Vortex Temporum (1994-96)

Essay by Nathan Friedman, commissioned by Freesound

Gérard Grisey (1946–1998) produced only 30 published works in his relatively brief compositional career, an oeuvre in which Vortex Temporum (1994–1996) stands out as a late masterpiece. Grisey is best known for his works of the 1970s and 80s, which helped establish spectralism—a term that encompasses aspects of a compositional school, style, and methodology. The later Vortex Temporum shows that Grisey was continuing to expand the possibilities that spectralism afforded through the 1990s and up until his sudden death from an aneurism in 1998.

Spectralism, which had perhaps its clearest demonstration in Grisey’s Partiels (1975), refers to music that is influenced by or constructed according to the pitches of the harmonic series—the (theoretically infinite) series of constituent vibrations that are sounded when a resonant object such as a string is activated. The first few overtones of the harmonic series approximate what we know in Western music theory as the major triad, but higher ones quickly diverge from the familiar materials of tonal music into microtonality. Partiels uses a technique called instrumental synthesis where, using a spectrogram, Grisey was able to isolate the overtones of the sound of a trombone and then distribute them across a chamber ensemble, effectively orchestrating the raw materials of sound. Far from merely imitating these and other sounds, Grisey uses them as sources for compositional transformations that have much in common with earlier modernist composers; despite the rhetoric that he and other spectralists used which claimed that they were creating something entirely new in their music.

Vortex Temporum’s construction shows the increasingly sophisticated spectral techniques that Grisey had developed by the 1990s: it is based on the imperfections of the harmonic series as it is actually heard in instruments, which are incapable of matching its idealized mathematical purity. The quality of these imperfections is known as inharmonicity, which forms a sort of spectrum of its own. Degrees of inharmonicity range from the instrumental tones that we recognize as sounding clearly pitched and resonant, which are only slightly different from the “pure” harmonic series, to those of unpitched instruments such as the tam-tam, which bear little relation to it at all. In particular, Vortex Temporum draws from the concept of “stretched” spectra, such as those found in the sound of a piano string. The overtones of a piano’s vibrations are slightly further apart than those in the “pure” harmonic series, something that Grisey exaggerates in Vortex Temporum. Grisey mixes these exaggerated stretched series with their opposites—compressed series, which occur in some brass instruments—as well as with closer approximations of pure series.

Music theorist Bob Hasegawa writes thatVortex Temporum represents Grisey’s “interest in borderline cases and thresholds—in this case, the perceptual threshold, where, as the degree of stretching increases, a spectrum is no longer heard as a fused timbre but instead breaks up into a collection of independent pitches.” In the piece, the instruments’ sounds seem to freely fuse and unfuse with one another in a sonic flux that gradually transforms, especially in the third movement. This continuous transformation of sound reflects Grisey’s dislike of the term “spectral” when used to describe his music: instead proposed the terms “liminal”, “differential”, or “transitory”, to avoid the stasis of mathematical perfection implied by “spectral”. In emphasizing its transformational nature, Grisey hoped that his music would create a viable alternative to both the excessive hierarchies of the tonal tradition and what he called the “levelling” of his modernist predecessors, especially serial composers such as Pierre Boulez.

Vortex Temporum is cast in three movements, separated by brief, noisy interludes, which Grisey partially included to stop audience coughing. As he began composing, Grisey set forth his plan in a note to the Freiburg-based Ensemble Recherche, who had commissioned the piece:

Vortex Temporum defines the original material of the piece, a formula of swirling, repeated arpeggios. Onto this Gestalt are grafted two other archetypes: an attack with and without resonance, and a sustained sound with or without crescendo ... Thanks to an imaginary microphone, a note becomes a timbre, a chord becomes a complex spectrum, and a rhythm becomes a swell of unpredictable duration.

In the first movement, the swirling arpeggios are contrasted with an irregular, limping figure in the strings, that explores the full range of timbres possible when bowing, from the instruments’ fingerboards to their bridges. These differing textures represent two of the building blocks of sound: smooth sine waves and rougher square waves. The opening arpeggios also betray the influence of Maurice Ravel, particularly a passage from his ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912). About two thirds of the way through the movement, the piano breaks out into one of the longest and most brilliant cadenzas in the contemporary repertoire, developing the movement’s musical material into virtuoso passagework and huge, thumping chords. The cadenza also emphasizes one of piece’s most interesting features: four notes on the piano have been detuned by a quarter tone, allowing it to more closely approximate the various spectra used in the piece.

Coming after the first interlude, the second movement consists of an uninterrupted chorale-like texture in the piano, built around the four detuned notes. Descending lines of steady quarter notes surround and pass between the detuned pitches, in a formation that Hasegawa compares to the famous “Shepard tone”, an illusion of continuous descent created by higher lines entering imperceptibly as lower ones drop out. The movement is an arch form, with the piano part beginning in the low register, gradually expanding to cover the entire keyboard, then returning, as sustained tones in the other instruments intensify and recede.

Grisey originally intended to end with the second movement, but at the last minute decided to write a third. The third movement forms what Jeffrey Arlo Brown calls a “temporally warped reprise” of the first, where materials from earlier in the piece are stretched and compressed in time rather than in pitch, creating unrecognizably slow and fast variations. This movement is also the most discontinuous, something that is particularly obvious in the reprise of the piano cadenza, which appears to be even more, to borrow a term from hip hop, “chopped and screwed” than its first appearance. At the end of the piece, the texture builds up to a wall of noise before receding into a final quiet interlude, a partial reprise of the second movement that explores the piano spectrum on which the whole work is constructed.