Programme Notes

Grisey described his Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four songs for crossing the threshold) as a ‘meditation on death’: the death of the angel, of civilisation, of the voice and – finally – of humanity, pooling texts from ancient Christian, Egyptian, Greek, and Mesopotamian civilisations which explore these themes. The work itself is haunted by the spectre of death in a more literal sense: it was Grisey’s final work before he unexpectedly passed away at the age of 52. He didn’t live to see its premiere by tonight’s ensemble, the London Sinfonietta, in 1999. It’s as if Grisey could feel death coming. The work is widely seen as Grisey’s auto-memorial.

Tonight’s programme sees death not as an end but as an act of transformation, as a crossing of the threshold from one state to another. Each work balances extinction with metamorphosis, sitting in ambiguous terrain between conceptual and musical states: between sound and silence, tone and noise, remembrance and rebirth, humour and melancholy. 

Cassandra Miller’s for mira is built from a transcription of Kurt Cobain singing ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ from their seminal MTV Unplugged album. In some ways it is a sonic tribute, cycling around a melodic line sung by a musical icon. Yet it is not an elegy in the traditional sense. Through a set of increasingly tangled repetitions, Miller focuses in on the grit and the grain of the source material, transforming the original’s trudging melancholy into something explosive, visceral, and glowing with new life. Transcription here is an act of transfiguration. The music is full of lament, but it flies past you with hyperactive, joyful excitement.

The physical threshold of the stage is dissolved in Rebecca Saunders’ stirrings still ii, dispersing the musicians around the hall, ‘seeking dialogue with the surrounding architecture and acoustic’. Here, we enter limbo. The piece is a collage of ruined, half-spoken, fragile sounds, ‘encircling and never-ending’ all around us, as if constructing a world from the echoes and resonances of sounds that have already come to pass.

Death need not be so po-faced: we see it reflected everywhere, all the time, in the most banal, everyday activities. John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine brilliantly captures this truth with a chorus of blown bottles, the performers attempting to breathe life into these vessels by emptying their own lungs over and over again. They celebrate this inane activity by drinking as they go, every gulp sinking the communal sound in a ritualistic lament until it completely fades away and the fun ends.

We conclude by accompanying Grisey across his own threshold, not into death, but onto strikingly new musical ground. Grisey’s final work opens a window onto a landscape which suggests where his music may have travelled next. Premiered in 1999 on the cusp of the new millennium, the music of Quatre chants seems to turn its back on much of the 20th century’s modernist tendencies to face simpler, more immediate gestures. Like a death mask, it has an uncanniness to it: it’s at once recognisable, but somehow hauntingly offset. Tonal scales float to the ground, re-tuned and harmonically twisted out of shape. A rising arpeggio repeats, its resonances - its musical shadow - subtly shifting colour behind texts found on Egyptian sarcophaguses. The apocalypse is heralded by a swarm of percussion. We end with a limping, lopsided lullaby. Underneath the voice’s light, suspended lines, the dark, heavy, murky ensemble sits waiting, like an instrumental memento mori that never leaves the stage.

Jack Sheen, 2025