

82
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
83
Petit, ’Ouverture du festival de Royan’.
84
Julian Anderson suggests that Murail’s use of the harmonic spectrum in Sables was
‘maybe influenced by a recent work by Grisey, Dérives for two orchestral groups’.
Anderson, ‘De Sables à Vues aeriennes’, 123.
85
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
86
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 189

Anticipating a hostile climate for the Royan premiere of Sables, Murail wrote
a long programme note-cum-manifesto, his first theoretical statement.87 The
main tenets of spectral music are here in basic form: an audition-based
compositional framework, replacing the idealist acoustical absolutes of pitch
classes with the moment-to-moment relativity of perceptual material; a
musical surface replacing motivic development with continuous differenti-
ation; a music not analytic but synthetic in conception (an antithesis Murail
explicitly makes). In justifying the reintroduction within a post-tonal frame-
work of the regulative principle of harmonicity, Murail touches on the
relation of this new harmonicity to common-practice tonality:
This harmonic system uses the only reference points that are objective and
‘scientific’: that is, natural resonances and white noise (symbolized by the cluster).
The harmonic thread which results from this is itself also in permanent evolution:
there is not at any given moment ‘a harmony’ but rather a process of harmonic
transformation always in progress. Of course, these processes sometimes allow
‘classified’ chords to appear, with relations of an octave and so on; but this is not a
return to the past! There’s nothing to compare to Ravel, Debussy, or Rameau.
Nevertheless, the same causes produce the same effects, and the same principles
lead to sonorous results that sometimes might be neighbouring.88

Murail implies the possibility of a new écriture: an open compositional system,

facilitated by information technology and founded on the insights of contem-
porary psychacoustics, an idea that he would develop from the 1980s onwards.
Mémoire-érosion is a prototype of these new principles. A quasi-étude
dimension is even hinted at by the work’s initially setting forth within a
spectrum on C. Murail draws on his early experiences with electronics to
simulate (or, as Éric Humbert-Claude says, to ‘transcribe’)89 the effect of an
electronic echo unit applied to notes played sporadically by a horn. Each
time the horn plays a note or brief figure, it echoes around the ensemble, at
first in a simple way but with chaotic, ‘erosive’ elements gradually creeping
in that tend towards noise. In terms of the compositional logic or écriture it
opens up, this simulation in Mémoire-érosion and Murail’s other first-period

87
During the festival Murail and Levinas were also interviewed on France Culture by
Claude Samuel (‘we explained our ideas’, Murail commented, with characteristic pith).
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
88
Murail, ‘Sables’, programme booklet, 1975. Murail also stated that here he had begun
work on a cycle, a triptych comprising Torrents, Sables, and Désirs: Torrents was to be
scored for orchestral brass and a piano with electronic echo effects; Désirs was to be
scored for orchestra and a separate percussion section; and Torrents, Murail wrote, ‘will
be a fanfare (a call [appel])’. This projected cycle never saw the light of day.
89
See Humbert-Claude, ‘Les Modèles perceptuels’.
190 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 6.4 Murail’s Mémoire-érosion (1975–6) for horn and nine instruments.
© Copyright Éditions Transatlantiques. Reprinted by kind permission of the
publisher.

works is the pretext for creating a process by which the musical canvas is
filled by auto-generating, self-proliferating material (Ex. 6.4). Herein is
evinced Murail’s notion of a relativistic music, mentioned in the Sables
programme essay, wherein, in the manner of a semiotic process, each sound
image has inscribed within it the sound image that has gone immediately
before (it is relevant in this regard that Moles considered his work on
information theory and aesthetic perception, which informed spectral
music’s development, to be structuralist in character by contrast with serial-
ism’s positivism).90 Mémoire-érosion’s repetition is not simply the repetition,

90
‘One could contend that the name “Information Theory” is no longer relevant to this last
aspect and that, in fact, the proper title of this book should be “Structuralist Theory of
Esthetic Perception,” since the basic hypotheses are in fact the ones of a philosophical
attitude now called “structuralism.”’ Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception,
v. Fabien Lévy has written at length about spectral music, serial music, and structuralism
Lévy, Le Compositeur.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 191

then, of a self-contained sound: it is the repetition of the very act of

repetition itself, of iterability, an operation whereby sound proliferates recur-
sively according to a mobile centre. The music’s wild expansiveness is,
paradoxically, a consequence of drastically simplifying the initial material,
reducing the compositional parameters to the harmonic spectrum and
periodicity. The auditory interest lies not in the literal repetition of the
horn’s material but in the way the processual writing generates the unfore-
seen: unfamiliar figures that could not have been reached other than by way
of the ostensibly familiar (recalling Paul Valéry’s description of how formal
rules in artistic composition ‘excite [the artist] to discoveries to which
complete freedom could never have led him’).91
The other premiere, Grisey’s Partiels, which he had begun composing while
studying at the LAM, was another l’Itinéraire commission. Having arrived at
his mature style, Grisey returned to the idea of composing a cycle of works (an
idea he had first considered after D’eau et de pierre). This cycle would go from
solo instrument to a grand orchestra, with each piece based on the same
material, the spectrograph of a trombone’s low E. Périodes would be the
second work and the current ensemble work the third; hence the name
Partiels, meant at once in the sense of ‘a moment from an unfinished work’
and that of ‘a component of sound’. As in Périodes, the successive sections of
the work follow the repeated respiratory schema of inhalationexhalation–
repose. The opening section of Partiels (the idea of which also underpinned, in
a much simpler fashion, the opening of Vagues, chemins, le souffle) displays
affinity with Moles’s thought. The opening of section is a series of ‘waves’ of an
ensemble chord modelled on the harmonic spectrum of a trombone’s low
E (Ex. 6.5), the same chord as appeared briefly at the end of Périodes: with each
wave, or occurrence, the chord becomes gradually more complex, adding
harmonic partials up to the twenty-fifth partial in tandem with a changing
dynamic;92 Grisey begins adding inharmonic partials, changing the temporal
onset and adding noise elements (such as bow-scraping on the strings), until
the synthetic figure eventually dissolves, starting the next section of the work,
a section based on ‘auto-engendering’ of harmonic content through the ring
modulation formula (the generation of sum and difference tones of two given

91
Valéry, ‘The Course in Poetics’, 92. Grisey writes: ‘It is the process that is first; the process
that manages the mutation of the sonorous figures and which leads to the ceaseless
creation of new ones. Even I am astonished to discover at what point the sounds
engendered by the process exceed, and by far, those that one could imagine a priori,
abstractly and outside of time.’ Grisey, ‘Devenir du son’, 27.
92
‘In addition, Risset found through the analysis of trumpet sound that the essential
characteristic of brass tone was the fact that the spectrum varies with loudness: when
the loudness increases, the proportion of high frequency energy also increases. (Risset,
1985).’ Oishi, ‘Timbral Movements’, 14.
192 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 6.5 Grisey’s Partiels (1975–6) for eighteen instruments. © Copyright

Casa Ricordi. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed by
permission.

pitch signals A and B). Effectively, in this first section, an initial Gestalt is
introduced, then, over successive iterations, gradually altered until it dissolves.
The same technique would underpin the opening section of many spectral
and post-spectral works, from Murail’s Gondwana to Romitelli’s Professor
Bad Trip Lesson 1. As Goldman writes: ‘A compositional logic is thus laid out
which makes current states responsible for their successors.’93 The appearing
of any hybrid spectre at all in the ensemble implies the serial appearing of
slightly different ones, since no one sound has precedence over others, and, in
this procession of sound simulacra, there is no original. Implicit in the use of
synthetic spectra is the serial repetition that generates their mutation. The
harmonic series is the regulative measure of their relative difference of any two
given sounds from each other (in the absence of any tonal avatars like a key
centre). In his programme note, Grisey called the harmonic spectrum and
periodicity the ‘two beacons [that] delineate the sonorous becoming’.94

93
Goldman. ‘Boulez and the Spectralists’, 223. 94
Grisey, ‘Partiels’, 137.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 193

First, one hears a low pedal E1 on trombone and a repeated low E0 on

double bass; then an ensemble chord gradually swells from silence into
hearing, each instrument playing a pitch corresponding to a frequency in
the trombone note’s complex wave form (as decomposed by a spectrogram’s
Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis). Of the ensemble technique underpin-
ning the first section, Grisey commented:
For a definition that wouldn’t be too convoluted, we can say that instrumental
synthesis consists in studying the harmonic components of any ordinary
sound and then realising with the instruments of the orchestra each of the
components thus analysed. It is a sort of projection of the microphonic on a
macrophonic screen which supposes an extension not only sonorously but
also temporally. It was in this way that was written, for instance, the opening
of Partiels for eighteen musicians. At the origin, then, as you have correctly
said, is a sonorous simulation, but that is only a point of departure, a way of
orienting oneself based on which begin all of the adventures and imaginary
drifts/derivations, the story of the sounds which compose the music.95

This synthesis technique makes plain the distinction between the notes on the
page and what we hear: the notes are diverse, the heard sound unified. The
screen onto which the notes of the score are projected is the ear. The ear is
where the distinct sound sources meet and fuse. In Baillet’s typology of
processes in Grisey’s oeuvre, this sequentially recurring presentation of a
gradually changing sound object is termed a ‘discontinuous evolution in
successive phases’ (the term ‘phase’ is appropriate here, signifying as it does
‘the state of an evolutionary principle at a given moment’).96 The deviations in
Partiels occur to a synthetic chord, and are controlled (Fig. 6.4) by effecting
change in one or more of the parameters defining that chord (density,
harmonicity, register, and so on). An overlooked factor in Grisey’s combining
synthetic spectral material with wave iteration form is the consistency therein,
between material and form, of an appeal to nature: just as the material is
derived from the reality of sound, with a birth, life, and death, so too the formal
process is derived from behavioural reality.
The second section of Partiels features Grisey’s first use of resultant tone (or
combination tone) harmonies as a principle for generating material. As Baillet
notes, this pitch generation technique is one of compositional ‘auto-
engenderment’ and features more often in Grisey’s music than does instru-
mental synthesis. Resultant tone harmonies were so important to Grisey that
he dedicated a whole lecture to them when teaching at Darmstadt in 1980,

95
Grisey, ‘Les dérives sonores de Gérard Grisey’, 239.
96
Baillet, Grisey, Fondements, 49–50. Stockhausen uses the term ‘phase’ in his essay ‘. . .
How Time Passes . . .’, 10.
194 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Figure 6.4 Grisey’s schematic diagram for the opening section of Partiels,
calculating the degrees of change of the Gestalt of the ensemble instrumental
synthesis simulation. Reproduced by kind permission of the Paul Schaer
Foundation, Basel, Switzerland.
L’Itinéraire and Synthetic Music (1973–1976) 195

under the name ‘sound shadows’. Resultant tones are based on the same
principle as ring modulation (to which Grisey had been introduced during
his electroacoustics studies with Marie). When two frequencies (A and B)
sound simultaneously, they produce sum tones (A + B: the two frequencies
added together) and difference tones (A–B: the lower frequency subtracted
from the higher frequency). Resultant tones are a psychoacoustic phenom-
enon present at all times as frequencies sounding at a lower amplitude than the
two source frequencies: hence Grisey’s name ‘sound shadows’. With complex
sounds with harmonic partials (calculated as the fundamental frequency
multiplied by integral multiples), the overtones, moreover, produce further
resultant tones (thus, for sum tones, as well as A + B there will be 2A + B, 2A +
2B, A + 2B, and so on). Baillet writes:
Limiting himself most of the time to lower factors (no higher than 3A ± 3B),
Grisey imagines a harmonic technique on two plains: a foreground formed
from a chord of a few sounds, sometimes only two; and a background, less
prominent, the ‘shadow’ of the first, formed from the combination tones
generated from that chord. It is the only direct influence of electroacoustics
on Grisey’s compositional framework, while the technological model was
determinant for Murail in the 1970s.97

In the second section of Partiels, Grisey uses the principle of resultant tones to
calculate a series of harmonies swelling into and out of silence. To do so, he
more or less freely selects which resultant tones to use according to an overall
formal plan moving from a lower to a higher register and from inharmonicity
to harmonicity. For his foreground harmonies, Grisey uses chromatic approxi-
mations of the frequencies, while for the background ‘sound shadows’ Grisey
uses microtones. Thus, through resultant tone harmonies, Grisey establishes
several compositional features at once: a dualistic compositional plane (par-
ticularly evident in Jour, contre jour (1978) for amplified ensemble and tape);
an immanent approach to pitch generation, whereby, quasi-organically, suc-
cessive harmonies are born each from each (rather than being decided upon
and imposed from some transcendent reservoir of pitch classes); an elegant
way of transitioning from harmonic to inharmonic sound aggregates or the
reverse; and a ‘principle of instantaneous generation’, as in Chowning’s
computer-generated work Stria (1977), asserting becoming over being.
Reviewing the l’Itinéraire concert in Le Monde, Jacques Lonchampt was
full of praise for Grisey’s piece; despite Stockhausen’s wind quintet Adieu
also being on the programme (which Grisey conducted), the young French
composer took the headline: ‘“PARTIELS” de Gérard Grisey à l’Itinéraire’.98

97
Baillet, Gérard Grisey: fondements, 18; for further discussion, see 88–91.
98
Lonchampt, ‘“PARTIELS” de Gérard Grisey à l’Itinéraire’.
196 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Halbreich was also in attendance; then the director of the Royan festival, he
had rejected Partiels for Royan because it would not be a world premiere,
and had also rejected Ensemble l’Itinéraire from performing because, he
said, it was not good enough. After hearing the premiere of Partiels, he
grudgingly admitted that Grisey had made ‘some progress’.99 It would not
be quite forgotten about in 1982, when Halbreich moderated l’Itinéraire’s
seminar at Darmstadt, introducing its aesthetic to the larger musical world.
Another old face that reappeared around this time was Grisey’s former
teacher Marie, who, popping his head in the door while l’Itinéraire was
rehearsing Partiels at the Pantin Conservatoire, quipped to Grisey: ‘Is that
yours? Sounds great!’ Grisey closed his original programme note for Partiels
with remarks, later excised, reflecting a residual soixante-huitard attitude:
‘Controlled intuition, formalised delirium: no art is possible without this
difficult equilibrium between chaos and immobility. Art as permanent
revolution?’100 A more formalistic branding would soon occur.

99
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 193–4.
100
Grisey, original programme note for Partiels, reproduced in Cohen-Levinas, ed., Vingt-
cinq ans, 395. The Marxist statement, describing art as permanent revolution, was used
by Boulez in regard to his Third Piano Sonata (the score of which Grisey owned).
 7 New Dimensions (1976–1978)

In March 1978, Grisey gave his first interview in the French national press,
with Gerard Condé in Le Monde. In the interview, conducted to tie in with
the premiere of Grisey’s Modulations, Grisey focused on salient aspects of
his own music – its hiding considerable complexity under an ostensibly
acoustically simple surface, for example, and its ceaseless dynamism.
He opened, though, by remarking that his aesthetic was not unique but
one shared with various other young composers: a burgeoning movement.
‘What seems interesting’ says Gérard Grisey (born in 1946), whose
Modulations for thirty-three instruments is to be premiered on 9 March by
the Ensemble Intercontemporain, ‘is not that I have this or that idea about
musical composition, but that I have been able to see that they are shared at
the moment by others. Moreover, these are not necessarily new ideas; more
often than not, we even have the impression of discovering forgotten
evidence. One could almost, since the word is fashionable, speak of
musical ecology: we are relearning what a sound is and, instead of dissociating
it from timbre, duration, and intensity, as was appropriate in integral
serialism, we are more interested in the influence of one parameter on
the other.’1

A few months later, Grisey delivered his first lecture at the Darmstadt
Summer Courses, where Prologue with resonators was also premiered by
Gérard Caussé (Murail went to Darmstadt as well for moral support).
There, to general scepticism (towards the end of the lecture, much of the
audience in this ‘Mecca of serialism’ began mockingly laughing at him),2
Grisey described the general principles of his music:
The different processes of mutation from one sound into another sound
or from one ensemble of sound into another ensemble, form the very
basis of my musical style – the primary idea, the gene of all composition.
The material results from the becoming of sound, from the
macrostructure, and not the other way round. In other words, there is no
base material.3

1
Condé, ‘La Nouvelle École Darmstadt’. 2
Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.
3
Grisey, ‘Devenir du son’, 27.

[197]
198 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Again, he went on to announce the movement, this time saying of whom it

was comprised and what its members had in common:
It seems to me that at the moment the inverse is happening of what was being
described a few years ago as a proliferation of styles. We are present at the
formation, if not of a group with a label, at least of very fruitful exchanges
between composers. I would in particular like to signal here a sort of collective
of musical thought which has formed around Ensemble l’Itinéraire, and
which includes composers as different as Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt,
Jens-Peter Ostendorf, Mesías Maiguashca, and myself. Very close to this
tendency are those composers who broach the computer synthesis of sound:
whether that be at IRCAM with Jean-Claude Risset and David Wessel or at
Stanford with John Chowning. I regret not having the time to allow you to
hear such scores as Mémoire-érosion by Tristan Murail, L’Orage, d’après
Giorgione by Hugues Dufourt, Solo für Orchester by Jens-Peter Ostendorf, and
Y ahora vamos por aqui by Mesías Maiguashca, scores whose musical
difference is only a seeming one and which display the same effort to
elaborate a language taking off from the internal structure of sound. We have
in common the same mistrust of abstraction, the same attention to immediate
perception, and a similar research of apparent simplicity as the ultimate stage
of a complexity that is internal and hidden; and often an identical material,
which is the application to the instrumental domain of the experience of the
electronic studio and acoustical research.4

These remarks, summarising in broad terms the new aesthetic, were a

recognition of the fact that Grisey, Murail, and others were doing some-
thing distinct and musically significant. On the other hand, they were
responding to the changing political climate in French new music, which
seemed to require establishing a common theoretical banner.
A central figure in this was the composer-theorist Hugues Dufourt, who
had recently relocated to Paris from Lyon. Dufourt had entered the frame
at the 1975 Royan festival, at which his work Mura della città di Dite was
performed by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Simon Bainbridge
(also on the programme was Brian Ferneyhough, at the time unknown in
France, whose music impressed Dufourt). Dufourt was not altogether
pleased with the performance he received. ‘The conductor’s role was very
important. Simon Bainbridge didn’t understand anything, so I spent two
hours with him explaining. He didn’t do an extraordinary concert but still
it was presentable.’5 Murail told Dufourt, ‘Well, we’ll try to do better’, and

4
Quoted in Lelong and Réby, ‘Notices et compléments’, 342–3.
5
This quotation and the next one from Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20
February 2014.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 199

Dufourt joined l’Itinéraire’s bureau for the 1975–6 concert season. Murail
said the invitation happened in a way that was ‘very informal. We just
asked people who we liked or were interested in to be part of it.’6 Arriving
among these former students of Messiaen’s, he found himself slightly an
outsider. ‘I was the only Boulezian. Boulezian not because I was taught by
Boulez, but I was labelled as a descendant by affiliation. It was the truth.
I then worked for twenty years with Boulez.’ Born in Lyon and having
Venetian ancestry, Dufourt trained at the Geneva Conservatoire, studying
piano with Louis Hiltbrand (assistant to Dinu Lipatti) and composition
with Jacques Guyonnet.7 Guyonnet had been one of Boulez’s pupils at
Basel along with Amy, Éloy, and others, and to the extent that Grisey, too,
drew on Boulez’s statistical serialist resonant textures, his and Dufourt’s
music occasionally crossed over in unexpected ways, even though
Dufourt’s pitch material remained equal-tempered. Alongside his music
studies, Dufourt studied philosophy with figures like Georges Canguilhem
and Gilles Deleuze (with the latter of whom he did not have an agreeable
experience);8 this twin formation determined Dufourt’s career path and his
redoubtably theoretical vision of his music thereafter.
Dufourt moved to Paris for his work with the CNRS, joining l’Itinéraire
at an uncertain point when, having received funding from the Ministry of
Culture for two concert seasons, it had no guarantee that it would receive
funding thereafter. L’Itinéraire’s open attitude was something Murail and
Tessier had deliberately promoted, reacting to what they considered the
conservative avant-gardism of the Domaine Musical and its allegiance to
pointillist serialism. ‘I would say from a political-aesthetic point of view,
l’Itinéraire had an image that was still vague when I arrived’, Dufourt said.
‘It was not well defined.’ Dufourt thought this lack of definition politically
imprudent given the imminent opening of Boulez’s music research centre
in Beaubourg in central Paris. ‘It was necessary to clarify the aesthetic with
the political, because with IRCAM, with the Ensemble Intercontemporain,
things were radicalised. So, we had to make choices, to define ourselves on
aesthetic level. That is perhaps what forced us to relaunch the confron-
tation with IRCAM.’9 When Boulez announced to the world the details of
IRCAM at a press conference at the Théâtre de la Ville in October 1974,

6
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
7
See Nonken, ‘Hugues Dufourt and the Origins of His World’ and Castanet,
Hugues Dufourt.
8
Deleuze, he said, was remiss as a supervisor: ‘I worked alone, because otherwise I would
not pass.’ Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
9
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
200 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

l’Itinéraire’s directorship had an uneasy sense that the group’s state

funding might be withdrawn. This was so not only given the institution’s
distinguished department heads (including Risset, whose computer sound
synthesis was a key influence on spectral music) but more pressingly, given
the creation alongside IRCAM of Ensemble Intercontemporain, a dedi-
cated all-star new music band with its own regular concert season in the
capital and in the regions (just like l’Itinéraire). In response, Dufourt
encouraged his new colleagues in l’Itinéraire’s bureau that their collective
should take a less passive position and revise its public brand. L’Itinéraire’s
identity, Dufourt argued, should incorporate the aesthetic tenets of the
music of l’Itinéraire’s composers. When asked if Dufourt’s arrival brought
a new impetus to l’Itineraire’s image, Murail answered in the affirmative:
‘Yes, I think so. I couldn’t be precise about that, but yes.’10
Dufourt, as a CNRS researcher, sat in on colloquia at Leipp’s acoustics
studio, though he said that he saw limitations in Leipp’s teaching, and
unlike Grisey he did not study for a diploma there. By the mid-1970s,
Dufourt already had a well-developed understanding of electronic music
owing to his time in Lyon; his teacher Guyonnet had founded a ‘high
performance’ electronic music studio in Geneva.
He set up a very sophisticated studio and I benefited from his teaching. When
I arrived in Paris, I did not find it the same, because with Guyonnet, I was
discussing everything—that is, the Berio studio, all the techniques of
Stockhausen’s Cologne studio, which Guyonnet also knew thoroughly, and
I too. Guyonnet had gone to see Varèse at least twice. So, our discussions were
about the future of electronics and its specificity.11

It was in this environment that Dufourt had learned with interest of

Risset’s innovations in computer sound synthesis. Within l’Itinéraire, the
only person Dufourt found to have a knowledge of electroacoustics com-
parable to his was Levinas, owing to the latter’s studies with Reibel of the
GRM. Alongside the ‘decisive’ meeting with Risset, Dufourt also around
this time met Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis. His conversations with
the latter, Dufourt said,
mainly concerned the fundamental incidence of computer science on music,
and, in particular, a point that has never been sufficiently emphasised:
namely, the role of the graphical representation of ‘dimensions’ and
‘parameters’ in the intelligence of sound phenomena. [. . .] I asked Chowning
whether, as a composer, I should not convert to a more methodical use of

10
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
11
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 201

computers [l’informatique]. He formally dissuaded me, telling me that

I would always be confronted with someone more competent than me, and
that my role was rather to transpose the new intelligence of the sound
phenomenon that computer representations brought to orchestral writing
[écriture]. I followed his advice. I insist on the fact that, in Chowning’s spirit,
it is time that counts. We must not stop at the mediation of space alone.12

