Some scenes of Werner Herzog’s cult movie Herz aus Glas for example, the memorable moment with Thomas Binkley sitting on a rock accompanying a high voice that intones the trouvère song ‘chanterai por mon courage’; the first time Schmelzer saw and heard the confratelli of Castelsardo in Sardinia, singing a four-voice falsobordone in their headquarters, a vocal practice that shakes the fundaments of western music history; the encounter with Bart Meynckens, Paul De Troyer, Koen Laukens, Arnout Malfliet and Lieven Gouwy, singers who made it possible to turn dead traces into living vibrations, giving back to polyphony its geo-political and cosmic dimensions, connecting distant time and geographic layers.

Many other impulses could be added: an LP by the Hilliards with strange sound climates in the Dunstable motets; the Roland Barthes essay (misunderstood by everybody according to Schmelzer) that would give the emblematic name to the group. What interested Schmelzer in the ‘grain’, in the ‘grittiness’ was not the timbre as such, or the voice technique (although it’s a strange phenomenon why certain voices sound completely neutral to us and others reveal worlds, histories, territories, climates…). In the second part of the essay Barthes compares two opera protagonists, Boris and Mélisande, and writes about la mort au travail: one understands that the grain is not a state of being, but a way of acting, of doing.

The voice should not be engaged in representing a repertory, but in immediate injection, producing what Barthes would call a non-pathetique pathos, a savage pathos. The grain is the condition of the voice to become a voice of the past, of the other, of an automatism, of a gesture.
Not without surprise, from the start, the approach and sounding results of graindelavoix were surrounded by controversy. Probably graindelavoix is the only ensemble in the early and classical music world, with one or two exceptions, that brings up every time so many different reactions, leading to discussions about aesthetical values, parameters, historical performance etc…

Sometimes you get even the impression that some critics were waiting for a new cd or concert-program to be able to break the usual boredom of early music releases. Some critics and public reactions evoke misunderstanding or misconception of what is at stake for graindelavoix. While some critics don’t hide their reservations or scepticism, others feel personally provoked and answer these provocations with emotional attacks.

Many times the combination of a certain conceptual approach (in reviews sometimes dismissed as pseudo-intellectualism) with the appearance of naturalism (in reviews sometimes called spontaneism) is received as a confusing and disturbing provocation, resulting in opposite reactions, in such a way that what some call naturalistic or spontaneistic, is called forced, artificial and hyper-manneristic by others.

Y Björn Schmelzer always writes exhaustive cd-booklets without an illustrative or explanatory goal. For him they give an extra essayistic dimension for listeners that like to provoke their own thinking and like to go deeper into conceptual issues involved in the sounding result. Nevertheless, the booklet-essays are often described as pseudo-intellectual, unreadable, hermetic or esoteric, etc…

Y The combination of different sorts of singers, with different timbres and expressive and articulated phrasing, is often understood not as a result of musicological research and artistic choice, but as pure provocation and ‘bad taste’.

Y Often the reviews and commentaries, are the result of the shock of a cd or a concert program that worked as a catalyser, revealing something of the hidden prejudices that not only critics but also academics in human science still bear about past and patrimony and which are suddenly erupting, mostly uncovering the true implications and intentions of the writer’s ideological background.

The ideas and artistic projects that propose new views on early repertoires resulted in multiple cds. These are mostly enthusiastically received as a welcome refreshment and vital boost more than needed in a musical landscape that suffers from aesthetic sclerosis and stereotypical approaches. Graindelavoix never provoked without explanation and never renewed in a fashionable or cheap way. If graindelavoix builds with every project on a track of another aesthetics, it is by reframing the repertoires and questioning the way we approach tradition and history, religion, practice and culture, beyond the cultural categories, following the statement of Bruno Latour that ‘we have never been modern’… Seeing early repertoires again as artistic or operative practices more than as ‘classical music’ already inscribed in accepted formats, graindelavoix tries to activate the potentials that were often, intentionally or not, excluded by classical music paradigms and parameters, dismissed as amateurism, mere tradition, ‘non-informed performance’, untrained vocality, improvisation, ornamentation that distracts from the essence of a transparent counterpoint, etc…

Not without surprise, from the start, the approach and sounding results of graindelavoix were surrounded by controversy. Probably graindelavoix is the only ensemble in the early and classical music world, with one or two exceptions, that brings up every time so many different reactions, leading to discussions about aesthetical values, parameters, historical performance etc…

Sometimes you get even the impression that some critics were waiting for a new cd or concert-program to be able to break the usual boredom of early music releases. Some critics and public reactions evoke misunderstanding or misconception of what is at stake for graindelavoix. While some critics don’t hide their reservations or scepticism, others feel personally provoked and answer these provocations with emotional attacks.

