by Angelo Orcalli
The essay presented here is a portion of a larger opus on Grisey and Xenakis which Angelo Orcalli has undertaken. It is an excerpt from his book Gérard Grisey in the aesthetics of the Itinéraire, publisched by Imprimatur of Padua in 1990. In view of its appearance in Sonus and in agreement with the magazine’s editorial staff, Orcalli has made several changes in order to guarantee its coherence and continuity. Analytical portions have been partially sacrificed in order to offer the reader the contextuality of Grisey’s work in its entirety in the context of the Itninéraire, and a precise aesthetic comment on the music and thought of the French composer. Readers and scholars should keep this in mind. One last note: for reasons of space the original notes on the text have been omitted. In this case as well, the author has directed referrals to the bibliography that appears at the end of the essay printed here. Each footnote number refers to the progressive order of the bibliography.
INTRODUCTION
In presenting the aesthetic orientation of the Itinéraire group to the Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, Tristan Murail wrote: “The most brutal and meaningful revolution to strike the world of music in recent years did not germinate from debate on musical writing (serial or other) but, much more profoundly, from the world of sounds themselves, in other words in the sonoral universe that the composer is invited to administrate” (36).
This is 1980, and Edgar Varèse hoped-for revolution and the enlargement of music’s sonoral universe that he pursued constitute, then, an established starting point; but how did this come about? What progress in the fields of acoustics and psycho-acoustics (besides Helmholtz and Fletcher) has created the conditions necessary for the realization of that “brutal” change? And lastly, what are the consequent transformations in methods of composing and musical writing? The second part of this essay proposes to examine the most recent developments in the “revolution of complex sounds” by means of the force lines tranced, beginning with the second half of the 70’s, by Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail and Michaël Levinas, a group of young French composers who, in ten years or so, have laid the foundation for a new musical aesthetic. I say new, because it radically differs from the practice of neo-serialism insofar as it denies the reduction of sound to a mere combination of parameters and considers the search for a nouvelle simplicité or any form of neo-expressionist reflux unsupportable.
The aesthetics of “spectral” music avails itself, first of all, of the patrimony of scientific knowledge offered by the analysis of sounds and by the use of techniques transforming acoustic signals. One must begin from this exploration of the world of sounds because, with its reflection on the data from micrographic representation of sound, the Itinéraire group has developed completely unbeard-of categories of musical thought and has produced compositions which give rise to synthetic totalities and have been conceived as an expansion of a natural process present in contracted form on the sonoral material. Their works develop musical writing capable of representing the new dimensions of sound rendered observable by magnetic recording and sonographic analysis. Thus, in acoustic-optic conversion, the Itinéraire ‘s spectral music (21) has found not only an instrument of exploration into the internal structure of sounds, but has also laid the foundation for a way of composing capable of projecting therein the complexity of morphological instability.
Their conception of sonoral material evidences in a musical setting the propension of certain physics, going back to Oersted and in a certain measure to Faraday, toward an anti-mechanistic vision of natural phenomena, the paradigms of which find their terms of definition in anti-atomism hinging on the physics of the continuum, in the unitary global cenception of the universe not as a machine but as a sort of invisible organism, and in the tendency to defer the explanation of the multiplicity of phenomena to a subjected spatial structure no longer passive recepticle of corpuscles but pervaded by force fields. Sonoral objects, like material ones, are considered zones of energy concentration and centers of intersection of force lines, true primary realities of the universe. Of the group’s creative results, those of Gérard Grisey will be particularly considered. His musical research proceeds from the sonoral material in relation to time researched in its phenomenological essence. An idea of form is born, which does not derive from the a posteriori development of starting material made up of melodic cells, of sonoral complexes and durations. Continuous mutation of the figurations is, instead, suggested by the becoming of sounds (devenir des sons ), their history, and the different processes of transformation inherent in the sound itself as though studied under a microscope. Grisey’s works are developed according to essentially timbral procedures of articulation which overcome the artificial discontinuity of the organization in pluri-parametric series, giving the lie to the widely-believed assumption of musical semiology, according to which – as Nattiez believes – timbre should seem vertical, fixed in time and incapable of creating, alone, a becoming (39).
In the following pages I shall try to summarize the most salient phases through which we have arrived at what Murail calls “the revolution of complex sounds “. TIME FORMS: NUMBER AND DRAMA Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail and Michaël Levinas belong, together with Peter Eötvös, Jonathan Harvey, York Höller and Emmanuel Nuñes, to a generation of composers that has assimilated the practice of electro-acoustic study, embracing also the theoric implications generated from acoustic-optic conversion. After directly experiencing Live Electronics and analogous techniques, they have tried for themselves the new conceptual instruments of digital analysis-syntesis. They oppose the analytic tendencies of post-Weberism with synthesis and interaction, liquidating every stereotyped category of musical thought. No reason exists, except a cultural one, they aver, for distinguishing timbre from harmony; between the two there actually exists a continuum like, analogously, the continuity between rhythm and intensity, or between rhythm and frequency.
The composer, therefore, must observe the sonoral universe beyond the grids (serial or otherwise) and work on the differences and relationships between elements, not on the relationships between objects and absolute reference points (38). Itinéraire’s music is above all, as Grisey specifies, differential (24), because it is an attempt at integrating all sonoral categories, exalting their qualities but at the same time avoiding the creation of hierarchies and levelling. The composer, operating on relationships, has the task of stressing the importance of the qualitative or quantitative nature of the difference which, once accepted as fundamental, allows him to organize tensions. “Music then is the becoming of sounds ” (24); and becoming here is understood as if the sound possessed a history and an organic evolution, the virtualities of which should be favored and potentiated by proceeding on the acoustic aura irradiated by objects and not on the combinatoriality of traditional languages that articulate notes and not sounds. Placed directly in connection with hearing, without linguistic mediations, the tensions of the sound should be grasped, as well as relationships immediately apparent to perception. Acoustic analysis shows us an extremely rich and articulated sonoral universe, an interweave of correlations between parameters, to the complexity of which Itinéraire’s music is no exception. One might say therefore that it is liminal, because it desires to evidence the threshold (limen, trans. note) where psycho-acoustic interactions are produced among parameters and play on their ambiguity (24).
