The Life and Music of Gérard Grisey: Delirium and Form

by Jeffrey Arlo Brown

The first biography of the composer Gérard Grisey shows how the artist's sensuality and rigor came together to form the musical genre known as spectralism.


The French composer Gérard Grisey (1946-98) changed the course of music history with his small but potent output. Labeled "spectral" music, his compositions looked to the physics of sound and the capacities of human perception for material and inspiration. Born in Belfort, Grisey was the son of a French Resistance veteran turned car mechanic and a homemaker. His first instrument was as humble as his the accordion. But Grisey rose from his provincial background to the heights of his profession.

This first biography of Grisey traces his journey from rigid Catholicism to broader mysticism; his studies in Olivier Messiaen's legendary composition class; the development of the first "spectral" works in the 1970s; Grisey's stint teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, during which he suffered severe depression; the development of his late, post-spectral style; and his untimely death at the age of 52, shortly after completing his masterpiece on death, the Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold. Drawing on original archival research, interviews with more than fifty of Grisey's colleagues, friends, and lovers, and the study of previously overlooked sketches, this biography shows the delirium and form at the heart of Grisey's life and art—the structured sensuality that allowed him to revolutionize the music of the twentieth century.

318 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2023

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gérard Grisey (1946–1998), the French composer who was a major figure in the “spectralist” trend of modernism that arose in the 1970s, here gets a full-length biography. The most striking aspect of the book is the glimpse into Grisey’s personal life, as Jeffrey Arlo Brown was able to read Grisey’s diaries as a young man, he secured interviews with the three major women in Grisey’s life, and he got a good idea of Grisey’s serial philandering. This is far from airing dirty laundry, as Grisey’s views of the erotic seem to have fed into the music.

I also learned a lot here about the course of his career. I knew Grisey played the accordion as a young man, but we learn how he was even a virtuoso who toured and recorded before abandoning the instrument, capable only of equal-temperament pitches, forever. His abortive stint teaching at Berkeley, where he clashed with other faculty and felt stifled in America, is sketched. Arlo Brown interviewed a large number of other people, such as close friend Gerald Zinsstag, some of Grisey’s composition students from Berkeley and in Paris, and performers of his works. Each of Grisey’s musical works (his oeuvre was comparatively small) is described in detail. Some of the musicological analysis was already familiar to me from publications like Cagey and the turn-of-the-millennium issue of Contemporary Music Review dedicated to spectralism, whom Arlo Brown cites, but he does put some daunting theory into more approachable language for a general audience.

There are some weaknesses here, however. Grisey’s name is inextricably linked with that of Tristan Murail, the second major figure of the spectralist style. However, the author rarely mentions the relationship between the two, except to twice vaguely mention some bad blood between the two. Murail did not respond to requests for interviews. Since Murail is still alive, perhaps Arlo Brown wanted to avoid controversy. Also, the spectralists were followed in the 1980s by the so-called post-spectralists like Kaija Saariaho, but this biography tells us nothing about how Grisey viewed these composers who credited him with so much inspiration – there is not a single mention of the name Saariaho in the book.