The dynamic of interferences, the constitutive role of time, and the con-
ception of sound phenomena not as discrete objects but as interacting
fields informed the concept Dufourt was developing for this new music.
They also related to Grisey’s thought, which had in part developed by
encountering Chowning’s work at Darmstadt in 1972.13
There was now a spur towards formulating a name for the l’Itinéraire-
associated composers’ common musical aesthetic. From 1973 to 1976, in
deliberate contrast to the seriousness of the Domaine Musical and the post-
war serialists, l’Itinéraire’s public image was deliberately casual and hip.
This tone changed markedly, however, from its 1976–7 season onwards.
Spurred by Dufourt, l’Itinéraire framed its 1976–7 concert season more
maturely in terms of music-theoretical attributes. Each concert in the
season was assigned a particular theoretical theme: for example, on
31 January 1977, ‘Le Son et l’architecture du temps’ (‘Sound and the
Architecture of Time’; works by Grisey, Scelsi, and others), and on
14 March, ‘Les Modèles musicaux’ (‘Musical Models’; works by Xenakis,
Mâche, and others). The season took place under the banner ‘Les
Nouvelles Dimensions de la pensée musicale’ (‘The New Dimensions of
Musical Thought’), and the programme brochure was accompanied by a
programmatic essay written by Dufourt on the season’s theme. Here, for
the first time, l’Itinéraire was signalling itself as the centre of a new
movement. Dufourt’s short piece ‘Les Nouvelles Dimensions de la pensée
musicale’ is the first step towards the essay ‘Musique spectrale’, and it
situates l’Itinéraire in contradistinction to what is presented as the out-of-
touch viewpoint of its musical elders. Earlier in 1976, a large and lavish
booklet had been published by IRCAM to mark the centre’s first major
initiative, ‘Passage du XXème siècle’, the concert series programmed from
January to October 1977 to coincide with IRCAM’s opening. The ‘Passage
du XXème siècle’ booklet included an essay by Boulez, ‘Invention/
recherche’, which argues that the contemporary state of music is one of

12
Dufourt, email to the author, 2 December 2022.
13
For an account of Dufourt’s theory of contemporary music, see Mendez, ‘Hugues
Dufourt’s Epistemology’.
202 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

blockages, stagnation, and emptiness14 (a view consistent with Boulez’s

published remarks from the early 1970s, in which, for example, he used
the word néant to indicate the standard of the scores he had received by
composers of the youngest generation in France).15 In ‘The New
Dimensions of Musical Thought’, taking a combative tone, l’Itinéraire
ridicules Boulez’s view: ‘One cannot but note the vitality of contemporary
music’, it declares. ‘Why, then – if not by either incomprehension or
incompetence – do we hear so much talk of uncertainty, of musical cre-
ation’s stagnation, or even of a void, a crisis? If there is a void, it is a well-filled
void; if there is a crisis, it is not our crisis.’ The short essay goes on to lay out
for the first time an antithesis between this new strand of music and the
music of ‘twenty years ago’, noting, for instance, that ‘[h]ere, instead of
combining sounds, the composer plunges into the interior of sound’ (one of
French spectral music’s key tenets, seemingly lifted from Young). The ‘new
dimensions’ opened and explored by l’Itinéraire led to the defiant conclu-
sion (prescient, as it turned out) that ‘the future belongs to us’.16 While in
their respective programme notes for Périodes and Sables, Grisey and Murail
had each begun to describe the terms of their respective musical aesthetics,
this was the first time a broader movement was declared.
Following this, having ‘boycotted’ the opening of IRCAM in 1976 (‘we
were very frustrated by all that’),17 Murail and Dufourt decided to form a
new collective: the Collectif de Recherche Instrumentale et de Synthèse
Sonore (Collective for Instrumental Research and Sonorous Synthesis),
whose acronym, CRISS, a homonym of crise, again poked fun at Boulez’s
declarations. Along with Dufourt and Murail was the microtonal composer
Alain Bancquart,18 and CRISS did little in its brief lifespan other than release
three portrait discs, one each for the music of its three members. CRISS’s
manifesto, however, published as an insert in the sleeves of two of the discs
and written by Dufourt in September 1978, expands on ‘The New
Dimensions of Musical Thought’ and adumbrates the manifesto to come.19
CRISS’s key music-theoretical concept was synthesis, as pursued by Risset
and Chowning and as already mentioned by Grisey and Murail. Building on

14
Boulez, ‘Invention/recherche’, 85–97. 15
Lonchampt, ‘Interview with Pierre Boulez’.
16
‘Les Nouvelles Dimensions de la pensée musicale’, in Cohen-Levinas, ed., Vingt-cinq
ans, 400.
17
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
18
Bancquart was closely associated with l’Itinéraire throughout the late 1970s, but because
of his status as a civil servant (at Radio France), he did not officially join the collective.
For an overview of Bancquart’s compositional career, see Biget, ed., Les Cahiers
du CIREM.
19
CRISS’s manifesto is reproduced in Castanet, ‘Hugues Dufourt’, 24–8.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 203

this, Dufourt’s CRISS manifesto in part takes up the same theme, linking
synthesis to a wider project: the creation of a new musical language (heir to
serialism): ‘Our key idea is that electronic sound gives rise to a new language,
and that this in turn demands appropriate constructs. The synthetic com-
position of sound plays an integral part in musical composition, condition-
ing it within to the point of renewing its principles and expressive forms.
We intend to contribute to the formation of a new syntax and a new style.’20
Dufourt specifies the emergence of a new musical movement exploring a
revised psychoacoustical conception of sound and taking into account
sound’s nature on the smallest scale. Just as thermodynamics teaches us to
define heat, via its small-scale atomic structure, not simply as sensory
warmth but as a mode of transfer of energy, the sonograph teaches us to
conceive of music’s material not on the human scale in terms of notes and
pitches but on the microscopic scale in energetic terms as transience and
dynamism. That affects both musical material (‘Music changes at once its
scale and its object. Henceforth, it operates on the signifying parameters of
the acoustic spectrum, whose minute oscillations it understands how to
control’) and musical form, composition becoming a macro-scale expression
of sound’s micro-scale structure (‘The act of composition gives way to a sort
of resonance, whereby it liberates to the level of audibility the dynamism of
its lower depths.’). In typical avant-garde fashion, this was described in
utopian terms: ‘This upheaval is inscribed in the historical logic of
twentieth-century Western music, which has tended to accord to timbre a
growing predominance.’21 Dufourt, the CNRS philosopher, was describing a
new stage in Western classical music led by him and his colleagues. In this as
in other ways, he reprised serialism’s claims of a couple of decades earlier and
asserted legitimacy for l’Itinéraire in relation to its competitors.22

Grisey and Murail as Leaders of the New Style

Into Les Espaces acoustiques, the six-work cycle he composed from 1974 to
1985, Grisey channelled his love not only for outstanding sonorities but for

20
Castanet, ‘Hugues Dufourt’, 25–6.
21
‘Les Nouvelles Dimensions de la pensée musicale’, in Cohen-Levinas, ed., Vingt-cinq
ans, 400.
22
In a 1974 interview, Boulez had encouraged young composers to have a disruptive spirit:
‘[In the postwar period] we were impatient, rebellious, in the process of breaking away
from everything that had gone before us. That’s why I say today that I’d really like young
people to attack us, to come up against us. But it seems that everyone is doing their own
thing, on their own little patch of grass, doing what they feel like doing.’ Quoted in
Cadieu, ‘Entretien avec Boulez’.
204 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Stockhausenean spectacle. It became his signature work (at least until

Vortex temporum). Mixing French timbral refinement with Germanic
formal nous and, as Grisey put it, ‘number and drama’, the complete cycle
aptly premiered not somewhere august like the Salle Pleyel but at the
Venice Biennale. As art, it is avowedly contemporary and engaged with
the world of its day. Grisey summarised the general principles of Les
Espaces acoustiques as follows:
● No longer composing with notes but with sounds;
● No longer composing only with notes but with the difference that separates
them (the degree of pre-audibility);
● Acting upon the differences: i.e. controlling the evolution (or non-
evolution) of the sound and the speed of that evolution;
● Taking into account the relativity of our auditory perception;
● Applying phenomena that have long been studied in electronic music
studios to the area of instrumental sound. These applications may be heard
in their more radical forms in Partiels and Modulations;
● Striving for a synthetic style of composition [écriture] in which the
different parameters contribute to the construction of a unique sound. For
example: the arrangement of non-tempered pitches results in the creation
of new timbres; from which arrangement result certain durations, etc. The
synthesis involves the creation of sounds (material), on the one hand, and
the relationships among the sounds (form), on the other.23
The last point indicates the mature realisation, on a grand scale, of Grisey’s use of
statistical parameterisation to create a synthetic sound figure alongside the degree
of change to control is movement and evolution. In this, he was outlining the
principles of a new écriture. ‘Les Espaces acoustiques seems to me today like a huge
laboratory where spectral techniques are applied to various situations (from solo to
large orchestra)’, he later told Guy Lelong, reflecting on the cycle. ‘Some pieces
have a demonstrative, almost didactic aspect, as if, excited by the discovery, I had
worked hard to convey as best I could the characteristics of the language I was
progressively inventing.’24
The didactic aspect, shared with early Murail works such as Mémoire-érosion, is
at its most stark in Prologue for solo viola, which, as its title suggests, opens Les
Espaces acoustiques with a conceit of dramatic rhetoric.25 Prologue is based on a

23
Grisey, ‘Les Espaces acoustiques’, 135. 24
Grisey, ‘Les Espaces acoustiques’, 132.
25
All sketches referenced here, GGCPSF. Other potential titles that Grisey considered were
‘SCANDICUS PLEXUS’, ‘NEUME’, ‘CANTUS pour Alto’, ‘MODULATION’, ‘ALL-EIN’
(which is circled, indicating that he liked it), ‘PROSODIE’, and ‘GESTALT’. Each
indicates one aspect of the work’s conception. Grisey’s wish to give a work a Latin title
would later be realised in Tempus ex machina and Vortex temporum. For more in-depth
analyses of Prologue, see Baillet, Gérard Grisey: fondements, 99–112, Féron, ‘Gérard
Grisey – Prologue’, and Hennessy, ‘Beneath the Skin of Time’.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 205

Example 7.1 Motif from Grisey’s Prologue (1976) for viola.

series of repetitions of a neume figure on E, the contour of which resembles a sine

wave (Ex. 7.1), a figure sporadically bookended by a two-note iambic heartbeat
rhythm (a lower B) and which gradually unfurls higher and higher components of a
harmonic series on the cycle’s low E. This repeated harmonic personnage (Grisey
refers to it in his sketches as a scandicus flexus) initially comprises five notes,
harmonics 3–7 and 9 of the cycle’s low E; eventually, as the harmonic spectrum
stretches upwards, the personnage is torn apart and transforms into inharmonic noise.

Will transformation. Oh be inspired for the flame

in which a Thing disappears and bursts into something else26

From the outset, Grisey imagined the solo figure as declamatory in character.
‘All the melodic phrases’, he wrote on the first page of sketches, ‘must be
“prosodied” like a recitative.’ The sounds played by the solo viola are initially
imagined as vocal expressions, with similar phrasing. Once the basic concept
had been decided (the scandicus flexus phrase based on notes from the
harmonic series on E), Grisey’s early sketches look almost like a cinematic
storyboard: a succession of images show how the curve’s discrete pitches
slowly give way to more and more notes, which eventually give way to
glissandi, with the scandicus flexus glissandi curve gradually giving way to a
straight descending line, and so on. In this, in keeping with Grisey’s French
vitalist associations, they inadvertently echo Bergson’s description of how
humans, through the reel of our perceptual apparatus, perceive motion:
Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place
ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially.
We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are
characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming,
abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of
knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this

26
Rilke, ‘Sonnet XII’, 157.
206 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

becoming itself. [. . .] We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in

the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a
cinematographical kind.27

In realising his perception-based musical concept, Grisey, as usual, drew

up schematic diagrams arranging, on the vertical axis, various parameters
that, on the horizontal axis, changed by increments: a synthetic Gestalt
undergoing degrees of change. The gradual shuffling of the harmonic
partials also employs serialist permutation techniques: one schematic
category is named ‘Neumes’, listing the pitches (in equal temperament)
from A to I in capital letters, which are mixed up progressively:
‘ABCDEFIGH’, ‘ABIEGHCDF’, ‘ABEFHCDIG’, and so on. Grisey also
re-uses the Xenakisean term métabole for the audible process of change.
Grisey opted to score the cycle’s introductory work not for double bass, as
was initially considered, but for viola because of the prominent place the viola
has in Périodes. The Gregorian chant neume idea for his musical figure
derives from Messiaen’s teaching: in one of his old student copybooks,
Grisey wrote this neume name beside analytic notes on the flute motif from
Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. As often with Grisey, music by
the statistical serialist generation provided inspiration: a model for some of
Prologue’s solo string writing, as with the viola writing near the end of
Périodes, is Xenakis’s Mikka (1971) for solo violin, which premiered at the
1972 Festival d’Automne in Paris; that work’s wandering glissando is
reprised in Grisey’s piece as its cyclical process begins to unravel. Inspired
by Brownian motion, Mikka finds sporadic zones of stability within its
endless movement, but Xenakis’s organisation lies elsewhere than in harmo-
nicity, owing to Xenakis’s rejection of Fourier analysis in his music; in this
regard Grisey signalled a definitive change from his Greek elder.28 Like
Murail’s Mémoire-érosion, Grisey’s Prologue also suggests some slight con-
ceptual alliance with Levinas’s Appels (a work discussed later in this chapter):
whereas with Murail that influence is in the use of the horn as instrument of a
‘call’, with Grisey it is in the supplementary aspect of Prologue’s score which
calls for the use of resonators (only optionally in solo performance – not
when the piece is performed as part of Les Espaces acoustiques). In Appels,
Levinas calls for the brass and winds to play into snare drums, which resonate
sympathetically at certain frequencies, relayed through the venue’s speakers.

27
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 306.
28
The argument against the use of Fourier analysis and the harmonic spectrum in
contemporary composition is set out in Xenakis, Formalized Music, 242–6. See also
Solomos, ‘The Unity of Xenakis’s Instrumental and Electroacoustic Music’. On the role
of Fast Fourier Transform analysis in spectral music, see Fineberg, ‘Appendix I’.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 207

In the version of Prologue with resonators, Grisey explored how the viola
might be used to cause a harp, a piano, a tam tam, a snare drum, and a
tambura to resonate (which in practice proved difficult to achieve).
‘I undoubtedly influenced Grisey’, Levinas said when asked about this.29
Following the Darmstadt premiere of Prologue with resonators, German
press reviews of the summer courses predictably focused on Ferneyhough,
but Grisey did receive some favourable attention.30
The fourth part of the Les Espaces acoustiques cycle, Modulations for
thirty-three musicians, also dates from this period. Grisey described the
work in Heraclitan terms: ‘In Modulations, the material does not exist in
itself. Rather, it is sublimated in a pure sonorous ceaselessly changing and
ungraspable in themoment. All is in movement.’31 Commissioned by
Boulez for his Ensemble Intercontemporain and dedicated to Grisey’s
former teacher Messiaen on the occasion of his seventieth birthday,
Modulations was one of the few contemporary French works presented
in this period at IRCAM, suggesting the esteem in which Grisey was held.
From a technical point of view, it develops in both sophistication and scope
the instrumental synthesis techniques introduced in Périodes and Partiels.
At the outset of composing this work, Grisey returned to the LAM to
conduct spectrographic research on brass sounds for use as the basis for his
writing in the piece. This was Grisey’s first occasion of concentrated work
in collecting and transcribing spectrograms of instrumental sounds with a
view to using them as compositional models, not only for pitch material
but for formal and temporal proportions. ‘During each work session’,
Féron writes, ‘Grisey had a systematic approach, focusing on a specific
note (most of the time an E, which is at the heart of Les Espaces acous-
tiques) which musicians had to play in as many ways as possible.’32 The
work was done with the LAM acoustician Michèle Castellengo; the instru-
ments analysed during this period were brass, double bass, and percussion,
and the resulting spectrograms would inform several of his works in the
following years, including Transitoires and Tempus ex machina.
Modulations is based as before on the twin poles of the spectrum of a
low E and periodicity. It is in five sections, comprising five interlinked
processes; generally, the processes tend to move from inharmonic to
harmonic or vice versa (with one exception), and there often occur simul-
taneously other processes in other statistically defined parameters. This is
the case in the opening section, which simultaneously moves from inhar-
monic to harmonic, from aperiodic rhythms to periodic rhythms, and

29
Levinas, email to the author, 16 December 2022. 30
Ely, ‘Darmstädter Ferienkurse’.
31
Grisey, ‘Modulations’, 138. 32
Féron, ‘Spectra as Theoretical and Practical Models’.
208 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

from dualism to unity in the ensemble on stage – a large ensemble divided

in two, corresponding to two alternating sound figures, gradually coales-
cing into one to articulate a harmonic, respiratory figure, with the notes’
durations also having significantly extended. In his analysis, Baillet notes
how the first figure – a chord on E – is initially played by the winds, while
the second figure – a chord on F whose frequency/pitch content derives
from ring modulation of the first group’s material – is initially played by
strings, before over time, alongside the other changes, the instrumentation
of the two figures coalesces. As the piece progresses, the brass take on a
preponderant role, and Grisey used spectrograms of brass sounds for
compositional models. A brief extract from a thorough analysis by Féron
of the sketches for Modulations will suffice to indicate the complexity of
Grisey’s compositional scheme, a scheme no less complex than that of a
serialist work:
The fourth part of Modulations comprises three sections whose theoretical
durations are respectively 110, 82, and 65 seconds. These values are deduced
from the series of intervals between harmonic partials previously mentioned:
Grisey resorted here to the intervals between the fifth and seventh, seventh
and ninth, and ninth and eleventh partials of his original spectrum. Each of
the three sections is divided successively into subsections whose durations
follow in turn logarithmic curves that are totally predefined. In the first
section (11000 , cues 31–36), there are thirty subsections which become shorter
and shorter: a complex polyphony is gradually built and the density of notes
becomes higher and higher. In the second section (8200 , cues 37–40), there are
twenty subsections which become longer and longer: the polyphony is
gradually transformed in ‘vague aggregates’ which become more ‘precise.’
In the third section (6500 , cues 41–44), there are just five subsections which are
even lengthier: the polyphony slowly totally disappears to be replaced by a
‘perfect homophony.’
During this fourth part the ensemble is split into four similar groups, each
of which constructs a five-voice polyphony. The main low voices played on
brass instruments follow a melodic gestalt similar to the neumes previously
composed in Prologue (1976) for solo viola. Pitches derive from a spectrum
with an E0 fundamental. The four other voices within each group are deduced
from other spectral models. Three of them are established thanks to spectral
transcriptions of brass sounds with mutes and one of them simulates an
imaginary mute.33

Nonetheless, as ever with Grisey, in contradistinction to serialist music,

compositional complexity ends at the perceptibility of the intended

33
Féron, ‘Spectra as Theoretical and Practical Models’.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 209

‘message’ (in information theoretical terms): surface simplicity is the

ultimate end of inner complexity. ‘Simplicity is often the result of very
thorough research’, Grisey told Le Monde around the time of the premiere.
‘I work slowly, as if I were circling around something, and then there
comes a moment when I know I won’t go any further – when the details
have become simple.’34 Modulations is particularly impressive to experi-
ence in concert, for which one has no need whatsoever to know anything
about the composer’s calculations. As with Partiels, there is an element of
Stockhausenean spectacle that is often lacking in those composers who,
over subsequent decades, tried in a less imaginative, more academic way to
imitate Grisey’s style. When drafting his programme note, combining in
one expression statistical serialism and information theory, Grisey again
drew on a term from Xenakis that would not make it into the final version
of the note, ‘la musique comme métabole continu d’objets connus en objet
encore inconnus’; but by now, he had moved beyond his influences in
establishing a musical style that was distinct and new. Reviewing the work’s
Théatre de la Ville premiere concert in Le Quotidien de Paris, Gérard
Mannoni wrote effusively of Modulations, saying it was ‘exactly the type
of work that is addressed directly to the sensibility without any need of
preliminary explanation’. It was ‘an important score, seductive without
demagoguery, far beyond the usual “obligato” intellectualism’.35 Although
the review also covered the works by Amy, Huber, and Messiaen that
were performed, Grisey received most of the column inches. For his part,
Grisey was less than pleased with what he considered the Ensemble
Intercontemporain’s inadequate attention to the microtones as scored: it
was only after some work that he and the conductor Peter Eötvös trained
the players to play the requisite quarter-tones. In this respect, he recog-
nised Ensemble l’Itinéraire as more attuned to the new music’s écriture.36
Murail too had found assurance in his style, and several of the works he
composed in this period are early spectral classics. Territoires de l’oubli
(1977), composed for his l’Itinéraire colleague Levinas, is the first French
spectral work for solo piano. Based on the piano strings’ resonance (the
sustaining pedal is depressed throughout), it is as much focused on the
appearing and disappearing inherent to sound as on sound’s stable consti-
tution.37 Its opening follows Murail and Grisey’s typical strategy by this

34
Condé, ‘La Nouvelle École Darmstadt’.
35
Mannoni, ‘Une séduisante création de Grisey’.
36
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 196.
37
For a detailed examination of the work, see Nonken, The Spectral Piano, 75–85.
210 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

time: a sound figure (here, a repeated, accelerating B–C minor ninth

gesture leading into a broken spectral chord) is presented several times
in sequence, establishing a virtual Gestalt; this enables the actualised sound
figure each time to be slightly altered while retaining the same profile. This
process of deviation eventually forces a transition into a new section
focused on a new sound figure, and so on. Formally, this repetition in
each section of a well-defined musical figure creates an inertial frame of
reference for the introduction of chaotic elements (such as in section E,
where a chord based on a tritone is sounded repeatedly at length (Ex. 7.2)).
In Territoires de l’oubli, as well as with quasi-electronic echo effects, Murail
worked with frequency calculations, and frequency modulation (FM)
harmonies also feature prominently in Ethers (1978) for amplified flute
and ensemble, another l’Itinéraire classic. At certain points in Ethers, the
amplified solo flute performer, singing and playing two different notes,
creates complex harmonies which in turn ‘determine’ the harmonic mater-
ial played by the ensemble.
Nowhere are the slowness and gradual unfolding of Murail’s first-
period music more palpable than in Treize couleurs du soleil couchant

Example 7.2 Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli (1977) for piano. © Copyright Éditions Transatlantiques.
Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 211

(1978) for chamber ensemble. Here, the slowness allows the listener to
‘enter into the sound’ (to use the phrase the young French composers had
borrowed from Young and Scelsi) better to perceive the music’s
harmonic–timbral micro-fluctuations, which are where the musical inter-
est predominantly lies. The harmonic material of each of Treize couleurs
du soleil couchant’s thirteen sections is determined by a specific dyad,
which generates the rest of the pitch content through calculations using
the ring modulation algorithm, gradually leading to the next dyad, and so
on, the material auto-generating from itself. The clarinet and flute play
each section’s two principal notes, while the strings, playing sum and
difference tones, generate the drift towards the next section’s basic
material, and the piano more freely ornaments the harmonic evolution.
Already here, despite the two composers’ similar styles, Murail’s aesthetic
voice is quite distinct from that of Grisey: where Grisey presents a
Stockhausenean cosmic spectacle, Murail presents a more poetic canvas
of sunsets and clouds. The resemblance of the title Treize couleurs du
soleil couchant to that of Monet’s series of paintings of the London
Houses of Parliament might lead some to consider it a neo-
Impressionist work. Murail’s view of his aesthetic lineage is different:
‘Rather than Impressionism, I would more willingly speak here of
Symbolism. From the natural phenomenon of a sunset, it is the structure,
the temporal evolution that is retained: the way in which the colours and
lights evolve and are transformed rapidly yet imperceptibly, impercept-
ible metamorphoses that lead into contrasting colours.’38 Murail’s sym-
pathy with Symbolism is evident not only in terms of programmatic
imagery but in terms of form, as François Sabatier’s account of
Symbolism suggests: ‘To those classical constructions demanding order
and a progression leading eventually towards an anticipated term ([. . .]
exposition/development/recapitulation), [Symbolist art] prefers struc-
tures that are free or founded on a principle of continuous metamor-
phosis.’39 Murail’s music affirms flux; it enacts not simply technical
spectral aggregates but, more precisely, the auditory sensations that
spectrally constructed sound figures elicit. ‘It is not the colours that
count’, Murail said, ‘but their coming together, and especially the aes-
thetic and psychological impact.’40 There was, moreover, programmatic
continuity with student works like Couleur de mer.