Lastly, having transfused the theoric-experimental patrimony of electro-acoustics into his own music inspires Grisey to define it as “transitory because it radicalizes, in the first place, the dynamism of the sound understood as a force field and not as an inanimate object, and because it aims, secondly, at sublimating the material itself to the advantage of pure sonoral becoming” (24). In 1980, for a series of lessons he gave at Darmstadt’s Ferienkurse, Grisey wrote a voluminous essay entitled Tempus ex Machina. Réflexions d’un compositeur sur le temps musical. Some years earlier, exactly between 1973 and 1974, he had written Dérives (for two orchestral groups) and completed, in 1977, the first four parts of his cycle Les espaces acoustiques, which is made up of the following compositions: Periodes, for seven instrumentalists (1974); Partiels, for sixteen or eighteen instrumentalists (1974); Prologue for solo viola (1976); Modulations, for thirty-three instrumentalists (1976-77); Transitoires, for large orchestra (1980-81); and Epilogue, for four solo horns and large orchestra (1985). Lastly, in 1979 he produced Tempus ex Machina, for six percussionists and Jour, contre-jour, for thirteen instrumentalists, electric organ and magnetic tape. The theoretic starting point for research on sonoral material in relation to time is declaredly Moles’ theory of information. Grisey proposes substituting the arbitrary and generally dualistic categories with which attempts have been made to classify durations: short-long, ternary-binary, rational-irrational values, symmetry-asymmetry, with a scale of complexity deduced from the theory of information, which would be valuable in directly returning to the phenomena of musical time just as they are perceived and in allowing us to glimpse a continuity denied by the divisions of the hierarchic organization of neo-serial techniques. Boulez’ tables are therefore contrasted with the following sheme (25):
Predictability
A) Periodicity maximum Order
B) Dynamic-continuous medium l continuos acceleration l continuous deceleration
C) Dynamic-continuous weak l acceleration or deceleration by degrees or by elision l statistic acceleration or deceleration
D) Statistic nothing l totally unpredictable division of durations l maximum discontinuity
E) Smooth Disorder l rhythmic silence As can be seen, the table groups the phenomena into classes from the simple to the complex, and from order to disorder, according to a criterion of the predictability of events (25).
This scheme regards musical time in the same terms in which electro-acoustic experience suggests studying the sonoral material, whether perceived as rhythm scansion (impulses with a frequency lower that 16 Hz), as the degree of jaggedness of the melodic intervals, or as the degree of inharmony in the timbral substance. If Boulez’ technique gives spatial shape to temporal dimension in order to allow it to correspond to the predominant field of pitch (12), on the contrary, the morphological complexities emerging from the most recent acoustic analyses demonstrate the unstable and fluctuating character of sonoral material, incapable of being reduced to the vector sum of independent parameters. In this way the possibility is opened of re-thinking musical time as an indicsrete multiplicity: a dominion of non-abstract virtualities, according to the organic paradigm followed by the new science of sound.
The revolution in complex sounds thus offers Grisey a scientific base from which to disagree with what he calls the utopia of static spatial vision of time, and to support a theoretic point of view substantially different from the one held by many twentieth-century musicians tied to a geometric concemption of temporal arganization of form. His criticism has singled out not only Boulez’ abstract classifications of musical technique (smooth time, striated time, etc.), but in a larger sense any form of applying mathematic proportions (aural section, Fibonacci series, stochastic procedures, etc.), which are largely devoid of phenomenological relevence, since the perception of time is anything but absolute and chronometric, to the temporal sructure of the composition. In most cases, Grisey affirms, it was expected that the listener should be able to memorize all the durations or that he should place himself in the middle of the work’s total duration in order to globally grasp its temporal symmetries (25).
How would it be possible to overcome mathematical time, the reversibility of which demands that the listener transcend his own limits of perceptive organization and memorization, without relinquishing the possibility of composing musical time? Through which compositive criteria and procedures would it be possible to control time and therefore the conditions of its formal reversibility without separating form from the way it is perceived in the irreversible flux of sounds? Finding himself with this timeworn problematic, Grisey seeks stable rudiments from which to begin his search for a “phenomenologically essential” time. The theory of information in Moles’ formulation allows him first of all to demonstrate that the intelligibility of every message is conditioned by its level of complexity. Since the human recipient is able to globally perceive, as far as form is concerned, only a limited number of information elements, it must be the structuralization and internal organization which, by increasing the redundancy of the message, allows its comprehension. Thus, the listener avoids being submerged by originality which in this context is synonymous with complexity.
The individual chooses several forms in the message, and each of these is the expression of a predictability or, better, of a pre-audibility, the degree of which is none other than a measure of the consistency of the phenomenon, a rate of regularity which allows the forms themselves to come forth. Pre-audibility, therefore, is based on its capacity to anticipate, judging from what has already been listened to, what will come next and to imagine the future of phenomenon, based on what has already been memorized. The concept of periodicity is an example of how a phenomenon ordered in time is capable of generating forms (34). Repetition, therefore, and not the presence of abstract symmetries of spatial nature, constitutes the principal instrument suggested by the theory of information in diminishing the level of complexity of the musical message. The table indicated above takes into consideration the most regular and ordered form of repetition: periodicity. Grisey adheres to the definition of rhythm proposed by Moles, according to which the appearance of an isochronism, approximative though it may be, creates expectation by the mere fact of being perceptible as such.
On the contrary, a completely irregular series of events ends up by cancelling all expectation, and thus the listener ‘s attention is not projected ahead, since an aleatory state shuts the state of expectation off, producing instead a stasis, robbing time of directionality. Also on the scale of rhythm there are two poles: absolute periodicity – the regular repetition of an impulse – on one hand, and an aleatory state on the other; both end up producing disinterest just as what happens with the “pure” periodicity of the sinusoidal oscillator and the murmur of white sound. Classic acoustics pitted noise against sound, reconducting the latter to the concept of periodic event in order to simplify the mathematic treatment. it was assumed a priori that sound was a periodic signal and therefore capable of decomposing into sinusoidal waves of multiple frequencies of the fundamental (f, 2f, .., nf..).
