Pierre Boulez is one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His musical trajectory is intermingled with a sizable portion of the history of art music: a leading figure of modernism, impossible to ignore, he has represented and enlivened the musical avant-garde since 1945 in the eyes or the public. His career as a conductor brought him to the head of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic among others, introducing him to a concertgoing public whose attitudes he hoped to reshape, initiating them through concerts and CDs to modernist classics from the first half of the century (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Berg, etc.). Pierre Boulez has also had a signifiant impact on the development of musical institutions, especially in France where he launched or nurtured such projects as IRCAM (where he became the first director), the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the Cité de la Musique.

Boulez is also a writer; his tastes and talent for taking public stances forced his adversaries as well as his champions to reflect upon and debate the aesthetic choices made at various turning points in history. His provocative affirmations, such as the famous article written at the time of Arnold Schoenberg’s death, “Schoenberg is Dead” (1951), or his cutting judgment on the “uselessness” of composers who haven’t “felt the need of the twelve-tone language” (1952) made Boulez a controversial figure in the artistic and cultural milieu, even beyond musical circles. Boulez’s ideas often connected with those of philosophers, writers, or sculptors, from the crucial moment of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s; thus it is hardly surprising that intellectuals such as Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze spoke of Boulez’s music on occasion. These conversations worked in both directions, and Boulez’s music is equally permeated by fertile exchanges with thinkers, poets, and artists, from Paul Klee to René Char, from Paul Valéry to Henri Michaux, from Stephane Mallarmé to James Joyce.

For a first look at Boulez’s musical world, let’s begin by a close look at what is in effect his opus 1, the first of the Notations for piano, composed in 1945:

These twelve measures can be split up according to a set of internal oppositions. By pairing each small motivic unit with its twin, the form of this miniature becomes perceptible. For example, the triplets in the first measure are also found in the final bar with the same pitches but the inverse melodic profile. The same reasoning can be followed for each unit in the piece, giving the following layout in columns:

In four of these pairs, the opening cell reappears transformed: the melodic profile of the first element is inverted, the durations of the second are lengthened, the chord is scored first fortissimo then pianissimo, and the ostinato pedal is transposed from the low to the high register. We are confronted by a typical Boulezian setup where certain basic aspects of the musical vocabulary are contrasted while others remain static.

Pierre Boulez defines a musical language by establishing oppositions between one type of material and another, forcing them to interact with one another. Though the surface may seem smooth or supple, the underlying system generally turns out to be rigidly organized. The author of the essay “Constructing an Improvisation” (1961) objects to the false opposites of freedom and constraints, between the musical idea and the mediating system, between spontaneity and calculation, between autonomy and free will. All in all, Boulez’s music offers a world of contrasts that transcends the fundamental unity of its core material.

If his earliest works such as the Première sonate (1946) and the Sonatine for flute and piano (1946) show an assimilation of a serial language inherited from Webern and Schoenberg as well as a rhythmic treatment indebted to his teacher Messiaen, the Deuxième Sonate (1948), published by Heugel in 1950, definitively established Boulez’s musical personality in the eyes of the avant-garde public. This technically demanding four-movement work is characterized by a dense counterpoint dominated by jerky gestures rarely heard before in piano works, which Boulez described at the time as “the instrument of madness itself.” With strident gestures and superposed layers, Boulez fulfills in this Sonate the wish he first expressed in 1948: that music “must be a sort of collective bewitching and hysteria, violently current” (in 1995, p. 262). Nevertheless, references to sonata form are hardly abandoned: its model is the Beethovian sonata, and the piece even includes a scherzo-trio. In 1951-1952, Boulez attracted a lot of attention with his experiments in nearly “automatic” composition, using what he called “total serialism.” In Structures pour deux pianos, livre 1 (1952), Boulez applies the proportions of a twelve-tone series to other musical parameters such as intensity, durations, and type of attack. This attempt—“not un-absurd,” as Boulez would later note— rests nevertheless on an assumed impulse to unify the musical discourse, a goal he would continue to aim for by other means in later works. This is undoubtedly why the original title envisioned for Structures was borrowed from a Paul Klee painting: À la limite du pays fertile.

