André Boucourechliev was born on 28 July 1925 in a culturally rich, music-loving, Francophile milieu. His father practiced law; his mother and maternal grandfather, with whom they lived, studied literature. From a young age, André was educated in French schools. His aunt, Dora Boucourechliev, was a Dresden-trained pianist and would be his only piano teacher until after the Second World War, when he went to study with Panka Pelischek at the conservatory in Sofia. At that point, he was appearing regularly before the public: he founded a “concert brigade,” and his virtuosic performances (often in working-class settings) soon earned him a medal as “first-rank shock worker.”¹ In 1948, he won a national competition in musical performance organized by the government. These achievements allowed Boucourechliev to convince the Minister of Culture that he should be granted permission to complete his studies in France rather than in the USSR. He would not return to his homeland until 1993.

Boucourechliev arrived in Paris in March 1949 and pursued his studies with Reine Gianoli at the École normale de musique. In 1951, he was awarded a licence de concert by a jury presided over by Alfred Cortot. Boucourechliev then went on to become the assistant to Jules Gentil and to teach at the same institution. He also attended Walter Gieseking’s masterclass in Saarbrücken. He recalled:

[Gieseking’s] personality was such that we felt truly connected to him, he had a mastery of music and a mastery of souls. The link with Gieseking kept my pianistic drive alive, and to be honest, it was only after his death [in 1956] that I felt free to change my skin, to become a composer.²
Boucourechliev’s knowledge of the piano, of piano repertoire, and of the role of the performer would profoundly influence his work. He published his first writings and had his first compositions premiered at the Domaine musical.

Even as he repeatedly returned to the works of the old masters — in particular, Schumann, Stravinsky, Chopin, Debussy, and Beethoven — Boucourechliev was an ardent defender of his own era, engaged in his generation’s combats. Most of his early writings concerned contemporary composers (principally Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen), the Domaine musical, electronic music, and serialism. As a gifted communicator, he remained attentive to the works, composers, and performers of his time. Also among his preferred topics were notions of unity in the musical work, program, difference, theme, and variation. Over four decades, his writings (in particular for the journals Esprit, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Preuves, and Réforme) gave the listeners for whom he wrote an essential role in the musical process.

In 1956, when Boulez’s Troisième Sonate and Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke XI had just been composed, Boucourechliev wrote about the links between serialism and indeterminacy:

In place of the formerly singular trajectories of the musical work toward its inexorable conclusion, we now have aleatoricism, a musical time open to a thousand possible outcomes. If yesterday serialism was an implacable system of organization, today it has become a form of thought, a way to experience time in its discontinuity and its absence of finality for just long enough to glimpse the elusive constellations of a work…³
He befriended Umberto Eco and helped spread the latter’s The Open Work in France.

Around this same time, Boucourechliev was also interested in electronic music, both as a critic and a composer. In 1956, Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna hosted him at Radio Milano’s Studio di Fonologia, where he produced a short Etude pour bande magnétique. Two years later, he would return there to work on his Texte I. Maderna and Berio — whom he assisted in the composition of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) — were his only composition teachers.

However, it was a different work that Boucourechliev chose to open his catalogue in April 1958. Musique à trois for flute, clarinet, and harpsichord, with its “thoughtful Webernian allure,” along with its omnipresent chromaticism and “network of concerted actions mutually conditioning one another,” displays some of Boucourechliev’s major compositional preoccupations. So do his other early works: Text I (for magnetic tape, 1958) is made up of components in constant motion and evolution. The Sonate pour piano (1959), full of contrasts and violence, leaves it to the performer to determine durations and speed of delivery. The score for Texte II (for two magnetic tapes, 1959) proposes various possibilities for asynchronous beginnings, creating various possible alignments. Boucourechliev stated his intentions clearly in a note accompanying Signes (a 1951 work he later withdrew from his catalogue). He describes

a free encounter between the composer and the performers in the realm of musical time. Time, which oscillates between rigorous and flexible—by turn imposed, suggested, or freely chosen—is sometimes transmitted by one of the performers and other times created in moments of collective understanding.

The free elements (durations and dynamics) of Musiques nocturnes (1965) would soon lead Boucourechliev toward his work Archipels.

Boucourechliev’s works from this time were regularly played at the Domaine musical. He also visited Darmstadt and Venice. A long stay in the United States (1963-1964) would be crucial for his work. There, he became fascinated by the ideology of Gordon Mumma, Robert Rauschenberg, and the ONCE group. “It’s not just a matter of aleatoricism, but of the fleeting, the instantaneous, that which cannot be repeated. And I believe that Archipels came from my contacts in the United States. Without them, I would not have written Archipels.”⁴

The influence of Earle Brown was decisive: “With Brown,” Boucourechliev wrote, referring to Brown’s Available Forms I and II,

the performer must listen to their partners and is called upon to react freely to what they hear, by way of elaborating the musical material…. The performers are thus not so much “masters of a form” as stakeholders in an unpredictable formal process, experienced as necessary. It is in this general direction that Archipels followed and developed.”⁵
This series of five works written over 1967 to 1971 “would have been inconceivable without my experience in America, but also without my lived awareness of the legacy of Webern and Debussy.”⁶

With this work, we arrive at the center of Boucourechliev’s oeuvre, the heart of his poetics, prefigured by his prior compositions over 1958 to 1965 and reflected in his subsequent work. His notion of mobility, which until then he applied to chamber ensembles, was now scored for a soloist and extended to the orchestra.