The new paradigm, instead, considers instrumental (not percussive) sounds as quasi-periodic events; periodicity, as understood mathematically, represents only an ideal limit which can only be approached by electronic instruments. In this way, a breach has been opened in the rationalistic wall of division practiced by classical acoustics between “regular” sounds and rhythms that are quantifiable and absolutely repeatable and reversible, invariants of Cartesian geometry, and the indeterminateness of the flow of sensations: unstable images, the flowing contours of which crisscross back and forth into one another. That which Michel Serres still regards as problem of music as “irreversible but saturated, engorged and thick with reversible” because it is supported by acoustics in which every sound, “every signal, falls into periodic order” (49), finds in the new science of sound a solution that, in spite of everything, does not necessarily resort to Lucretian atomism. It is a question of re-thinking rhythm (i.e. the periodicity of phenomena belonging to our own temporal scale) in terms that are consistent with the new paradigm. It follows that absolute periodicity cannot be interpreted either as basic material or as a unit of rhythmic structure. If anything, it constitutes the ideal reference point for the perception of time, just as sinusoidal sound is for the perception of pitch, and it must never be considered an a priori fundamental of hierarchic system (25). The analysis of sonoral substance indicates, rather, that in “nature” it is opportune to speak of quantity of periodicity or degree of order present in the temporal organization of events. It is from this perspective that Grisey introduces the notion of périodicité floue.
The work Periodes arranges periodic events which shift slightly from a fixed point of reference: like the periodocity of heartbeats, breathing, or walking (see Ex. 1, taken from Periodes ). In his works Grisey follows rhythmic periodicity in the same way a composer of electronic music searches for the exact rate of phase-displacement to program in order to render electronic periodicity vivante without destroying its character; a difference must always emerge to make the material aesthetically appreciable. Integrand part of musical time, periodicity should be completely exploited, vanquishing the obsessive denials that have characterized the serial experience. Besides being an irreplaceable compositive means for the sonoral message intelligible, it is likewise immutable since it derives from the interaction of the sonoral material. The practice of electro-acoustic teaches that the components of sounds should not be considered separately, according to procedures often used in serial music, but understood as a complex weave of relationships between parameters (26). With the assertion of the organic paradigm, sonoral material loses its characterization as a precisely-drawn object, as if it were a body in space or a crystalline-substance model of spatial periodicity.
It takes on, instead, a dimension that is essentially temporal, unstable and full of virtualities. Grisey plays on the ambiguities of the parameters and on the possibilities of crisscrossing, passing from beats that color and animate the timbre to those that, falling into the category of rhythm, become perceptible as impulses if appropriately favored and amplified. There ensue regular pulsations, the duration and intensity of which are subordinate to the evolution of the dynamic entanglement of the interactant sonoral material. Two examples from the work Partiels, considered by many the programmatic manifesto of Itinéraire aesthetics, may clarify these concepts. Page 17 of the score, at [15]; the first and second B-flat clarinets (the instruments play as written) play D=146.8 Hz and C=134.64 Hz (C raised by a quarter-tone), the dynamic profile goes from ppp to fff only to later decrescendo; the interaction of the two sounds results in a beat of 12.2 Hz and the listener would only just perceive it as a rhythmic impulse if the wooden drum did not intervene to amplify it with its rhythm of about 12 Hz (2/4, =1/88). Likewise, on page 19 of the score, five measures before [17], Ex. 2, the horn and trombone play respectively C-sharp = 69.3 Hz and B# = 60.55 Hz (B lowered by a sixth-tone).
In this case as well, beats are generated, realized rhythmically by the bass tom-tom with mute, one pulsation every 0.115 seconds (2/4,@ =1/104), which is equivalent to the 8.7 Hz corresponding to the arithmetic difference – frequency of beat – between the fundamental frequencies produced by the two brass instruments. Intensity, rhythm and timbre are closely connected to form a single complex event. These stylistic devices are recurrent in Grisey’s scores and in them we can already notice the force of a method of composition that is essentially synthetic and capable of grasping the intimate correlations between the parameters of sound in relation to perception. Inseparable from the subject who perceives and memorizes it, the sonoral material in Grisey’s formulations loses its character of abstract numerical objectivity in order to demonstrate its virtual and continuous multiplicity. There arises a method of composition which, leaving behind an abstract predefinition of the entirety of the possible solutions, thus suceeds in carrying out and expanding the local potentialities of interaction between events so as to derive a formal precess. In Grisey’s music, tempos rarely have determining structural values; they are of use, locally, in obtaining the expansion and compression of sequences. It is, instead, the total duration of the sequence – as the composer himself sustains – which is structurally important and not the unit of measure. From this freedom of movement issues the “biological” rhythm according to which large sections of his works are organized. In fact, Grisey ‘s musical writing has two sources of inspiration: one of technical nature, deriving from the knowledge and utilization of techniques like additive synthesis, ring modulation, frequency modulation, etc., and the other, probably more prevalent, linked to bioform.
This latter is a distinctive factor in Grisey’s compositions; he stands out from the other members of the Itinéraire for this very characteristic. To place in consideration more complex examples of the way Grisey composes musical time, we must now examine the second category, the dynamic-continuos. The composer presents above all Weber-Fechner’s Law: S = k log E (where S indicates the sensation and E the physical stimulus) to which he attributes a totally general value because, in his opinion, it regulates the perception of the durations, of the pitches and of the intensities. These relations are actually out-of- date in many aspects. On the basis of more up-to-date experimental research, S.S. Stevens has proposed the substitution of Fechner’s law with a law formulated thus: ß S = k (E/E°) in which S indicates sensorial intensity, E and E° are respectively the intensity of the physical stimulus and the threshold of intensity, k depends of the unit of measure and ß varies with the sensorial modality in question. Substantially, Stevens proposes the assumption that to equal ratios of stimuli correspond ratios of sensations and not differences, as Fechner’s psycho-physics states. Stevens’s theory has shown itself particularly convincing in the study of the relations between the intensity of sound (I) and the sonoral level (sone) (L). Such a relation, approximately expressed by the equation 1/3 L = c (I) , has been widely accepted in recent treatises on musical acoustics by Juan Roderer, Donald Hall, John Backus and Arthur Benade; the latter, in his Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics, underlines how, in spite of the fact that it is unsupported by experimental data, Fechner’s hypothesis has cast such a spell of intellectual attraction on scientists inclined toward philosophy that it is often spoken of as Weber- Fechner’s “law” (10)!
