Introduction: Spectral Thinking

Journal article

Hidden away on the back inside cover of an A5 school-style notebook of music manuscript paper, Gérard Grisey taped a piece of characteristically French squared notepaper. On it is written the phrase ‘Bell Strasbourg Cathedral’, and beneath it is found a hastily scribbled pencil sketch, including hand-written stave lines.

Given that Grisey includes it along with sketches for his last works, Vortex temporum and Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil, it must surely date from the final years of his life, 1994– 98. Grisey was clearly transfixed by the sound and attempted to notate it for future reference2 – not just the bell’s ‘spectral’ profile, but also the way it is attacked, how the humnote continues, and how the sound as a whole is shaped across time. There is no obvious evidence in this notebook to connect the notation of the Strasbourg bell directly to the works being sketched, but to anyone who knows, for example, the opening of Vortex Temporum (1994–96), it should be clear that the sound of the bell is never far away. A tiny, swirling fragment from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé is transformed into the rapid, repeating arpeggios of the opening as a kind of representation of a sine wave,3 but which might equally be understood as the sound of a tolling bell: a single, distorted spectrum (four notes on the piano are tuned down a quarter tone), like that heard in Strasbourg, each ‘attack’ slowly fading across four bars, while the cello enters periodically with a sustained ‘hum’. Similarly, the repeated rocking figures of the berceuse that concludes the Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil (1996–98) have the character of a tolling bell, here suggesting a ritual dimension.

Authors: Cross, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Twentieth-Century Music
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 3-9
• Publication date: 2018-04-26
• Acceptance date: 2017-11-17
• DOI: 10.1017/S1478572218000038
• ISSN: 1478-5730 and 1478-5722