Les espaces acoustiques

Tuesday 14 October, 7.30pm / Queen Elizabeth Hall

Gérard Grisey decsribed Les espaces acoustiques, a cycle of six pieces, as 'a great laboratory'. It is widely considered to be the breakthrough piece in what has become known as 'spectral music', yet it has not been heard in its entirety in the UK. On 14 October the London Sinfonietta joins forces with the Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble to give the UK premiere, conducted by the composer's friend George Benjamin.

Below Julian Anderson, also a friend of Grisey, questions why it has taken so long for Les espaces acoustiques to reach the UK and introduces some of the ideas behind Grisey's music and the monumental cycle that represents the summit of his career.

You will also find suggested further listening and live performance at the bottom of this page.

Full details about the concert and booking information

An Adventurer in Sound

Julian Anderson on Grisey

The first UK performance of Gérard Grisey's cycle of six pieces Les espaces acoustiques (Acoustic Spaces, 1974 - 1985) is a major cultural event by any standards. But the fact that it has taken 23 years for this extraordinary cycle of works to be heard here is a curious reflection of Grisey's paradoxical status in Britain. In the early 1980s word spread amongst new music enthusiasts of a new type of music being created in Paris by Grisey, his colleague Tristan Murail and other younger pupils of Olivier Messiaen. Their music was reputed to use novel kinds of tunings, harmonies and textures, whilst also being surprisingly beautiful to the ear. For purely accidental reasons, Murail's work was played early on in the UK and enjoyed immediate success, whereas Grisey remained almost entirely unheard here until the mid-1990s. Yet recordings one heard suggested that here was one of the most consistently original voices in French music since Boulez.

When I arrived in Paris in 1987 it became clear that the new movement in French music had acquired a name - spectral music. This term was actually coined by the composer Hugues Dufort and was not approved of by either Murail nor especially Grisey himself. In brief, these composers were turning sharply away from what they saw as the abstruse pattern-making of post-war serialism and its successors. They wanted to take music back to its roots in the sheer stuff of sound itself - back to its acoustic origins and our perception of sounds in time. This entailed exploring so called "sound spectra" - the internal components of sounds, hence the term spectral - and reconstituting these artificially on live instruments. For example, at the opening of Grisey's Partiels you will hear a loud trombone note, followed by a mysterious chord from the rest of the group. This chord is in reality an instrumental resynthesis of the trombone note's partials - a magical effect. But if such delicious sounds were all there was to Grisey's music, it would be of little lasting interest. In fact, Grisey was very excited above all by the change of sounds over time: his music is in a constant state of evolution from one sound texture to another. So the name spectral is very misleading. In its obsession with continuously changing processes this music has something in common with minimalism and like it makes much use of repetition. But it is much less static and infinitely more dramatic in its sound worlds and use of extreme instrumental sonorities.

One of the first works Grisey composed in this style was a work for seven players called Périodes (1974) , but due to the open ended nature of the musical processes involved he promptly extended this into a much larger work, Partiels, for 18 players (1975). He then suddenly realised an entire set of works could be created to run one into the other, each taking the acoustical explorations a step further and each for a larger group than the last. In this way he leads us from an initially simple lullaby for solo viola (Prologue ) step-by-step into a torrent of magnificent colours for large orchestra (Transitoires and Epilogue ). Each individual piece nevertheless remains a satisfying entity in itself which can be played either in isolation or together with the others. Elements of theatre crop up, too: short passages of dramatised action for various players throughout the cycle highlight the endlessly volatile soundworld and provide what Grisey termed "bridges between concert time and everyday time". At the end of Partiels Grisey even goes so far as to stage a latter day Farewell Symphony, with the players and conductor packing up as the music disintegrates around them. (It erupts back into rude life right at the start of the following piece, Modulations .)