38
Murail, ‘Treize couleurs du soleil couchant’.
39
Sabatier, La Musique dans la prose française, 414.
40
Rigaudière, ‘Tristan Murail, retour’, 12–13.
212 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Dufourt, Levinas, Tessier, and Spectralist Diversity

The 1977–8 season marked a change in l’Itinéraire’s focus. In addition to
its regular Paris concert season, the ensemble played concerts around the
rest of France and abroad. Throughout spring 1978, l’Itinéraire played
concerts in France’s regions, while in May 1978 the ensemble played in
Bonn, Rome, and Pesaro. This new musical current was now being heard
abroad, and Murail and his colleagues were making contact with fellow
travellers like the Feedback group in Cologne (including Johannes Fritsch,
Rolf Gehlhaar, and David Johnson) and the Oeldorf group near Cologne
(including Eötvös and Maiguashca). ‘Many of the concerts of l’Itinéraire
featured compositions from the Oeldorf Group’, Maiguashca recalled.
‘Claude Vivier was a very frequent guest at the Oeldorfer Summernight
Concerts. My contact with Gérard [Grisey] was more personal, since he
was not very active in the administrative concerns of l’Itineraire. We met
many times, in Paris and Freiburg, always around musical activities,
concerts, lectures.’41 Dufourt recalled that at one meeting of the program-
ming committee, Grisey came in and excitedly told the other members of
the committee, ‘“I’ve discovered a sensational composer from Canada, we
absolutely have to have him performed.” It was Vivier.’42 (However, as
mentioned earlier, Grisey had already met Vivier in 1972.) Rădulescu, too,
eventually found his way onto l’Itinéraire’s programme, though Murail
‘wasn’t [impressed]. We played some of his pieces. He was way too
systematic. There was a problem of form in this music; there’s no form
to it.’43 Dufourt was similarly unconvinced by Rădulescu.44 Works like
Maiguaschca’s FMelodies II (1981) for ensemble and electronics show how
the wider engagement with spectralist principles also crossed over with
non-Western musical influences. Nonetheless, when l’Itinéraire’s new elec-
troacoustic sub-ensemble performed at the Royan festival in 1977 (a year
after, according to Grisey, Halbreich had been dismissive of them45), the
programme note struck a defensive tone:
Today, l’Itinéraire continues to play an irreplaceable role, in line with what it
set out to do from the beginning: to present avant-garde music of all
tendencies, the newest music, which, despite the creation of new central

41
Maiguashca, email to the author, 23 February 2014,
42
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
43
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
44
‘He had many, many ideas, but no formal consciousness [. . .]. He was someone who
foresaw what the problems were but who did not give himself the techniques to solve his
problems.’ Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
45
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 193–4.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 213

organisations [an allusion to IRCAM], remains largely absent from the

programmes. Another original character of l’Itinéraire lies in the fact that it is
a collegial enterprise, where performers and composers collaborate both in
the elaboration of programmes and in the definition of the group’s general
policy. [. . .] In four years, l’Itinéraire has been able to ensure a large number
of premieres (about 70, 50 of which were commissions) and to perform, often
for the first time in France, many other pieces. L’Itinéraire has thus frequently
been the starting point for the careers of works, composers, and soloists.
In addition to concerts, l’Itinéraire also organises events (concerts in the
streets of Paris last June and July, events in schools).46

Dufourt underlined that l’Itinéraire’s financial independence meant it had

no political pressure to perform this or that music, a rare degree of
autonomy. ‘L’Itinéraire was not being performed. So, when we pro-
grammed ourselves with Grisey, Murail, Levinas, it meant that our choices
were much more advanced than anything else being done – because
nothing, absolutely nothing made us co-opt except for the music. There
were no social forces to put pressure on us, to engage us, or even to make
us meet – nothing.’47
By now, the collective had developed not only its aesthetic-theoretical
brand but its organisational structure, and it was funded for three roles:
creation, transmission, and education. Thus, l’Itinéraire’s first statute, as
approved by the Directory of Music, was ‘to develop musical creation and
to favour direct contact with the public’. More informally, as the intern
Henri de Vezins wrote (he made a report on the time he spent with the
collective in 1980), l’Itinéraire’s objectives were:
● To bring together a group of musicians, composers, and performers in a
context specifically reflecting a general aesthetic;
● To execute work bearing at once on musical research and on its diffusion
in concerts of recent music;
● To favour composition via premieres and consequently, in giving space to
living music, to increase the repertoire of contemporary classical music;
● Finally, not to become a fixed institution but to remain always entirely in
control of its own activities.48
By the late 1970s, l’Itinéraire existed in five divisions: three musical ensembles, a
bureau, and a programming committee. L’Itinéraire’s president was Murail; its
vice-president, Levinas; its treasurer, Tessier; and its secretary, Pierre-Yves Artaud;

46
L’Itinéraire, biographical note, programme booklet, 1977.
47
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
48
De Vezins, ‘Rapport de stage 1980’. I thank Roger Tessier for supplying me with
this document.
214 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

its bureau comprised, as well as the four already named, Patrice Bocquillon, Jean-
Max Dussert, and Dufourt. Inevitably, as in the rock group trope, there were
sometimes personality clashes and ‘musical differences’. During one bureau meet-
ing, in front of the assembled collective, Murail allegedly made an impolite remark
about Levinas’s music’s lack of écriture.49 Levinas was not much taken with the
music of Murail and Grisey, which he considered over-formalistic. The flautist
Bocquillon remarked: ‘Michaël is very musical, very intelligent and inventive; he
has created his own recognisable sound world. He knows perfectly well the
technique of spectral composition [écriture], because during the breaks, he would
improvise some Murail or Grisey and the difference was obvious!’50 Dufourt said
that the distinction Levinas later outlined between sound on the one hand and
music on the other ‘was fundamental for him. And I think that not only is it
fundamental for Levinas, it is fundamental in general. That is, he is right.’51
Surprisingly, given how often Grisey cited Deleuzean ideas, the younger composer
never spoke about his interest with Deleuze’s former student. ‘Grisey never talked
about Deleuze’, Dufourt said, ‘and in fact, Grisey never spoke to me about
philosophy. Not a word. On the other hand, I talked a lot about philosophy with
Levinas.’ By the end of Dufourt’s membership of l’Itinéraire’s bureau, he and
Murail, who had artistically had ‘fundamental discussions’ and worked together
on CRISS, had gone in different directions.52 Dufourt remarked: ‘It was never a
personal matter. We have always remained on good terms and decisions were
taken by l’Itinéraire’s general assembly. There is no room for personal consider-
ations.’53 Murail said that ‘There were some stupid discussions about the budget,
and he was also a bit difficult around that time.’54 Nonetheless, as with many long
artistic friendships, in later years any small disputes were water under the bridge.
Levinas, similarly relaxing his position over time, speculated on what made Murail
and Grisey’s artistic friendship effective: ‘I think that the collaboration between
Murail and Grisey was a matter of a division of roles. Murail’s contribution was his
computer skills, which [later at IRCAM] enabled him to design a synthesis tool.’55
The programming committee was l’Itinéraire’s power base, being pri-
marily responsible for the ensemble’s aesthetic identity. Dufourt remem-
bered that when he was a member of the programming committee in the
late 1970s, l’Itinéraire ‘received scores from all over the world [. . .], from

49
Tessier, interview with the author, Paris, 27 February 2014.
50
Bocquillon, email to the author, 4 August 2016.
51
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014. See Levinas, ‘Le Son et la
musique’. Dufourt said in the same interview that Levinas’s ‘is the vision of the analyst.
He is a great analyst. He can pick up any score and play it on the piano.’
52
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
53
Dufourt, email to the author, 2 December 2022.
54
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
55
Levinas, email to the author, 17 December 2022.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 215

Romania, from Asia, from the USA’,56 which helped the French musicians
get in touch with like-minded composers internationally. With regard to
how the programming committee made its decisions (in a manner in
keeping with Murail and Grisey’s perceptual focus), the Swiss composer
Gérard Zinsstag, a friend of Grisey’s after the two met at Donaueschingen
in 1978, tells how, when he enquired about how he should submit his
music for consideration,
[Tristan Murail] placidly advised me that I should send tapes but especially
not scores, since the programming committee [. . .] made its judgement on
the acoustic product and not a graphic one. In this remark, I sensed an ethic
very different from what I had known prior to then, and which might be
summarised by the following lapidary phrase: ‘Let me hear what you write;
don’t show me scores!’57

Regarding l’Itinéraire’s operations in the 1970s, Dufourt insisted that

Tessier’s role had been underplayed: Tessier was ‘the true administrator of
l’Itinéraire’.58 While Ensemble l’Itinéraire’s musicians all received a wage, the
administrators did not. ‘I think I received a bit of money at the very
beginning’, Murail said, ‘because I was doing practically everything – moving
the stands, everything. Then [later] we had people to do that.’59 Among the
musicians who performed initially with l’Itinéraire were Bernadette Val
(soprano); Pierre-Yves Artaud and Patrice Bocquillon (flute); Jean-Max
Dussert (clarinet); Jean-Guillaume Cattin, Philippe Labadie, Philippe
Saisse, and Paul Mootz (percussion); André Jicquel (crystal and trombone
Baschet); Alain Bouchaut (Baschet percussion); Franc˛oise Pellié (ondes
Martenot); Jean-Pierre Sabouret (violin); Geneviève Renon (viola); and
Raymond Maillard (cello). With l’Itinéraire as a platform, French spectral
music was more diverse than simply music using spectral harmony and
instrumental synthesis in the vein of Murail and Grisey. The respective styles
of Levinas, Tessier, and Dufourt, sharing preoccupations with electroacous-
tics, colour, and psychoacoustics, are nonetheless diverse.60
Sometimes, the ensemble’s performers demonstrated new playing tech-
niques to the composers. Bocquillon, in specifying the performers’ role in
spectral music, outlined an important distinction. ‘L’Itinéraire’s performers
collaborated directly with the composers concerning the new instrumental

56
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
57
Zinsstag, ‘Regards sur l’Itinéraire’, 275.
58
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
59
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
60
This diversity was underlined in the first significant article on spectral music, Castanet,
‘Musiques spectrales’.
216 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

possibilities that the new spectral conception [écriture] engendered. They

never worked on the concept itself as set forth by Grisey and Murail
(although interested in and well acquainted with it) but on its instrumental
consequences.’61 In relation to Dufourt, Bocquillon noted: ‘His writing was
very strategic and totally masterful on a conceptual level and on the level of
instrumental writing. [. . .] In Erewhon, he went as far as indicating where
to strike the tams to sound certain harmonics that would fuse with other
instruments.’ Bocquillon considered Levinas’s compositional approach in
the 1970s more empirical.
I remember that he would play two tapes of recorded sounds, and when he
happened to strike upon a mixture of sounds in an interesting way, he wrote it
down. Lots of sections from his pieces were resolved during rehearsals. [. . .]
It’s clear he had the ideas, but he had lots of trouble formalising them and
more still in writing them down. He counted on us to notate them in a reliable
way – in which regard, his faith wasn’t misplaced.62

As an example of this, Bocquillon cited Levinas’s Contrepoints irréels

(1980) for four or six flutes or ensemble and tape, in which he as
l’Itinéraire’s flautist and Levinas worked together to develop embouchure
techniques mixing sound and breath, ‘which I notated for the score’.63
While the piece ‘is very successful, it was in no way based on writing
[écriture] strategies as with Grisey and Murail but was more an experience
of sonic collage that functioned very well. All of his pieces from this era
were written in this fashion, with the help of performers, including
[Levinas’s first opera] La Conférence des oiseaux. [. . .] I don’t think he
could have written long pieces like Gérard or Tristan.’ Grisey also occa-
sionally had écriture issues: there is a trombone pedal in Périodes which is
impossible to play, and the steel drum part in Quatre chants pour franchir
le seuil includes pitches beyond the instrument’s range.
Levinas was reluctant to identify himself with this emerging movement.
Privately, he questioned the desirability of composers identifying them-
selves under a common rubric, which might lend itself to stylistic homo-
geneity and musical conservatism.64 ‘I lived curiously through the

61
Patrice Bocquillon, email to the author, 3 August 2016.
62
Bocquillon, email to the author, 9 August 2016.
63
This quotation and the next from Bocquillon, email to the author, 4 August 2016. For
context, I add that Bocquillon made these remarks following a parting of ways with
Levinas. ‘I produced a Murail CD with Ensemble Fa which won the [1992] Grand Prix de
l’Académie Charles Cros: Michaël took offence and I had to leave l’Itinéraire’,
Bocquillon stated.
64
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 217

contemporaneity of l’Itinéraire in the 1970s without truly believing in the

music played in the concerts organised by the group’, he later said,
explaining that he was not attracted to theorising or systematic thought
(which reminded him of serialism); he situated himself ‘far from process
music and systems advocating the internal analysis of sound for generating
form’.65 Levinas’s disapproval is clear in some of his written publications.
The programme note for Ouverture pour une fête étrange (1979) for two
orchestras, which also appears as a preface to the score, opens with a
critique of the musical inclinations of his confrères:
In a certain strand of contemporary music, there exists a tendency towards
mimesis. Through analysis, one tries to reduce the physical sound of an
instrument to simply one sound among others. All the while, though, one
forgets that dramatic element of instrumental sound connecting it to the life of
the body – in other words, to the incarnated personality of the musician. [. . .]
No doubt it has been a fruitful moment, for example in the work of Ligeti, to the
extent that growing sonorous complexity, based on the laws of acoustics, can
conjure up and lead towards fantastic sounds. Nevertheless, there is the risk of
simplification. The musical work is not based exclusively on timbre.66

Levinas continued his critique at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982,

when as part of l’Itinéraire’s collective feature, he gave the lecture ‘Qu’est-
ce que l’instrumental?’, which overtly took aim at stylistic aspects of the
courant spectral, with which ‘conformism’ he contrasted his electroacoustic
music’s operatic extravagance and explosive ruptures.67 A decade after this,
in a text first published in 1991, Levinas wistfully identified his aesthetic
during the 1970s as having been to one side of that of certain other
composers of l’Itinéraire: ‘In the beginning, although I was naturally
integrated into the general structure of the group and agreed with the
others on the diverse positions we took in matters of musical direction,
I nevertheless felt myself strangely outside of any “current”. Reflection
alongside other composers was not the lot of my own musical develop-
ment.’68 After this, however, Levinas began to see things differently.
Twenty years after the passage just cited, in a programme note written
for a 2011 performance of Appels (1974) by Ensemble InterContemporain,
Levinas presented Appels to the audience in a different light. ‘Appels was
one of the founding pieces of the courant spectral’, Levinas writes, con-
tinuing that the work is based on a harmonic spectrum radiating from a

65
Levinas, ‘La Migration des âmes’, 68.
66
Levinas, preface to Ouverture pour une fête étrange. History proved him right.
67
Levinas, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’instrumental?’ 68
Levinas, ‘La Migration des âmes’, 67.
218 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 7.3 Levinas’s Appels (1974) for eleven instruments.

© Copyright Éditions Henry Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by kind permission of the
publisher.

fundamental sounded by the large gong. Levinas goes on to trace this

‘timbre-based’ approach to composition to his attending, along with
Grisey, ‘Stockhausen’s famous 1972 Darmstadt seminar on Stimmung’, at
the hearing of which vocal piece ‘we were brought back to timbre and its
seemingly infinite perspectives’.69 ‘I think he wanted to keep his own
personality and didn’t like to be associated with’ a common movement,
Murail said of Levinas’s earlier stance.70
Whatever the case, Appels is (Ex. 7.3) the first notable work in which
Levinas uses a technique he often deployed thereafter: so-called sonic
parasitism (at other times called sonorous mixity or hybrid sounds).71
Appels is scored for ten players, comprising flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon,
horn, trumpet, trombone, and three percussionists (of whom one plays

69
Levinas, ‘Darmstadt en 1972’.
70
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
71
See Campbell, ‘Timbre, Technology and Hybridation in the Music of Michaël Levinas’.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 219

piano doubling gong). The most novel aspect of the score is that the brass
players play their instruments into snare drums with the switch on. This
achieves a hybrid sound where the sound of the snare’s sympathetic
vibration mixes with the sound emitted by the brass instrument to form
a sound hybrid. The vibration and the sound which provokes it are
together processed through a microphone and diffused throughout the
hall. Throughout the several brash, wild minutes of Appels, each brass and
wind instrument is played with the instrument’s bell aimed into an open
snare drum. The resulting sound, a fusion of the pitched brass or wind note
and the mask of white noise elicited by sympathetic vibration from the
snare drum, is picked up by a microphone placed inside each snare and
relayed through the venue’s PA system, whose speakers surround the
audience. The work’s almost constantly loud dynamic, the wild ‘call’ itself,
whose repetitions around the ensemble constitute the work’s form, along
with the large percussion section of gongs and other resonant instruments,
combine to give an effect of quasi-primal shock.72 ‘I was the first in
l’Itinéraire to support the need for live electronics in the domain of
instrumental performances’, Levinas states (Murail had created an elec-
tronic instruments ensemble prior to l’Itinéraire).73 Although precedents
for Levinas’s sonic parasitism are found in, for example, Cage’s prepared
piano or Stockhausen’s ring-modulated piano in Mantra (1971), the tech-
nique follows naturally from Levinas’s earlier Arsis et thesis for amplified
solo bass flute, which, as seen earlier, mixed breathed vocal grain and
pitched musical note. A suggestion of fauvist animism persists in
Levinas’s fascination with non-human grotesquery in works such as
Froissement d’ailes (1975), La Conférence des oiseaux (1985), and La
Métamorphose (2011). ‘The work has force and colour’, noted Le Figaro’s
Claude Pascal following Ensemble l’Itinéraire’s premiere of Appels in
December 1974. ‘It does not leave one indifferent.’74
Appels shows a few similarities with Grisey (in aesthetic rather than
écriture). ‘Of course my work on sympathetic vibration influenced Grisey
before his viola piece’, Levinas said (referring to Grisey’s Prologue with
resonators).75 From the point of view of compositional material, the
parasite sounds (pitches masked in white noise) are similar to the deviant
sound of the clarinet at the opening of Vagues, chemins, le souffle or the
ring-modulation harmonies in Partiels. In each case there is a desire to

72
Levinas is rightly seen as a grandfather of the Saturationism movement of Raphaël Cendo
and Franck Bedrossian, which emerged in Paris in the first decade of the 2000s.
73
Levinas, ‘La Migration des âmes’, 67. 74
Pascal, ‘‟Itinéraire” au nouveau Carré’.
75
Levinas, email to the author, 17 December 2022.
220 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

escape from fixed analytic-representational categories towards liminal or

‘between’ sounds that cannot be so categorised (which, as we will see, also
applies to Dufourt’s music). Although, unlike Grisey, Levinas does not
compose in the Xenakisean statistical manner (notwithstanding his father
Emmanuel Levinas having written about Xenakis’s Nomos Alpha (1965)
for solo cello in his book Otherwise than Being), his sound objects are often
mutant sounds, neither one thing nor the other but rather a weird,
disconcerting union of the two. Levinas later called it an ‘aesthetic of the
extraordinary’.76 Levinas and Grisey also share a fondness for spectacle
that is mostly absent from Dufourt and Murail. ‘I played the electric razor’,
Murail recalled of performing Appels with l’Itinéraire, ‘an electric razor you
have to apply to a tam-tam’.77 A common formative influence in this
regard is Stockhausen, and in both Grisey’s and Levinas’s writings there
is a propensity towards drama. A mainstay of Levinas’s aesthetic through-
out his career is the liveness of the encounter, which cannot be represented
by spectrogram or score. Ultimately, Levinas summarised his position as
follows:
Later, I diverged from strictly spectral concerns. I had foreseen a risk of
formal simplification linked to the very principle of the spectral process and a
limitation of the poetics of the ‘musical’ to the materiality of timbre (what
I mentioned above in connection with Berlioz: the loss of the metaphorical
and ‘corporeal’ dimension of timbre, of the identity of instrumental sound).
I also saw in the concept of the generating cell an avatar of a somewhat
impoverishing and limiting serial mentality. I was thinking of the concept of
accident, of the revelation of the musical idea, of going beyond the system, of
the caprice of the musical, of the encounter with textuality.78

In the late 1970s, l’Itinéraire’s bureau used to convene at Levinas’s family

home by the École Normal Israélite Orientale (ENIO) in the west of Paris,
where Dufourt recalled meeting his mother and discussing philosophy
with his father (who, despite his intellectual brilliance, was not a
musical man).79
Tessier’s music of the period likewise incorporates amplification and
signal processing effects, with elements of spectral harmonicity and drama,
though it remains free of any system. ‘I work with what I have, but with a
perpetual obsession to surpass it’, he said. ‘Hence the idea of instrumental
performance in relation to sound and the life of sound. This is what in

76
Levinas, ‘Mon père pensait une esthétique de l’extraordinaire’, 48–50.
77
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
78
Levinas, ‘Questions en pointillés àMichaël Levinas’.
79
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 221

l’Itinéraire we called the “new instrumental virtuosity”.’80 In person,

Tessier is enthusiastic, generous, warm and personable; Sophie Stévance
remarks that, through this temperament, he is as dedicated to teaching as
much as to composition, lacking the egotism that can drive some com-
posers.81 After a formative 1960s youth period in which he absorbed
influences of aleatorism and the counterculture, the main later reference
for Tessier’s sense of sonorous freedom was Scelsi. In Trièdre (1973) for
flute, accordion, and vibraphone, some sections feature long-held notes or
chords, as at the beginning of the piece on the accordion (B♭ above middle
C); but this attention to surfaces is always balanced by a proclivity for
paroxysms and rough edges (Ojma (1974) for strings is another work that
nods to Scelsi’s French reception). Clair-obscur (1979), composed for
Ensemble l’Itinéraire, has similarities to Levinas’s music, notably repeated
horn, flute, and soprano ‘calls’, alongside amplification and electronic
effects like reverb, echo, and ring modulation (the Levinas work it is most
like is Voix dans un vaisseau d’Airain, chant en escalier (1977) for chamber
ensemble and tape). Section D of the work, though, recalls Grisey and
Murail in its use of a harmonic series (Tessier’s programme note alludes to
‘a new system of non-tempered harmony’), and in the drifting form and
spaciousness there is a sense of musical freedom, an absence of creeds;
Sophie Stévance associates with expressionism Tessier’s use of screams to
cut through his musical textures.82 Clair-obscur used l’Itinéraire’s amplified
chamber ensemble as an experimental sound laboratory, contrasting heter-
ogenous instrumental polyphony on the one hand with spectral unification
on the other.83 Of 1981’s Mobile-immobile (dedicated to Levinas), Tessier
wrote:
The principle of the piece, based on the simultaneity of the musical events
that compose it, is modified by a constant mutation at the level of the
instrument itself. Through the use of certain playing modes (especially on the
strings), it is possible to obtain an ‘electronic colour’ which, while preserving
the specificity of the instrument, allows it to go beyond its own identity.84

Electronic colour is in the foreground on Héxade (1977–8), Tessier’s

classic work for six ondes Martenots. After a Sclesi-esque opening with all
six instruments sounding a low E, a high shriek breaks through the low
murmurs, and the piece that unfurls is like a drama envisaged against a

80
Tessier, ‘Portrait: Roger Tessier’, 15. 81
Stévance, Roger Tessier, 27.
82
Stévance, Roger Tessier, 53. See also ‘Clair-obscur’, 40.
83
See Castanet, ‘Roger Tessier’, 136.
84
Tessier, programme note for Mobile-immobile, 1980.
222 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

cosmic backdrop (as in his earlier works Vega and Cheliak, Tessier was
inspired by conversations he had with cosmologist Patrick Amiedieu).
Reviewing Héxade in 1980 as part of a disc of ondes Martenot works,
Diapason’s Alain Féron, comparing the music to Varèse, wrote: ‘Without
going into technical and philosophico-scientific considerations, this work
is certainly the best adapted to the instrument. The language, the syntax,
the vocabulary explored here by the composer are really adapted to the
possibilities of the ondes Martenot.’85 The image conjured by the title –
which refers to an astronomical system with six suns, wherein a given
planet therefore never sees night – resonates with Murail’s Les Courants de
l’espace (1979) for ondes Martenot and orchestra, composed a year later.
Héxade was for its part inspired by an Isaac Asimov story entitled
‘Nightfall’.86
Dufourt’s entry to l’Itinéraire coincided with his arrival as a composer
on the national stage, with high-profile premieres at Royan in April 1977 of
La tempesta d’après Giorgione (1976–7) for chamber ensemble and
Erewhon (1972–6) for six percussionists. ‘Aucune des compositions de
Hugues Dufourt n’est éditée’, Dufourt wrote pointedly in the Royan
1977 programme booklet under a list of his works;87 yet by the following
year, he was one of the few contemporary French composers being com-
missioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain (the flute concerto Antiphysis
(1978)). In terms of new music, Dufourt said, Royan, like much of the rest
of France, remained under the sway of pseudo-radical neo-serialism.
Composed in this climate, Erewhon was envisaged as a tabula rasa.
‘Already in 1970, I said to myself that my pieces, and all neo-serial pieces,
were sounding neoclassical. So a break was necessary.’88
France was in a period of what Adorno would have called moderate
modernity. Royan had its ‘phenomena’, if you like. There was Rădulescu, and
there was also [Philippe] Boesmans, who made a lot of noise. It was said of
[the latter]: ‘This is the music of the future.’ Everyone thought that that was
the music of the future, and we were very sceptical. That is why I say it was
moderate modernity: there were apparently radical people who make the
gestures of modernity but who basically do nothing much. There was also the

85
Féron, ‘Les Ondes Martenot’.
86
Stevance, Roger Tessier, 51. More recently, Tessier composed a beautiful monodrama on
the life of Camille Claudel, Les Larmes de l’exil (2004) for soprano, children’s choir,
and orchestra.
87
Dufourt, biographical note.
88
This quotation and the next from Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20
February 2014.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 223

German Neo-Romantic movement. All this happened in Royan. There was

also the premiere of this famous symphony by Górecki. It subsequently went
around the world, but the general judgement in the hall, which was composed
of professionals, was that this symphony was a disaster.