Archipelis an exploration of open forms, variable from one performance to the next. And yet, chance has nothing to do with it, because each performance is a product of decisions made in the instant, by free and responsible performers guided by constant reciprocal listening. This denial ofaléa, and this commitment to relations between consecutive moments, distinguishes Boucourechliev’s poetics from that of, say, John Cage. The work’s unity relies upon links established through detailed and rigorous conception. Inspired by the idea of genetic material dictating the potential behaviors of the music, Boucourechliev defined with extreme precision all the elements he offered the musicians. Each realization, though unique, had already been envisaged by him.

In dividing the structures from their presentation, Boucourechliev offered performers a powerful tool for open-endedness. The score designates pitch-based elements, which Boucourechliev carefully selected for the harmonic and melodic intervals they introduce, the registers they traverse, and the lines they trace. The score also offers the performer a selection of schemas, or rules, for the other parameters aside from pitch: dynamics, density, speed and flow, phrasing, timbre, etc. The performer realizes the music by spontaneously associating schemas and pitches. Archipel 4 (for piano solo, 1970), for example, proposes fourteen raw pitch elements and no fewer than 111 schemas. Nearly all may be used multiple times, yielding an enormous number of possible associations and orders. The split between schema and material thus allows for reappearance without redundance: anything may be reused, but nothing may be repeated.

Most of Boucourechliev’s open works also include parts with traditional staff notation, though even these elements are susceptible to modification. Complete rigidity is an exception. A second level of openness exists regarding the order in which structures may be played and juxtaposed, which can create something quite novel, especially when multiple musicians are involved. Each moment becomes unique. Yet Boucourechliev sometimes directs the musicians to come together, around a dynamic, a register, or a polarized note, for example. He is not completely against directing the process or imposing certain elements.

In these ways, he oversees, more or less strictly, the course of the work and its overall form. While the fourth Archipel, consisting entirely of schemas and a bank of materials, constitutes his most open piece, Ombres, from the same year, has fixed notations and a closed form, with only two “archipelic” passages. Years later, works like Lit de neige (1984) and his last two string quartets (1989 and 1994) would also be characterized by open-ended stretches.

Boucourechliev’s considerations regarding form allow for his work to be divided into three phases. In the earliest works (1958-1965), form remains closed. In the second phase — from the first Archipel (1967) through Six Etudes d’après Piranèse (1975) — the compositions are for the most part decidedly open. And finally, from Nom d’Œdipe (1978) through Trois Fragments de Michel-Ange (1995), Boucourechliev directs the trajectory of his works, without entirely renouncing stretches of openness and the unpredictability of certain details.

For the entirety of his creative output, he remained committed to indeterminacy — which he used in a way that was perfectly compatible, in his view, with closed forms and which achieved sounds that could not be generated through fixed notation. Openness, moreover, provided him with a means to escape the inexorability of development, as well as the pitfalls of rhetoric. In the end, it yields to no one.

More personal themes appear in the titles Boucourechliev used and are perceptible in the works’ construction: multiplicity, expedition, vision, and blindness. Many of his titles refer to Greek mythology.

Haunted by an eternal return, Boucourechliev’s music oscillates between resemblance and difference, selfsame and other. He once observed that the note D appeared “strangely” throughout many of his pieces. So did recollections of Beethoven, most notably the Holy Song of Thanksgiving from the String Quartet No. 15, op. 132, heard in Ombres (Homage to Beethoven) and in the three quartets. Initially chromatic in the extreme, his music turned in the 1980s toward diatonicism, due in part to recurrent melodic figures.

Repetition was a limit he constantly came up against. At its purest, it could seriously alter the course of the work, or end it altogether. Such was the case in his first work, and it would be the case in his last Fragment de Michel-Ange, A l’alma stanca…

André Boucourechliev died in Paris on 13 November 1997.

Notes

<sup>1. [Translator’s note: The title of shock worker was an official distinction the Soviet Union awarded to productive citizens and exemplary workers.] ↩
2. Catherine DAVID, “La leçon de musique” (interview with Boucourechliev), Le Nouvel Observateur/Arts et spectacles, 1285, 22-28 June 1989, p. 109. ↩
3. André BOUCOURECHLIEV, “Qu’est-ce que la musique sérielle?,” France Observateur, 591, 31 August 1961, p. 17. Reprinted in A l’Ecoute, Paris, Fayard, 2006, p. 38. ↩
4. Interview with the author, 1993. ↩
5. André BOUCOURECHLIEV, “La musique aléatoire: une appellation incontrôlée,” Analyse musicale, 14, January 1989, p. 40. Reprinted in Dire la musique, Paris, Minerve, coll. “Musique Ouverte,” 1995, p. 193. ↩
6. BOUCOURECHLIEV, Dire la musique, p. 182. ↩</sup>