Les Chants de l’Amour

Gérard Grisey - Les Chants de l'Amour (1982-84), for 12 voices and magnetic tape

The writing of the parts assigned to the 12 singers is based not on words, but on vowels and diphthongs extracted from the spectral analysis of the phrase "I love you." Some sound interjections are also used, such as sighs, bursts of laughter, or fragments of the same sentence.

The electronic part was synthesized at IRCAM using the "Chant" program, which creates highly malleable artificial vowels that act at times as a glue, at times as a complementary or contrasting element to the real voices.

Grisey intelligently uses vowels even in the majority of the sung parts, thus managing to blend the real voices with the materials generated by the program.

"I see sounds as beams of force oriented in time, infinitely mobile and fluctuating."

The lesson of Stimmung is present, and Grisey creates an extremely dynamic piece, with an almost pyrotechnic style of writing, which combines the fundamental traits of spectralism with a remarkable expressive force.

Program Notes by Gérard Grisey

The first draft of "Les Chants de l’Amour," in reality the formal implementation, dates back to the summer of 1981. I then conceived the idea of great vocal polyphonies enveloped and supported by a powerful fundamental. The CHANT program conceived at IRCAM, of which I had then heard some examples, immediately struck me as the ideal instrument for realizing this continuous voice and these respiratory pulsations, the true amniotic fluid of human voices.

At the origin of "Les Chants de l’Amour," there is no specific text, but rather a phonetic material composed as follows:

An introduction containing the dedication of the piece in ten different languages ("love songs dedicated to all lovers on earth");
The different vowels contained in the phrase "I love you." Thus, sixteen different vowels for the singers and a hundred vowels for the synthesized voice;
Different consonants that gradually appear throughout the piece.
The names of famous lovers: Tristan, Isolde, Orpheus, Eurydice, Don Quixote, Dulcinea, Romeo, Juliet...
Litanies around the word love, composed in French, English, German, and Hungarian, especially for their sonority;
Interjections, sighs, bursts of laughter, halètements, moans, fragments of sentences, especially for their erotic character;
"I love you," "Amant," "love" recorded in 22 different languages, phonetic material for the crowd, and a concrete source intended to be processed by the computer;
An excerpt from Cortázar's "Rayela";
The phrase "I love you" is the formal semantic basis of the entire piece.

That is, 28 sections in total, easily identifiable since each has the same breathing form.

The electronic part of "Les Chants de l’Amour" comes mainly from two sound sources: the synthesized voice from the CHANT program and recorded spoken voices, digitized, and then processed by the computer, primarily with a series of filters. The interest of the synthetic voice lies not so much in its imitation of the human voice as in the infinite possibilities for its distortion. We discover many fields of perception and emotional reactions linked to the avatars of the human voice.

The other side of this synthetic voice, sung and fully vocalized, is the spoken voice, the noise of consonants and tongue. Only the computer could allow me to record these different voices, group them, multiply them, and transpose them to create true cascades of the human voice, a whirlwind of crowds at the four cardinal points repeating "I love you" in the diversity of their timbres and languages. Throughout "Les Chants de l’Amour," various types of relationships evolve between the twelve voices of the choir and between the choir as an entity and the voice of the machine. This voice, in turn, divine, enormous, threatening, seductive, mirror and projection of all the phantoms of human voices, splits and multiplies itself up to the crowd.

Back