The Voices of Silicon Valley in collaboration with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) has released performances of the American premiere of Gerard Grisey's "Les Chants de l'amour" ("Songs of Love"). The recording of the first of two US performances of this work was on March 9, 2025, at Wu Hall at the UC Berkeley Department of Music.

"Les Chants de l’Amour" is a piece for 12-voice vocal ensemble and computer-generated tape. It was commissioned by the Ministère Français de la Culture and IRCAM (the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in Paris) and premiered on June 3, 1985 in IRCAM’s Espace de projection by the Scola Cantorum of Stuttgart conducted by Clytus Gottwald. The tape was realized at IRCAM by Jean-Baptiste Barrière and Pierre-Francois Baisnée in collaboration with Grisey using the synthesis and processing version of CHANT, a synthesis-by-rule DSP devised and created at IRCAM.

The piece opens with exclamation "Songs of love of all the lovers) in several languages, including Hebrew, Russian, French, and German. Toward the end of this 36-minute work, we hear a monologue in Spanish by a woman who is longing for her beloved. The work explores the formant content of the vocalic part of the sentence “I love you”, formally treating this material through the entire piece, which follows the acoustical frame of the sentence itself. Seven different writing styles (ranging from polyphony, the syllabic style, and litanies to homophony) are presented gradually, employing transitions created by interpolation processes. Find the video recording here:   Our 2024-25 concert year brought a historic achievement - the American premiere of a masterpiece by Gerard Grisey, "Les Chants de l'amour" ("Songs of Love"). It was our collaboration project with CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) at UC Berkeley, without whose help this project would be impossible. Torday we are releasing the recording of the first of our two performances of this work, on March 9, 2025 at Wu Hall at the UC Berkeley Music department: