Polychrome: For orchestra. Gerard Grisey's Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil: Spectral music on the threshold.

Abstract

This dissertation offers a broad analytical perspective on the late works of Gerard Grisey, with particular emphasis placed on his final composition, <italic> Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil</italic> (1996--8). While Grisey's music has recently attracted the interest of theorists and musicologists in the US, most of the attention is paid to a few landmark works from the 1970s such as <italic>Partiels </italic>(1975) and <italic>Modulations </italic>(1976--7). Though these works instantiate concepts developed and expanded upon in Grisey's subsequent works, the late works written in the 1980s and 1990s contrast with them in that they display more traditional features of Western classical music, such as dramatic ruptures, melodic tendencies, and periodic rhythms. Nearly all analyses of Grisey's music have proceeded from a frequential point of view, meaning that pitches are not viewed as individual entities, but are considered only in the context of an overtone, or spectral, structure. This method of analysis emphasizes Grisey's compositional process, and is usually nothing more an involved form of sketch study. While the results of such sketch studies are nearly always fascinating, many analytical questions are left unasked and unanswered about the aesthetics of Grisey's late style. After writing no music for voice in the 1970s, Grisey composed three major vocal works in the last 15 years of his life: <italic>Le Chants de l'Amour </italic> (1982--4), <italic>L'Icone paradoxale</italic> (1992--4), and <italic>Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil</italic>. The first part of this dissertation will focus on Grisey's evolving relationship with texts and vocal writing in these three works. The second and third parts will focus specifically on <italic>Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil</italic>, in a presentation of pitch and rhythmic structures. While these analyses will touch upon spectral procedures, the emphasis will be on more traditional kinds of melodic, harmonic, and motivic concepts, which are emblematic of Grisey's late style.