Four - Exchange Beyond Language (1968–70)

Summary

Grisey's écriture classes at the Conservatoire National Supérieur were a constant in his student years. Several exercise books from that time remain: Grisey practiced figured bass accompaniment, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration in notebooks that ran into the hundreds of pages. In a later interview, Grisey complained of this education, at once boring and difficult and destined to produce a generation of traditionalist-copycat composers:

The term “French music” automatically evokes the specter of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, including its entire catalog of écriture classes. One produced there—it's not that long ago—a mixture of different styles, including among other characteristics a strong dose of Fauré. This was meant to allow you to pass your examinations, perfectly anonymous, but also undeniably “anonymously French”!

Still, Grisey was a proficient and motivated student, and successfully mastered the requirements of the Conservatoire. He received first prizes in history of music (1966), harmony (1967), fugue and counterpoint (1968), and second prize in piano accompaniment (1970). The latter was especially impressive considering the piano wasn't his first instrument.

The only letters Grisey wrote between 1968 and 1970 were again during his breaks in Belfort. These letters were typical of the composer's youth: he avoided the prosaic in favor of the abstractly spiritual. On February 17, 1968, Grisey meditated on death in a letter to Jocelyne Simon, returning to a theme of his teenage years. “Death, too, so close and so far …” he wrote:

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think that it will all rot away soon. There is something in me that “knows,” that rather feels that it is petrified of eternity, which cries out to the Other Side. Isn't that the soul? If music can be the product of this part of us, it should therefore be the only lan-guage of men.

On April 10, from Belfort again, Grisey told Simon that he was reading Blaise Pascal's Pensées. The book contains much that appears relevant to Grisey's aesthetic. For Pascal, human nature was at its core a process of constant change, an idea that fits neatly into Grisey's later goal to write music of a “pure sonic becoming, mutating ceaselessly.” A famous passage in Pascal also parallels Grisey's later idea of the different planes on which his music operated, from the microscopic to the cosmic. “What is a man in the infinite?” Pascal wrote.