Recital: An Evening of Pierre Boulez

Aspen Contemporary Ensemble

David Robertson, conductor

Antonina Styczen, flute

An Evening of Pierre Boulez

By Dan Ruccia

Writers have a strange tendency towards defensiveness when they write for a general audience about the music of Pierre Boulez and his mid-twentieth-century modernist peers. His voluminous thickets of notes present a problem to be justified; his dissonant, chaotic surfaces become something to overcome to find a deeper, more palatable meaning hiding underneath. It’s something this writer has been guilty of in discussing Boulez in the past. As pianist Tamara Stefanovich noted in a post-concert talk in 2015, “We need to change our vocabulary [in talking about Boulez] from ‘difficult,’ ‘dissonant,’ and ‘challenging’ to ‘complex,’ ‘rich,’ and ‘beautiful.’”

The two pieces on this concert provide a prime opportunity for such a rethinking, being simultaneously “dissonant” and “complex,” “challenging” and “beautiful.” They exemplify many of the ways his compositional approach had evolved away from the ultra-rigorous serialism of the 1950s and open-ended forms of the 1960s toward something generally more flexible (though no less rigorous). They both emerged from long periods of gestation and are the result of his tendency to return to works or harmonic schemas over and over. While their ensembles may be opposites, the way they carve out time is similar. And they are both fundamentally about taking the sound of one instrument and exploding it outwards into a larger ensemble.

The winding story of …explosante-fixe… begins in a castle in Scotland in August 1971, where Boulez was struck by the sound of a flute echoing through the empty halls. Shortly thereafter the U.K. magazine Tempo commissioned him to contribute to a series of tributes to Igor Stravinsky, who had died in April 1971. He submitted a one-page score to an open-ended, quasi-improvised piece of music that he described in a 2011 interview as a “kit” that “anyone could use to try to compose something.” (Apparently only Heinz Holliger actually did.) At the center of the page is a single stave, marked “Originel.” It starts on an E-flat—a note that in German is called “Es” or “S,” for Stravinsky—which is followed by six other pitches. Arrayed around it in a hexagon are six elaborations marked “Transitoire II–VII,” each connected to the other via a series of arrows. Instructions on the next page describe how the performer is to navigate the score. The title comes from a passage in surrealist André Breton’s 1937 book L’amour fou (“Mad Love”) describing “convulsive beauty” (la beauté convulsive): “convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, explosive-fixed (explosante-fixé), magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.”

The piece was performed a few times in the 1970s, each time featuring a revised score and a different ensemble, some with electronics. But Boulez was never fully satisfied with the results, so he let the work sit until the late 1980s. Inspiration (and technical advancements in computing) struck between 1991 and 1993, when he wrote this “final” version of the piece by expanding material from Transitoire V, Transitoire VII, and Originel into three movements separated by short electronic interludes. “I’m in no rush to complete the other parts,” he would note in 1998. “I really like infinite works in this sense, in the double meaning of being unfinished, yet capable at the same time of being extended indefinitely.”

He built the piece around the vision of a solo flute sounding in a resonant space, with the ensemble of strings, woodwinds, brass, and MIDI-triggered electronics serving as resonators. Put another way, the ensemble becomes a castle with an ever-shifting series of empty halls that forever echo and transfigure the sound of the flute. The soloist is always surrounded by a sonic cloud: a flurry of complementary sixteenth notes, a harmony flying just out of sync, or a reverse echo that prefigures a given line. Using then-state-of-the-art technology from IRCAM, the electronic music research institute he founded in the 1970s, Boulez has the computer listen to and follow along with the soloist, triggering an entirely different kind of sonic transfiguration.

The choice of ensemble here is unusual for Boulez. As we will see in sur Incises, he often privileged keyboard and percussion instruments. “It was interesting to do without instruments I like very much,” he said in 2011, “to find something with completely ‘normal’ instruments and try to find a very different sound.” With this ensemble he has the capability to play with different ways of sustaining pitches and dynamic contours beyond the decay of a plucked string. That he rarely chooses to do that says a lot about the sounds he prioritizes as a composer.

Next comes sur Incises for the unusual ensemble of three pianos, three harps, and three percussionists playing largely pitched instruments. In 1991 Boulez wrote to pianist Maurizio Pollini about a proposed commission: “Having performed again Stravinsky’s Les Noces . . . gave me the idea of writing a piece for solo piano, a group of two or three pianos and keyboard percussion instruments . . . (and possibly adding two harps??). I would like to compose a uniquely striking piece. Do you think that’s an unrealistic idea?” While that particular piece never came to be, Boulez held onto the idea.

When Pollini approached Boulez about writing a short work for the inaugural Concorso Umberto Micheli piano competition in 1994, Boulez responded with Incises. The title means “interpolations,” and it was a mere 4 minutes of music: an episodic introduction followed by a flurry of unrelenting sixteenth notes. [Incises will be performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard in his AMFS recital on July 30.] The material proved to be generative for Boulez, and he almost immediately began a new work expanding on this seed, gradually returning to the ensemble he had proposed to Pollini. This new work, titled sur Incises (literally “on/above Incises”), was intended for the ninetieth birthday concert of Paul Sacher, a conductor and one of Boulez’s friends and major patrons. By the time the concert occurred in April 1996, he had only completed 11 minutes—the first movement of the finished piece—with promises to Sacher that more was on its way. Over the next two years Boulez poured all his compositional energy into the work, and its size and scope ballooned accordingly. By the time it was completed in 1998, the second movement had grown to 23 minutes, employing material Boulez would retroactively add to Incises. He dedicated sur Incises to Sacher, and its full version was premiered in August 1998, one year before Sacher’s death.

Like many of Boulez’s works composed after 1970, sur Incises is based on a pitch collection, in this case derived from Sacher’s last name: E-flat (as above, “S”), A, C, B-flat (“H” in German), E, and D (“ré” in French). From those six notes Boulez derives a seemingly endless profusion of harmonies and gestures, motives and filigrees. From the combination of pianos, harps, and percussion he crafts a seemingly endless array of textures, timbres, and resonances. One instrument will echo another or reinforce the sustain of a chord. One will play a flurry of notes and another will sound a harmony made from a permutation of those same pitches. Often everyone will breathlessly unspool mountains of sixteenth notes with a relentless fury that pushes the endurance of the performers. At a few key moments the full ensemble hits the A at the bottom of the piano, creating an ecstatic rupture in the flow of time after which everything seems to move differently. He saves the more unexpected percussion—steel drum, tubular bells, crotales—for moments when the texture thins, allowing their unusual clanging to shimmer iridescently like the carapace of some alien insect. Taken as a whole, sur Incises approaches glancingly close to the uncanny.

So what does Boulez prioritize as a composer? Why should we follow Tamara Stefanovich’s advice and change how we talk about this music? It’s because Boulez really is speaking in a different musical language, one no more or less clear or notable than any other. In it individual notes and harmonies are less significant than the spaces those notes create. He composes in resonance, density, and gesture, using contrast and repetition as a mode of emphasis and evolution. And that in turn requires us to retune our listening, to focus on how his gestures permutate and evolve, or on how he controls the progression of sounds to activate every resonant space in the concert hall. He is fundamentally making a case that these ways of listening are the predicates for how we listen to music more broadly; Boulez is just getting rid of unnecessary trappings. — © Dan Ruccia