Le marteau sans maître (1955) however remains the most famous work of this early period, a piece emblematic of Boulezian language in more than one respect. It reflects Boulez’s wish to create a musical corollary to surrealist poetry—in this case, René Char, whose work he’d already used twice before, in the cantatas Le soleil des eaux (1950, 1958, 1965) and Le visage nuptial (1951-1952, 1989)—a task which was no doubt achieved only partially by composers more closely associated with the surrealist movement, such as André Souris. The lineup of exotic instruments (guitar, xylorimba, viola, alto flute, vibraphone, percussion, and contralto voice) makes this the first piece to employ what would later be understood as Boulez’s instrumentarium par excellence—that is to say, resonant instruments, those whose players (Boulez explains) can no longer control the evolution of their sound after an attack (all the instruments in Marteau except the alto flute and viola). The color resulting from this uncommon choice of instrumentation approaches, in the ears of many of its first listeners, the timbre of a Balinese gamelan. Elsewhere, his original use of the voice, a sort of extension of Sprechstimme, alongside closed-mouth effects and conventional singing, anticipates a not insignificant later preoccupation (notably in Pli selon pli and cummings ist der dichter). In addition, the cyclical structure of interposed movements shows an interest in non-linear forms, later manifest in the composer’s attempts at open forms (see below).

Boulez’s works maintain a sort of genetic relationship, with the origins of certain pieces often visible as ‘works-in-progress’ in others. A few clarifications must be introduced here. First of all, certain works are “derived” from other works: the source work is in this case comparable to a living organism nurturing its offspring. There are other pieces which exist in successive versions, sometimes reworked after long periods, even decades: the four versions on Le visage nuptial (studied by Gerald Bennet (1986)), the different versions of Pli selon pli and Répons—examples of potentially unfinishable pieces. Certain works remain unfinished and apparently abandoned (only two of the five movements of the Troisième sonate were published, though Boulez premiered work in 1957 by playing all five movements). Elsewhere, occasional though non-explicit borrowing between pieces can be found, such as the reorchestration of two of the Notations for piano (1945) inserted into the Première Improvisation sur Mallarmé (the second movement of Pli selon pli) a secret self-quotation in 1962 sine the Notations were not published until 1975. Finally, there are the pieces withdrawn from the composer’s catalogue, such as Poésie pour pouvoir, an electroacoustic piece with an inconclusive coordination between ensemble and electronics.

The example of Poésie pour pouvoir illustrates another contrast which marks Boulez’s imagination from very early on: the interplay between instrumental sound and electronics. One could detect in the failure of Poésie pour pouvoir the basis for a path which would lead to the establishment of IRCAM and to research into the possibilities of interaction between instruments and electronics. Real-time technology, where the sound of an instrument is modified and redistributed with practically no delay, remains a major preoccupation for Boulez, one he puts into practice in several works combining acoustic instruments with their electroacoustic extensions: Dialogue de l’ombre double, …explosante-fixe…, Anthèmes 2, and above all Répons.

But the fundamental contrast that has always retained Boulez’s interest is that which exists between pulse and resonance. In his well-known treatise Penser la musique d’aujourd’hui (1963), an extension of his courses at Darmstadt, Boulez defines a distinction between ‘smooth’ time and ‘grooved’ time. Alternating between moments of pulsated, rhythmic time and others where time is homogenous and undifferentiated—this will always be the key to unlocking Boulez’s musical universe. Unfurling a passage in ‘smooth time’ often consists of composing resonance: allowing instruments to resonate implies letting oneself be guided by the highly unforeseeable patterns of decay particular to individual instruments. This alternation is present in early works such as Notations (mentioned earlier in this text) or the Deuxième sonate, where a percussive gesture confronts a resonant element in the first measure. Boulez later put the same concept to spectacular use in Éclat (1965), where the choice of instruments (piano, celesta, harp, glockenspiel, vibraphone, mandolin, guitar, cymbalom, and tubular bells, plus six other non-resonant instruments) creates a sort of scale from the shortest possible resonance (mandolin) to the longest (piano). A part of the work’s dialectic involves allowing instruments to resonate without intervention. In the central section marked “Assez lent, suspendu, comme imprévisible” (markers 14-19), the instruments play simple unornamented notes one after another, accentuating the resonance between each attack. This fascination for resonance seems to be the most durable lesson Boulez retained from his fellow traveller of a brief period, John Cage: resonance is the open path to a certain unpredictability, the randomness of the moment, but always under control and within circumscribed limits. The remarkable entry of six solo instruments in Répons (at marker 21) is no less engaged with this fascination with the evolution of resonances; here, the resonances are amplified, prolonged, and spatialized by the electronics.

