Gérard Grisey – Prologue (1976)

Prologue isn’t really meant to stand on its own.  It’s the introductory movement of Grisey’s 75-minute-long cycle Les Espaces Acoustiques (1974-85), and it leads directly into the next movement, Périodes.  I’ve actually never listened to the whole thing, just Partiels (the third movement) and now this.  I’ll get around to it at some point, but for the purposes of this weekend’s paper, I’m sticking with the movement for solo viola.

One of Saariaho’s major musical concerns is the spectrum between pure pitched sound and noise, and for that, she certainly has Grisey to thank.  I would even go so far as to say that Prologue is about that spectrum.  It opens with a series of short melodic figures based on the overtone series of a low E, and it lays its cards on the table early on by placing a lot of emphasis on the lowest partials that don’t fit into the equal-tempered scale, a slightly lowered D and an A half-sharp.  These figures are set off against a recurring two-note figure, played on a C string that’s been tuned down a half-step so that the bottom note of the instrument is also part of the overtone series.  (Why Grisey didn’t just move the whole thing up a half-step I couldn’t tell you.)  As the piece continues, several processes happen at once.  The melodic figures get longer and include more and more notes that aren’t part of the series.   At the same time, Grisey starts distorting the timbre, first with sul ponticello, then with scratch tone and bow ricochets.  And as the piece continues, he introduces glissandi between the notes of the melodic figures, while simultaneously increasing the tempo.  By the time all of these effects have fully taken hold, the piece has turned from a series of slow, oscillating figures with distinct pitches to a series of rapid sul ponticello downward glissandi, culminating in a violent scratch-tone double-stop attack, which then fades to near silence (pppp).  There’s also a transitional section that focuses on varying levels of vibrato and gradual bow-position slides from sul tasto to sul ponticello and back — oddly, the recording leaves out the last few lines of the score — but the bulk of the piece is one big process.  And since the “noisiness” of a pitch is defined by the presence of frequencies not in that pitch’s overtone series, the gradual introduction of non-overtone pitches into the piece’s melodic material serves as a metaphor for what’s going on timbrally at the same time.  Pretty sneaky!

List of extended techniques used (this is more for myself than anyone reading):  microtones, extreme bow positions, bow position slides, overpressure, glissandi, harmonics, varying vibrato.