Whilst the obsession with acoustics and the nature of sound might seem to be quite as abstruse a topic as anything in post-war serialism, Grisey's music is anything but cut off from the world. It communicates with startling immediacy and directness to listeners who know nothing of acoustic spectra, but have open and willing ears. In fact, Grisey was profoundly interested in all areas of culture being a particular connoisseur of ancient Egyptian art which crops up more than once as an influence in supposedly abstract works. But he refused any immediately easy solution to the problem of communication. "Art which doesn't dare is no art at all" he once said, and there is no doubt that both players and listeners have to be prepared for the unexpected at every turn. How sadly appropriate that this most unpredictable of recent composers should die accidentally just having completed a work on the subject of death, the dark and disturbing Quatre chants pour Franchir Le Seuil which the London Sinfonietta premiered six months after his death ten years ago. The London Sinfonietta will revive this piece at the Venice Biennale in October, and it is to be heard on November 30 in the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Philharmonia Orchestra's 'Music of Today' concerts.

Tonight's conductor, the composer George Benjamin, was one of the first enthusiasts for spectral music outside France. Grisey thought Benjamin's UK premiere, with the London Sinfonietta in 1995, of his Le temps et l'écume was the finest performance of that piece he'd ever heard. In its wake the London Sinfonietta immediately commissioned Grisey to compose what turned out to be his last work for a concert conducted by Benjamin. There was a close rapport between the two composers, especially in the last years of Grisey's life. Benjamin's performances of Grisey remain uniquely exciting and close to the composer's intentions.

Since I was first startled by Partiels in 1982, I have lost count of the number of fellow composers - of widely differing styles - who say they found in that work, as I did, a gateway to an entirely new sound world. In central Europe the complete Les espaces acoustiques cycle has now been played numerous times and recorded twice. On the two occasions I have heard it live, I've been not only bowled over by the force of the music itself but deeply struck by the way it has caught the imagination of large audiences. It is high time that the British public was given this chance to share in Grisey's adventures and this performance of Les espaces acoustiques is the perfect opportunity to plunge in at the deep end.

© Julian Anderson

Julian Anderson (b.1967) studied composition with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Oliver Knussen. In 1987 he studied privately with Tristan Murail in France, and published some of the first literature in English about spectral composition. He was a close friend of Grisey and visited his composition class at the Paris Conservatoire as a guest.

Les espaces acoustiques on CD

Accord 465 386-2: Gérard Caussé (viola)/Ensemble Court-Circuit/Pierre-André Valade/Frankfurter Museumorchester/Sylvain Cambreling

soundclips on this page are taken from the above recording

Kairos: Garth Knox (viola)/Asko Ensemble/WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Stefan Asbury

More live performances

Saturday 4 October 2008

Grisey: Quatre chants pour Franchir Le Seuil / London Sinfonietta / Valdine Anderson / Diego Masson / Venice Biennale / 8.00pm / La Fenice / Venice

Sunday 30 November 2008

Grisey: Quatre chants pour Franchir Le Seuil / Philharmonia Orchestra / Music of Today / 6.00pm / Royal Festival Hall / London

Saturday 7 February 2009

Tristan Murail: Total Immersion / BBC Symphony Orchestra Composer Day / Barbican Centre / London

Recommended further listening

Music by other composers influenced by 'spectral' music

Where recordings are available the appropriate label is indicated in brackets.

Kaija Saariaho Lichtbogen / Du Cristal / …à la fumée (recorded on Ondine)
Claude Vivier Lonely Child / Bouchara (Phillips)
Magnus Lindberg Joy / Aura / Cantigas (Sony)
György Ligeti Violin Concerto / Horn Concerto (Sony)
Enno Poppe Holz (Wergo)
Richard Causton Phoenix (London Sinfonietta Label)
George Benjamin At First Light (Nimbus)
Julian Anderson Khorovod / Alhambra Fantasy (Ondine)
Hugues Dufourt Hommage à Charles Negre
Tristan Murail Gondwana (Naïve) / Désintégrations / Time and Again