Stèle, Gérard Grisey

Stèle (1995) by French composer Gérard Grisey was composed for two percussionists—one bass drum each—and a luminous chronometer. It is worth noting that Grisey composed two other works for percussion alone: Le noir de l'Étoile (1991) and Tempus ex machina (1979). Despite its apparent compositional simplicity, Stèle stands as one of his most mature works—all the more significant given that Grisey died in 1998, with his final piece, Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, premiering posthumously in 1999. As Tom Service wrote in a 2013 article for The Guardian, Grisey's music was fundamentally about sound as material, as physical element, as living phenomenon—and about how sound affects the body, the ears, and what it can make us feel. *Stèle/ is dedicated to the memory of Dominique Troncin, Grisey's student who died prematurely after a long illness. The piece situates itself within what might broadly be called a poetics of death and threshold-crossing. In his program note for the premiere, Grisey described the image that came to him while composing: archaeologists discovering a stele and dusting it off until uncovering a funerary inscription. We do not know what that inscription might have said—but the image was enough to serve as an entry point.

Profiling and breaching in - Score and Setup

During the profiling phase, I encountered numerous sources framing Stèle as a funeral rite—a reading consistent with Grisey's own description. This became the conceptual anchor for my hacked interpretation. Reflecting on what characterizes funeral rites across cultures, the procession emerged as a recurring and structurally significant element: sometimes rhythmical, as in New Orleans funeral bands; sometimes slower and more solemn, as in Catholic tradition. From there, I adapted both the stage disposition and the instrumentation to bring a funeral march into the foreground of the piece.

In Grisey's original setup, the two percussionists are placed in a triangular disposition. In my interpretation, I placed both bass drums together on two connected handmade aluminium wheeled carts, and assembled a system of straps that allows me to hook my body to the carts and drag them backward along a straight path through the performance space.

Manipulating

Within this setup, the path becomes a metaphor for human lifetime. The performer, dragging the bass drums while walking backward, can be understood as a soul carrying the body through terrestrial existence until its passing. That moment of passing is staged literally: at a certain point in the performance, I leave the stage entirely. The final section of the piece—previously recorded—then plays through speakers, enacting the threshold crossing between life and death that runs as a central theme through Grisey's late work.

Luminous Chronometer

The luminous chronometer specified in Grisey's score is an unusual and somewhat enigmatic element—Grisey himself left no explicit explanation for its inclusion. It may have functioned as a simple synchronization tool for the two performers, or, in line with some of his writings, it may relate to the idea that the continuous repetition of a sound gradually shifts the listener's attention away from rhythm and toward the texture of sound itself. In my interpretation, the chronometer is reframed as a representation of the continuous flow of time. One light bulb is placed at each end of the path, representing external, universal time; three more hang directly from the bass drums, marking the span of a terrestrial lifetime moving through space. All bulbs blink at 40 bpm—Grisey's original tempo marking—controlled via MIDI CC messages and Arduino.