The enormous Erewhon was conceived as a symphony for a quasi-

orchestra of 150 percussion instruments (performed by only six percus-
sionists; its premiere required a conductor, Giuseppe Sinopoli). The Royan
programme note projected companion pieces for electroacoustic instru-
ments and the symphony orchestra (which would become Saturne and
Surgir (1984), respectively). In his programme note for the premiere,
Dufourt takes a combative tone against the musical world, comparing its
antagonism towards new technology to the conflict in Butler’s titular novel,
in which a society scared that machines might replace humans has a civil
war, ‘won, to my regret, by the anti-machinists’ (‘Erewhon is today the
musical world’, he adds).89 To some extent, as with Grisey a couple of years
earlier, one has an impression of the young Boulez. Dufourt composed
Erewhon between 1972 and 1976 for the Percussions de Strasbourg; he
explained the genesis and significance of Erewhon as follows:
I invented a lot in this work, but not everything, because I went to the
premises of the Percussions de Strasbourg with a tape recorder to record
sounds, but it was impossible to deploy such equipment. So, I had to use my
imagination and extrapolate it to 150 instruments. This score marks the break
with my works of youth, because I threw myself into a piece that was a little
utopian and without limitation of either duration or instruments, refusing the
castration of contemporary music. The genesis of Erewhon spanned four
years, and represented a superhuman effort.90

Dufourt told Fleuret that it was ‘a work that developed by scissiparity, that
is, by internal division. I worked on all the parts, but every time I was at
work on one piece, there were two that came out, and so on.’91 The process
involved research of new percussion instruments and techniques alongside
a deliberate ignoring of tonal music-derived gestures, analogous to Varèse
earlier in the century with Ionisation. Dufourt’s programme note pointed
out that a work intended to be instrumentally and technologically of its
time demanded a new organology. Interestingly for spectral music’s later
amenability to the instruments and tuning systems of global musical
cultures, Dufourt’s idea in part was ‘to mix all civilisations in a single

89
Dufourt, programme note for Erewhon, 1977.
90
Quoted in Serrou, ‘Les 50 ans des Percussions de Strasbourg’.
91
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
224 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 7.4 Dufourt’s Erewhon III (1972–6) for six percussionists. © Copyright Éditions Henry
Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.

project. It was a kind of utopia, universalism’. He said that the Royan

premiere was well received by a group of West African drummers who
were also performing at the festival.92
From the rapid tom and bongo flourishes of the outer movements to
the bejewelled resonant percussion of the inner movements (Ex. 7.4),
Dufourt sets out to render in music the ‘image of a world in genesis’, a
world before the world,93 and the music’s timbral textures deny easy
semantics. Something Dufourt set out to explore in this work was the
fundamental role of the physical gesture in instrumental music and its
separation from the resulting sound. One percussion instrument can
potentially articulate many different sound types, which direct our atten-
tion towards the dynamic spectrum of resonant textures; this is particu-
larly the case in Erewhon’s central movements, with their shimmering

92
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
93
Dufourt, programme note for Erewhon, website of Éditions Henry Lemoine.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 225

surfaces. Dufourt in this way presented composition as something that

should subvert any system it rolls out in the very process of rolling it out,
recalling what Foucault said of Boulez’s thought: ‘to supply the strength
for breaking the rules with the act that brings them into play’.94 In this,
the music of Dufourt and Levinas did not always sit easily with that
of Grisey and Murail, which on a harmonic level lent itself more
to formulas.
Evident in Erewhon is the determinant effect on Dufourt’s musical
thought of his experience with electroacoustics, first at Guyonnet’s
Geneva studio and then during conversations with Risset and Chowning.
Instrumental composition could not remain unaffected by the changes that
psychoacoustics had brought to our knowledge of sound’s behaviour on
the smallest scale. The first of Dufourt’s compositions for pitched instru-
ments in which this is registered is La tempesta d’après Giorgione (also the
first of his works named after paintings). Based on Dufourt’s subsequently
characteristic style of slow-shifting sound textures, La tempesta explores
‘nature under narcosis’.95 It uses an ensemble combining electroacoustic
instruments (electric guitar, ondes Martenot, Hammond organ) and low
winds (flute (doubling bass flute and contrabass flute), bass clarinet
(doubling contrabass clarinet), oboe (doubling cor anglais))to explore the
drawn-out moments before a looming storm hits – a time of stasis,
unresolved tension, heightened luminosity (Ex. 7.5). Here, the instrumen-
tal timbres are allowed to flow freely and, in immanent fashion, to deter-
mine their own form. When a prolonged low note on contrabass clarinet
sounds, for example, its acoustic characteristics of grain, breath, and
intensity effect corresponding acoustical reactions in other instruments,
as if the ensemble were a weather system manifesting interferences and
intensities. The foreboding instrumental textures are framed by enveloping
silence. ‘For me, silence is a form of expectation’, Dufourt said, ‘a form of
threat, a form that always will precede the emergence of sound; because
sound is the manifestation of the phenomenon, but always before the
manifestation of the phenomenon, there is an anxious expectation or,
when we do not wait, a surprise. Silence first; then, the phenomenon.’96
Pondering the titular painting by Venetian colourist painter Giorgione

94
Foucault, ‘Pierre Boulez’, 244.
95
Dufourt, programme note for La tempesta d’après Giorgione, website of Éditions
Henry Lemoine.
96
This quotation and the next two from Dufourt, interview with the author, 20
February 2014.
226 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Example 7.5 Dufourt’s La tempesta d’après Giorgione (1976–7) for

eight instrumentalists. © Copyright Éditions Henry Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by
kind permission of the publisher.

helped Dufourt to think through the compositional impasse of the times.

Of that canvas, he said the following:
What is so characteristic in it, and so new, that was irreducible to the past?
One fundamental thing – besides the colour, the treatment of shape and time,
and so on – is that it breaks away from Renaissance perspective. It breaks
away from this because it suppresses the intermediate world, in other words,
the world of natural distance to objects. And so it has a kind of extreme
proximity. One has the impression that the painting touches [you], but by the
sensations it provokes. Then there is in this environment a kind of distant
perspective, inaccessible, in the vanishing points. It is impossible to grasp
since all of the intermediate world, which sets out the human realm, has
disappeared. So then, one can say that it is a dreamlike painting because it
lacks the main dimension of reality [le réel]. It is also very far away and yet
very close. I thought, here is the key. It is one of the keys to my music.

A music of colour, silence, and emergence describes La tempesta well. On a

practical level, the sound combinations resemble the resonant percussion
sounds of Erewhon. To the earlier work’s rolling timpani ending in a gong
strike followed by tubular bells in slow decay, there here corresponds a
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 227

plectrum strike on a low electric guitar note followed by a swelling cloud of

low winds, the combined sound’s complexity blurring the distinction
between harmony and timbre. At times, the music’s drifting, swelling,
bassy textures resemble moments from Grisey’s music (such as the closing
section of Partiels). Dufourt remarked that
We were on the same ground and at the same time antipodes. We were very
close, and I don’t know how far Grisey pushed this ambivalence in my regard.
It is certain, in any case, that he made this huge piece for percussion, Le Noir
de l’étoile, which is a kind of anti-Erewhon. Grisey knew my music for sure,
but we never had a technical interview. On the other hand, we had a lot of
technical discussions about the new fundamental characters of sound.
I remember, for example, that roughness – that is, the frequency rate, the
aleatory rate of frequency and intensity that creates the roughness of a [sonic]
ensemble – I remember that we had a very long discussion about what
roughness is and why it is a fundamental dimension that had never been
understood before.

After a performance of Sortie vers la lumière de jour for amplified ensemble

in 1977, Dufourt, having commended Grisey for the work, added: ‘soon
we’re going to see Griseyists appearing’.97 Nonetheless, relations between
the composers retained a degree of polite formality.
De Vezins remarks that, although the electric instrumentation of
l’Itinéraire’s sub-ensemble, Ensemble d’Instruments Électroniques de
l’Itinéraire (EIEI), was not as yet responsible for having created any new
musical languages, ‘in the degree to which [the instruments] offer com-
posers a range of new sonorities’, that instrumentation certainly was
susceptible to instigating such creation.98 Dufourt’s singular, vast Saturne
(1978–9) for twenty-two instruments shows him working closely with
l’Itinéraire’s performers in realising his style of spectral music. The instru-
mentation of Dufourt’s score was uniquely tailored for Ensemble
l’Itinéraire (and its subdivisions) as it existed in this era: winds, brass, six
percussionists, and four electronic instruments (played by the EIEI) – two
electric guitars and two electric organs/synthetisers (doubling ondes
Martenot). Dufourt wanted to explore composing with an ensemble simi-
lar to a contemporary rock set-up (Fig. 7.1), though he ‘never liked [rock
music]. We were never consumers of popular music; but the sound of the
bands, that was something extraordinary.’99 Martin Laliberté notes that, as

97
Quoted in Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 194.
98
De Vezins, ‘Rapport de stage’.
99
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
228 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Figure 7.1 Stage set-up for Dufourt’s Saturne (CDMC).

far as Dufourt was concerned, ‘it was undoubtedly the artificial [. . .] aspect
of this lutherie, its absence of mechanical contingency, that attracted
him’;100 beyond this was the modernist desire to create a musical language
owing nothing to dead traditions past and everything to the unprecedented
technological uniqueness of the contemporary world (Fig. 7.2): a language
of unstable, complex, paradoxical sounds in a musical form, forty minutes
long, derived solely from the physical and technological characteristics of
these instruments.
As has been seen, Dufourt, inspired by electroacoustics, had sought to
effect a tabula rasa with Erewhon. Then, partly inspired by the titular
canvas, he developed towards a more general instrumental écriture in La
tempesta d’après Giorgione. He said:
I wanted to create a paradoxical music, a music in other words that it is both
absolutely intimate and at the same time extremely distant. Everything one
finds in the series, in the serial world, the world of representations that we still
find in Ferneyhough – all that had to disappear. You have spoken about

100
Laliberté, ‘Orchestration, mixité et pianisme’.
 New Dimensions (1976–1978) 229

Figure 7.2 Promotional photograph for l’Itinéraire’s sub-ensemble, the Ensemble d’Instruments
Électroniques de l’Itinéraire (EIEI); left to right: Claude Pavy, François Bousch, Françoise Pellié,
Jean-Guillaume Cattin, and Tristan Murail.

silence. I would also talk about emergence; because what makes silence? It is
that condition of emergence – from where, one does not know; silence. There
is no recognisable motif. There is no work of memory; there is no leitmotif.
There is no progressive harmony with recognisable chord sequences. I tried to
make it all go away. And in that regard, there was one person who perceived
absolutely this deep character: Grisey. It did not escape Grisey.101

Grisey recorded for posterity a poetic response to hearing Saturne at its

premiere:
A vortex in slow rotation – all-absorbing, inexorable. As with a neutron star,
light no longer issues from this monstrous body.
Saturne is a sound trap. What we perceive of it is only the external iridescence
of latent and prodigious forces that stubbornly refuse to explode. The few
paroxysms in Saturne do not release its forces: they only manifest
[the forces’] potentiality.102

101
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
102
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 194–5.
230 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Throughout Saturne’s three sections and forty or so minutes, Dufourt

explores oppositions between the traditional classical instrument families
and the electroacoustic instruments (Ex. 7.6). This is especially the case in the
opening section, the stylistic tenor of which is like that characterising
Dufourt’s previous ensemble work La tempesta d’après Giorgione: slow block
homophonic chords, swelling sonorities separated by silences, a lack of overt
virtuosic display, with instruments sometimes used in an unusual way; when
the bass flute first appears, for example, it is playing at the top of its register.
One of the few recognisable repeated figures is a wind chord, though its
periodic recurrence is unpredictable. With occasional changes in dynamics,
and discounting one major paroxysm midway through, this is the music’s
style throughout. At times, there are Boulezean action–reaction elements: the
bass guitar or electric guitar strikes a sustained note, in ‘reaction’ to which the
winds sound a simulated resonant wash, trailing off. Deliberately blurring the
distinction between timbre and harmony, Dufourt draws his writing from
the physical nature of each sound. For example, on page 7 of the score, there
is a percussion resonance followed by a single note on electric guitar: the two
sounds’ proximity suggests to the ear that they are connected. Often these
combined sonorities call to mind complex percussion sounds. At other times,
the organ is used with ring modulation, ondes Martenot is used with wah-
wah, and a drumstick is used behind the electric guitar strings. The overall
effect is heavy, hypnotic, and fascinating.
Dufourt later wrote:
Spectral music essentially represents a change in the way we think about
music. It is no longer a music based on traditional separate categories such as
melody, counterpoint, harmony, or timbre. Spectral music is instead a music
of intermediate categories and hybrid objects. These objects are situated at the
border of two or more dimensions; timbre and harmony, harmonicity and
inharmonicity, pitch and noise [. . .] Spectral music is the exploration of
continuous transitions between traditionally heterogeneous domains; it
creates mixtures. Its problem is that of crossing the thresholds of perception.
Its working hypothesis is interference or intermodulation. This conception
has been made possible by the advent of computer science, which has unified
the field of sound and established the various types of transition between
notions as diverse as pitch, noise, timbre, or harmony. We have changed
scale, language, and perspective.103

Consistent with this explanation, Saturne partakes of spectral music

through presenting almost unanalysable sound mixtures. The unusual

103
Dufourt, ‘La Violence de l’art’, 21–2.
 New Dimensions (1976–1978) 231

Example 7.6 Dufourt’s Saturne (1979) for twenty-two instrumentalists.

© Copyright Éditions Henry Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.
232 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

specificity of Saturne’s score has meant that outside Ensemble l’Itinéraire

the work has had few if any performances, despite being one of the classic
spectral works. Asked how Dufourt worked with the ensemble’s instru-
mentalists, Bocquillon replied: ‘In the end, [Dufourt] doesn’t have many
strange playing techniques in his pieces. Everything comes from his writing
[écriture].’ Bocquillon added that Dufourt’s écriture in this piece and
similar ones from the time comprises for the most part ‘sounds that are
very long, very low, very high, very rapid.’104 In a similar vein, the guitarist
François Bousch remarked: ‘when Hugues wrote Saturne, we (the EIEI)
worked with him and suggested playing techniques and sonorities
according with his very precise demands’.105 Dufourt already had a precise
conception prior to working with the players. His écriture existed separ-
ately from its realisation; it preceded rehearsals, even if the realisation here
and there drew on suggestions from the performers. ‘The musical mind,
more than it foresees, takes advantage of the situations it provokes. For the
rules of the game are constantly, unpredictably renewed in the course of
the game’, Dufourt said at a lecture delivered a few years later at
IRCAM.106 Nonetheless, what Saturne makes abundantly clear is the
pivotal role – too often underplayed – of l’Itinéraire’s instrumentalists in
the realisation of French spectral music. Bocquillon stated:
L’Itinéraire was really the only ensemble able to play spectral music to a very
high level from 1973 to around 1990. The performers were all motivated and
had great involvement with the composers. We premiered all the pieces by
Murail, Grisey, and Levinas that corresponded to our set-up and many others.
Later other ensembles came which also played spectral music. But I remember
that Gérard or Tristan wasn’t happy with interpretations by Ensemble
l’InterContemporain, whose players had a fantastic level but not at all the
knowledge of this music.107

Membership of the l’Itinéraire project encouraged a sense of ownership over

the music and of investment in the burgeoning compositional movement.
For the performers’ perspective on l’Itinéraire’s early years, I give the clari-
nettist Jean-Max Dussert the final word. ‘Over and above what could have
been a “technical” collaboration, the richest and most fruitful aspect was
certainly the spirit in which it all took place: friendship between musicians of
the same generation, and a true enthusiasm at times (Périodes, Partiels, and
so on) with the feeling, at the time, that music was passing through Paris!’108

104
Bocquillon, email to the author, August 2016.
105
Bousch, email to the author, 8 August 2016. 106
Dufourt, ‘L’Artifice d’écriture’, 209.
107
Bocquillon, email to the author, August 2016.
108
Dussert, email to the author, 20 August 2016.
New Dimensions (1976–1978) 233

In reaching maturation, spectral music was diversifying. As much is

apparent in the contrast between two spectral works for the same forces
both from 1979: Grisey’s Tempus ex machina for six percussionists, a
spatialised work much of which is based on temporal processes moving
in and out of sync, and Dufourt’s Sombre journée for six percussionists,
based on slow, swelling, floating textures. Grisey’s work is more systematic
than Dufourt’s, and it harks back to his spatialised student music. Yet they
are undeniably both works of spectral music. One of Dufourt’s aforemen-
tioned ‘cellular divisions’ from Erewhon, Sombre journée premiered in
spring 1979 at a Paris concert series, the particularities of which were
outlined in a Le Monde review:
After the fiasco of the last international festival of the SIMC in Paris in 1975,
it is understandable that the French section of this venerable ‘International
Society of Contemporary Music’ (created in 1923 and which in many
countries has become a union for the defence of the mediocre) has sought
more attractive formulas. Hence the four days it has just organised, thanks to
Radio France, in the cycle ‘Perspectives du vingtième siècle’, with exclusively
French composers belonging to different trends. No new names, of course,
but quality music and creations by Grisey, Constant, Decoust, etc.

The review goes on to give Dufourt’s work a positive assessment:

Two premieres marked the programme of the Percussions de Strasbourg in
the old hall of the Palais des Arts. Sombre journée, by Hugues Dufourt, was
taken from the initial version of Erewhon, the superb ‘symphony’ for
percussion that was performed in Royan two years ago, but it is no less
exceptional in quality: a rigorous score made almost entirely of rolls on the
skins (with a few colours borrowed from the metal plates), in a sort of beating
rain, a perpetual tremolo, intensities being modulated with extreme care,
which swells, shadows, deforms, and unfolds in dynamic and polyphonic
progressions without any concession to the picturesque, and which achieves a
true musical mystery through this simple play on the ‘density ratios’ and
‘variations in intensity or celestiality’.109

The description of a play on density ratios recalls Le Monde’s

description in 1974 of Grisey’s Dérives as a play on the grand surface of
time. Unmentioned, though, is how the International Society for
Contemporary Music (ISCM) concert series asked each composer featured
to contribute a brief programme essay. Dufourt’s essay was three pages
long, but its title cast a long shadow.

109
Lonchampt, ‘Dufourt et Mâche à la S.I.M.C.’
 8 Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982)

One evening in 1978, Grisey, Murail, and Dufourt, along with the German
composer Jens-Peter Ostendorf, were at Murail’s apartment near Bastille
discussing ‘a group publication that would put in clear terms the aesthetic
and technical aspects of our discoveries’.1 They discussed whether their
goal would be best served by one joint-authored article or a few separately
authored ones. The time for such a statement was right: Grisey and
Dufourt had both that year had successful premieres with Ensemble
Intercontemporain; Grisey was being interviewed in the national press
and lecturing at Darmstadt; and commercially released records were in
the pipeline for the different composers’ music. They had surely noticed,
too, Gérard Condé’s remark in Le Monde that, ‘for several years now a
calling into question of musical heritages has been initiated in several
countries under different forms without, up to the present, there having
been any manifestos or theoretical writings’.2 At that meeting in Murail’s
apartment (which was ‘a cavern,’ Dufourt said, big enough to hold a lot of
instruments and for l’Itinéraire occasionally to rehearse there, and in which
Murail had also set up a personal computer to work on frequency calcula-
tions3) they began to pitch potential names for their common musical
tendency, recognising that, if they were not careful, they might otherwise
be saddled with an unwelcome name by the press. Murail suggested
musique vectorielle; Grisey, musique liminale; Dufourt, musique spectrale.
In the end, they could not agree on a name, nor on how to proceed with the
mooted publication(s). Each was busy with his own musical projects, and
their socialising as a group was mostly limited to professional occasions.
In spring 1979, Dufourt’s short essay ‘Musique spectrale’ appeared in the
programme booklet for the concert series ‘Perspectives du XXème siècle’
held at Radio France as an initiative of the ISCM. The series comprised six
concerts held over two weekends, featuring several world premieres and
the music of twenty-two composers, all of whom were French or France-
based, each of whom had one work performed, and almost all of whom

1
Grisey recalls this meeting in Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 196–7.
2
Condé, ‘Retour à l’évidence musicale’.
3
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.

