THE PROBLEM OF TIME AND SPACE TERMS IN GÉRARD GRISEY’S DISCOURSES GABRIELIUS SIMAS SAPIEGA
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre gabrielius.sapiega@lmta.lt
Spectralism as a historical movement is generally considered to have begun in France and Germany in the 1970s, precursors to the philosophy and techniques of spectralism, as prizing the nature and properties of sound above all else as an organizing principle for music, go back at least to the early twentieth century. Controlling the sound parameters in the respective music inevitably becomes an important one of the essential parameters of the organization of music in time – the relationship between space and time. These issues were discussed in Gérard Grisey’s article “Tempus ex machina” in 1980, which is based on Grisey’s earlier 1979 discourse, Réflections sur le temps. Grisey himself states in “Tempus ex machina” that this concept was based on the implications of “primary numbers (Messiaen), the golden ratio (Bartók), the Fibonacci series (Stockhausen), the Newton binomial series (Risset) and <…> kinetic gas theories. (Xenakis)” (Grisey 2018: 62). Examining Grisey’s musical works as well as his writings, we can feel a smooth transition from K. Stockhausen’s “... wie die Zeit vergeht…” (...How Time Passes…, 1957) and P. Boulez’s Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Thinking about music today, 1963) which is not mentioned in the original texts. Such an approach allows a closer look at the processes of organization of sound propagation prevailing in spectral music, complements the theoretical fields of this compositional current and further perspectives from a phenomenological point of view. An important aspect of significations and their categorization can be realized: what relationship between time and space is meant by certain compositional elements and solutions represented by intended terms? Looking critically at Grisey’s musical texts, we notice the current problem of term significations, which is obvious in the perspective of this time: many of them are not fully explained, and the descriptions themselves are sleek, not specific, perhaps even misleading, without knowing the full genesis of the term. For this reason, it is necessary to identify the field of significance of the relevant terms, to typologize it as an appropriate method of cognition. Keywords: spectral music, time, space, typology, signification.
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