Notes on Structures Ia

8/19/2019 Notes on Structures Ia

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Notes on Structures and serialism

Boulez entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1943 at the age of 17, Messiaen’s harmony class

in 1944. In 1945 he attended Ren é Leibowitz’s concert of Schoenberg’s Op. 26, which was a

revelation to him. He linked serialism with Klee, Kandinsky and Mondrian, as well as Joyce,

Kafka and Musil in literature. Paris was dominated by the neo-classicism of Boulanger, Break

with representation by the abstract expressionists was allied to 12-tone technique.

The serial aesthetic: Webern quotes Goethe on order in nature, requiring to abstract laws.

Klee wrote that Art does makes the invisible visible. Boulez - attempt to express the inner

self, but drew heavily on Romantic theories of art.

Boulez on Webern’s significance: “… he has rethought the very notion of polyphonic

music through the principles of serial writing (a writing which he discovered progressively in

his works, through the primordial role he give to the interval proper, and even to the isolated

sound), such is Webern. Throughout Webern’s work, one senses an effort to reduce the

articulation of the discourse to serial functions as much as possible. For him, the purity and

rigor of the experience were to be preserved above all.”

Aesthetic:

1. A new relationship between vertical and horizontal

2. The ‘articulation of the discourse through serial functions alone’; the deliniation of form

through contrasts derived from the series;

3. A purity and rigor, carefully through-out, extending to orchestration, which becomes

part of the structure.

The influence of the second Viennese School:

The unity of the serial hierarchy, topology and characterology: Schoenberg

Uniquity of the series, selectivity due to internal characteristics: Webern

One or more multiform series of varying typology: Berg



In 1953 Boulez wrote “Schoenberg is dead”: “…the confusion of theme and series in

Schoenberg’s serial works reveals quite clearly his inability to glimpse the sound world which

the series invokes. Here dodecaphony consists only of a rigorous law for the control of

chromatic writing.”

In the early days he dissed Berg, but no more. Now he admires Berg’s sense of continuous

development, and sees the ambiguity of his “novel-like” form as a virtue. “A work whose

course reveals itself completely at one hearing is flat and lacking in mystery. The mystery of

a work resides precisely in its being valid at many different levels. Whether it is a book, a

picture or a piece of music, these polyvalent levels of interpretation are fundamental to my

conception of the work.” [CD: 24-25]

But Webern’s work is like a picture by Mondrian: “You can see its perfection and it is very

striking, being stripped down to the absolute minimum–a truly austere kind of perfection; but

when you see it again at a later date, it offers you nothing further. The next time I see the

picture again it is the same.”

Schoenberg, however, has never been rehabilitated, but is always pictured as the

conservative: “Those rhythms of quite insufferable squareness, the diminishing level of

invention (after 1920), the style, and finally the contrapuntal procedures which are academic

and appear on every page.” Not to mention his adoption of ‘dead forms.’

The influence of Messiaen and Stravinsky was felt primarily in the area of rhythmic

innovation and development. Messiaen held advanced private classes outside the

conservatoire. Although Boulez found many things objectionable about Stravinsky’s music,

he described the Russian in 1948 as “the first person who consciously made an effort in the

rhythmic sense.” [Propositions, RA, 65] But the serialization of rhythm belongs to “Mode de

valeurs et d’intensit és” from the Quatre Études de rhythme (1949/50). Boulez first

incorporated rhythm into serialism in Structures (1951/52).

Partially through the infl. of Cage (under whose infl. Boulez wrote his Third Piano Sonata

1957) Boulez “loosened up” and wrote beautiful works recognizably in the Debussy tradition



like Le Marteau sans ma î tre (1952-54, rev. 1957); the textures here are much less pointillist

than in B’s earlier works; B admits that the serial orders are undecipherable to the analyst

PIERRE BOULEZ conversations with C élestin Deli ége

PB: What I attempted there was what Barthes might call a reduction of style to the degree

zero. …the first Structure …was an experiment in what one might call Cartesian doubt: to

bring everything into question again, make a clean sweep of one’s heritage and start all over

again from scratch, to see how it might be possible to reconstitute a way of writing that begins

with something which eliminates personal invention.

