Gerard Grisey
Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil
... As only few other composers, Gérard Grisey was a master at working in these various "altidudes", one who skilfully zoomed back and forth between micro- and macro-time, or, in Grisey's beautiful imagery, between human time and the extended time of whales and the extremely compressed time of insects. and this disposal of time, of the hearing perspevtive - Grisey certainly knew it - affords the music a power that touches on the metaphysical just as the texts of "Quatre chants" do. "Fertilised w…
Les Espaces Acoustiques
Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques is a groundbreaking work which defies assumptions about what music “ought” to be. Not for nothing did the composer describe it as “a great laboratory”, exploring the way we listen.The “Acoustic Spaces” cycle, begun in 1974 and completed in 1985, consists of six instrumental works that may be played consecutively, since each acoustic space extends the previous one. The unity of the whole is based on the formal similarity of the pieces and on the two acousti…
Vortex Temporum - Pèriodes
Gérard Grisey's cycle of compositions, Les Espaces Acoustiques, is considered one of his most significant works. Written between 1974 and 1985, it consists of six discrete pieces, for ensembles ranging in size from a solo viola with resonators to an orchestra of 84 players. In the cycle, the pieces progress from the smallest ensemble to the largest, and Périodes (1974), for seven players, is the second. The piece is a relatively early example of spectralism, a method of composition developed by …