[234]
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 235

were currently active.4 ‘Perspectives du XXème siècle’ was a celebration of

contemporary French music in the face of IRCAM’s (not coincidentally)
similarly titled concert series ‘Passage du XXème siècle’, which had been
held in 1977 and wherein, to widespread chagrin, Boulez had snubbed
almost all currently active French composers. The aim of ‘Passage du
XXème siècle’, Boulez declared, was to educate the public about the history
of new music, from the Second Viennese School to the present day, a well-
funded canon-forming exercise supported by a lavish programme book
produced to coincide with the series (featuring essays on the history of
twentieth-century music, a timeline of the significant events during that
period, photographs of the key figures at IRCAM, and programme notes
for all the works performed, as well as Boulez’s essay ‘Invention/recherche’,
which situated IRCAM as the telos to which modernist music until then
had been leading). Given Boulez’s statement that the aim of ‘Passage du
XXe siècle’ was to ‘summarise, in public, that which exists: the current state
of things, immediate or far off’,5 the fact that that the current state of things
did not feature many other French composers provoked a desire to
respond. This led René Koering and Bancquart to conceive their own series
as a riposte. This is the background to the publication of the essay
‘Musique spectrale’ (again showing how the idea of spectral music was
defined against the backdrop of Boulez’s institutional machinations). Éloy
stated that Boulez’s political style was ‘to govern through his “shadow”
(charisma) and have obedient people nominated all over’ the political
landscape;6 Murail said that it was less Boulez who was the problem than
his coterie: ‘The problem is not so much with the king but with the court.’7
‘The institution is the specific terrain of the battle between art and politics’,
Dufourt remarked more generally.8 Throughout March 1979, France
Musique ran programmes on the history of the ISCM and programmes
featuring interviews with all of the featured composers. In addition, all of
the ‘Perspectives du XXème siècle’ concerts were broadcast on France-
Culture in the summer of 1979; and in order to ensure that all of the
composers and their respective musical concerns were properly intro-
duced, Bancquart invited each of them to contribute a short essay to the
programme booklet. The brief programmatic essays include contributions
by the likes of Vandenbogaerde, Mâche, Paul Méfano, Michel Decoust,
Risset (these latter two being wayward department heads at IRCAM), and

4
See Cagney, ‘Synthesis and Deviation’. 5
Boulez, Passage du XXème siècle, 9.
6
Éloy, email to the author, 9 August 2014.
7
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
8
Dufourt, ‘Pierre Boulez, musicien de l’ère industrielle’, 176.
236 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Éloy (who had by now fallen out with his former teacher Boulez). Risset’s
and Éloy’s programme notes – which in part discussed, respectively,
analyse spectrale (‘Sounds, like colours, are formed of spectral components,
harmonic in the case of instrumental sounds’9) and music conceived as a
mode of transfer of energy (Éloy’s Fluctuante-immobile being ‘a work
simple in appearance, but complex at the level of the articulation of the
timbral groups between themselves, and of the interaction of their various
forms “of energies”’:10 concepts similar to those Grisey was setting forth in
1978, and to those of Dufourt, who subtitled his manifesto ‘pour une
pratique des formes de l’énergie’) – show that the theoretical concerns of
the l’Itinéraire-associated movement were not unique. The synthetic bell
tones that Risset first created in the 1960s, which were prominent in
InHarmonique (1977) for soprano and tape (a piece l’Itinéraire per-
formed), would soon be revisited spectacularly in Murail’s Gondwana
(1980) for orchestra; and Éloy was later sceptical about the new concept:
‘[the term] “spectralism” for me is just a political puppet to replace the
social declining of [the term] “serialism” during the seventies’.11
This ‘Perspectives du XXème siècle’ booklet shows differences in how
the musical movement centred on l’Itinéraire conceived itself in 1979.
Of the five composers chiefly associated with l’Itinéraire (Dufourt,
Grisey, Levinas, Murail, and Tessier), only Murail does not contribute an
essay. The booklet is the source of Grisey’s two short essays ‘À propos de la
synthèse instrumentale’ and ‘À propos du son’, later included in his
posthumous Écrits;12 the source of an untitled text by Roger Tessier that
is the only such theoretical text, apart from his programme notes, he wrote
(to the best of my knowledge); and the source of Levinas’s ‘À propos de
Strettes tournantes-migrations’, one section of which, entitled ‘Le Timbre,
le spectre sonore et d’autres dimensions’ (‘Timbre, the Sound Spectrum,
and Other Dimensions’), is the first published critique of the courant
spectral (preceding the others he wrote).13 Levinas wrote:
It is perhaps a fertile idea to think of music in terms of a single dimension.
By favouring one parameter at the outset, one frees the others from certain
aesthetic habits. Music has often happily evolved in this way. Thus, serial and
post-serial music gave priority to structure; thus, work on the timbres of
orchestral masses was influenced by electroacoustic music; thus, again today,
the rediscovery of the harmonic spectrum and its application in musical

9
Risset, programme note for Trois moments newtoniens.
10
Éloy, programme note for Fluctuante–immuable.
11
Éloy, email to the author, 9 August 2014.
12
Grisey, ‘À propos de la synthèse instrumentale’ and ‘À propos du son’.
13
See Deliège, Cinquante ans de modernité musicale, 904.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 237

composition. But in this fixation, is there not produced some simplification –

a simplification that can be traced back to certain confusions with
electroacoustic music? This often gives birth to instrumental works which
limit themselves to imitating a certain electroacoustic language. But how over
the course of a work can one play upon this organisation of sound and
occasionally shatter it? Must sound always be ‘beautiful’, and can it not be at
first theatrical, even if that seems to be sometimes a technical aberration?
In any case, does the instrument not have an irreducible specificity which
bears upon music, speech, stage, and theatre? And does rethinking the
parameters in their mutual birth not liberate anew the entire space
of invention?14

This is characteristically well observed. It took Grisey a few more years to

reach similar conclusions: describing his response to hearing Murail’s
Désintegrations (1982–3), he wrote: ‘Despite the extreme rigour of thought
and the literally unheard-of [inouï] quality of the sounds that Murail sets
out in profusion, I discover the point at which it’s time for me to add
rupture and rapidity to the obsession with continuity and processual
slowness’.15

Dufourt’s musique spectrale

Those approaching Dufourt’s essay with an image of spectral music as a
music of beautiful, lush harmonies – of spectral music as the music of
instrumental synthesis and other frequential harmonic techniques – might
be surprised to find that Dufourt’s essay begins with a discussion of the
development of percussion instruments in the twentieth century. The fact
that it does so underlines the essay’s source in Dufourt’s compositional
practice: Sombre journée, as has been mentioned, was originally a move-
ment of Dufourt’s enormous percussion work Erewhon. It is in this context
that Dufourt’s theoretical preoccupation with the unstable sounds created
by percussion instruments makes sense, and ‘Musique spectrale’ revises
and expands what he had written for the premiere of Erewhon two years
earlier. In the Erewhon programme note, Dufourt pointed out that the rise
to prominence of percussion instruments in twentieth-century Western
classical music represents a decisive challenge to traditional musical values.
The West’s prevailing musical values are the legacy of a tradition prioritis-
ing pitched instruments; accordingly, those values are based on the sup-
posed unitary self-identity of the simple pitched note and the projection of
that concept into melody, harmony, and rhythm, where such notes can be

14
Levinas, ‘À propos de Strettes tournantes-migrations’.
15
Grisey, ‘Autoportrait avec l’Itinéraire’, 198–9.
238 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

shuffled about. However, the complex sounds of percussion instruments,

considered in their native otherness, without being reduced to the Same of
self-identical pitch, disrupt this anachronistic framework. ‘Noise, grain,
and scatter-shots’, Dufourt writes, ‘everything that has only been tolerated
at the periphery of music – because of being unusual and because of its
strange, hybrid character – today occupies a central position in the order of
our expressive values.’ This ‘profound aesthetic mutation’, as he describes
it, demands of us three things: that we create new concepts, new modes of
listening, and new modes of thought adequate to a reality of sound
acoustically characterised not by the stability of pitch but by the instability
of continuously changing frequency envelopes: ‘All of music is thus con-
ceived dynamically: under the form of oscillations, processes, and arrange-
ments of order and disorder. This intervention [mettre-en-œuvre] consists
in articulating between these expansive configurations, while playing more
or less on their structural conflicts.’16 Dufourt says that the composer must
elaborate from sound and its ‘structural configurations’ the terms of a
new language.
The essay ‘Musique spectrale’ develops these ideas. It opens in the same
vein, with remarks on the technology of percussion and electronic instru-
ments and on how the myriad complex sounds that these instrumental
means produce – ‘transients of attack and extinction, dynamic profiles in
constant evolution, noises, complex sound masses, multiphonics, grain,
resonances’ – ask of us a new manner of theoretically conceiving sound
and a new manner of technically organising sound.17 The contemporary
state of technology and science, in short, demands of musical composition
a paradigm shift (Dufourt later called spectral music ‘an epistemological
revolution’18). The late twentieth-century definition of sound’s behaviour
on its smallest scale (where the frequency envelope’s temporal evolution is
a priori) is inconsistent with our traditional definition of sound on a large
scale (which generally assume that sound is static): the microphonic and
the macrophonic need to be brought into alignment. The consequences of
this as identified by Dufourt are again threefold: (1) our definition of sound
(music’s material) now changes in scale, from macro to micro; (2) the
sound object takes on a correspondingly different appearance (now
regarded as a sensory effect produced by the spontaneous distribution of
frequencies in constant evolution); and (3) our musical categories must be

16
Dufourt, programme note for Erewhon, 1977.
17
Except where otherwise stated, subsequent quotations in this section are from Dufourt,
‘Musique spectrale’.
18
Dufourt, La musique spectrale.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 239

revised to reflect this, shifting from a traditional focus on static identity to a

more accurate focus on instability, transitions, and movement. At a certain
threshold, each acoustic parameter can accordingly mutate into another
acoustic parameter. Musical composition involves the projection of mater-
ial into form; thus, the music-compositional forms produced by this new
view of sound will be expressive of sound’s internal structure: process
forms, forms based on continuous change, on the mutation of one sound
state into another, and so on. This adequation of material and form
represents an ‘aesthetic of immanence’ (immanence being a Deleuzean
term), and the movement in France exploring this new reality Dufourt
dubs spectral music. That name underlines that its aesthetic focus takes off
from sound’s behaviour at a microscopic scale (spectral components as
acoustical atoms); the name is also alliterative with ‘serial music’. Dufourt’s
essay strangely does not mention any composers by name, nor does it
specify specific compositional techniques. This makes it at times opaque.
Part of Dufourt’s reason for expressing things abstractly was doubtless that
the new compositional approach outlined, which Dufourt introduces as
musique spectrale towards the end of the essay, should be open enough to
comprise himself, Grisey, Murail, and others, including composers who
had not yet arrived on the scene. As we have seen, Dufourt does not regard
spectral music as simply a compositional toolkit (which reductive view he
considers naive),19 but as a wholesale episteme from within which com-
posers now operate. Dufourt concludes his essay by defining musique
spectrale through various theoretical antitheses with what is now brought
out as an analogous, but historically superseded, compositional method:
musique sérielle. Musique spectrale’s focus on zones of transition (transi-
tions between noise and harmony, for example), on hybridity (sounds that
have an indeterminate pitch identity), and on flux ensures that musique
spectrale’s forms are derived from the psychoacoustically accurate view of
the complex sound phenomenon: the compositional plane as a musical
tapestry ceaselessly unfurling, transparent veil upon transparent veil, a
planar continuum which cannot be abstractly parametrised other than
through an act of violence (analogous to Grisey’s image of his approach
to composing ‘the skin of time’ in his essay ‘Tempus ex machina’). If on
one level Dufourt’s antithesis with serialism signalled how spectral music

19
Regarding the sense of the epithet ‘spectral’, Dufourt said that it is ‘not just the sound; it’s
all these so-called emergent phenomena that suppose the abandonment of traditional
rhetoric. It is not simply a sort of technique for using partials to connect them to each
other: that’s ridiculous, too restricted; far too narrow and naive a vision.’ Dufourt,
interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
240 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

took leave of the past, on another level (more apparent with historical
distance) the antithesis also signalled how spectral music’s identity was
inconceivable without the prior existence of serialism: ‘Serial composition
therefore rests on a fundamental violence, since it must reduce and cross
over systems that are concurrent and restrictive. [. . .] But in contrast to the
serial aesthetic, we conceive of the musical work as a synthetic totality
whose articulations, sequence of events, and style of temporality derive
from essential affinities.’ Historically, the essay deliberately exaggerated
spectral music’s difference from serialism: in particular, from the statistical
serialism of the late 1950s onwards, the orchestral works of Boulez, Ligeti,
and Xenakis, without whose global parameterisation and calculation of
densities, resonance models, the degree of change, and smooth sound
blocks there would have been no French spectral music at all.

Grisey and Dufourt’s Aesthetic-Theoretical Correspondence

Despite the essay’s publication, the name musique spectrale failed to take off
in 1979. Neither was the name mentioned in any of the press coverage of the
next major manifestation of the movement in Paris, a ‘Journée Gérard
Grisey’ at the 1980 ‘Perspectives du XXème siècle’ series, at which, over
two concerts, works by Grisey, Dufourt, Murail, and others were performed.
The two concerts of the Gérard Grisey day took place at the Maison de Radio
France on Saturday 15 March 1980, and the works performed were, at the
first concert (performed by Ensemble l’Itinéraire), Grisey’s Prologue with
resonators and Jour, contre jour, François Bousch’s Arcanes, Mesías
Maiguashca’s Y ahora vamos por aqui, Dufourt’s La tempesta d’après
Giorgione, and Levinas’s Concerto pour une piano-espace 2; and, at the
second concert, Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli (performed by Levinas) and
Grisey’s Dérives (performed by the Orchestre National de France conducted
by Jacques Mercier; this performance of Dérives is the one subsequently
released on a Grisey portrait LP on Erato records in 1981 (along with
Partiels)). In the programme booklet, for theoretical context, excerpts from
Grisey’s essay ‘Devenir du son’ (‘Becoming of Sound’) were reproduced,
alongside a short introduction by Grisey making clear, graciously, that the
day’s music belonged not solely to him but to a new musical movement,
though he did not call it spectral music or indeed give it any name:

Only at rare moments, when the discovery of new materials and the
development of new syntaxes make it necessary, does the worrying
individualism of the twentieth-century composer give way to encounter and
exchange. We are experiencing these rare moments in musical history.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 241

L’Itinéraire is more than just a subsidised ensemble to which musicians from

different backgrounds and interests come to gather; it is a melting pot, a place
of exchange, criticism, and reflection where a material and syntax are
patiently being elaborated, made inescapable by the recent acoustic
discoveries and the appearance of electronic instrumentation. Whatever the
experts may say about the crisis of young music, this music which is ours, that
of our generation, is made and will be made in the enthusiasm of discovery
and a common passion for music, the only guarantees of our friendship.20

The last remark was ambiguous (and Dufourt later expressed a similar
view).21 Similarly, when Friedrich Hommel subsequently invited Grisey to
give seminars at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982, Grisey invited
l’Itinéraire to be involved as well ‘despite everything’ (as he wrote with a
hint of jadedness in his daybook).22 The Gérard Grisey day at the Maison
de Radio France received lengthy reviews in La Croix and Le Monde; in the
former, Roger Tellart described Grisey as the leader of a movement
bringing musical sound back to the immediacy of perception and away
from abstraction, while in the latter, Jacques Lonchampt described Dérives
as a ‘journey’ work based on ‘harmonic spectra’. Neither journalist used the
term musique spectrale.23 Grisey, for his part, had read Dufourt’s essay, did
not favour the name musique spectrale, and wanted to avoid the name
being applied to his music. Here, then, I return to the correspondence
between Grisey and Dufourt described at the outset of this book.
To recap: Grisey had in April 1980 moved to Berlin to begin a year-long
DAAD fellowship, and, ahead of the imminent Darmstadt Summer
Courses that summer, at which he, Dufourt, and Murail were scheduled
to talk about their music, Grisey sent Dufourt his lecture on musical time
(‘Tempus ex machina’) to read and addressed the question of what term
the composers should use for their common musical aesthetic. Grisey
quickly rejected the epithets spectral (‘too static and vague: Stimmung
and Tibetan music are spectral musics’) and vectorial (‘too dynamic,
limiting and vague; and Xenakis already defined his music as vectorial
spaces’) and proposed to Dufourt that they use instead the epithet liminal:
Liminal (limen: the threshold, that which concerns the threshold, taking place
on the threshold) is used only, as far as I know, in psychology. Liminaire

20
Grisey, Programme note for Journée Gérard Grisey.
21
‘Our relation was like friendship, but up to what point I don’t know.’ Dufourt, interview
with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
22
GGCPSF.
23
See Tellart, ‘Gérard Grisey à l’Itinéraire’ and Lonchampt, ‘Les Dérives miroitantes de
Gérard Grisey’.
242 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

seems to have the sense of ‘that which is held before’. The threshold is what
joins all of us; it is our common denominator. It can have a dynamic sense
(only a retrograde person rests on a threshold!). It implies at least two fields
and encourages movement. We play with thresholds as others
play with series.24

Part of Grisey’s reason for sending Dufourt his theoretical essay was his
own insecurity in music-theoretical matters. Conscious of Dufourt’s hier-
archical status as a university aggregé in philosophy and a CNRS
researcher, Grisey sought Dufourt’s advice, and to some degree validation,
in formulating and espousing at Darmstadt a theory of their common
musical tendency. From this letter one can see that Grisey did not quite
understand what Dufourt meant by ‘spectral music’ (though admittedly
not many since then have done so either). Dufourt replied that he was
unable to attend Darmstadt that summer, but he gave Grisey lengthy
feedback: ‘Use the adjective “liminal” if you wish’, Dufourt writes to
Grisey, ‘but I am not very keen, for it is too restrictive, too “reductive”.
I’ve given up on “spectral” since a while back – much too narrow as well.
But it doesn’t matter; I have more pressing things to talk about . . .’.25 It is
striking to consider that Dufourt had in 1980 decided to abandon the term
‘spectral music’. Equally striking are some of the critiques Dufourt gives of
Grisey’s thinking, critiques motivated by the observation that Grisey’s
approach to composition might devolve into an academism all its own.
Commenting on Grisey’s statement that the ‘principal contribution’ of
their common movement to the new music world was ‘the liquidation of
fixed categories in favour of synthesis and interaction’, Dufourt writes:
‘This is why the term “process” bothers me; since in its signification, it
implies a passive operation susceptible to crossing over into a kind of
automatism. Whereas the music, on the contrary, takes off from transgres-
sion, from the perversion of rules.’ As well as being consistent with Boulez,
this point again recalls the Spinozist metaphysics of Deleuze, in which it is
nature’s very nature to evade any restriction to fixed identity, even, para-
doxically, to its own fixed identity (‘That is the only way Nature operates –
against itself’).26 Similarly, in conceiving of their musical movement,
Dufourt favours a-systematic sonic transgression over systematic rule
following; favours paradoxical sound complexes over representable har-
monic identities. Grisey’s interest in the notion of the liminal (an epithet

24
Grisey, ‘Lettre à Hugues Dufourt’, 281–2.
25
This quotation and the next one from Dufourt, letter to Grisey, 9 July 1980, GGCPSF.
26
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 242.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 243

he took from the writings of Moles on information theory and aesthetic

perception) stems from a similar motivation: it indicates the music’s
essential connection to what has taken place ‘always already before’, an
interval or ‘between’ of consciousness irreducible to the supposed identity
of the present moment (what Derrida, in his early post-phenomenological
writing, calls the trace structure, or in Dissemination, the ‘entre’). This is
what Dufourt insists on, too. Dufourt’s description of musique spectrale as
deploying sound’s innate morphological propensity to change (sound’s
instability or dynamism) and of musique spectrale as entailing an
identity-destroying act of acoustical ‘transgression’ (sound’s transient pro-
cess of formation equally being its transient process of deformation)
underlines the difficulty of ever defining spectral music in the simple
manner of a genre. How could there be a musical genre of sound’s consti-
tutive psychoacoustic behaviour of auto-differentiation? An analogy sug-
gests itself here with Derrida’s similarly impossible ‘grammatology’ – the
science, set out in writing, of the possibility of writing (and it is worth
recalling that what one is speaking of in regard to Grisey’s music is
an écriture).
The bulk of Dufourt’s reply to Grisey is not about the name. Instead, it
concerns other aspects of their shared aesthetic that emerge from Dufourt’s
reading of Grisey’s essay on musical time. Here, the philosophical training
is on full display in the specialised terminology Dufourt uses. Given its
historical interest – written at the threshold of once and for all naming and
determining this genre – I reproduce it at length:
(1) In my view, it is appropriate to put more stress on the dialectic of our
music and its categories. Your paper [exposé] borrows a mode of
exposition from a type of thought that you want to combat. You explain
that music is violent. Indeed, in its formal structures, it is the
internalisation of the violence of society. But the worst of things would be
to assume, for our own account, this neutralising liquidation to which the
dominant ideology would like us to submit. You should therefore be
aware of a presentation that is too ‘positivistic’ and the models of
functional rationality. These will be pointed to afterwards to say that you
are doing everything like [previous people] but less well (and, in
parentheses, not in agreement with ‘skin, flesh, skeleton’ – too
positivist) –
(2) I would shift the critique from the terrain of pure duration to the politico-
musical terrain. For before starting out on the technical criticism, one has
to lay bare the system of thought which characterised the avant-garde of
the post-war years and show how it refused in principle any
consideration of the problem of time. Your paper, in its internal logic and
in its content, actually has a philosophical basis. Thus, one must say so,
244 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

and cross swords at the level of ‘foundations’. Serial music, like the music
of Cage, lived from a mythic atemporality.
(3) Radicalise the aporias. It is not just a case of thresholds.
cf. p. 14 – periodicity acceleration.
p. 17 dynamism-unpredictability
p. 23 – auditory/temporal perceptive acuity.
The scientific references are, in my opinion, not solid. Questionable in
their conception and in their functioning as proofs. It would be more
worthwhile to present these ideas on an intrinsically musical plane.
(4) There’s one thing that bothers me fundamentally in your essay: it’s the
contradiction between what you mean and the manner in which you say
it. What you mean is that we have dissolved a purely scriptural, formalist,
a-temporal conception of music, and moreover a non-structured one.
(From the microstructure of Boulez and Stockhausen to the happening –
Silence – esotericism of Cage, it’s the same: a refusal of mediation.)
We are re-establishing, therefore, mediations (rather than transitions);
which allows us:
(1) to generate tensions (dynamic conception of time)
(2) to think and organise in structures
(3) to reestablish a form of communication
Our principal contribution: the liquidation of fixed categories in favour
of synthesis and interaction.
This is why the term ‘process’ bothers me, as it implies a passive
operation susceptible to falling into a type of automation. Although
music begins, on the contrary, with transgression, the perversion of rules.
In any case, I would employ instead the term ‘mediation’, which implies a
dialectical circularity.27

Reading these insightful yet stylistically overwrought (not to say faintly scholas-
tic) lines, one does not wonder why Dufourt’s ideas have had less currency in the
music’s public reception than have those of Murail, who, when he adopted the
spectral moniker for his music, made it more straightforward and practical.
Nonetheless, Dufourt’s critique also has glimmers of brilliance. Signing off more
casually, Dufourt extends his best wishes to Grisey’s wife Jocelyn and, regretting
his inability to come to Darmstadt, quipping that ‘it promises a few punch-ups’,
suggests attending next year, in the mean time telling Grisey: ‘Don’t scorch
everything!’ It is plain that Darmstadt for these French composers was a
dragon’s den.
Although seemingly no reply exists from Grisey, one can imagine how he
reacted to this ambivalent letter. Dufourt supports that the younger composer will

27
Dufourt, letter to Grisey, 9 July 1980, GGCPSF.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 245

fly the flag at Darmstadt for their common project; but he is nonetheless critical of
the terms Grisey uses and is not shy in tearing them apart, nor in being rather
condescending about Grisey’s scientific knowhow (Dufourt claimed that, when he
attended Leipp’s acoustics laboratory (which was where Grisey studied), he ‘saw
very early on the limits of Leipp’s teaching and Leipp’s acoustics’).28 The distance
between Grisey’s and Dufourt’s respective views of their new musical tendency
seems intractable. One instance of this is Dufourt’s rather dogged insistence on the
Adorno-favoured term ‘mediation’; but the most telling difference of opinion is in
the final paragraph. The term ‘process’ is particularly associated with Grisey and
Murail, both of whom have their own take on what it means. In regard to Les
Espaces acoustiques, Grisey writes:

The term ‘process’, which I contrast with the term ‘development’, signifies
that it is no longer a question of obtaining a musical discourse through the
proliferation of details, but rather of deducing the detail of each area crossed
from a trajectory set in advance. This allows one to propose journeys to the
listener linking one characteristic state of the sound matter to another (for
example, from consonance to noise), passing through zones from which any
recognised signpost seems to have been abolished. In other words, the process
determines the contradiction between the known and unknown, the
predictable and unpredictable, and integrates surprises on the basis of what is
relatively identifiable.29

Dufourt points out the danger inherent in leaning too much on this
seductive premise: a predictable, by-numbers, mechanical music; an overly
codified approach to composition resulting in Fauré-esque musical con-
formity skirting with boredom. Dufourt’s credo – that music is in the first
based on transgression and on the breaking of all rules – aligns him with
Levinas. Finally, there is historical irony in the fact that, at this point,
neither Dufourt nor Grisey wanted to use the name ‘spectral music’, each
of them considering it inadequate; but that die was already cast.

