3 - Statistical Serialism and Vagues, chemins, le souffle (1970–1972)

Summary

This chapter and the next focus respectively on Grisey’s last two student compositions, in which salient features of his mature music begin to appear in germinal form. Vagues, chemins, le souffle is scored for two spatialised orchestras and amplified clarinet. The chapter details how Grisey adopted and creatively modified techniques from the post-war modernist composers Xenakis, Boulez, and Stockhausen, and how the latter music, often referred to as sound-mass music, should be considered in actuality a continuation of serialism’s principles applied to statistical masses. In this regard, Grisey’s music developed through creative engagement with serialism. The aspects of Grisey’s music covered are the use of resonance models and the harmonic spectrum, the composition of auditory processes, the composition of sound metabolisms, and the notion of a large-scale orchestral simulation of a small-scale instrumental timbre.