Gerard Grisey – Prologue

Gerard Grisey said in an interview:

We are musicians and our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture

Grisey as said to be a founder of the genre of Spectral Music, where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. This is something which is completely foreign to me, so I thought that I should give this analysis a go, and see how it turns out…

Grisey’s “Prologue” for solo viola – the first movement of his “Les Espaces Acoustiques” – paints an eerie picture that blurs together form and frenzy; and makes great use of silences and pause. Indeed, as is with his spectral music compositions, Grisey expects his “sounds to evolve through time”. I believe this particular work does this extremely well, as you can almost physically feel the music building throughout, with the opening being rather melodic, and at 12.30 it becomes a mass of sound completely losing whatever tonal center it may have had. From about that point, the music becomes less melodic and more aesthetic, giving an atmospheric idea as opposed to a melodic idea.

The opening few phrases are very melodic, each phrase bookended by two accented B notes. This motif carries on throughout the work, with the phrases changing in length and becoming less predictable for the listener.  However it this unpredictability that allows the listener to sit and listen to the work in its entirety (approx. 17 minutes). It’s the mix between melody and atmosphere that keeps listeners on their toes. But then… it just… ends. Just like any other phrase in this work, it ends. But doesn’t being again. It took me about 15 seconds to realise that the work had ended.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this work, as its origin and concept is very different to anything I would normally listen to. It would have been nice to see the score, or whatever was used to construct the piece, but I believe I still got plenty out of it by just listening.

Emma

Gerard Grisey’s Prologue

I suspect that if I had listened to this piece about 4 months ago, I would have disliked it – immensly. However, whilst I still don’t think I would like to compose in the manner that Grisey does, I found myself able to enjoy this piece of music and appreciate its subtle aspects of melodic transformation.

This piece is follow solo viola, and in listening it is apparent that Grisey’s focus is not transformation of melodic material but rather the timbral aspects presented. Thus, I found the melody somewhat unusual – the pharsing would appear logical, yet the cadences were not. It would seem that this was caused due to the melody being composed to be specifically “non-melodic!” So, whilst a sense of lyricism is not prevalent in this work, what would particularly impress the listener is the continual development of new tone colours, which are countered against the backdrop of an occaisional repeating lower sound. this would, I believe, function as a kind of sonic map and compass – showing where you left and how far you have travelled in the timbral sense.

I think you could therefore draw a comparison with Grisey’s work and some of the symphonic works of Mozart and other classical composers. Whilst Mozart, Haydn and others focussed on melodic transformation, Grisey employs timbral transformation, leaving a starting point, transforming the sound and returning.

On a final note, today is Saturday. Therefore,

GO THE MIGHTY COLLINGWOOD MAGPIES!

Timothy

Gerard Grisey- Prologue

 

Gerard Grisey

Remember when Tom was showing us his piece exploring different tuning, well, I think this is a piece that Tom should reference and make note of.

“Prologue” is a solo viola piece that explores tuning and pitch.

Essentially we have the repetition of an expanding and unfolding shape. We recognise the shape through rhythmic repetition that allows us to identify the increasing and expanding intervals with the motifs contour.
We also have a trend to focus on one pitch, both rearticulated and sustained, almost as a tool to get a sense of our tuning perception at which point we break away from and get micro-tones- or leaps to out-of-tune-sounding pitches- I guess- hard to see exactly what is going on without a score.
It is interesting to note that the suggested focal points- the notes at which our attention is drawn too has strong harmonics, thus giving us a rich set of frequencies that we can align the unconventional tuning with.

Although it sounds like the piece would be uninteresting and perhaps just like an experiment- the way Grisey has structured the piece appears to be working from an additive process. He will give us little information and lots of silence, but as we progress we get less silence and more information- logical if you think that it is training and testing our ears to something new, then he will bring our attention on just a couple of pitches or the repetition of one interval. This is successful in making a scientific approach in music musical.

One point in the piece that I wasn’t sure about was the change in articulation- most of the notes were clearly separated but about half way through we get the addition of slurs and legatos. However, this was only a trajectory to get to a point where we lose a sense of the purely musicality to a more atmospheric sound world using only gliding and sliding playing from the viola. I found this an interesting test for our ears, because we recognise the same kind of principles at play in the first half of the piece- exploration of pitch and tuning, only our ears are not so ready to take offense- I think this occurs because we associate atmospheric type sounds to be less pitch orientated.

Pru