Gérard Grisey advanced Debussy’s sonic world

Gérard Grisey was a French composer in thrall to the acoustical properties of sound. His music has little metre or pulse but it trembles with a hushed intensity of emotion. Grisey died in 1998, at the age of 52, of an aneurysm. He is credited with founding the ‘spectralist’ approach to composition – a term Grisey himself never accepted, but which provides a connecting thread between figures as dissimilar as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.

Grisey’s compositional method was termed ‘spectral’ because it borrowed from the acoustic data provided by spectrograms (visual representations of sound frequencies) and treated sound as the fundamental building block. Spectral music lacks traditional melody; instead, chords slowly dissolve into one another, instruments fade in and out, and a sustained block of sound changes gradually over time, exposing the hidden layers inside a single note. ‘Music is made with sounds, not with notes,’ Grisey liked to say. His spectral sound-world is steeped in beauty and a strange kind of sensuality. Grisey is recognised as one of the most important voices in contemporary classical music.

He was born 80 years ago to a working-class family in Belfort, north-eastern France. His father ran a garage there that specialised in car batteries, and was militant in the Resistance. Grisey was at primary school when he begged his parents for an accordion. Before long he was a prodigy on the instrument. (‘Gérard Grisey, Five Years Old, Plays The Blue Danube On His Accordion’, boasted a local newspaper headline.) All his life, Grisey associated the accordion with his humble origins. After studying music at Germany’s Trossingen Conservatory, he worked until 1972 with the composer Olivier Messiaen in Paris, where he won many prizes at the Conservatoire. Messiaen’s influence on Grisey was incalculable.

Everything Messiaen wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. In Messiaen’s music, Grisey divined a preternatural stillness that spoke to the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism. Like Messiaen, Grisey had been brought up a devout Catholic. Messiaen’s most famous composition, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), was written in 1941 at a German prisoner of war camp in Silesia where the composer was being held captive. It considers the abolition of time as proclaimed by the Angel of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. Grisey’s last completed work, the extraordinary Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four Songs to Cross the Threshold), composed in 1997, is a death-haunted meditation on the end of times. Scored for soprano and 15 instruments, it moves with a slow, melancholy grace reminiscent of Messiaen’s wartime quartet. The texts are drawn from a variety of cultures. ‘The Death of Civilisation’ uses a litany of inscriptions from ancient Egyptian sarcophagi. There is an adventurousness in the doleful music that suggested new horizons but, tragically, Grisey died before it was performed.

In the early 1970s, Grisey attended composition classes under Stockhausen in Darmstadt. Grisey admired Stockhausen, whose mesmeric 1968 work for six voices, Stimmung, is often said to foreshadow spectral music. (Its atmosphere of om-like inward contemplativeness certainly chimed with Grisey’s interest in so-called drone music.) Grisey was wary, however, of the German composer’s dogmatic rejection of concert hall harmony and symphony. His aversion to Stockhausen’s ideological systems and prescriptions of any kind may be one reason why he was never quite an established composer in France, whatever the success enjoyed by some of his work there. Grisey first came to prominence in France in 1974 with his ground-breaking orchestral composition Dérives, which blurred the boundaries between durational time, timbre and harmony, and abandoned concrete ideas for process and resonance. Claude Debussy’s translation of the sea into orchestra in La Mer provided a model for Grisey, who took non-western harmonic developments a step further into Stockhausen territory. Dérives and other of Grisey’s mid-1970s compositions caress the ear in an undeniably gorgeous way.

Debussy was Grisey’s key influence after Messiaen. One of history’s most sensual composers, Debussy was in thrall to Indian classical music and other eastern sonorities (among them the Japanese koto used by David Bowie to ambient effect on his Heroes album). Grisey’s own thirst for ‘un-French’ music sometimes put him at loggerheads with the old guard, just as it had Debussy a century earlier. According to his biographer Jeffrey Arlo Brown, Grisey was regarded with suspicion by his peers at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was Professor of Composition from 1982 to 1986. Grisey’s was thought to be a drug-induced music for hippies to ‘space out to’, recalled the American composer Evan Ziporyn, who was a Berkeley student at the time. Grisey’s ability to create new possibilities in sound was precisely what made him so modern; in that regard he was a latter-day Debussy. 

In 1889, the story goes, Debussy had been transfixed by the Javanese gamelan orchestras he saw perform at the Paris World Fair. The percussive cling-clang of gongs and metallophones influenced the abstract moods of his Préludes for solo piano, which are built on a gamelan-like idea of movement through stasis. Grisey’s masterpiece, the cycle of six huge instrumental pieces he composed between 1974 and 1985, Les espaces acoustiques (Acoustic Spaces), interweaves Debussy-like lullaby motifs with ghostly sonorities and moments of unexpected Wagnerian grandeur. The overlapping passage that ends Périodes and begins Partiels – the cycle’s two most powerful works – is among the most dramatic music Grisey ever wrote. Heavily inspired by human respiration, the music’s heartbeat rhythm begins to fray and exhaust itself, until the whole thing shimmers like a mass of pointillist particles. Les espaces acoustiques is a signpost in the development of contemporary music; like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, it took music beyond anything conceived before. 

The cycle’s fourth work, Modulations, was dedicated to Messiaen on his 70th birthday in December 1978. Grisey was then studying acoustics and electro-acoustics at the science faculty of Paris VI University (now merged with the Sorbonne). While at the university he founded a group of composers – les spectralistes – who sought to reconnect music with the basic properties of sound and attempted to transfer techniques developed for electronic music to live instrumental performances. Tristan Murail and Hugues Dufourt were the prominent group members. A debate still rages as to whether it was Grisey or Murail who wrote the first spectral composition. Dufourt is in no doubt that it was Grisey: ‘Gérard had something of a guru about him’, he recalls, adding: ‘He had a way of influencing people – and he influenced Murail for a very long time.’

In his later years, Grisey was a much-featured composer at contemporary music festivals in Berlin, Strasbourg and Huddersfield. Audiences often felt transported by what they heard. (‘I was led through vast landscapes full of epic beauties, with breathtaking transitions, transformations, and metamorphoses,’ remembered one concertgoer.) By the early 1990s, Grisey had become a revered teacher and theoretician, whose music was recorded by leading ensembles and conductors, including Pierre Boulez. His penultimate chamber piece, Vortex temporum (1996), completed two years before his sudden death, takes a motif from Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé as a departure point for an exploration of musical time. The music’s slow-changing textures belie Grisey’s interest in the impressionist sonic sketch as perfected by Ravel and his contemporary Debussy. Sound is not merely something we hear, in Gérard Grisey’s view, but a universe we inhabit. No late 20th century French composer had a more refined or fastidious ear for the possibilities inherent in sound.