Murail’s Spectral Music

For Murail, in contrast to Dufourt’s (for some) hard-to-follow theorising,
the term ‘spectral’ is ‘purely technical’,30 referring to an approach to
composition using sound and computer analysis in the design of what he
terms frequential harmony: harmonic structures that are modelled on the

28
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
29
Grisey, ‘Les Espaces acoustiques’, 132.
30
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
246 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

internal structure of complex sounds.31 Murail is pragmatic, and he is not

much drawn to speculative theorising (something he considered too much
present in Levinas’s 1970s music). Nonetheless, like Grisey, Murail had
also spoken at Darmstadt in 1980, delivering the lecture ‘‘La Révolution des
sons complexes’ (‘The Revolution of Complex Sounds’), and his classic
work Gondwana for orchestra was also commissioned for the summer
courses. While the Gondwana world premiere at Darmstadt was not
satisfactory, the French premiere a few months later by the Orchestre
National de France at a Tristan Murail portrait concert (where it was
programmed with Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony and Murail’s Les
Courants de l’espace) was much more successful.32 One enthusiastic lis-
tener was Murail’s former composition teacher, whose words must have
been gratifying. ‘I believe you have realised what electronicism was for a
long time searching for’, Messiaen wrote to Murail in a note, ‘with a beauty
of sonority rarely attained in contemporary music.’33
Given the analysis necessary to compose his music, Murail enviously
eyed the computational resources available at IRCAM. ‘IRCAM was
exactly what we needed’, Murail remarked. ‘Boulez didn’t need IRCAM
for his music, but we needed it.’34 Starting with Territoires de l’oubli,
Murail had been making tables of frequency calculations using a pocket
calculator, and the personal computer he installed in his Bastille apartment
allowed him to work more efficiently on the calculative dimension of his
harmonic framework. Although l’Itinéraire had felt threatened by
IRCAM’s opening, relations thawed eventually, and following the prelim-
inary gesture of Ensemble l’Itinéraire, from its 1978–9 season onwards,
using IRCAM’s Espace de projection as its regular Parisian concert venue, a

31
As outlined in detail in Fineberg, ‘Appendix I’.
32
‘I wasn’t very happy after the Darmstadt performance, it wasn’t very good. But then a few
months later it was played at this concert in Paris, and it was excellent; the recording is on
the CDs which are still now for sale are from this concert.’ Murail, interview with the
author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
33
Messiaen’s full letter is as follows: ‘Dear friend, allow me to congratulate you with all my
heart on your works Gondwana for orchestra and Les Courants de l’espace for ondes
Martenot transformed by the ring modulation of a synthesiser and in dialogue with an
orchestra. These are two truly astonishing works, to which I listened with joy and
admiration. Not only does one hear all of the changes which you wished, which
contribute to the originality of the form, but especially harmony and timbre together
are reconceived, and reconceived by a true musician. I believe you have realised what
electronicism was for a long time searching for, with a beauty of sonority rarely attained
in contemporary music. An immense bravo for this magnificent music!’ Messiaen, letter
to Tristan Murail, 22 December 1980, CDMC.
34
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 247

rapprochement between the l’Itinéraire-associated composers and IRCAM

was broached. Of l’Itinéraire and IRCAM, Dufourt said: ‘that confron-
tation was never a war. Because it was I who personally asked Boulez if
l’Itinéraire could do its concerts at the Centre Pompidou: he said yes.’35
Murail, remarking that Boulez was always polite to him, said:
I remember being at a soirée at the Goethe Institute. Treize couleurs de soleil
couchant was commissioned by the Goethe Institute. And at the same concert,
or same evening, Nicholas Snowman was there, who was at that time the
artistic director of IRCAM. We started speaking, and I remember that it was a
very ‘active’ discussion. [. . .] After that I think he called me and I think he
offered me a commission for Ensemble Intercontemporain. I said, ‘Yeah, well,
we could just do that.’ Then he said, ‘But maybe you would be more interested
in doing something with computers.’ And this is how the idea came that we
should organise a special ‘composer’s session’ for l’Itinéraire people.36

The participants at the l’Itinéraire composers’ stage at IRCAM were

Murail, Grisey, Dufourt, Tessier, Levinas, Bousch, and Pascal Dusapin.
They did workshops and read workbooks by IRCAM members like
Andrew Gerzso on the use of programs like 4X and Music X.37 While
for some (notably Grisey) the experience of working with computer pro-
gramming was unfulfilling, for Murail it was liberating, and it set the
agenda for his subsequent working method, his second-period music,
and for spectral music as an international movement. The compositional
framework he had developed in the 1970s thrived when wedded to
IRCAM’s computational resources.
Whereas ‘The Revolution of Complex Sounds’ delineates the compos-
itional terms of his first-period music, Murail’s 1982 Darmstadt lecture,
‘Spectres et lutins’, delineates the basis in computer-assisted composition
of his subsequent music. The title of the essay – an untranslatable pun on
the double sense of the words spectre (spectrum/spectre) and lutin (pixel/
pixie) – indicates Murail’s vision of the complicity of spectral music and
computation (in French, l’informatique): the effectiveness of computa-
tional analysis and synthesis when combined with the perceptivity-focused
compositional framework that Murail and Grisey developed in the 1970s.
The essay opens with a summary of this new conceptual framework and
the (psycho)acoustic ramifications of the Scelsean injunction that we move
‘beyond categories’; the stress here is on the micro-acoustic fluidity of

35
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
36
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
37
Some notes from this stage are held in the GGCPSF.
248 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

harmony and timbre, better conceived via the single category of harmony-
timbre. At times, the tenor of Murail’s statements on this immanent
compositional organisation is utopian and quasi-philosophical:
‘Frequency space is continuous and acoustical reality only has to define
its own temperaments. If we push this reasoning to an extreme, the
combination of pure frequencies could be used to explain all past categor-
ies of musical discourse and all future ones.’38 The shift is from the
traditional essentialist view of pitch classes as having an identity separate
from their realisation to a new immanent view of frequencies as only ever
defined through their concrete actualisation; that actualisation pre-
inscribes within frequencies’ identity their relation to other actualised
frequencies. Such philosophising, generally not in Murail’s character,39
not only underpins Murail’s argument for the organisational richness of
the spectral musical position but also in a subtler way attests to Murail’s
inheriting the legacy of post-war serialism (as, indeed, was appropriate for
a compositional movement now based at Boulez’s music research centre).
Political jostling notwithstanding, this was an immanent musical organisa-
tion derived from the nature of sound, just as serialism had aimed to be.
After outlining this theoretical grounding, Murail in the rest of the
essay details the technical application of computation to spectral musical
composition. His discussion is oriented around the example of
Désintégrations (1982–3) for ensemble and tape, Murail’s first Ensemble
Intercontemporain commission. Désintégrations set a template not only for
Murail’s later style but for French spectral music as a wider movement
joined by a younger generation of composers such as Saariaho and
Dalbavie. It is, in effect, a brief single-movement symphony. That is not
to say that it develops themes, that it is scored for a traditional orchestra,
that it has a traditional sonata form, or that it expresses something on the
part of its composer; rather, the symphonic designation owes to the fact
that it is a unified, coherent, large-scale work in several sections, of high
dramatic force, all of whose material derives from one germ, ‘the notion of
the spectrum’.40 The spectrum creates material and formal coherence

38
Murail, ‘Spectra and Sprites’, 138.
39
Regarding philosophy, Murail had ‘memories from my philosophy class when I was at
high school. My teacher of philosophy was a big fan of Henri Bergson; his classes were
very boring.’ Murail said he finds phenomenology more relevant with regard to his music:
‘I’ve read a little bit of Merleau-Ponty [. . .] There’s a book called Phénoménologie de la
perception where there are some ideas or suggestions that correspond to some experiences
I had, especially about memory, anticipation, the perception of present; all these things.’
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 15 January 2014.
40
Murail, Programme note for Désintégrations.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 249

throughout; in this way, just as earlier twentieth-century single-movement

symphonies like Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony and Scriabin’s Prometheus:
The Poem of Fire express late tonality writ large, Désintégrations expresses
spectral music writ large. The instrumental pitches and electronic frequen-
cies are based alike on spectral analyses of specific instrumental sounds.
The first section, for instance, presents two aggregates (with fundamentals
on A♯0 and C♯2; Murail uses the term ‘aggregate’ rather than ‘chord’
‘because these combinations of sounds serve equally well in the synthesis of
electronic sonorities as they do in writing instrumental parts’41) based on
the spectral analysis of a low piano note (C1); the material based on each of
these notes in a process manner alternates before gradually, over successive
iterations, converging. This section’s formal arc describes a movement
from relative harmonicity to relative inharmonicity, the eventual simultan-
eity of the two aggregates creating a complex, bell-like sonority. During
this process, the two aggregates are augmented by the addition of further
partials (some partials being transposed down an octave). In analysing the
piano note’s frequency content, Murail observes the formant zones by
which certain groups of partials stand out as louder than others; he then
uses this data to eliminate relatively insignificant partials from compos-
itional consideration while selecting other partials – the more perceptually
prominent ones – for transcription into instrumental pitches and thus
musical notation (approximating to the nearest quarter-tone). The initial
instrumental iterations of the harmonic material in the woodwinds are
sounded by relatively simple timbres (clarinet and flute in medium to low
tessitura), while the later iterations introduce spectrally more complex
instrumental timbres (oboe, bassoon, horn). To accentuate this increasing
tension, the tape part begins to sound some of the partials of the double
reed instruments’ notes, sounding, in this way, ‘the harmonics of the
harmonics’ or secondary partials. Throughout Désintégrations, coherence
between acoustic and electronic parts is ensured by the fact that pitch and
frequency content are based on identical spectral material. In this way,
Désintégrations represents an unprecedentedly sophisticated realisation of
the Scelsean vision of a musical composition based on sound’s internal
nature.
While Murail’s 1980s music set a benchmark for the alliance of IRCAM
and spectral techniques, Grisey, by contrast, did not take to electronics.
When Georgina Born was conducting ethnographic research at IRCAM,
she briefly met Grisey there, as well as, separately, Dufourt (‘I was

41
Murail, ‘Villeneuve-lès-Avignon conferences’, 213. Murail gives a detailed analysis of
Désintégrations in this lecture transcript, 211–32.
250 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

introduced to him as being a philosopher who was interested in the

sociology of music’) and Murail (he ‘was “inside” IRCAM and had a
research project of some kind’):
Grisey had a commission in 1984, from memory, and I was doing fieldwork as
he worked with several ‘tutors’ on this piece; it was treated condescendingly
by those assisting him, and it did indeed seem rather ‘unserious’ and
dilettante – he asked for a number of people (I took part in this) to record a
vocal statement about ‘love’ spoken in many languages (I think it was ‘I love
you’), and this was somehow to be part of the material from which to generate
the piece. You can imagine that this was judged to be Grisey not really taking
advantage of IRCAM’s higher purposes.42

Subsequently, Grisey considered the work in question, Les Chants de

l’amour (1982–4) for choir and electronics, a misstep; he henceforth
eschewed electronics and spent years reconsidering how to compose
écriture liminale for the voice.
At l’Itinéraire’s tenth anniversary showcase at IRCAM, which ran from
16 to 19 May 1983, Murail delivered a lecture entitled ‘Musique spectrale:
vers une nouvelle organisation sonore’ (‘Spectral Music: Towards a New
Organisation of Sound’).43 By this stage, Murail had begun to teach at
IRCAM, and some of the students he had in the mid-1980s would explore
in their own work the frequential-harmonic techniques practised by
Murail and Grisey, by then closely identified with the name ‘spectral
music’, giving rise at once to the second generation of spectral composers
and to the notion of spectral music thereafter disseminated internationally:
not Dufourt’s epistemic notion of spectral music but what might be called
Murail’s technical notion of spectral music. In the first published article by
a critic to mention the term musique spectrale, Halbreich calls it ‘the notion
developed first and foremost by Murail and Grisey, [. . .] based on the
exploration of resonances, inharmonic as well as harmonic’. While director
of the Royan Festival, Halbreich had taken an interest in Murail’s music,
and now in the 1980s he described the spectral compositional movement
as one ‘supported not only by works (sometimes masterpieces) but also by
theoretical reflection of great novelty, without a doubt the first since
the serialism of the 1950s to present a comparable coherence and
robustness’.44

42
Born, email to the author, 10 December 2022. For an analysis of Les Chants de l’amour,
see Mason, ‘Feeling Machines’, 123–46.
43
Cited in the IRCAM events programme for May 1983 as reproduced in Cohen-Levinas,
ed., Vingt-cinq ans, 439.
44
Halbreich, ‘1973–1983’.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 251

Grisey’s écriture liminale

Grisey was not best pleased when he heard people calling his music
spectral music. In the mid-1980s, he remarked:

The music of Les Espaces acoustiques can appear as the negation of melody,
polyphony, timbre, and rhythm as exclusive categories of sound, in favour of
ambiguity and fusion. The parameters are only a reading grid and the musical
reality resides beyond, in the thresholds where an attempt at fusion takes
place. ‘Liminal’ is the adjective that I would gladly give to this type of writing;
more gladly in any case than ‘spectral’, often heard today and which seems to
me too limiting.45

‘I remember a short discussion with Grisey’, Murail said. ‘We were at

Darmstadt at that time, and he told me, “People have started speaking
of musique spectrale and I don’t like it, because I think my music is
rather musique liminale.” I told him, “Yes, but you know, we cannot
help [it]. That’s what will happen” – and that’s what did happen.’
Of the epithet that would become ubiquitous in the reception of his
music, Murail correctly observed, ‘[y]ou cannot describe something
with just one adjective’.46 As a simplified way of summarising one’s
music for the public, though, it was expedient. At Darmstadt in 1982,
Grisey, resisting using this name for his music, delivered the lecture
‘La Musique: le devenir des sons’ (‘Music: The Becoming of Sounds’),
in which he described his music with three other epithets: ‘differential’,
‘transient’, and ‘liminal’. Psychoacoustics showed that the microscopic
scale is the true measure of how sound behaves, and being micro-
scopic, it is prior to the domain of identity. Dufourt called this
element ‘spectral’ because of how it pertained to the micro scale;
Grisey termed it ‘liminal’ because of how it showed our musical
parameters to be fuzzy floating signifiers. Generally speaking, Grisey
uses the term ‘liminal’ in his 1982 lecture to designate those aspects of
his music that are based on the psychoacoustic reality of human
audition rather than on classical music-compositional concepts, which,
coming from a different scientific age, are demonstrably inaccurate
with regard to how we perceive sound. 47 Grisey stipulates three

45
Grisey, ‘Structuration des timbres’, 114.
46
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
47
Except where otherwise stated, a subsequent quotations in this subsection are from
Grisey’s, ‘La Musique: le devenir des sons’.
252 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

principal applications for the term ‘liminal’ (adapted from his readings
of Winckel and Moles):48
(1) for the transitional zones between different sound parameters;
(2) for the fusion of instrumental tones in ensemble chords modelled on
harmonic spectra;
(3) for the use of resultant tone harmonies to auto-generate material from
itself (as in Partiels section 2, or as with John Chowning’s use of FM
synthesis in Stria (1977)).
It is with the second of these that Grisey’s music is most often associated –
so-called spectral chords – but it is instructive that Grisey says the chord is
secondary to the sensory effect it produces in the listener (the passive
synthesis of our pre-conscious hearing).
(1) Grisey first observes that the traditional compositional parameters –
noise, harmony, timbre, rhythm, and so on – are in reality not distinct
from each other. Rather, at certain thresholds, they tend to mutate into one
another (Grisey has already made this observation back in 1972). He cites,
in this regard, the phenomenon of beating that occurs when two signals of
only slightly different frequency are emitted simultaneously: in a very low
register, humans will perceive the beating rhythmically; in a very high
register, they will perceive it as a timbre. Another example of the inexact-
ness of parameters is the dependence of humans’ perception on durational
relativity: a chord that, when played briefly, will sound as a timbre will,
when played over a long duration, become a harmony, the ear being able in
the second case to, as it were, enter into the sound phenomenon and thus
to hear the multiple constituent components. ‘It is therefore only our
perceptual limits’, Grisey concludes, ‘that invite us to project parametrical
scales onto the continuity of phenomena.’ The examples he cites are
‘psychoacoustical thresholds’ well known in science, which were estab-
lished by the mid-twentieth century, but whose insights music theory had
not yet integrated. (In Grisey’s effort here there is an echo of Deleuze:
‘Bergson says that modern science hasn’t found its metaphysics, the meta-
physics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me.’)49 When

48
Although one imagines that Victor Turner’s use of the term ‘liminal’ in regard to tribal
rites of passage would have appealed to Grisey, there is no evidence that he drew
on Turner.
49
Quoted in Villani, La Guêpe et l’orchidée, 130. This aspect of Grisey’s thought, whereby
parameters transition into one another, recalls the moment in Stockhausen’s Kontakte
where a pitch descends from a high into a low register and its pulsations slow down until
they are perceived as a rhythm. See Stockhausen, ‘The Concept of Unity in Electronic
Music’.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 253

one looks at sound at a small scale, Grisey continues, ‘one finds there such
a tissue of correlations that the very notion of parameters in serialism,
defined and isolated, seems obsolete, inapt at realistically representing
musical phenomena’. The musical parameters should be thought of as a
sort of grid paper making it possible to measure the acoustical object we
are drawing, while it does not follow that that object is at all reducible to
the graph’s coordinates. Grisey’s imagery is that of the map versus the
territory. We should not confuse the rough categories we use – parameters,
pitch classes – for the infinitely richer reality of sound. The true reality of
musical sound is a phenomenal reality, measured empirically by human
audition and qualitative experience. In question, then, is the correctness of
our inherited concepts with regard to the perceptual reality of musical
sound as a phenomenon. This is a philosophical issue spilling over into the
domain of music. Grisey concludes with a poetic question: ‘Between the
colours of the rainbow, other colours are found which we yet dare not
name. Is this a question of education or of language?’
(2) Grisey next theorises the technique with which his music is most
often associated: instrumental synthesis. Citing the opening section of
Partiels and a section from Modulations, Grisey describes how a harmonic
model using pitch ratios derived from the harmonic or inharmonic
spectrum of a given naturally occurring sound source, inserted within an
ensemble or orchestral score, produces a unique aesthetic phenomenon
that, properly considered, is reducible to neither a chord nor a timbre. The
sound phenomenon is ‘a hybrid being for our perception, a sound which,
without yet being a timbre, is no longer a chord – a sort of mutant of the
music of today issued from the cross-fertilisation of new instrumental
techniques and the additive synthesis realised by computer’. The macro-
phonic spectrum as a synthetic phenomenon ‘is situated in a liminal zone’:
it has an undecidable character, appearing at the mutual limit of harmony
and timbre. It is also a sonorous simulation: ‘the projection into an
harmonic [. . .] space of the natural structure of sounds’. As with the first
sense of liminality, then, Grisey here puts the onus not on sound as
structure but on sound as phenomenon; not on the sound object but on
the musical image of a sound object, that which appears to sensory
perception. The phenomenon is ‘the perception of a synthetic spectrum
and not of a chord’.50
(3) Finally, Grisey turns to form. He describes an approach to generat-
ing musical material based on analysing the psychoacoustical properties of

50
Grisey, ‘Structuration des timbres’, 100.
254 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

a given sound and the potential for deriving from it another sound (a new
law of the shortest way). This approach to generating material is based not
on selecting material from a Platonic realm of pitch classes and chords but
on selecting material through cognisance of the particular psychoacoustic
‘pregnancy’ of a given sound, as expressed by that sound’s relative degree
of ‘light and shadow’. Grisey uses the term ‘sound shadow’ to describe the
resultant tones that exist psychoacoustically within any sound or chord:
the additional and differential frequencies produced in the human ear by
the relative degree of harmonic agreement of that sound’s component
frequencies or pitches. In considering a given sound not simply as a
predefined mark on the page but as a perceptual phenomenon, ‘[t]he
distribution of the harmonics, the relative intensity of the partials, the
combination tones, the beatings, and the diverse fluctuations, form a
characteristic aura’. ‘Researching a minimal threshold of transition
between one sound and the next incited me from the start to know as
well as possible this distinctive aura possessed by the sound used, and then
to select a potential component which, once placed in relief, will become
in turn a new radiating object.’ Then that object in turn undergoes the
same process, and so on. This approach to pitch generation is a decentral-
ised one. Grisey recursively generates a trajectory unprogrammable in
advance by abstract (thus, centralised) formalisation of ‘all possible notes’,
as characterised serialism and pitch-class set theory (with the chimera of
479,001,600 possible twelve-tone series). From a practical point of view,
the technique of pitch generation Grisey outlines creates a theoretically
endless process of becoming, by which the synthetic sound moves through
different harmonic-timbral configurations, each sound the threshold to
another sound, and another sound, and another (a sign of a sign, in post-
structuralist parlance). From a theoretical point of view, the ramifications
of this ‘principle of instantaneous generation’ (as Grisey terms it) are
more radical. They are true of écriture liminale in general, and Grisey lists
them as follows:

● [This technique] lays waste to the concept of material considered as a cell,

theme, or series, in regard to which the work would be the a
posteriori development.
● The concept of development gives way to that of process.
● The true material becomes the pathway the composer traces through the
arborescence of possibilities each aura provokes: material is thus
sublimated in favour of a pure sonorous becoming.
● In the case of wandering, the musical work’s pole (the anchoring point of
the process) is no longer at the beginning of the score: it is diffused across
every instantaneous choice and measured by the degree of pre-audibility.
Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 255

In the case of transition, the anchoring points are situated at the beginning
and at the end of the process.
● The composer operates across the entire duration at once, in all possible
instants, every gesture determining a sort of chain reaction whose power
and effects he must control.51

Grisey outlines the technical terms of his musical style. He presents an

approach to musical composition based on immanence. From the irredu-
cible singularity of any given sound is derived, through écriture liminale, a
correspondingly singular musical form, a musical form that is sui generis,
generated instant by instant. There is no ideal or transcendent model that
analysis may refer the work to; moreover, since the processual surface of
the work is based on continuing pregnancy or ‘tendency’ towards the next
moment, this threshold form evades the present, its nature inhering always
in the ‘between’ of successive moments.
These, then, are the principles of liminality in Grisey’s music in 1982.
Although he does not propose it as a name, a liminal music would be one
taking off from the psychoacoustic principles outlined. Grisey’s style is not
simply a techniques toolkit (i.e. not simply instrumental synthesis) but a
wholesale écriture, a compositional logic based on an analysis of how
humans perceive sound. The synthetic sound image is the composer’s
proper materialt: the perceptual skin of the work.

