D’eau et de pierre is the threshold work into Grisey’s mature music, the first work idiomatically recognisable as being in Grisey’s mature style featuring a gradually changing static ensemble texture. This chapter explores the influences on the work, showing how it tied in with the so-called meditative music of the era, in particular that of Jean-Claude Éloy and La Monte Young, each of whom was exploring long durations and static harmonic surfaces. It details Grisey’s attendance at the 1972 Darmstadt Summer Courses, where, alongside lectures and seminars by Chowning, Rădulescu, Xenakis, and Ligeti, he took part in Stockhausen’s seminars on Mantra and Stimmung. A performance of the latter by the Collegium Vocale Köln made a strong impression on him, performed by the Collegium Vocale Köln, made a strong impression on him. D’eau et de pierre was completed after this, and its form drew on Stockhausen’s concept of the degree of change of a given statistical sound.

This chapter and the next focus respectively on Grisey’s last two student compositions, in which salient features of his mature music begin to appear in germinal form. Vagues, chemins, le souffle is scored for two spatialised orchestras and amplified clarinet. The chapter details how Grisey adopted and creatively modified techniques from the post-war modernist composers Xenakis, Boulez, and Stockhausen, and how the latter music, often referred to as sound-mass music, should be considered in actuality a continuation of serialism’s principles applied to statistical masses. In this regard, Grisey’s music developed through creative engagement with serialism. The aspects of Grisey’s music covered are the use of resonance models and the harmonic spectrum, the composition of auditory processes, the composition of sound metabolisms, and the notion of a large-scale orchestral simulation of a small-scale instrumental timbre.

While the ‘post-serial’ has been a resilient critical category over more than half a century, its status remains problematised by ongoing debates around the nature and limits of the serial itself. In particular, as insight grows into European serial practice after World War II, so does the case for understanding serialism as a more capacious concept than hitherto, embracing not only technique but also aesthetic and – a category regarded as taboo by certain of its practitioners – style. The generalisations that serialism underwent in the 1950s led less to a rigidly deterministic model of ‘total’ serialism than to a proliferation of the concept in many directions. Its seemingly endless possibilities of permutation led it (surprisingly to some) towards the statistical and the aleatory, while its notion of the ‘parameter’ went at times beyond the conventional categories of pitch and rhythm to embrace the manipulation of text, action and gesture. If relatively few composers now profess an overt allegiance to serialism, fewer still can entirely avoid the explicit reflections on material and process that it stimulated.