Additionally, Boulez’s predilection, for about ten years around 1960, for what came to be called “open pieces” can only be understood as a result of his exploration of contrasts between grooved time/smooth time and pulse/resonance—concepts which play a primordial role in nearly all his pieces, from Notations (1945) to Sur Incises (1994/1998), even when the form is fixed. Rather than “open pieces,” Boulez preferred “works with an open trajectory,” a term that applies to Éclat (1965), the Deuxième livre de Structures pour deux pianos (1956-1961), Domaines (1961-1968) for clarinet with or without ensemble, and above all the Troisième sonate which alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI (1956) inspired a large number of open-form compositions in the 1960s such as Earle Brown‘s Modules I and II (1967) or André Boucourechliev‘s Archipels (1966-1971). Explaining his fondness for open forms, Boulez explicitly claims to represent the poetic ideals of Mallarmé, whose Livre, an immense unfinished project involving a poem in moveable parts, reconstructed by Jacques Scherer in 1957. According to Scherer, “in order to eliminate chance even more radically, the Livre refuses the passivity of monolinear continuity, existing rather in a multi-dimensional hyper-space of non-Euclidean geometry” (Scherer, 1957, in 1977, p. xvii).

Boulez was inspired by this spirit not only in his extended “Portrait of Mallarmé,” the monumental Pli selon pli (whose earlier versions included some open-form indications in the vocal part), but also in pieces such as the Livre pour quatuor (published in 1968), where the performers are invited to play a subset of several proposed sections in their own chosen order.

Throughout the years, Boulez’s interest in larger forms began to grow. The turning point must have been Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1975), a piece where a single breath lasts twenty minutes, where Boulez clearly reaffirms his will to “last.” But this work, one which garnered public attention more easily (it has been recorded about six times), with its obstinate repetitions and static harmony, is one of the least representative of Boulez’s habitual style, usually more frenetic and more focused on variation at the expense of repetition. Regardless, large-scale form takes a prominent role in the works that follow Rituel, pieces of substantial scope such as …explosante-fixe… for MIDI flute, large ensemble, and real-time electronics (1991-1993), Répons for six soloists, ensemble, and electronics (1980-1984), or Sur Incises for three pianos, three harps, and three percussionists (1996-1998) in two long movements, played without a pause. This tendency can perhaps partly be explained by the experience acquired as a conductor in the 1960s and 1970s, leading orchestras in Cleveland, New York, and Vienna (in long-winded pieces like Mahler symphonies), as well as his experience conducting the Ring cycle and Parsifal at Bayreuth (1976-1980). At the same time, Boulez authored some of his shortest works for soloists small ensemble, which often elaborate on a local level ideas more fully explored in the pieces of larger scope; we hear echoes of Mémoriale in …explosante-fixe…, of Dérive 1 and Anthème 1 in Répons, of Dialogue de l’ombre double in Domaines, etc.

Parallel to this taste for large-scale form, Boulez demonstrates in his later works a greater attention to the audience’s ability to follow the trajectory of a piece. This interest in the perceptual previsibility in his work is mot discernible in what Boulez termed “signals” and “envelopes,” signposts to guide the listener. Signals, or points of reference that serve to articulate crucial moments in the form, are often radical changes in dominant texture, often using long sustained notes. In Mémoriale (1985) these long notes played with a tremolo are endowed with a harmonic accompaniment that define the boundaries of the form. In the same fashion, the sustained harmonics in Anthème 1 (1992) act as a signal that divides the work into seven sections of variable duration. The long high notes played by the winds in Répons (especially during the orchestral introduction) also play a guiding role in helping the listener to understand the global movement of the piece, without necessarily contributing a higher level of detail. In Dérive 1, a short piece for six instruments filled with shimmering timbres, Boulez guides the audience’s perception by radically limiting the harmonic content to only six chords. This reduction allows him to engage in a game of ornamentation in which an abundance of appoggiaturas that threaten and ultimately supplant the regular pulse of the meter (this is Boulez’s only piece written from start to finish in 4/4!). The figures are complex, but because they appear only in the context of six harmonic envelopes, made all the more recognizable by their fixed registers, Boulez attains a high degree of immediate comprehensibility which no doubt accounts for the popularity of the piece.

Through its engagement with serialism, open forms, the problems of interaction between instrument and machine, and questions of perception, Boulez’s output is as rich as it is unified. If “total serialism” was quickly abandoned, the search for unity never has been, and serial thought remains second nature even when Boulez returns to thematic writing in recent works, or when splitting lines into ornamentation, as in Dérive or in Répons. Furthermore, as a conductor, educator, analyst, and administrator, he has had a hand in creating lasting institutions devoted to the progress of music and its relation to the public.

Translation: Christopher Trapani.