Many times the combination of a certain conceptual approach (in reviews sometimes dismissed as pseudo-intellectualism) with the appearance of naturalism (in reviews sometimes called spontaneism) is received as a confusing and disturbing provocation, resulting in opposite reactions, in such a way that what some call naturalistic or spontaneistic, is called forced, artificial and hyper-manneristic by others.

Y Björn Schmelzer always writes exhaustive cd-booklets without an illustrative or explanatory goal. For him they give an extra essayistic dimension for listeners that like to provoke their own thinking and like to go deeper into conceptual issues involved in the sounding result. Nevertheless, the booklet-essays are often described as pseudo-intellectual, unreadable, hermetic or esoteric, etc…

Y The combination of different sorts of singers, with different timbres and expressive and articulated phrasing, is often understood not as a result of musicological research and artistic choice, but as pure provocation and ‘bad taste’.

Y Often the reviews and commentaries, are the result of the shock of a cd or a concert program that worked as a catalyser, revealing something of the hidden prejudices that not only critics but also academics in human science still bear about past and patrimony and which are suddenly erupting, mostly uncovering the true implications and intentions of the writer’s ideological background.
Many other impulses could be added: an LP by the Hilliards with strange sound climates in the Dunstable motets; the Roland Barthes essay (misunderstood by everybody according to Schmelzer) that would give the emblematic name to the group. What interested Schmelzer in the ‘grain’, in the ‘grittiness’ was not the timbre as such, or the voice technique (although it’s a strange phenomenon why certain voices sound completely neutral to us and others reveal worlds, histories, territories, climates…). In the second part of the essay Barthes compares two opera protagonists, Boris and Mélisande, and writes about la mort au travail: one understands that the grain is not a state of being, but a way of acting, of doing.

The voice should not be engaged in representing a repertory, but in immediate injection, producing what Barthes would call a non-pathetique pathos, a savage pathos. The grain is the condition of the voice to become a voice of the past, of the other, of an automatism, of a gesture.
Not without surprise, from the start, the approach and sounding results of graindelavoix were surrounded by controversy. Probably graindelavoix is the only ensemble in the early and classical music world, with one or two exceptions, that brings up every time so many different reactions, leading to discussions about aesthetical values, parameters, historical performance etc…

Sometimes you get even the impression that some critics were waiting for a new cd or concert-program to be able to break the usual boredom of early music releases. Some critics and public reactions evoke misunderstanding or misconception of what is at stake for graindelavoix. While some critics don’t hide their reservations or scepticism, others feel personally provoked and answer these provocations with emotional attacks.

Many times the combination of a certain conceptual approach (in reviews sometimes dismissed as pseudo-intellectualism) with the appearance of naturalism (in reviews sometimes called spontaneism) is received as a confusing and disturbing provocation, resulting in opposite reactions, in such a way that what some call naturalistic or spontaneistic, is called forced, artificial and hyper-manneristic by others.

Y Björn Schmelzer always writes exhaustive cd-booklets without an illustrative or explanatory goal. For him they give an extra essayistic dimension for listeners that like to provoke their own thinking and like to go deeper into conceptual issues involved in the sounding result. Nevertheless, the booklet-essays are often described as pseudo-intellectual, unreadable, hermetic or esoteric, etc…

Y The combination of different sorts of singers, with different timbres and expressive and articulated phrasing, is often understood not as a result of musicological research and artistic choice, but as pure provocation and ‘bad taste’.

Y Often the reviews and commentaries, are the result of the shock of a cd or a concert program that worked as a catalyser, revealing something of the hidden prejudices that not only critics but also academics in human science still bear about past and patrimony and which are suddenly erupting, mostly uncovering the true implications and intentions of the writer’s ideological background.