The reference to Deleuze is doubly interesting and meaningful; the author of Différence et répétition is the originator of the 1970’s rebirth of Bergsonism. He has known how to evidence those aspects of Bergson’s thought compatible with the most anti-mechanistic instances of recent scientific speculation. .In the preface to Différence et répétition, Deleuze writes: ” In the wake of Samuel Butler, we discovered Erewhon, as meaning to a time, the nowhere, the original, and the here – now moved, altered, modified, always reconstructed. Neither empirical particularities nor abstract universal: cogito for a vanished ego. We believe in a world where individualizations are impersonal, and singolarities pre-individual: the splendor of ONE (one says, one speaks) “. Not by chance have the passage referred to by Grisey and the context surrounding it been commented on by Ilya Prigogine, perhaps the world’s most authoritative representative of the opening of the scientific world toward Bergson’s philosophy. This has taken place following important research in the field of thermo-dynamics on processes far from equilibrium for which non-linear relationships are valid. ” Of course – says Prigogine, referring to that very passage in Deleuze’ text – this is a rather strange thought for someone who, like us, has practiced the exclusion of that which cannot be observed as a basic principle and resource of new invention. And yet in some cases philosophers have preceded science by thinking what cannot be observed ” (44).
In the field of music, would we find ourselves facing the paradox of an aesthetic of the inaudible? The sonoral object is analyzed by the sonograph which offers a visual image within the limits set by the theory of signals; science, therefore, offers what can be observed and demonstrates the dynamic and transitory nature of matter; but it is up to the imagination to transform the potential into reality and the object, the etre vivant, into process, macroform. In this way, Grisey’s aesthetics finds an aperture through which to free the virtualities of otherwise inaudible material. It gives form to the inaudible or, better yet, to that which apeears so in purely objective representation. Even the most elementary sonoral object is not an atom comparable to a mathematical point, because its energy content has musical meaning only if it is considered inseparable from the way it is perceived, i. e. its duration. But duration is time relating to a phenomenon, it is experienced by the consciousness, and this is the most profound reason why intuition cannot establish the mathematic continuum. This had already been demonstrated by Hermann Weil: ” Bergson’s philosophy takes credit for having insisted on the profound extraneousness of the world of continuity as immediately experienced by the world relating to a phenomena, the durée” (55). Grisey arrives at Bergson and goes, on a philosophical plane, beyond Fechner; the object the finite, contains the infinite, but not an infinity of atoms. This was the road, going back to Leibniz, taken by Stockhausen to reduce the material of Kontakte to the modulation of micro-rhythmic events; the temporal equivalent of Leibniz’ principle: “les régles du fini réussissent dans l’infini et viceversa”.
Grisey does not pose the problem of the differential threshold as an interval at the limit of perceptibility or as the generating element of a system of pitch (Wronski), but of the given potentialities in events that are apparently indivisible when contracted in time. Besides, sonographic analysic demonstrates that sound is irreducibly complex with its own organic history; the virtualities it contains must be realized by the composer. Music, the becoming of sounds, derives mainly from a flow of favored potentialities, from the “history of the sounds which make it up ” and orients the flow by concealing its complexity, not by means of cuts dictated by the choice of pre-arranged grids, but with continuity, through branching off, through differences and, in any case, not through branching off, through differences and, in any case, not through hierarchy or cancelling of th other way. Dominion is that of the life and history of sound and not of its drowining itself in chaos. It is a question of finding the instruments to avoid this pitfall, to create islands or order and to diminish the entropy of memory. Repetition and difference, and hypnosis of psychotropic time are some of the means, perhaps the only ones, that the composer has at his disposal in order to interfere in the listener’s physiological rhythm. If, by means of electro-acoustic manipulations, time has been conquered, spatialized and transformed into centimeters of tape or a numeric sequence and this operation has opened the way for technical reproducibility and electronic synthesis, then Grisey’s technoforms have succeeded in amplifyng and rendering audible the detail, slight fluctuations and the attack of each partial. In his music every beat and every combination sound is revealed and evidenced because it belongs to the evolution and genetic mutation of the sound itself. Grisey’s aesthetics is deeply anti-informatic because, availing himself of the techniques of elaboration of signals, he has found the way to subtract material from technical domination by re-appropriating essential time. Grisey uses temporal expansion to create a rhythmic silence where listening to the microphonic world is favored by the principle of indetermination. In the hypnosis of psychotropic time, therefore, the cosmic network should be shown; object becomes process, local becomes global and chords become bands of timbre so that the slightest alteration in the spectral content obtained through orchestral simulation of the techniques of electronic synthesis becomes noticeable.
Everything that the deficiencies of our ears allow communications engineers to eliminate as “fine particulars”, in spite of obtaining an efficient codification, is turned to good account. But did we not start with the theory of information? What is the price – one might object – to be paid for not falling into aporia? This is to say, how can we be faithful to scientific premises and yet concede space to the imagination? Grisey has refused to choose between the catalogue of electric sounds (Risset) and an ingenuous anti-technological naturalism, i. e. the immediate contact with nature indicated by Heisenberg as the only road for art in the era of atomic physics.
Starting from his extraordinary sensitivity and a philosophical mixture, the ingredients of which find their common denominator in a sort of holistic vision of sonoral matter, he has succeeded in giving form to the ideal experiment: the expansion – from outside the ordinary – of musical time.
But coherently, by composing such processes, he pays the price demanded by the principle of uncertainty: the quasi-periodicity of sound and the a priori choice of the harmonic spectrum of the low E, which characterizes – albeit tranformed, compressed and expanded – the entire cycle of Les espaces acoustiques.
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