Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T23:50:39.527Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gérard Grisey, Accordionist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2018

JONATHAN GOLDMAN
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It is tolerably well known that Gérard Grisey's first instrument was the accordion, but little has been written about the influence the pioneering spectral composer's main instrument had on his compositional language. The decade of the 1960s was marked by the centrality of the accordion and saw the completion of his first youthful compositional essays, most of which were scored for the accordion. It was also the period in which he studied at a school devoted to the accordion, in Trossingen. Later, when studying with Messiaen in Paris, Grisey distanced himself from the accordion, writing in 1969 that ‘I am not playing accordion anymore. My way is another one.’ After establishing the chronology of Grisey's engagement with the accordion, this article assesses the extent to which the spectral composer's training on the accordion left traces in his mature compositions and raises questions about the standard historiographies (and geographies) of French spectral music.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 15 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Spectral Thinking , February 2018 , pp. 11 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Julian. ‘A Provisional History of Spectral Music’. Contemporary Music Review 19/2 (2000), 7–22.Google Scholar
Baillet, Jérôme. Gérard Grisey, fondement d'une écriture. Paris: Harmattan, 2000.Google Scholar
Cagney, Liam. ‘Synthesis and Deviation: New Perspectives on the Emergence of the French courant spectral, 1969–74’. Diss., City University London, 2015.Google Scholar
Chadabe, Joel. ‘A Conversation with David Tudor’ (1993), http://emnstitute.emf.org/articles/chadabe.tudor_93.html (accessed 10 September 2010).Google Scholar
Cohen-Levinas, Danielle, ed. Vingt-cinq ans de création musicale contemporaine. L'Itinéraire en temps réel. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998.Google Scholar
Dallman, Paul Jerald. ‘Influence and Use of the Guitar in the Music of Hector Berlioz’. MMus thesis, University of Maryland, 1972.Google Scholar
De Souza, Jonathan. Music at Hand. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Degen, Helmut. Handbuch der Formenlehre. Grundsätzliches zur musikalischen Formung. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1957.Google Scholar
Donin, Nicolas. ‘Enquête sur l'atelier d'un compositeur contemporain’, Revue de synthèse 129/3 (2008), 401–20.Google Scholar
Donin, Nicolas and Theureau, Jacques. ‘La coproduction des œuvres et de l'atelier par le compositeur (À partir d'une étude de l'activité créatrice de Philippe Leroux entre 2001 et 2006)’. Circuit, Musiques contemporaines (‘La fabrique des œuvres’) 18/1 (2008), 59–71.Google Scholar
Drost, Ulrich, Rieger, Martina, and Prinz, Wolfgang. ‘Instrument Specificity in Experienced Musicians’. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 60/4 (2007), 527–33Google Scholar
Drott, Eric. ‘Spectralism, Politics and the Post-Industrial Imagination’, in The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed. Björn Heile. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 39–60.Google Scholar
Dufourt, Hugues. Musique, pouvoir, écriturei. Paris: Bourgois, 1991.Google Scholar
Féron, François-Xavier. ‘Sur les traces de la musique spectrale: Analyse génétique des modèles compositionnels dans Périodes (1974) de Gérard Grisey’. Revue musicale 96/2 (2010), 411–43.Google Scholar
Gervasoni, Pierre. L'Accordéon, instrument du XXe siècle. Paris: Mazo, 1987.Google Scholar
Goldman, Jonathan. ‘David Tudor and the Bandoneon’. American Music 30/1 (2012), 30–60.Google Scholar
Grisey, Gérard. ‘La musique: le devenir des sons’ (1982), Écrits, 45–56.Google Scholar
Grisey, Gérard. ‘Structuration des timbres dans la musique instrumentale’ (1991), in Écrits, ed. Lelong, Guy. Paris: Édition MF, 2008. 102–105.Google Scholar
Grisey, Gérard. Écrits, ou l'invention de la musique spectrale, ed. Lelong, Guy. Paris: Édition MF, 2008.Google Scholar
Hindemith, Paul. The Craft of Musical Composition, rev. edn, trans. Arthur Mendel. New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1945.Google Scholar
Kienscherf, Barbara. ‘Jacobi, (Karl Theodor Franz) Wolfgang’, in MGG Personenteil, Vol. 9. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2003, col. 810–11.Google Scholar
Klemm, Ernst and SL, ‘Brehme, Hans’, in MGG Personenteil, vol. 3. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000, col. 804–5.Google Scholar
Laux, Karl and SL, ‘Degen, Helmut’, in MGG Personenteil, vol. 5, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001, col. 671–3.Google Scholar
Leipp, Émile, ed. ‘Bulletin du Groupe d'acoustique musicale’, 59 (February 1972).Google Scholar
Leman, Marc, Styns, Frederik, and Bernardini, Nicola. ‘Sound, Sense and Music Mediation: A Historical-Philosophical Perspective’, in Sound to Sense, Sense to Sound. A State of the Art in Sound and Music Computing, ed. Polotti, Pietro and Rocchesso, Davide. Berlin: Logos, 2008, 15–46.Google Scholar
Leman, Marc, Styns, Frederik, and Bernardini, Nicola. Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Pantev, Christo, Larry, E. Roberts, Matthias Schulz, Almut Engelien, and Bernhard Ross. ‘Timbre-Specific Enhancement of Auditory Cortical Representations in Musicians’. Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology 12/1 (2001), 1–6.Google Scholar
Rose, François. ‘Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music’. Perspectives of New Music 34/2 (1996), 20–9.Google Scholar
Supičić, Ivo. ‘Instead of an Introductory Word’. International Review of Music Aesthetics and Sociology 1/1 (1970), 3–14.Google Scholar
Wilson, Peter Niklas. ‘Vers une “écologie des sons”: Partiels de Gérard Grisey et l'esthétique du groupe de l'Itinéraire’. Entretemps 8 (1989), 55–81.Google Scholar