Grisey, instead; follows Leipp, who considers Fechner’s “law” approximately valid, although he recognizes its limits, in particular as far as the sensation of intensity is concerned (29) . Stockhausen too had pointed out the necessity of adopting for durations (analogously to frequential intervals) logarhithmic relations, considering Messiaen’s additive scale as unsuitable. But for Grisey it is not a matter of obtaining a chromatic distribution of the temporal continuum. Fechner’s hypothesis is assumed instead to confirm a substantial homogeneousness and continuity among the parameters in the relation between physical and psychic. Recognizing that there is only one modality of perception common to acoustic quantities, Grisey therefore relies on the feasibility of finding general rules with which to alter, locally and in a continuous way, the periodicity of a sequence by means of progressive acceleration or deceleration. We’re not talking about grids but instruments in control of the temporal continuum, so that we can regulate the degree of tension and the velocity of the formal process. Grisey presents three diagrams which express the same number of functional realtions between the number of events and the units of time (see fig. 1). The first graph represents a periodic succession (one event every four seconds), the second an example of acceleration obtained by compressing the tempos according to arithmetic progression, and the last depicts a geometric progression. If perception of duration is regulated by Fechner’s law, contraction of the temporal intervals in decreasing geometric progression is noticed as a regular reduction of durations according to the quantity itself, but this does not happen in arithmetic succession which is heard as an acceleration, at first slow and later faster and faster. With these graphs one can verify the variations in density of events; acceleration renders the present more dense, and overloads the listener’s memory, causing him to lose his capacity for judging the degree of correlation of the sequence, overwhelmed by a growing flow of information as he is. Expectation disappears and the listener is literally projected toward what he doesn’t yet know. The rise of his biological tempo and the rise of the musical tempo added together cause him to lose all memory.
Rarefaction, on the contrary, decelerates the process, tension decreases and “the slowing down provokes a sort of expectation in the vacuum of the present (…), the listener is dragged back because the rise in musical tempo has in a certain way been upset ” (25). Two examples will allow us to follow the musical application of these concepts; the first, excerpted from Periodes (pages 13-15 in the score), shows how, from the maximum density of the continuo glissandi, we pass on to the discrete. Then, through successive rarefactions, there is obtained an effect of progressive slowing down, until the tension dies out. Variations are controlled by elementary laws without resorting to distributions of probability which to Xenakis seemed the only means of recovering the dominio over the “irraisonnée” dispersion produced by serial manipulations. Instead, the search for intermediate degrees collocated between periodicity and stochastic causality belongs to Itinéraire aesthetics, and in this may be noted the determinant influence of electro-acoustic experiences. Through the use of continuous functions, Grisey knows how to organize tensions that may also be quite strong, but which are then skillfully re-equilibrated; faithful to the metaphor of the living organism, he has, in fact, defined his music as the search for an ecology of sounds (26).
The second useful example comes from Partiels (pages 38-39 of the score) and demonstrates an ecceleration. The progressive thickening produced by the woodwinds, which reaches its apex two measures before [31], blends with the fff chromatic cluster of the accordians (see Ex. 3), and the polyphony is so dense that the sonoral material is ever more condensed into a single complex event. In the cycle Espaces Acousticques, Partiels is followed by Modulations which, in my opinion, constitutes the highest culmination realized up till now by spectral music; this work can be numbered, with Stockhausen’s Inori (1973-74), among the masterpieces of that period. A further example of how the tempopral evolution of sonoral material can be controlled is offered by the first of the eleven sections into which the work is divided. The first section lasts 225″ and is divided into thirteen micro-states. The universe of Modulations ensues from a rapid and dry sequence of fff chords formed by generative sounds produced by the winds, over which are superimposed additional ones produced by the strings and sustained by percussion instruments and Hammond organ (Ex. 4).
The frequential field is immediately invaded from FO (tuba) to F§6 (I violin); the material is contracted in time, and after the first leaps it unfolds, by means of expanding the duration of the micro-states, causing a process of fluctuating slowing-down provoked by the non-periodic succession of tempos (2/4, 7/10, 10/16, 7/16 etc.). After the first convulsions, there is established a breathing-like rhythm provoked by an oscillation between the rapid tremolo entrance of the strings (fff > ppp) and that of the winds (f >ppp) together with the percussion instruments. The density slowly decreases and the succession of micro-states shrinks the texture more and more; the cosmos of Modulations takes form through breath. The material, from an initial state of inharmony, proceeds towards the luminous harmonic field of low E, foundation of the entire composition. The universe shows its order and swells, spreading with progressive temporal lengthening the chordal blocks which tend, in this way, to coagulate in timbral events. In the general diminishing of complexity, attention is stimulated for the internal variations of the timbral mixture, perceived as though the listener were immersed in a continuous flow of sonoral material. Grisey’s music is differential in the sense that it organizes tensions on the basis of its perceptive capacity to compare that which is about to be heard with what has been mastered in the past and laid away in the memory; thus, there is obviously a consequent need to explore the thresholds of perception between periodicity on one hand and accelleration/deceleration on the other. According to him, musicians of the future will have to pay attention to chrono-biology, a science which one day will offer: “the temporal image of man, corollary of the anatomic, purely spatial image” (25).
Are not acceleration and deceleration, like different periodicities, part and parcel of our daily experiences? Are we not immersed in day-night circardian rhythms? However, nature often presents an alteration between continuity and discontinuity, as can easily be ascertained from geologic stratifications. The dynamic-discontinuous category may, in music, be the source of acceleration and dramatization essential in avoiding an excessive predictability of events. Grisey presents three other diagrams (see fig. 2); the first demonstrates how to obtain acceleration through elision: that which, on the basis of what has been heard before, one expects to happen; then, immediately and brusquely, the present arrives. The elements expected in the future perfect have been eliminated and in this way the process has undergone a compression perceived as discontinuity. The second graph depicts values statistically fluctuating around the curve which indicates the geometric acceleration of the duration. The flowing sense of the process is fixed, but it is a question of understanding just how greatly statistic disparities will compromise directionality.
