| Gérard Grisey: | Le Noir de l’étoile for six percussionists, tape and transmission of astronomical signals (1989-90, 60’) |
|---|---|
| Ensemble This - Ensemble That: | Brian Archinal, Victor Barceló, Bastian Pfefferli, Jennifer Torrence |
| With: | Federico Tramontana / Alexsandra Nawrocka (Biennale College Musica - Performers) |
| Sound projection: | Thierry Coduys |
| Production: | La Biennale di Venezia – CIMM, Centro di Informatica Musicale Multimediale |
Music
Gérard Grisey
Gérard Grisey - Le Noir de l'Étoile
In 1985 I met astronomer and cosmologist Joseph Silk in Berkeley, who introduced me to the sounds of pulsars. I was seduced by those of the Vela Pulsar, and immediately asked myself, in a manner similar to Pablo Picasso picking up an old bicycle seat, “What could I do with them?”. The answer came slowly: integrate them into a musical work without manipulating them, simply let them exist as points of reference within a music that would somehow be its casket or its stage; in short, use their frequencies as tempos and develop the ideas of rotation, periodicity, slowing down, speeding up, and glitches that the study of pulsars suggests to astronomers. Percussion instruments were clearly essential since, like pulsars, they are primordial and relentless, and like them define and measure time, not without austerity. In the end, I decided to reduce the instrumentation to membrane and metal percussion instruments, excluding keyboard percussion.
Le Noir de l’Étoile was born, or almost... All that remained was to imagine a glowing counterpart to the score, to devise a set design.
Gérard Grisey