Organizzazione spettrale, processo e forma in Solo pour deux di Gérard Grisey

Abstract

Grisey's tendency to structure his compositions as a form of process stems from his strive towards musical forms that unfold according to a self-generative logic. Precisely from this perspective, however, a piece of music cannot be reduced to a simple juxtaposition of processes. In Solo pour deux the composer returns to an idea he had already experimented with a few years earlier, namely that of a single process. A heterogeneous variety of processes, often structured through the Fibonacci series, is coordinated and directed in this piece by a “unique process of continuous acceleration.” The same predominantly horizontal use of the series of harmonics, while probably dictated by the restricted ensemble (clarinet and trombone), can be seen as a kind of temporalization of an entity that is as static in nature as the harmonic spectrum. The harmonics of two series built on two different fundamentals, in fact, are presented throughout the piece one by one in an ascending or descending direction, so that the harmonic spectrum itself is taken as such as compositional material. The repetition, albeit in the textural and figural variety of the piece, of similar processes in an increasingly contracted form poses the problem of how to stop the acceleration by concluding the piece. Grisey will opt for a systematic destruction of the processes themselves, which will contrast with the very organizing principles from which the piece originated.