Grisey’s answer is formulated in qualitative terms; the Gestalt of a temporal sequence (see fig. 2) remains vectorially oriented, whatever the statistic meandering may be, provided the curve is not too long or the ambit of the differences so strong that the surprise effect ends up by directing attention to the single events of the present to the detriment of the global perception of the sequence itself. Functional relations are indeed useful for fixing possible forms of temporal orientation and they point to ways of creating temporal correlations in the sonoral message, regulaties which, distinguishing themselves from the aleatory state, emerge as perceptively recognizable. With the statistic division of the durations which neutralizes predictive powers and leads to stasis of time, our picture of the categories which classify rhythm is complete; beyond, there is non-rhythm, the total absence of the segmentation of time – rhythmic silence. The analysis of threshold conditions, for which the insurgence of noise in such rhythmic forms take place, is the equivalent of the research, on the scale of frequencies and timbres, into what Moles calls the least spectral structuralization necessary for timbral individuality to emerge from white noise (noise coloring). In this sense the principle of uncertainty of the perception of signals can also be extended to the skeleton of time. Grisey, on the basis of Moles’ argumentation (34), states this principle in the following way: that what we gain in dynamism, we lose in unpredictability and viceversa. In this context the term unpredictability assumes the meaning of the lack of regularity of the message, but also, and this is the characterizing aspect of Grisey’s reflection, of the impossibility on the listener’s part of judging the direction of the process and of grasping the differences separating the objects.
The appearance of a form in substance is subordinated to the velocity of the passage of time, and therefore to the quantity of information transmitted in a certain time lapse. The categories utilized by Grisey substitute traditional rhythmic syntax and delineate a concept of musical time substantially different both from Stockhausen’s solutions and from the polyrhythmic stratifications of Ligeti’s Atmospheres, where a high ration of entropy produces the same static effect already explored by Xenakis in 1956, in Pithoprakta, with the direct use of thermo-dynamic models. This solution made a great effect but it was also a blind alley from which the composer emerged by retracing the road of polyrhythm paved, however, not with traditional models, but with those of algebra (Persephassa). Grisey has understood the master’s lesson; in the metaphor of the living organism one might say that the tendency to chaos belonging to closed thermodynamic systems and the increase in entropy manifested in the field of transmission as erosion of the signal (which perennially haunts communications engineers) are laws not directly applicable to living beings since, in the opposite case, they would be excluded from all rhythmic activity.
The second principle of thermodynamics, in its traditional formulation, is applied to closed and balanced systems. Biological beings, on the other hand, are open systems; they exchange energy and metter with with their environment. To the research group headed by Ilya Prigogine (44) goes the credit for having formulated an extended version of the second principle, applicable to both isolated and open systems. It seems that there is a renaissance of the Lucretian idea that matter is capable of abandoning the state of undifferentiated equilibrium to bring forth spontaneous order. But if the most recent scientific discoveries induce us to believe that chaos is not matter’s only direction, then Grisey’s thesis, according to which it is possible to organize islands of order from a musical point of view, becomes acceptable as well. This could lead us to believe that art is not merely consolatory, and we should no longer believe in Monod’s affirmation, according to which “the same source of disturbance “of noise” which, in a non-living, i.e. non-repetitive, system would little by little abolish every structure, is at the origin of the evolution in the biosphere” (35). Would it then follow that aesthetics can be scientifically based, yet without starting from the assumption of total disorder as happens in Xenakis?
The order mentioned by Grisey is not indeed of logic-mathematic nature. It does not arise from the absolute reversibility and spatialization of time; it is found instead in the sonoral material, in its evolving and fluctuating nature, marked by a process of birth and decadence that is irreversible but not totally chaotic. Ligeti has already said (30) that the nucleus of form might be recognized in a single sound, indicating in the temporal dimension the place where these contradictions between form and matter might be composed. Grisey goes further, countering chronological time with his phenomenologically essential one, sought with the help of graphics which can be considered the temporal equivalents of the spatial transformations studied by D’Arcy Thompson to demonstrate the existence of mathematical rules in the growth of organic forms. Mathematics intervenes then, not as a science of quantity, but as a science of qualitatively understood forms, not as the theory of the number of permutations of given elements, but as a representation of the possible ways of connection and dependency of dimensions, in conformity with a law of movement. Isn’t it perhaps Weber-Fechner’s law that links exterior movement to interior? Didn’t Fechner say in his Zend-Avesta that a root exists – a common being, even if it manifests itself differently under the exterior or interior aspect? Aren’t we really talking about the same process which only appears different from a phenomenological point of view? Adherence to the paradigm of organic connection, of great complexity, and of the interrelating and integration of all sonoral parameters in relation to perception seems, for Grisey, to be a way of contending with statistical reduction, chronometric parcelling and the destruction of our inner duration.
THE COSMIC NETWORK
The expressions differential, liminal and transitory deserve a closer examination, since for Grisey it is unthinkable to speculate on musical time without referring to its relation to sonoral material and the way in which this occupies the durations. It is indeed the study of what he calls the “chair du temps” to place the meanings of these categories in the proper light, especially the transitoriness of musical form. We have seen how complexity, understood in the sense of the theory of information, must not exceed the perceptibility of the message; this means that the composer must intervene on the degree of predictability or, rather, on the ratio of information introduced by each sonoral event. Grisey says, “Let’s imagine a sonoral event A followed by another event B. Between A and B exists what we might call the thickness of the present, such thickness is not constant, it expands or contracts according to the event. If the difference between A and B is minimal, if, in other words, B is perfectly predictable, time seems to flow at a certain rate. On the contrary, if B is radically different, unpredicatble, time will go by at another rate ” (25).
