Gérard Grisey (1946-1998)
Being a tutelary figure of the spectral movement that emerged in France in the early 1970s, Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) published relatively few writings on his music during his lifetime. Besides the traditional program notes and a few interviews, only four texts were released before his untimely death on November 11, 1998. Written during the composition period of the cycle Les Espaces acoustiques (1974-1985), these texts revisit the foundations and the characteristics of his musical thought and were published in various languages in specialized journals and as chapters of collective works. In the spring of 1998, he wrote the short essay “Vous avez dit spectral?” in which he wrote a retrospective review on the spectral endeavour, which was published posthumously a few years later.
After his death, the documents from his studio were carefully listed and later entrusted to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Among these documents were various texts (diaries, letters, reflections, lecture notes...) that Guy Lelong, in collaboration with Anne-Marie Réby, brought together with existing publications in order to establish a first anthology of Gérard Grisey's significant writings (Écrits ou l’invention de la musique spectrale, MF, 2008, 378 pages). Ten years later, a new expanded edition was published (Écrits, MF, 2018, 430 pages) in which appear unpublished letters addressed mostly to Jocelyne Grisey-Simon, with whom the composer shared twenty years of his life until their separation in 1986, but also to the acoustician Michèle Castellengo, with whom he collaborated from the mid-1970s onwards.
François-Xavier FÉRON
22/10/2019
Trans. Kiefer Oakley
| firstname | Gérard |
|---|---|
| lastname | Grisey |
| birth year | 1946 |
| death year | 1998 |
| same as | https://data.bnf.fr/13894740/gerard_grisey/ |