This chapter gives an overview of Gérard Grisey’s youth and early musical formation. It shows how, having been given an accordion at the age of five, Grisey went on to become a youthful virtuoso on the instrument, winning medals at the accordion World Cup. It discusses how, as a teenager, Grisey became preoccupied with music, religion, and death, three topics that were for him intimately linked, and how Grisey’s later musical values of beauty, clarity, and perceptivity were already established by the time he arrived at the Paris Conservatoire. It details aspects of his compositional training in Trossingen under Helmut Degen and in Paris under Henri Duttileux, before finishing with a glimpse of Grisey’s interest in the Catholic mystic and scientist Teilhard de Chardin.

This chapter follows up on Chapter 3 by presenting nine portraits of works for multiple orchestras or for an orchestra divided into spatialized groups composed, premiered or reprised between 1958 and 1978 by Henry Brant, Henri Dutilleux, Gunther Schuller, Luigi Nono, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Gilles Tremblay, Harry Somers, Charles Ives and Anthony Braxton. These works were premiered in New York, Boston, Paris, Darmstadt, Toronto and Tokyo. The common features of these works invite their being studied as a group, focusing on the ways composers and critics characterized these works premiered in the heyday of both post-war avant-gardism and the public dissemination of stereo hi-fis, thereby creating points of contact with the works discussed in the previous chapter.