Musical time is composed by directly intervening on the degree of pre-audibility. The perception of an unexpected acoustic shock alters its linear progression: chronometric time and perceived duration do not correspond, because the sudden charge of information attracts the listener’s attention to itself, leaving a “violent trace on the memory”. Anchored to the present moment, we are less ready to grasp the evolution of the musical discourse and so time contracts. On the contrary, a succession of predictable events grants the listener a wider margin for perceiving this evolution: time expands. The analysis has shifted to sonoral material which, with its informative content, deforms the perception of chronometric time; its curve varies in relation to the sonoral mass occupying it. It follows that the quantity of information cannot be judged solely in relation to the number of events in the time unit (density), but in relation to the nature of the events themselves, which contributes to altering the elapse rate of the temporal flux. Perception is sensitive to the action the spectral content exercise on the duration. Interesting examples derive from the electro-acoustic practice of inversion: because of the dissymmetry of the sonoral object, information is no longer concentrated in the first instants, but, progressively distributed, it produces in the listener a kind of suspense. Hearing instead the same sound, but in the normal recording direction, the ear cannot follow in detail what happens in too short a time. In the onset phase, the rapid variation of spectral content present in the first milliseconds cannot be analyzed by hearing; it is synthetically noticed as a noise that colors and characterizes the timbre.
Therefore, in order to hear the microscopic structure of sounds, an expansion of time is necessary. Recording techniques enable us to slow down the speed of the tape and the sonoral objects may be heard as if they were observed under a magnifying glass. One has, says Schaeffer, a loss of general vision which escapes from the temporal sonoral screen like a projection of light that is larger than the projection screen itself (48).
Conversely, as Moles sustains, “acceleration produces a thickening of information; by shortening time one obtains an authentic temporal telescope capable of focusing attention on what before was the jurisdiction of memory” (23). Electro-acoustics has added of experimental elements to Grisey’s reflection on the feasibility of intervening in the ambit of different temporal scales. Evidently, it is not a question of pure application of the technical operations described in the instrumental field; expansion and contraction transcend such a level to become structural elements of composition. A series of extremely predictable sonoral events concedes a wide disponibility to perception and the smallest event acquires importance. The consequent expanded time and the implicit predictability make up the conditions needed to perceive the microphonic structure of the sound. It is as if the zoom effect, in drawing nearer and nearer to the inner structure of sounds, was not capable of functioning unless it was in relation to an inverse effect concerning the duration. An example is offered by Partiels, which begins with a raucous and unstable sonority: E = 41.2 Hz fourth string of the contrabass played high on the bridge (ASP) sfffz, the position rendering the fundamental almost imperceptible (Ex. 5); instead, we hear the octave, E = 82.4 Hz true generator (f) of the acoustic spectrum, reinforced by the trombone, which plays it f with the Plunger mute.
The contrabass repeats the trombone’s sustained E, with more and more exact periodicity. Having reached the rhythmic stability of one sound per second, the contrabass leaves low E and enters ppp without vibrato the octave (E = 164.8 Hz = 2f) to reach, after about 4.5 seconds, ff, apex of his dynamic profile, while the fundamental, entrusted solely to the trombone, enters immediately f only to decrescendo during the course of the event. At approximately O.8 seconds follows, beginning ppp, the B = 247.2 Hz = 3f) played by the B-flat clarinet, and then the G-sharp (412 Hz=5f) of the violoncello and so on, in ever closer succession, the D# (lowered by a sixth-tone, 576.8 Hz = 7f) and the F-sharp (741.6 Hz = 9f) of the viola still without vibrato, the A^ (raised by a quarter-tone, 906.4 Hz = 11f) of the piccolo, and lastly, almost synchronously c^ (raised by a quarter-tone, 1071 Hz = 13f), F (1401 Hz = 17f), and varying with the repreise, D-sharp (1236 Hz = 15f), G (1565.6 Hz = 19f), or C raised by a quarter-tone (13f), A# (1730.4 Hz = 21f) in the violin (no vibrato). These harmonic partials, which appear without creating ruptures or discontinuity “as though they gushed from the trombone”, at the beginning of the second measure after the initial caesura, reach the maximum intensity established by the dynamic envelope. The lower harmonics follow a more pronounced profile and they are entrusted to instruments capable of reaching appreciable intensities (trombone f >, contrabass ppp<f>, clarinet ppp<f>, violoncello ppp<f>), while the variations of intensity in the higher harmonic components are contained in less sharp profiles (flute ppp<mf>, viola ppp <mp> and violins <p>).
The instruments are not limited to actuating, even partially, the harmonic spectrum generated by E= 82.4 Hz; through asynchronic antrances and dynamic variations they simulate the transitory nature of the sonoral object germinated from a hybridization of timbre between stringed and brass instruments. The elementary periodicity of the rhythmic cell in the contrabass, the harmonic proportions of the spectrum tuned to the sixth-tone, the evolution of extension of the single partials designed according to substantially consistent profiles with quasi-periodic conditions and, lastly a skillful use of instrumentation responding to a progressive ebbing of intensity in the upper harmonic components: all of these contribute to assure the prevalently periodic regime of the etre vivant. The seductive acoustic image and the “hypnosis” which, in my opinion, it produces are not derived from the object in itself, but from its temporal expansion and the consequent amplification carried out by the orchestral group. Both dynamism and the internal life of the sound persented at the beginning are rendered audible, but Grisey intends for the object to acquire aesthetic value only insofar as it becomes a process. The succession in which the spectral components appear re-proposes, in extremely expanded proportions, the asynchrony of the partials and evidences thus a characteristic aspect of the strings and the brass which can be distinguished in this from the woodwind family for example (apart from the bassoon). Similarly, the dynamic variations present in the transitory phases of sound – of a few hundredths of a second – are projected on a temporal screen enlarged 40 to 50 times.
The duration of onset is extended over two measures in 3/4 for a total chronometric time of 5 seconds @= 1/70 to 1/80. After all the components have reached the “stationary phase”, the band is prolonged ad libitum until it disappears. The entire episode, from the rhythmic cell in the contrabass, is repeated again by the reduced grouping of Periodes, to which Partiels is closely linked, then at [1] the spectrum is enriched by the contribution of other components. Chronometric time is stabilized (@ =1/60, in 2/4) , the instrumental grouping is almost complete: the horn reinforces the E in the trombone and at the end of the “transitory”, which lasts two measures, the glockenspiel and the accordian intervene to realize mp several even components (4f, 8f, 18f, 20f) and with the addition of the piccolo to produce a further expansion of the unevens (23f, 25f). The expansion of the orchestra also achieves a higher formantic zone (typical of the brass and in particular of the trombone), permitting a structurization of timbre that is easier to articulate. The following band lasts 10 seconds, and then the phase of “decline” begins, only to die out in a measure in 11/16 covered by the contrabass’ rhythmic cell, in varied form now, to announce a growing instability.
