On June 22, 2009, Le Poisson Rouge will host a Pulitzer party for Steve Reich. The night promises to be filled with excitement and celebration as Signal will play the U.S. premiere of Reich’s Pulitzer-winning piece, Double Sextet. In addition to Double Sextet, the group will also play the original 1984 Sextet. Two pieces on the program would be enough to satisfy any Reich fan, but it has been announced that Reich will personally be there as well! Tickets are only $25 in advance and $30 at the door, but I don’t expect there to be any tickets left at the door. I just bought mine today, so check back for a write up over the party.
Each year, the Composition Department at Cleveland State University hosts the Composers’ Recording Institute. During this five day workshop, composers present their works, work closely with the performers which will record their work, and be directly involved in a two hour long recording session. This program attracts many of today’s most talented interpreters of contemporary music.
I have been notified that I will be participating in this unique program from July 13-17. My solo violin piece, Cataclysm will be performed by violinist, Rolf Schulte. Mr. Shulte has enjoyed a quite successful career by premiering a number of works by composers Elliot Carter, Milton Babbitt, and Gyorgy Kurtag, just to name a few.
I could not be more excited to have my work not only performed, but recorded by such a legendary contemporary music figure. I will directly assist the recording engineer in producing a commercial quality recording. With June in Buffalo and the Recording Institute going on, this summer promises to be not only productive, but also a valuable learning experience. I am looking forward to growing from these events as a composer this summer.
In David Bundler’s interview with Gerard Grisey in 1996, Grisey explicitly defines what “spectralism” meant for him. Towards the end of his life, Grisey drifted away from the strictly physical analysis of sound spectrums and relied on other means to convey his state of mind. This interview appeared in the March 1996 issue of 20th Century Music.
GG: Spectralism is not a system. It’s not a system like serial music or even tonal music. It’s an attitude. It considers sounds, not as dead objects that you can easily and arbitrarily permutate in all directions, but as being like living objects with a birth, lifetime and death. This is not new. I think Varese was thinking in that direction also. He was the grandfather of us all. The second statement of the spectral movement — especially at the beginning — was to try to find a better equation between concept and percept — between the concept of the score and the perception the audience might have of it. That was extremely important for us.
DB: How do you achieve that?
GG: I think it’s important to know our perceptive limitations as human beings. I started in the late ’70s with an extremely basic attitude towards sound — thinking, “What is an octave? What is a minor third? What is a dissonance? What is a consonance? Why do we have periodicity? Aperiodicity?” And in dealing a little with acoustics and psycho-acoustics, there were a few taboos that were thrown away in that period. The taboo of using dissonance/consonance. There was a period when people tended to say, “Well, there is no such thing as a dissonance and a consonance.” But you can reconsider the question and see that they basically do exist on two levels. The first level would be a rather physical one. It’s true that we have sounds that are more complex than others. It’s true that we have timbres that are more in a state of fusion than others. It’s true that our ear reacts differently to different stimuli. So it’s true that we have an array of possibilities that goes from the most simple to the most complex. Now, what is cultural is what function you give to those poles. The first attitude considers that I have this array of possibilities from simple to very complex, and my ear won’t react to a minor third as a minor second or whatever. It will react differently. We will react physically differently. Now the function you decide to have within the music is cultural.
Grisey’s emphasis on spectralism being a form of thought rather than a system of composition would seem like a relatively new concept for the 20th and 21st centuries. Much of the recently composed music stems from Schoenberg’s system and undergoes other systematic modifications, and to have a composer reject any system in order to “rediscover the hierarchy,” has a certain originality to it. However, it is not new and Grisey acknowledges this, but the main focus and inspiration for the spectral movement is to extend time in all directions and experiment with psycho-acoustics. This attitude also brings the audience back into the picture because the extended form of this type of writing has a transparency about it that allows the listener to follow closely and hear the intentions of the composer.
By scientifically deconstructing a sound and extending time so the deconstruction can be studied, Grisey has displayed an intimate understanding of sounds and acoustics. This knowledge, however, has not created a stale admiration for sounds, but rather a sound world of more beauty than could be arrived at without the use of scientific means.