Ma fin est mon commencement

Grisey delivered this talk during his composition seminar at Darmstadt in
1982. Christopher Fox remarks that Darmstadt in 1982 ‘was the first year
without any representation from the old guard among the instrumental
teachers’.52 However, the old guard still dominated the political environ-
ment, and some were suspicious of the young French composers.
‘Stockhausen was still present’, Dufourt said, ‘and was not at all in favour
of what we were doing. Above all, our main opponent was Dahlhaus; he
was a tough opponent. Dahlhaus had previously been fiercely opposed to
electroacoustics; there are articles by Dahlhaus on electroacoustic rational-
ity that are terrible. It was a condemnation. We were even worse in his
eyes.’53 Grisey had met with a cynical reception at Darmstadt in 1978 and
later quipped that the Parisian composers voyage to the German ‘Mecca of

51
Grisey, ‘La Musique: le devenir des sons’, 52.
52
Fox, ‘31st International Ferienkurse’, 49.
53
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
256 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

serialism’ was like ‘Tintin in America’. Along the same lines, Murail
recalled that when he first lectured in 1980 (delivering the paper ‘The
Revolution of Complex Sounds’),
they also played Treize couleurs du soleil couchant with the ensemble of the
professors there. And they played very well – after I explained what I wanted.
Because at first, they played it like Stockhausen, and I told them, ‘No, you have to
have a subtle approach to sound’, and things like that. And they did very well; the
piece was played at one of these concerts at Darmstadt, and [there was] huge
applause, a very good reception. It was kind of conducted [. . .] by the trombone
player or something. And I don’t remember whether he or Kontarsky or whoever
said, ‘Well, if you like, we’ll play the piece again.’ And at that time, maybe one
third of the audience left. They were very angry with the piece.54

In 1982, Rădulescu was present, too, and alongside performances of his

music that took place, he again gave a lecture on his sound plasma theory
(he had yet to rebrand his music as spectral music).55 Alongside the
lectures by Grisey and Murail, Dufourt and Levinas both spoke at
Darmstadt for the first time. Levinas’s lecture ‘Qu’est-ce que
l’instrumental?’ set out his own aesthetic position in contradistinction to
those of Murail and Grisey. Levinas argued (without naming them) that
the latter’s focus on frequential harmony had confused musical sound with
its technical analysis, entailing the danger that their approach might
become a new sort of dogma. Such formalism ran the risk of stifling the
living imagination. All the better to show this, Levinas’s work Les Rires du
Gilles (1981) for five instruments and tape was performed by l’Itinéraire, a
wild work largely comprising Appels-esque screams on wind and brass
instruments (Ex. 8.1). Where Grisey’s and Murail’s music at that time was
about slow transformation, Les Rires du Gilles is all explosive
déclenchement and theatricality. Its play of unsettling laughs follows earlier
dramatisation of the breath (Arsis et thesis) and of the call (Appels);
moreover, it prepares the way for Levinas’s subsequent operas, and it is
rich in timbre and colour. Of Levinas’s critique, Dufourt commented:
Levinas always considered this courant as having been made up. It made him
laugh; he didn’t believe in it. He always accused me privately and jokingly of
having created this chimera for political reasons, outside of truly musical
reasons. So he told me, but it wasn’t an accusation; in my opinion, he was right
at a much deeper level. Levinas still made a form of spectral music. It seems to
me that Grisey and Murail developed especially the area of pitch. I tackled the

54
Murail, interview with the author, Salzburg, 16 January 2014.
55
See Heaton, ‘Horatiu Rădulescu’.
 Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 257

Example 8.1 Levinas’s Les Rires du Gilles (1981) for five instruments and tape.
© Copyright Éditions Henry Lemoine, Paris. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.
258 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

ratio of intensity, the structural relationship of intensity to frequency, because

energy is an absolutely decisive structure. And it seems to me that Levinas was
the only one to deal with phase, the phase shift. So, all these ghostly characters
that appear in his music are in fact always phase shifts.56

Grisey has said the primary germ of his music was mutation and change;
Levinas’s music, through sonic hybridisation, puts primacy on the disrup-
tion of identity. In this, while Levinas and Grisey differ in terms of écriture,
it is hard to deny that musically they are kin. As Bataille observed, laughter
ruptures the domain of stable knowledge and identity; Levinas was in this
way inheriting the intellectual milieu of his father.57
Darmstadt in 1982 was the moment when spectral music as an international
movement took off. Among the young composition students at Darmstadt in
1982 were Saariaho and George Haas (the latter’s proclivity for turning lights
off and on during works like In Vain may be traced back to his hearing Jour,
contre jour at Darmstadt, a work whose score similarly calls for dimming the
lights).58 But in another sense (as Dufourt put it), ‘Darmstadt in 1982 was the
end’ (Fig. 8.1).59 By this point, Dufourt had left l’Itinéraire’s bureau. He had
recently been elevated within the CNRS to director of the Centre
d’Information et de Documentation ‘Recherche musicale’ (leading among
other things to the 1989 establishment of the doctoral programme ‘Musique
et musicologie du XX e siècle’, the first of its kind in France). Dufourt said:
We were at a turning point. Murail wanted to give a more rational and
economic orientation to the management of l’Itinéraire, which was perfectly

56
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
57
‘One of the most remarkable aspects of the domain of the unforeseeable unknown is
given in the laughable, in the objects that excite in us this effect of intimate overturning,
of suffocating surprise, that we call laughter.’ Bataille, System Non-Knowledge, 133.
58
In attendance, too, was Vivier, who sat in the audience for l’Itinéraire’s seminar, ten years
after he and Grisey had met at Darmstadt as composition students. He would be dead
within a year, murdered in Paris on 7 March 1983. On his Québécois friend, Grisey later
said: ’He was an intelligent man, and his speech was beautiful, surprising without being
highbrow. It was the sad speech of someone who loves life enormously and who asks for
tenderness from others without showing it, hiding behind constant provocation but
without aggression. [. . .] For me, Vivier is a composer-vagabond, something more
common among painters but rather rare among composers, who prefer to have their
own apartment with a piano and so on. He is a maverick, but a maverick who knows
classical writing very well, not a self-taught maverick. And at the same time he’s a great
lyricist. In my opinion, there’s a Schubertian side to him; he’s gifted with a real vocal and
melodic sense. [. . .] The verticality and simplicity of his music also remind me of
Byzantine music. [. . .] Stockhausen respected Vivier’s mystical side, and this is what
brought them closest together.’ Grisey, ‘Entretien avec Gérard Grisey’.
59
Dufourt, interview with the author, Paris, 20 February 2014.
 Spectral Music and écriture liminale (1979–1982) 259

Figure 8.1 L’Itinéraire composition seminar at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982. From left to
right: Costin Miereanu, Michaël Levinas, Harry Halbreich, Gérard Grisey, Hugues Dufourt, Tristan
Murail. Claude Vivier can be seen in the foreground. Printed with the permission of the
Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.

understandable. At the same time, I myself was asked to found what became
the UMR 7912, a musical research unit linked to the CNRS, the École
Normale Supérieure (National Education), and the Ministry of Culture.
We were also encouraged and followed, l’Itinéraire and myself, by Maurice
Fleuret, then Director of Music. Maurice Fleuret had asked me to clarify my
position, because I could not bear the heavy administrative and institutional
burdens of the CNRS while at the same time continuing to run l’Itinéraire as
an association. I therefore withdrew from l’Itinéraire. I must also remind you
that this first institutional project at the CNRS (a joint CNRS/École Normale
Supérieure and Music Directory at the Ministry of Culture) was carried out
with the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and in association with it. These
were therefore heavy affairs that required constant transactions between
three ministries.60

60
Dufourt, email to the author, 2 December 2022.
260 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

Tasked with these reforms, he was in a conflict of interest with l’Itinéraire.

He did, however, assume more of a presence at IRCAM as a scholar
working with Boulez. Grisey similarly considered l’Itinéraire’s group sem-
inar at Darmstadt to be the moment of parting for the group of French
composers. During their IRCAM stage, Grisey had seen a job advertise-
ment on the institution’s notice board for a composition professorship at
the University of California at Berkeley. He successfully applied for the job
and relocated from Europe to California, continuing the peregrinations
that had begun with his move to Trossingen.61 Finding himself at home in
vocal music, Levinas launched a successful career as an opera composer
with La Conférence des oiseaux (1985, libretto adapted by Jean-Claude
Carrière). During subsequent years, particularly informed by his work at
IRCAM, he refined his distinctive style of spectral music (affiliation with
which current he eventually embraced).
My work on the Berliozian world and timbre, the transition to theatrical
myth, is part of the true history of spectral music. One would require a
discussion of my theatrical work in collaboration with IRCAM and my
somewhat isolated orchestral pieces including Par delà (1994). I produced
four operas between 1985 and 2014 and it is difficult to isolate them from the
evolution of the spectral movement and the influence on the
younger generations.62

Murail thrived at IRCAM, helping to develop the Patchwork software and

elaborating a broader electroacoustic framework. For him, spectral music
was an approach to composition using sound and computer analysis in the
design of what he terms frequential harmony: harmonic structures mod-
elled on the internal structure of complex sounds.63 The new generation he
taught – Hurel, Dalbavie, Saariaho, Anderson, Fineberg – took this in.64
The old era had passed and a new one begun.

61
The job advertisement was sent to IRCAM by Richard Felciano (Felciano, email to the
author, 8 April 2013).
62
Levinas, telephone interview with the author, 9 December 2022. Levinas stressed in this
regard his tutelary relationship with Fausto Romitelli.
63
For more on Murail at IRCAM in the 1980s, see Cagney, ‘Murail’s Musical Poetics’.
64
Pousset, Fineberg, and Hyacinthe, ‘The Works of Kaija Saariaho’.
 Conclusion

In February 1857, Flaubert wrote to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie:

‘Art should rise above personal feeling and emotional susceptibilities! It is
time we gave it, through rigid systematization, the exactness of the
physical sciences!’1 Flaubert’s enthusiasm was in keeping with the age
of August Comte’s positivism, which reprised the Enlightenment spirit of
Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie: rationalist projects spanning the
secular world from a centre in Paris. Over a century later (an eyeblink in
the longue durée), the same wish to exert scientific exactitude upon art
animated successively the serial and spectral movements. With the pas-
sage of decades, one can regard the latter as partner projects towards a
newly rationalised écriture – less staunch opponents than bickering (and
reconciling) siblings. It was not just the spectral composers’ constant
references to serialism as their elder aesthetic foe: Dufourt’s antitheses of
serial music and spectral music in his 1979 essay-cum-manifesto; Grisey’s
argument that he and the others played with threshold as their elders
played with series. Nor was it just the me-and-my-shadow parallels of
lecturing at Darmstadt and publishing theoretical essays claiming uto-
pian comprehensiveness. More fundamentally, it was the shared ideal of
generating musical forms from the internal nature of sound. That ideal
(once mature success and middle-aged quietude arrived) ensured their
continuity. The spectral generation’s arrival, too, was well timed: having,
during the 1970s, worked through and resolved many of serialism’s
impasses, they were well placed in the 1980s to inherit serialism’s insti-
tutional apparatus.
The historian Marc Bloch observed that many social creations exert a
force of inertia: ‘Man spends his time devising techniques of which he
afterwards remains a more or less willing prisoner.’2 In regard to artistic
composition, Paul Valéry similarly wrote of how
gradually, and on the authority of very great men, the idea of a sort of legality
crept in and took the place of what had been, at first, recommendations of
empirical origin. Reason put rigor into the rules [. . .] Very strict and even
very severe conditions relieve the artist of a number of the most delicate

1 2
Allott, Novelists on the Novel. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 39.

[261]
262 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

decisions and of many responsibilities in the matter of form while they

sometimes excite him to discoveries to which complete freedom could never
have led him.3

Modernist vers libre had smashed the alexandrine; modernist music chez
Boulez dealt in the same way with the musical theme, the notion of key,
and pretty much everything else, all of which tokens of music past were too
familiar to serve as tokens of music’s future. Thus went Boulez’s artistic-
institutional parcours: having invested decades in establishing serialism’s
legitimacy, having groomed a generation of loyal disciples in France, and
having corralled the French state into bestowing upon him a music-and-
acoustics research centre consolidating his serial insights, he found that the
serial inkwell had run dry. Répons (1981–5), his trumpeted IRCAM and
Ensemble Intercontemporain showcase, a few impressive moments aside,
is something of a bombastic anti-climax. Serialism’s social creations had
exerted on Boulez a force of inertia. At this propitious moment, the notion
of spectral music appeared and took over.
While they resented Boulez’s dogmatism, in pursuing their ideal of an
immanent approach to material and form (spectral harmony, periodicity,
the auto-engenderment of form from material), Grisey, Murail, and
Dufourt followed in Boulez’s footsteps. They did so, moreover, with the
benefit of historical hindsight. In the language of industrial research and
development, spectral music exploited ‘absorptive capacity’, taking what
was useful from serialism (degree of change, metabolisms and processes,
resonant sound blocks) while discarding everything useless (arbitrary
prohibitions on triads, octaves, slowness). Subsequently, Dufourt worked
behind the scenes at IRCAM and publicly lauded Boulez as the exemplary
musicien de l’ère industrielle. Levinas fully achieved his brand of spectral
music at the institution, leading to his series of operas, compositions like
Rebonds (1992–3), and his own encomiums for Boulez. Murail at IRCAM
instructed a new generation of composers, such as Marc-André Dalbavie
and Philippe Hurel, in his spectral techniques and started writing pro-
grams to help create musical structures; he assisted in the development of
IRCAM’s Patchwork program, and other computer programs that he went
on to employ included OpenMusic and Max MSP.
At the same time as spectral music was becoming better known through-
out the international musical world, Murail refined spectral harmony as a
compositional framework. La Barque mystique (1993) for five instruments
links, in a programmatic way, spectral musical colour to the variegated

3
Valéry, ‘The Course in Poetics’, 92.
Conclusion 263

canvases of the symbolist painter Redon (‘the relations between colours are
both complex and obvious’, Murail writes of that work, ‘since the matched
colours are a priori incompatible’),4 while Serendib (1991–2) for ensemble
and electronics, composed, like Désintégrations, for Ensemble
Intercontemporain, shows his development in the interceding decade and
is rife with ruptures and splinters (the serendipitous element Murail
indicates in his title). Access to IRCAM’s computational resources encour-
aged Murail to seek to develop a compositional system appropriate to our
contemporary technological age, analogous in its operative logic and
aesthetic malleability to common-practice tonality, but established on a
more psychoacoustically complex basis. He remarked: ‘Certainly some very
beautiful sounds are found in spectral music, but also – essential corollary –
some of the most horrible sounds produced in the history of music. It is
not therein that the problem lies. The problem is to reintroduce within
sound phenomena systems of hierarchy, magnetic attraction and direc-
tionality, allowing the creation of a musical rhetoric on new bases’ (echoing
Boulez decades earlier).5 Murail avoided the term ‘system’ owing to its
connotations, conjuring as it did the spectre of serialism as a systematic,
and hence unartistic, approach to musical composition. But ‘system’ need
not be understood in terms of a closed, identity-based framework: the
conceptual replacement of essentialist pitch classes with immanent fre-
quency complexes theoretically allows the emergence of an open system
based not on predefined sonic identities but on virtual potentialities regu-
lated within any given composition according to the organisational
principle of moment-to-moment harmonic distribution (which is, again,
consistent with Boulez’s definition of the series in Penser la musique
aujourd’hui).6 Murail – who on occasion went so far as to claim that
‘harmony is music’ – said as much in his 1980 and 1982 Darmstadt
lectures:
Composers have often thrown themselves into the world of extended
instrumental techniques with much abandon but little discernment. Rather

4
Murail, ‘La Barque mystique: note’.
5
Quoted in Alla, ‘From the Construction of Timbre’, 5.
6
‘I proceeded from the elementary to the most general level in order to stress that this was
not a catalogue of more or less useful procedures, but an attempt to construct a coherent
system by means of a methodical investigation of the musical world, deducing multiple
consequences from a certain number of rational points of departure. I consider that
methodical investigation and the search for a coherent system are the indispensable basis
for all creation, more so than the actual attainments which are the source or the
consequence of this investigation.’ Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, 142–3.
264 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

than creating a coherent system for the integration of new instrumental

sounds, extended techniques have been used as simple ‘sound effects’, as
exotic stunts, often inappropriate or casually tossed off. But if these sounds –
their inner structures and the way they are produced – are studied with some
scrutiny, more rational methods could be discovered that could well give rise
to a new musical logic. This could lead to an ideal compositional method in
which structures of sounds would correspond to musical forms. Both would
adhere to the same criteria and follow the same principles of organization;
there would be perfect reciprocity between the score’s microcosm and
macrocosm; the form–content distinction would be blurred and finally
rendered meaningless, as one half of the opposition would be understood as a
direct result of, and even identical to, the other.7
Establishing links between these elements is a matter of conceiving ‘functions’
in the mathematical sense. In principle it would suffice to describe the
structure of durations and primary partials in order to describe everything.8

From the fact that harmonicity is an attribute shared by common-practice

tonality and spectral music alike, it seemed to follow that tonal forms
might be open to reinterpretation on a spectral basis. Thus went the
historical spiral: with Romantic harmony having given birth to dodecaph-
ony, and dodecaphony having given birth to serialism, and serialism
having given birth to spectral music, spectral music in the 1990s began
to engage in a more overt way with the longer Western art music tradition
(in works like Grisey’s Vortex temporum (1994–6) for Pierrot ensemble
and Murail’s Lachrymae (2011) for alto flute and string quintet), with
varying success.
Nonetheless, it was telling that, at the same time, Murail’s music began
to integrate more autobiographical allusions. For during this time, some
second- and third-generation spectral music began to feel stale – much like
the academism into which serialism had fallen before expiring. Helmut
Lachenmann’s remarks on spectral music summed up how many felt:
‘Spectral music’ as an aesthetic or stylistic program: that seems limited to me.
I like the idea of a kind of ‘hyperconsonance’, with its formants, from which
the form and the sound material are derived. But as for myself, I prefer to
gather different objects under the same architecture almost by induction:

7
Murail, ‘The Revolution of Complex Sounds’, 132.
8
Murail, ‘Spectra and Sprites’, 139. Deleuze writes: ‘systems have not strictly lost any of
their living forces. There is today, in the sciences or in logic, the beginning of a theory of
systems said to be open, systems founded upon interactions, that refuse linear causation
and transform the notion of time. [. . .] What Guattari and I call rhizome is precisely the
case of an open system.’ Deleuze, ‘On A Thousand Plateaus’, 31–2, translation modified.
Conclusion 265

then, these objects acquire the role of formants which – by the strategy of
structuring – give a new meaning to the very idea of such a global
‘consonance’, which results from it and of which they are part. Where the
‘global consonance’ is based on systems of frequencies and intervals from the
‘classical’ formants – where it recalls at the same time the experiences of
impressionism and serialism – the idea of spectral music seems to me to cling
to a kind of magic security analogous to that of the tonality. And so it seems
to me to be full of wonderful and interesting but also regressive elements: the
idea of a seductive garden, where one walks around forgetting oneself.9

By the second decade of the 2000s, much French music drawing on

frequential models as a basis for instrumental harmonies had sleepwalked
into a routine just as predictable as that of most 1970s serial music. It was
little wonder that Levinas and Dufourt’s music – less systematic, more
querulous, more explosive – previously neglected in the anglophone world,
started to attract more interest (Guy Lelong remarked that, for him,
Dufourt’s later music deserved as much attention as Murail’s).10 Nor is it
a coincidence that, at the time of writing, the most successful twenty-first-
century composer to have exploited spectral techniques and concepts was
Fausto Romitelli, in whose Professor Bad Trip triptych one hears the
influence just as much of Dufourt’s Saturne and Levinas’s Les
Réciproques as one does of Grisey’s Partiels and Murail’s Désintégrations.
Dufourt’s critique of rule-based process music in his 1980 letter to Grisey
and Levinas’s critiques of formalistic timbre-mimetism in his
1982 Darmstadt lecture ‘Qu’est-ce que l’instrumental?’ are essential to
the story of what spectral music was and perhaps still might be.
At this point I return to Flaubert. In an 1868 letter to his fellow novelist
and friend George Sand, Flaubert again espoused a rationalist vision of
modern art: ‘Isn’t it time to bring Justice into Art? The impartiality of
painting would then reach the majesty of the law – and the precision of
science!’11 On the face of things, one might agree: the artist as one who
should objectively present things as they are, whether that be the inner life
of humans or the inner life of sounds. Yet, as Sand pointed out in her reply,
this supposed objectivism (and it is the same with the pretentions of
formalist spectral music; what Dufourt was getting at when critiquing what
he saw as Grisey’s positivism) is a chimera:
I know you disapprove of the intervention of personal doctrine in literature
[. . .]. I’ve no judgment to pass on your friends, the writers of whom you speak

9
Lachenmann, ‘Des paradis éphémères’.
10 11
Lelong, email to the author, 1 January 2023. Allott, Novelists on the Novel.
266 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

[. . .]. Only I think there is wanting in them, and in you especially, a

sufficiently decided and extensive vision of life. Art isn’t simply painting. True
painting, moreover, is full of the spirit that moves the brush.12

All art, no matter how formalist, ultimately comes from human beings.
The ideology of artistic formalism – the artist as disinterested demiurge, as
clockmaker, scientifically setting in place their material by rational calcu-
lation – ignores the fact that the artist is a flesh-and-blood human making
decisions, decisions about what to show and what not to show, decisions
about what effect they wish for their audience, decisions about what their
very role and message as a composer is. Madame Bovary, the rationalist
novel par excellence, is moral through and through, written by a particular
man in a particular body. For this argument between Flaubert and Sand
one can substitute that between Murail and Levinas: composition is
écriture; but it is also more than just harmony and frequency spectra; there
is always a spirit that moves the brush, a hand guiding the mouse cursor.
Murail, of course, later agreed with this, as witness the masterpiece Winter
Fragments, with its touching autobiographical allusion.13 But here I pass
on; my historical focus was, after all, spectral music’s emergence rather
than its subsequent steady state.
This book’s dual title should not be seen as conflating Grisey and
spectral music in one-to-one correspondence. As with all of the composers
herein, the generic term ‘spectral music’ does not comprehend Grisey’s art
taken on its own. The first half of this book showed how Grisey’s develop-
ment of his mature compositional style (the use of harmonicity and
periodicity as twin compositional poles; the statistical conception of sound
in time, measured by the degree of change; the principle of form as
material’s auto-engenderment) involved the formulation of principles of
écriture that became adopted more widely. Grisey’s friend the writer Guy
Lelong (the editor of his posthumous collected writings) points out that ‘in
his introductory text for Les Espaces acoustiques (which I collected [in the
Écrits]), one has the impression of someone who worked without being

12
Allott, Novelists on the Novel.
13
‘Gérard Grisey’s death deeply shocked me. I had the feeling of finding myself all alone.
The snow falling, and his brutal end, on 11 November 1998 are for me tied together.
From them came Winter Fragments. Based on the concept of recollection, I used as a
requiem melodic structures that are transformed, becoming at the end the very simple
initial melody of Prologue, a piece for viola written by Gérard as the opening of his Les
Espaces acoustiques. I was very close to him, and even if our paths later diverged – which
was advisable – we never stopped exchanging ideas, techniques and even computers.’
Murail, ‘Tristan Murail, un héros trop discret’.
Conclusion 267

influenced by other composers of the “courant spectral”’14 – an important

distinction for Grisey’s path as a composer. Lelong recalled Grisey once
quipping in private (‘I don’t think he would have said it in a text intended
for publication’) that he had invented spectral music, despite the fact that
he rejected that generic name:
It was at a friend’s house, where there were a few of us, in June 1992, if
I remember correctly. You know that he didn’t like the phrase ‘spectral
music’. That day, he protested again against this formula, and I told him
laughing: ‘Stop saying that spectral music doesn’t interest you!’ And that’s
when he answered me: ‘Of course spectral music interests me; besides, if it
hadn’t interested me, I wouldn’t have invented it!’
I remember another conversation, towards the end of his life, when he
came to my house for dinner (there were only four of us). ‘When you know
you have found a new language, it comes first because there is an urgency to
show it.’ And he did not mention any other composer.
But in the second part of his life as a composer (after Talea), it was the
superimposing of different temporalities that interested him more than
spectral music as such.
I don’t know if he always considered himself to be the inventor of the
courant spectral. I only heard him say so once. I’m not sure that it was an
essential preoccupation for him, and in general his writings on spectral music
are mostly about his own music.15

Murail for his part later said:

My friend Grisey and I were looking for new techniques to say what we had to
say, without aligning series, or open forms. When, in 1974 at the Villa Medici,
l’Itinéraire premiered Grisey’s Périodes (a score of complex sounds supposed
to analyse a trombone spectrum), I was startled, and I had the impression that
he had found the solution. Spectral music’s real beginning, with this idea of
examining the interior of the sound – it was he who launched it, not me.16

Nonetheless, what each did artistically with this approach was wholly
different.