The figure presented at [1] is in fact re-proposed, slightly varied. At each reprise of the initial texture, morphological mutations, more and more pronounced, are added. Grisey, therefore, is playing on two levels: he renders the harmonic components present in the sound of the contrabass and trombone audible and at the same time he attempts to blend the instruments into a single timbral amalgam in order to obtain an acoustic image in which the different sonoral sources are not retraceable. Here the composer is helped by the liminal aspects of instrumental synthesis. To achieve an optimum fusion annulling the instruments’ identity, the intonation of the partials should be perfect, something that is difficult to achieve due to conditioning tied, among other things, to tempered tuning. Still, in the ambit of acceptable approximation, the liminal threshold of pitches allows the perception of a synthetic spectrum by neutralizing the chordal character of the band. Additive synthesis has been widely used by electro-acoustic music since its very origins. We are talking about superposing pure frequential components endowed with variable coefficients of magnitude. To speak of instrumental additive synthesis – as Grisey does in the specific case of Partiels – signifies, then, the intention that the instruments of the classical orchestra should perform a function similar to that of electronic oscillators. Instruments do not emit pure sounds, however; if anything they behave like mechanical filters with response times determined by their configuration and physical structure. This would make it seem as if it would be more opportune to speak of subtractive synthesis, which is carried out through filtering, as is widely used in the electronic simulation of traditional instruments. The definition of additive, moreover, doesn’t seem very clear to us, but an analogy with the use of colors in painting may perhaps help us to understand that between instrumental synthesis and electronic synthesis. When we speak of bands of pure light, we are talking about the additive synthesis of colors. The painter who mixes his colors is not actually carrying out such a synthesis since he doesn’t add light, but the entire spectrum, apart from the wave-lengths that are absorbed.
To find an analogy of synthesis according to additive principles, those relative to light, in painting, we must avail ourselves of the pointillistic technique used by the neo-impressionists. Close observation of Seurat’s paintings demonstrates how the precise proximity of small dots of unmixed color forms new colors when seen from a distance. Instrumental synthesis is cleary distinguished from electronic anti-objectualism. The former seeks, based on its fund of knowledge acquired from electro-acoustics, to define relations of time, frequential configurations and dynamic relations between sounds of orchestral origin, natural sounds, so far as to demolish their individual pregnancy. We liberate ourselves from the dictatorship of material by starting from the material itself, relyng on the timbre-chord ambiguity, acting on the liminal aspects of perception and frustrating the organizing activity of the cognitive functions which tends to compress every virtuality into objects. It is not a question of finding the Urphaenomenon of sound, the originating element which Stockhausen had glimpsed in the purity of sinusoidal functions, opening the way for electronic additive synthesis, although in the end he was convinced that the feasibility of photographically reproducing “objects” does not eliminate the use of natural color. It should be noticed that instrumental additive synthesis presents aspects that are paradoxical if one considers that the use of this compositive technique gives form to a macroscopically amplified spectrum that is not comparable to usual timbral images of instruments. The partials, in fact, in taking on macroscopic relevance, become quite audible, and yet perception tends to globally integrate the acoustic image, giving up on distinguishing the different sonoral sources without, however, succeeding in exactly classifying the new timbre. Starting points of many of his works, sonographic representations of single orchestral sounds are used like photograms, developed and enlarged by orchestral sections. Similarly, the score becomes the bi-dimensional projection of the acoustic space of representation of sound. Temporal expansion becomes the essential element of Grisey’s musical concept, so closely linked to the relation between sonoral object and macroform. The more the auditory sensitivity to perceive the microphonic world grows, the more the temporal one shrinks, to the point that longer durations are needed in order to approach the internal strucuture of the sound.
“We are dealing with a law of perception that can be formulated in the following way: the sensitivity of auditory perception is inversely proportional to that of temporal perception ” (25). The influence of the principle of uncertainty formulated by Moles in analogy with the principle of indetermination of quantum physics is clear. The reference model is drawn from the theory of communications, the paradigms of which are extended to psycho-acoustics. The inner ear should act, in functional terms, like a bank of parallel filters tuned to superimposed to the same laws and limits of transmission systems. As a matter of fact, if we consider, as Moles explains, that the only way of reducing a disturbance drowning a message in the transmission channel and particularly on the receiver’s part is to diminish the range of transmitted frequencies, then we can understand how particularizing a priori the nature of the signal by means of filtering permits us to extract from the background noise of the environment a phenomenon – weak though it may be – and describe its form, always supposing that we have a long enough time at our disposition (34). But observation time cannot be disproportionately elongated; phenomena in nature are not periodic and may undergo transformations within the temporal interval of observation. In general, it is know that with a narrow-band filter it is possible to obtain a good resolution in frequency to the detriment of the feasibility of obtaining a response with rapid changes in the magnitude of the signal. On the contrary, with a wide-band filter what we lose in resolution we gain in response time. This latter is, therefore, inversely proportional to the passing frequency band.
