The French composer Gérard Grisey spent several years in the 1980s teaching at UC Berkeley, where he completed Les Chants de l’Amour (The Songs of Love), a work for 12 singers and tape lasting roughly 35 minutes. It was commissioned by IRCAM, the French electronic-music institute, and IRCAM software tools were used to produce the tape.
According to Grisey’s publisher, Les Chants de l’Amour had never been performed in the U.S. until last weekend. On Sunday, March 9, Voices of Silicon Valley, in collaboration with Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), presented Les Chants de l’Amour at the new Helen and Thomas Wu Performance Hall, which UC Berkeley describes as having “state-of-the-art sound, lighting, and digital technology upgrades.”
Under Artistic Director Cyril Deaconoff, Voices of Silicon Valley — a small chorus dedicated to new and avant-garde music, particularly with a technological twist — has previously performed such demanding works as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung, making the ensemble well suited to taking on Grisey’s challenges.
The text of Les Chants de l’Amour is complex and so fragmented as to fall below the threshold of comprehension. We hear the vowels in the English phrase “I love you” in many variations, the names of fictional lovers, another phrase (“Love songs dedicated to all lovers of the Earth”) in 10 different languages, words in 22 different languages, and a long text in Spanish, along with sighs, laughter, moans, and panting.
The tape includes not only a wide assortment of electronic sounds but an artificial voice. The human performers sing scales, repeated vocal fragments and patterns, isolated syllables, and bits of text. The vocal lines and the music on the tape skitter about. At times, the combined effects are hypnotic. In certain moments, the vocal lines are sweetly lyrical. Understandable words sometimes swim up from the mix. There’s only occasionally a sense of underlying pulse. Listening, you might feel suspended in an ocean or the sky.
Toward the end of Les Chants de l’Amour, there’s some acceleration and what sounds like a small explosion. The music is both fascinating and enigmatic — perhaps we’re not intended to truly understand it but to simply let it sink in through our ears and pores.
Sunday’s program began with five shorter contemporary works. Deaconoff’s Our Time, the concert opener, starts with the sound of breaking glass, which recurs over the piece’s wordless four or five minutes. The whole thing calls to mind finger-snapping pop music.
Ali Oscillano in Fioco Cielo (Wings waver in the faint sky) by Carmine-Emanuele Cella, co-director of CNMAT, is billed as a five-voice madrigal. It sets a despairing poem by Salvatore Quasimodo to heart-piercing music whose sequential entrances, harmonies, and proportions nod to the Renaissance form.
Alexander Frank, a tenor with Voices of Silicon Valley, heard the world premiere of his piece A Mess. Frank described the text as split up vertically, rather than horizontally, with different words (and part of words) sung simultaneously. The work depicts a conversation that a woman has with herself — her inner dialogue represented by two solo sopranos. Happily, A Mess is anything but what its title suggests. Frank contrasts a full choral texture with birdlike writing for the soloists, who sing at the extremes of their range and slide about from note to note. What you could make out of the text was playfully informal.
Frank contributed another piece to the program — Chatter, which is just that, putting the listener in a public place where fragments of conversation pop up from a sea of voices. Amusingly, the text of the eight overlapping spoken lines is “an unedited ChatGPT response to a prompt.” It cannot be said that the AI wrote Chatter, though.
The second world premiere on the bill was Edmund Campion’s Symbionts, which sets a text by the composer’s brother. Campion, CNMAT’s other co-director, studied with Grisey and, if I caught this correctly, described Symbionts as the beginning of a larger homage to Les Chants de l’Amour.
Symbionts creates a cloud of words, a bit like Chatter. The tempo changes in Campion’s piece are a distinctive feature, now faster, now slower, arising from the use of “polyphonic tempi,” which the program notes described as “employing precisely notated rhythmic relationships that shift in phases.” These are complicated enough that the performers require in-ear click tracks. Charmingly, at the close of Symbionts, Deaconoff turned to the audience and sang the last phrases with the chorus.
As with much new music, one hearing was barely enough to take in the evening’s complexities. Fortunately, a second chance to catch Symbionts and Les Chants de l’Amour, along with Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, is coming up: March 29 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