In Structures you can follow the process of re-introducing personal invention; … the first

piece is purely automatic; the second already introduces a certain regularity: there is no longer

just this statistical feature of twelve values, but polarisations centering on certain points in the

series; these become rhythmically regular and so already establish a certain sense of direction

in the midst of this statistically differentiated world. After this, the third piece is very strongly

directed towards oppositions between completely static passages and frenetically dense ones.

…at the end of the second piece it was in fact I who was suggesting to the material that we

make something together… what interested me was to see how the ‘material/myself

relationship was gradually reversed to become ‘myself/material’; so that afterwards 1 was

completely free of complexes about the strict organisation of one’s material.

… Thus this sort of absurdity, of chaos and expansion of serial technique mechanical wheels-

within-wheels tending almost towards the random, was completely intentional . . .At that

point disorder is equivalent to an excess of order and an excess of order reverts to disorder.

The general theme of this piece is really the ambiguity of a surfeit of order being equivalent to

disorder. This equivalence between disorder and order is finally overthrown, becoming an

opposition between the two.

… that period there was uncertainty about the evolution of music, and it was not possible

to do otherwise. Musical methodology had to be questioned, … in my opinion nothing

could be more fruitful than this perpetual modification of perspective, of hypotheses, in the

face of musical reality.



A musical labyrinth incorporating nonlinear design, performer-based decisions, and

notions of form itself as a principle aesthetic, Boulez's Third Piano Sonata represents a

pinnacle of musical Modernism --an "open work" cast in ivory and ebony.

Third Piano Sonata; The ideal version of the sonata has five movements, which Boulez

calls formants. Although all five formants contain very specific systems intended to open the

work's structure to aleatoric elements, only formants 2 and 3 have been published, so the work

has never received a complete public performance by anyone save Boulez himself. Formant 2

is titled Trope, and formant 3 is titled Constellation. The Constellation movement has a

mirror-image double, Constellation-miroir, which may be played in its stead. Additionally,

Boulez recently published "Sigle," a short fragment unassigned to a formant.

Trope is made up of four fragments, each taking its name from related terms of literary

criticism: Text, Parenthesis, Commentary, and Gloss. The performer is free to chose which

fragment serves as the beginning; as long as Commentary is played either before or after

Gloss, and providing that the performer plays through each fragment to the end in the

direction selected.

The next formant, Constellation, serves as a labyrinth of sorts, allowing the performer the

freedom to select a path through the movement from several alternative possibilities. The

movement is essentially comprised of a series of "vertical" fragments called "points," which

are written in green ink; and "horizontal" fragments called "blocs," which are indicated in red

ink. (Although a small sub-section named M élanges reverses these color assignments.) After

playing a fragment, arrows in the score prompt the performer to go to one to four possible

next fragments, and so on through the piece. And as if this weren't enough, the reverse side of

the sheets contain Constellation-miroir, which may played as a substitute for Constellation.

Both formants make some rather unusual demands on the performer apart from the need to

occasionally make choices regarding organization and rhythm. The performer must also

employ various resonance effects, including a near virtuoso "legwork" on the pedal, and the

use of piano harmonics.

Trope and Constellation are actually fairly gentle, basically static, lacking any sense of

motion or narrative development, and in both, silence plays a very important role. The music



generally takes the form of tiny, spiky clusters of notes, each embedded in a field of silence

with varying degrees of lingering sustain or pointillist crispness connecting them to the next

cluster. The music evades any sense of dramatic continuity, forcing the listener to focus on

each isolated event itself rather than its overall relation to the whole.

Documents

Notes on Structures Ia