14
Guy Lelong, email to the author, 19 December 2022.
15
Lelong, email to the author, 19 December 2022. Lelong added: ‘There are always several
people behind the emergence of a movement such as spectral music. But as far as spectral
compositional techniques are concerned, it seems to me that Grisey was the initiator with
Périodes (1974). Philippe Hurel once told me, a long time ago, that Murail agreed.’
François Rose, who wrote one of the first significant articles on spectral music, said that
Grisey had no interest in reading it: ‘I informed Gérard Grisey about it. I do not recall
him asking any questions about it, not even asking for a copy of it, but that would not
have been like him anyway.’ Rose, email to the author, 29 October 2014.
16
Murail, ‘Tristan Murail, un héros trop discret’.
268 Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music

For Grisey, technique and knowledge were essential for the composer,
but the artwork existed apart. In Grisey’s view that, for the artist, art is not
a product but a mode of being and of questioning, there is an echo of
Rilke’s view that ‘true art can issue only from a purely anonymous
centre’.17 This modernist aesthetic-philosophical position (one that recalls
Flaubert, and the Proust quotation I used for the epigraph of this book) can
paradoxically, in decentring the human, help create a deeper sense of self.
The anonymous system of writing ultimately comprehends life itself as that
élan vital that overturns all prior models. Gleick’s remarks on information
help to frame Grisey’s work as the composer of métaboles sonores for
whom every sound, analysed by information technology, has a birth, life,
and death:
Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages,
instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures
for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself
is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every
cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the
quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at
the cellular level – an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human
being. ‘What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm
breath, not a “spark of life,”’ declares the evolutionary theorist Richard
Dawkins. ‘It is information, words, instructions. [. . .] If you want to
understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think
about information technology.’ The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly
interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and
decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information
between organism and environment.18

Hence, Grisey, the artist in the age of Monoprix and Paris Match,
appealing to the becoming-other of humans:
Think of whales, men and birds. When you hear the songs of the whales, they
are so spaced out that what sounds like a gigantic, drawn-out and endless
moan is perhaps only one consonant to them. This means that it is impossible
to perceive their speech with our constant of time. Similarly, when we hear a
bird sing, our impression is that it sounds very high-pitched and agitated. For
its constant of time is much shorter than ours. It is difficult for us to perceive
its subtle variations of timbre, while it may perceive us, perhaps, as we
perceive the whales.19

17 18
Rilke, Duino Elegies, 253. Gleick, The Information, 10.
19
This quotation and the next one are from the liner notes to a CD of Grisey’s chamber
works, Ernesto Molinari et al. Translation modified.
Conclusion 269

Hence, Grisey, the composer in the age of the SNCF’s jarring jingle,
appealing for a music of wintry slowness (while aware of the absurdity of
conveying that wish via electronic media):
Cut to pieces by the media, drowned in information overload, measured in
this age of zapping and video clips, this time, the time which Bataille called
‘sacred’, the time of Art, Love and Creativity, the instant when something
unprecedented can emerge, can only be preserved by artists if they completely
resist this late twentieth-century environment. Paradoxically, however, these
are precisely the rhythms that feed and inspire them. This is the only world
which calls forth their questions. And so the response to this discontinued
flood of information will be a music recovering unity and continuity. Its
wintry slowness will be the reversed echo of a stress-ridden world rushing
towards its end.

Écriture liminale, a by-product of twentieth-century information science,

shows us that, from the perspective of our nerve endings, we already do
exist as a whale; that, from the perspective of our body’s lifespan, we
already do exist as a small bird. Through art, we can move beyond our
bounds. Composition is not just pen on paper: it is signals and signs,
information flowing every which way at once, the becoming-other of
humans as ultimately what it means to be human.
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 Index

Abbott, Alain, 51 resonance chords, 5, 87–8

aleatoricism, 57 son lisse, 99, 154
Amy, Gilbert, 46, 55, 160 Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, 79
Anderson, Julian, 260 Bousch, François, 232, 240, 247
Artaud, Antonin, 53 Breton, André, 79
Artaud, Pierre-Yves, 111, 213 Butler, Samuel, 156, 223
Auric, Georges, 55
Cage, John, 244
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 19 Canguilhem, Georges, 199
Bainbridge, Simon, 198 Casa Ricordi, 156
Balthus, 128, 173 Castellengo, Michèle, 103, 182, 207
Bancquart, Alain, 202, 235 Casteneda, Carlos, The Teachings of Don Juan,
Bataille, Georges, 258 101
Bayle, François, 58 Cattin, Jean-Guillaume, 215
Beatles, the, 53 Caux, Daniel, 104
Beckett, Samuel, 22, 160 Cecconi Botella, Monique, 158
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 25 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Symphony no. 5, 37 (CNRS), 199, 258
Béjart, Maurice, 139 Chowning, John, 178, 200, 202, 225, 252
Belfort, 13 presentation at Darmstadt 1972, 110
Belfort Conservatoire, 21 Stria, 113
Institution Sainte-Marie, 17 Ciapolino, Richard, 21
Bell Telephone Laboratories, 6, 178, 182 Collectif deRecherche Instrumentale et de
Bergson, Henri, 32, 205, 252 Synthèse Sonore Synthesis (CRISS), 202
Berio, Luciano, 54, 65 collectives, prevalence of in early 1970s, 157
Bocquillon, Patrice, 214, 216, 232 Collegium Vocale Köln, 112
Boesmans, Philippe, 222 Couroupos, George, 34, 53, 65, 174
Born, Georgina, 249 Criton, Pascale, 130
Bouchaut, Alain, 215
Boucourechliev, André, 58, 123 Dahlhaus, Carl, 255
Archipels, 57 Dalbavie, Marc-André, 260
Boudreau, Walter, 54, 111, 113 Darmstadt Summer Courses, 1, 106–16, 158,
Boulez, Pierre, 19, 46, 56, 76–82, 147, 160, 173, 197, 241, 244
199, 201, 225, 235, 247, 260, 262, 263 l’Itinéraire group seminar at in 1982, 255–8
12 Notations, 73 Romanian spectral music at in 1972,
announces creation of IRCAM, 131 110–11
Figures, doubles, prismes, 86, 152 Darrow, Stanley, 28
influence on Grisey, 81–6 Debussy, Claude
Malraux affair, 163–4 La mer, 38
Penser la musique aujourd’hui, 77 Pelléas et Mélisande, 36
Piano Sonata No. 3, 64 Decoust, Michel, 235
Pli selon pli, 150 Degen, Helmut, 25

[292]
Index 293

Deleuze, Gilles, 130, 199, 214, 239, 252 Gagneux, Renaud, 31

on sound blocks, 154 Geay, Gérard, 31
Denis, Didier, 130 Glass, Philip, 104
Derrida, Jacques, 243 Górecki, Henryk, 223
de Vinogradov, Boris, 103, 174 Grisey, Gérard, 128, 176, 180, 197, 214, 216,
Domaine Musical, 54, 58, 159 234, 240, 247, 249, 255, 260, 266–9
closure of, 160–2 as accordionist, 19, 23, 26, 27–8
Grisey’s D’eau et de pierre performed at, acoustics readings, 114, 141–5
130–1 acoustics studies at the Laboratoire
Donaueschingen Musiktage, 215 d’Acoustique Musicale, 180–5
Duchamp, Marcel, 156 aleatoric music of, 58, 64, 65, 71
Dufourt, Hugues, 53, 144, 178, 198–201, 202, Anubis-Nout, 22, 27
213, 214, 216, 222–32, 234, 236, 247, 249, ‘À propos du son’, 115
255, 261, 262 on art and the artist, 13, 28, 268
Erewhon, 216, 222–7, 237 on atonality as non-existent, 33, 100
Grisey, correspondence with regarding auto-engendering of form from material,
naming their music, 1–2, 241–5 113, 254
on Grisey, 227 Charme, 61–3, 97
La tempesta d’après Giorgione, 225–7 cites Hindu theology, 98, 101
meets Risset and Chowning, 180 coloured silence, 67
Mura della città di Dite, 198 compositional schematism, 25, 65, 150
and Murail, 214 on his compositional training, 13
on Murail’s Sables, 186 correspondence with Dufourt regarding
‘Musique spectrale’, 234, 235, 237–40 naming their music, 1–2, 241–5
Saturne, 227–32 D’eau et de pierre, 26, 59, 61, 95, 96–100,
Sombre journée, 233 104, 113, 116–24, 130, 138, 170
Dusapin, Pascal, 247 declines to join l’Itinéraire, 159
Dussert, Jean-Max, 214, 232 degree of change, 99, 119, 150, 177, 183, 206
Dutilleux, Henri, 13, 31, 163 Dérives, 102, 147–56, 177, 188
Figures de résonances, 63 Deux madrigaux, 32
‘Devenir du son’, 1, 49, 90, 91, 115, 191, 197
Eimert, Herbert, 73 devout Catholicism of, 19, 32, 66
Éloy, Jean-Claude, 46, 54, 56, 81, 101–24, disapproves of the name ‘spectral music, 251
235 Dufourt on physical appearance of, 53
Faisceaux-diffractions, 103 Échanges, 63–8
Kâmakalâ, 102 écriture liminale, 1, 33, 76, 120, 234, 250,
on Pli selon pli, 82 251–5
Ensemble Intercontemporain, 3, 161, 207, 209, Étude en fa majeur (étude pour accordéon
222, 232, 247 no 2), 28
family of, 15, 18, 67
feedback group, 212 first commercially released recording, 31
Ferneyhough, Brian, 207, 228 first efforts at composition, 19
Festival d’Art Contemporain de Royan, 55, first music published, 28
69–72, 89, 137, 161, 186, 198, 212, 222 harmonic spectrum, 150, 170, 253
Festival d’Automne à Paris, 54, 155, 161 influence of Scelsi, 140–1
Fineberg, Joshua, 260 influence of Teilhard on, 33
Flaubert, Gustav, on art as science, 261, 265 initial harmony studies, 21
Fleuret, Maurice, 54, 57, 177, 223, 259 initial studies at the Paris Conservatoire, 28–9
French Ministry of Culture, 4, 52, 54, 56, 163, Initiation, 65–6
199, 213 instrumental synthesis, 92, 110, 172, 180, 193
294 Index

Grisey, Gérard (cont.) top student at school, 18

on inventing spectral music, 267 Transitoires, 59
on the key precepts of his music, 30 use of Boulez’s prisms technique, 5, 150–3
‘La Musique, le devenir des sons’, 251 use of classical rhetorical devices, 18
Les Chants de l’amour, 250 use of Messiaen’s personnages sonores
Les Espaces acoustiques, 58, 143, 172, 191, technique, 61, 92, 95, 97, 119
203, 245 Vagues, chemins, le souffle, 25, 58, 71–2,
‘L’Ombre du son’, 1 83–6, 102, 154
Magnificat, 30 and vitalism, 17, 144
on mapping art onto life, 17 Vortex temporum, 25
Mégalithes, 64–8 wins Prix de Rome, 96
on Messiaen as teacher, 36 youth and early training, 14–24
Modulations, 207–9 Grisey, Jocelyn Simon, 29, 67, 129, 244
morbidity, death, depression, 21–2, 29 Groupe de Recherches Musicales, 111, 168
music and beauty, 21 Groupe d’Étude et Réalisation Musicale, 56
music and religion, 19 Guézec, Jean-Pierre, 46
on music as being beyond language, 33, 58, 66 Guyonnet, Jacques, 199, 200, 225
music-theatre elements in, 58
‘Musique et espace’, 116 Haas, George Friedrich, 258
neutral sound archetypes, 121 Halbreich, Harry, 55, 186, 195, 250
on the Paris Conservatoire and French Helmholtz, Hermann von, 5, 178
music, 34 Henry, Pierre, 54
Partiels, 25, 37, 59, 91, 172, 185, 191–6, 252, Hiltbrand, Louis, 199
253 Hindemith, Paul, 25
Passacaille, 31 Holstein, Jean-Paul, 51
Perichorises, 66–7 Hommel, Friedrich, 241
Périodes, 141, 169–96 Hurel, Philippe, 260
periodicity, 98, 113
process music, 90, 98, 193, 245, 254 information theory, 5–7, 268
Prologue, 59, 140, 197, 204–7, 208 influence on Grisey, 183–5
Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, 22, 67, 129 International Society for Contemporary Music
resonance chords, 67, 82–3 (ISCM), 233, 234, 235
resultant tone harmonies, 114, 193–5, 254 IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination
‘Rétrouver une fonction musicale’, 100 Acoustique/Musique), 3, 4, 131, 160, 199,
and Romanticism, 22 201, 207, 213, 235, 246, 250, 260, 262
schematisation, 72, 76 l’Itinéraire’s reconcilement with, 246
sound figures, 59, 72, 92, 94, 95, 169, 192,
205, 208 Jacobi, Wolfgang, 27
sound metabolism, 90, 94, 99, 209 Capriccio for solo accordion, 27
spatialisation, 64, 70, 89–90, 233 Jicquel, André, 215
spectral chords, 59, 72, 83, 99, 113, 116, 154 Jolas, Betsy, 48
statistical parameterisation, 116, 150, 193 Journées de Musique Contemporaine, 54, 98
Stèle, 22
studies in Trossingen, 24–8 Koering, René, 235
studies with Degen, 25–7
studies with Dutilleux, 31–2 Labadie, Philippe, 215
studies with Marie, 91–2 Laboratoire d’Acoustique Musicale, Université
Tempus ex machina, 64, 233 Paris VI Jussieu, 6, 51, 109, 172, 207
‘Tempus ex machina: A Composer’s Grisey’s acoustics studies at, 181–5
Reflections on Musical Time’, 114 Lachenmann, Helmut, 264
Index 295

Landowski, Marcel, 56, 161, 162, 164 Méfano, Paul, 46, 123, 235
Leibowitz, René, 48 Messiaen, Olivier, 13, 19, 52, 53, 55, 69–70,
Leipp, Émile, 5, 13, 103, 181, 200, 245 135, 162, 164, 168, 207
Acoustique et musique, 142, 143 composition class, 35–40
Leiris, Michel, 53 Livre d’orgue, 60
Le Roux, Maurice, 55 personnages sonores technique, 60
Levinas, Emmanuel, 220 praises Murail’s music, 246
Levinas, Michaël, 53, 113, 157, 160, 200, 209, Quatre études de rythme, 46, 74
213, 216, 236, 245, 247, 265 Timbres-durées, 48
Appels, 206, 217, 218–20 Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine,
Arsis et thesis, 112 43
Concerto pour une piano-espace 2, 240 Turangalîla-symphonie, 96
Conférence des oiseaux, 216 Miereanu, Costin, Espaces au-delà du dernier,
Contrepoints irréels, 216 58
critique of spectral music, 216–18, 236, 256 Milhaud, Darius, 163
crossovers with Grisey, 206, 219–29 minimalism, 56, 116, 128
early training and influence of his father, Moles, Abraham, 5, 142, 243, 252
44–6 Monet, Claude, 211
on Grisey, 34 Mootz, Paul, 215
La Conférence des oiseaux, 260 Murail, Gérard, 136
Les Rires du Gilles, 256 Murail, Tristan, 50, 80, 146, 155, 173, 177, 198,
on the Paris Conservatoire and French 200, 202, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 234, 235,
music, 34 240, 245–50, 256, 260
‘Qu’est-ce que l’instrumental?’, 217, 256 acoustics discussions with Grisey, 138
sonic parasitism, 218 Altitude 8000, 47, 135, 136
Ligeti, György, 31, 240 Comme un œil suspendu et poli par le songe,
Melodien, 131 42
Requiem, 155 Cosmos privé, 136
seminar at Darmstadt 1972, 108 Couleur de mer, 133
‘States, Events, Transformations’, 108 Désintegrations, 237, 248–9
l’Itinéraire, 4, 56, 61, 130, 157–69, 173, 185, and Dufourt, 214
191, 198, 199, 201–3, 210, 212–16, 219, Dufourt on physical appearance of, 53
221, 232, 234, 236, 240, 247, 250 early studies, 43
concerts and stage at IRCAM, 246 first theoretical statement, 189
Ensemble d’Instruments Électroniques de forms l’Itinéraire, 158–67
l’Itinéraire (EIEI), 227 on frequential harmony, 248
group seminar at 1982 Darmstadt Summer Gondwana, 1, 236, 245
Courses, 258 harmonic spectrum, first use of, 174
La Barque mystique, 262
Mâche, François-Bernard, 182, 235 La Dérive des continents, 138
Mahler, Gustav, 174 Le Lac, 136
Maiguashca, Mesías, 198, 212, 240 Les Courants de l’espace, 222, 246
Maillard, Raymond, 215 Lovecraft, 139
Malraux, André, 55, 56, 128, 163 meeting with Scelsi, 136
Marie, Jean-Étienne, 48, 91, 96, 185, 196 Mémoire-érosion, 139, 185, 189–91
Concerto ‘Milieu divin’, 89, 104 on Messiaen as teacher, 36
MATH 72, 51–2, 158 Où tremblent les contours, 137
Mathews, Max, 6, 178, 180 Sables, 186–9
May ‘68 événements, 48–9, 53, 54, 57, 196 sound figures, 210, 211
meditative music, 100–6, 140 on spectral music, 245, 251, 263
296 Index

Murail, Tristan (cont.) Saariaho, Kaija, 258

‘Spectres et lutins’, 247 Sabouret, Jean-Pierre, 215
student music of, 132–8 Saisse, Philippe, 215
and Symbolism, 136, 211 Samuel, Claude, 55, 57, 69, 100
Territoires de l’oubli, 209–33, 240 Sand, Georges, on art as science, 265
Tigres de verre, 174 Scelsi, Giacinto, 69, 136–8, 140–1, 173, 247
Treize couleurs du soleil couchant, 210–11 influence on Grisey, 150
at the Villa Medici, 127–9 Schaeffer, Pierre, 5, 142, 181
Musica Elettronica Viva, 129 Solfège de l’objet sonore, 48
musique concrète, 54 Schoenberg, Arnold, 72, 80, 142, 155, 173
Musique en jeu, 53, 131, 168 on atonality as non-existent, 33
Farben, 25, 76
Nemescu, Octavian, Concentric, 110 Theory of Harmony, 33
Schubert, Franz, 25
Oeldorf group, 212 serialism, 4–5, 23, 72–81, 206, 208, 222, 228,
Ostendorf, Jens-Peter, 128, 198, 234 250, 254, 261, 263
antithesis with spectral music according to
Paris Conservatoire, 23, 34, 53, 159 Dufourt, 239
curricular reforms after May ‘68, 50 Boulez’s conception of, 76–8
serialism at, 47 develops into spectral music, 144–7, 177
Pellié, Franc˛oise, 215 as distinct from dodecaphony, 72–3
Penderecki, Krzysztof, De natura sonoris, 55 Grisey’s critique of, 23, 75–6, 81, 112
Percussions de Strasbourg, 223, 233 in late 1960s France, 46–7
Perspectives du XXème siècle, 234–7 statistical serialism, 5, 74–6, 156, 181
Petit, Jean-Louis, 54 Xenakis’s critique of, 74
Point-radiant, 50–1, 158 Shannon, Claude, 178
Pompidou, Claude, 67 Snowman, Nicholas, 247
Pompidou, Georges, 131, 155 spectral music, 1–9, 109, 114, 182, 185, 189,
Prix de Rome, 4, 49, 127 201–3, 223, 230, 233, 241, 248, 258
affinity with serialism, 261, 264
Rădulescu, Horațiu, 212, 222, 256 correspondence between Grisey and
presentation at Darmstadt 1972, 110 Dufourt regarding naming their music,
Ravel, Maurice, 29 241–5
Daphnis et Chloé, 38 Dufourt’s concept of, 237–40
Pavane pour une enfant défunte, 22 Éloy on, 236
Reibel, Guy, 49 influence of computer sound synthesis on,
Reich, Steve, 104 177–81
Rencontres Internationales de Musique Lachenmann on, 264
Contemporaine de Metz, 99, 121 Murail on, 186, 251
Renon, Geneviève, 159, 215 naming of, 234
Ricord, Christian Gabrielle Guez, 129 as paradigm shift, 7, 238
Riemann, Hugo, 26–7 Winckel and Leipp as source of spectral
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 130, 268 attitude, 144–7
Risset, Jean-Claude, 5, 109, 142, 174, 177, 178, spectrograph, 6, 207
180, 200, 202, 225, 235 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 13, 19, 31, 67, 121,
InHarmonique, 236 204, 255
Mutations, 179 coloured silence, 121
Romitelli, Fausto, 265 degree of change, 5, 98
Roquin, Louis, 39, 51, 176 Gruppen, 75
Rothko, Mark, 101 ‘. . . How Time Passes. . .’, 75
Index 297

Hymnen, 102 Villa Medici, 128, 158, 173

Kreuzspiel, 26, 73 Vivier, Claude, 111, 113, 212
Mantra, 112
on music as being beyond language, 115 Wagner, Richard, 25
seminar at Darmstadt 1972, 112–15 Das Rheingold, 37
Stimmung, 2, 60, 66, 110, 113–15, 121, 153, Webern, Anton von, 55
172, 218 Winckel, Fritz, 5, 171, 181, 251
Trans, 104, 139 influence on Grisey, 142–5
visits Messiaen’s class, 98 Vues nouvelles sur le monde des sons, 142
Zeitmaße, 26 Wolff, Jean-Claude, 31
Stravinsky, Igor, 46, 60
Xenakis, Iannis, 13, 54, 56, 74, 136, 150, 174,
Tabachnik, Michel, 121 209, 240
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 19 Darmstadt seminar 1972, 106–7
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 32–3, 89, 101, Eonta, 64
130 on Grisey, 96
Hymn of the Universe, 32 influence on Grisey, 88–93
Tessier, Roger, 51, 173, 213, 215, 220–2, 247 Metastaseis, 69
Clair-obscur, 221 Mikka, 206
early studies, 158–96 Nomos Gamma, 57
forms l’Itinéraire, 158–96 Nuits, 57
Héxade, 43, 221 sound metabolism, 5, 90, 99
Trièdre, 221 Terretektorh, 55, 70, 89
Tosatti, Vieru, 137
Trossingen, 23 Young, La Monte, 129, 202
Éloy on, 103
Val, Bernadette, 215 reception in France in 1972, 104–6
Valéry, Paul, 191, 261 resultant tone harmonies, 105
Valli, Rudi, 23
Vandenbogaerde, Fernand, 50, 235 Zbar, Michel, 130
Varèse, Edgard, 54, 200, 223 Zinsstag, Gérard, 215