In the case of filters as in that of the ear, say Moles, the role played by perception time is useful only in integrating the rhythmic impulses received and in differentiating this rhythmicity from the total arrhythmia of background noise. If the difference is great then sensation appears and order and predictability may be perceptibly distinguished from disorder. The self-correlation of the message takes command of the organism to the detriment of the contingency of noise. From this point of view we might say that the sensation of form is the perception of self-correlation of the sonoral material, the nature of which is expressed in periodicity. There is also a second constant of time which Schaeffer and Moles call density of the present, on the order of 50 milliseconds, which intervenes at the level of temporal discrimination of two successive events. The study of the psycho-acoustic relationships between frequency and time, undertaken during the 30’s by Shower and Bidulph, contributed to the develoment of the granular theory of sound, proposed by Gabor in 1946. These relationships quantify, in the field of perception, limits analogous to those formulated by Heisenberg for the application of classical models on the atomic world. For Grisey, the discontinuity of matter and its tendency to condense itself into objects are the result of a contraction of time. On the other hand, if time is expanded, it permits us to “travel” inside the sound in virtue of the effect of enormous enlargement; the high degree of predictability increases the perceptive sensitivity and the flow of sonoral matter becomes indivisible. Sudden leaps disappear in favor of the continuity of transformations from one state to another on the part of the sonoral material. Thus, the sound demonstrates its continuous and essentially transitory nature: the sonoral objectc is nothing more that the contraction of a process. And if the process can be considered an expanded object, then the form and the becoming of the sound end up one and the same. Object and form can therefore be considered as one single phenomenon observed through different scales of enlargement. The composition of objects is manifested by means of language that relates and combines them. Perceived as a separate entity, the object permits us to “ascertain the process of its Gestalt and apply a combinatoriality” (25).
Seen as a process, form, instead, renders the internal dynamism of the sound legible; under this aspect it is the manifestation of becoming, of the very life of the sonoral object. Consequently, the properties of material cannot be explained by means of atomic models; indeed, the closer one draws to it, the more one discovers its continuity. The new paradigms of science present a universe in which every element is totally correlated to everything because of the impossibility of separating the parts from the totality, the subject from the object under observation. Science, says Grisey, lets us discover or rediscover the importance of the horizontal network of relationships existing in the cosmos (26). Here can be found traces of Bergsonism, which has particularly influenced new models of scientific thought ever since the 1970’s. And so, science has rediscovered (wiederentdecken) something that previous concepts, those of eighteenth-century mechanism, had kept hidden. But isn’t it true that Bergson, in the very physics of the electro-magnetic field (so dear to the Itinéraire), had already predicted that atomism would be surpassed? ” If there is one truth – he wrote in Matter and Memory – that science has placed utterly beyond dispute, it is that of a reciprocal action by all parts of matter – and, referring to Faraday’s theories, he continued – as we gradually approach the ultimate elements of matter, we see the discontinuity which our perception has established on the surface disappear. Psychological analysis had already revealed to us that such discontinuity is relative to our needs: every natural philosophy ends up by finding it incompatible with the general properties of matter ” (11).
Atoms lose their consistency of primitive reality to become intersections of force lines. Yet there is more for Bergson as well as for Grisey: discontinuity is relative to the contraction of the duaration. ” May we not perhaps imagine, for example, that irreducibility between two perceived colors depends especially on the brief duration in which the trillions of vibrations they complete in one of our instants are contracted? If we could spread out this duration, experience it, in other words, with a slower rhythm, then as the rhythm gradually slows down would we see perhaps the colors pale and spread out in successive impressions, still colored certainly, but always on the point of mingling with pure vibrations? Where the rhythm of movement is slow enough to match with the habits of our consciousness – as happens, for example, with the lowest notes in the scale – do we not perhaps feel the perceived quality decompose by itself into repeated and successive vibrations united among themselves by an inner continuity?” (11).
But if form is conceived not as a composition of objects or a linguistic fact stemming from the instrumental gesture, but as a process of expansion of the duration, does this not mean – to resume, upside-down, Moles’ affirmation on the accelleration of magnetic tape – moving the memory forward and attenuating attention? Leaving space for duration means then re-ascending Bergson’s cone of memory and deviating from the immediate perception that contracts the presente or renders it discrete. It seems that there is a real similarity with Bergson’s idea according to which art delays action towards representation, passing on from perception through memory-image to pure memory. According to Moles, the functions normally indicated by the term memory differ because of their distinctive temporal expansion. On one hand, we can point out the instantaneous duration of perception, i. e. its minimal time, and on the other, the memory necessary for perceiving temporal structures, a sort of phosphorescence of immediate perception with the double function of creating the presence of sensations and assuring the “contonuity of being”.
This second memory dates the events of concsciousness and renders possible the assumption of form, as it constitutes the condition necessary for perceiving self-correlation. Lastly, the mnemonic function of long-term retention – although subject to degradation and erosion, it determines the action of past experience on the present behavior. Thus, we can accept, albeit in terms of recent psychology, Bergson’s tripartition: sensation, memory-image, pure memory. Remaining faithful to Moles’ ideas and thus indirectly to those of Bergson, Grisey thinks in terms of degrees of presence of sound, from the smallest interval of perception to the density of the present, where immediate memory is added, up to the more or less remote past, territory of cognitive memory. In composing, one can favor the instant and the immediate memory of the sonoral event, or rely on the listener’s cognitive memory which confronts the elements of the musical discourse strung along the long temporal period. In the first case the macroform is an emanation, the irradiation of an instant, while in the second everything is posed a priori. But the cognitive memory is subject to erosion and condemned to degradation by systems destined to see their own entropy increased. As we have seen, the composer suggests several ways of avoiding the entropic pitfall: repetition, violent and unexpected contrasts or an increase in the degree of pre-audibility tending toward the infinite; maximal temporal expansion produces “an intensely seductive or hypnotic effect”, rhythmic absence. Through the extreme expansion of time, “we become deaf to all the forms of relations between events, melodies, harmony, articulation, gesture and rhythm” (25).
The duration can spread out and overwhelm the common language solidified in instrumental practice, thus obtaining a stoppage of traditional musical discourse. “Let’s imagine ourselves – says Grisey – as the hero of Castaneda’s works who contemplates the water from the riverbank, then let us progressively and mentally reduce ourselves to the size of the water molecules until we ourselves become molecules: we would certainly be surrounded by an unfamiliar landascape, but would we still feel the force that carries these molecules of water toward the sea? ” (25). The composer is interested in the potentiality of imagining structures no longer derived from only one type of perception and the experience described by Castaneda is actually the effect of an intoxication due to the use of mescaline. In his General Psychopathology, Karl Jasper, commenting on the consciousness of duration of the recent past and on the acceleration and slowing down of the flow of time, mentions mescalinic ecstasy: in the subject he examined this intoxication produced an over-estimation of the time elapsed: ” time seemed to have lengthened enormously ” (27).