WCXX

That's why Boulez loves percussion instruments like gongs. Strike a gong, and the sound burgeons outwards, but even as it swells, the sound is already dying. So it is with Boulez's music.

This little miniature for six players, composed in 1984 as a gift for William Glock, one-time Controller of the Proms, catches Boulez's essence. Everything springs from the six-note chord heard at the beginning, which is derived from the surname of the famous Swiss musical patron Paul Sacher. By an ingenious process of shuffling the intervals, Boulez "derives" five more six-note chords from this one. (He cheats for chord five: "I like to give myself rules, for the pleasure of breaking them", he says).

The piece simply shuffles and decorates these chords, bursting outwards in spirals and eddies, before returning to its starting point.

LISTENING POINTS

00.01 The first chord unfurls quietly on the piano; the second one pounces at 00.06.

00.10 The third chord arrives, with a trill on the violin's bottom string (as you'll hear, Boulez absolutely loves trills). The fourth chord stutters into being at 00.15 with the flute on top.

00.23 The fifth chord is ushered in by a downward plunge on the clarinet. A crescendo on the vibraphone prepares the ground for the last chord, at 00.32.

00.43 Chord 3 returns. From now on the six chords are shuffled, at an ever slower rate, while the decoration loaded onto them gets more and more luxuriant. Each chord is pre-echoed in thickets of tremolos and trills, and similarly echoed afterwards. The tension builds, until...

2.39 A startling change of motion occurs. The decorations drop away, and a stealthy tiptoeing begins in the piano.

3.19 Boulez brings back chord 6, in such a way that its bluesy quality is highlighted. The relaxed surface of the music is ruffled by the increasing speed of the chordal shuffling underneath.

4.57 Suddenly the piano freezes on chord 1, while the other instruments prance delicately around it. At the end, the chord shivers into silence.

FURTHER LISTENING

Notations II for piano

In December 1945, when he wrote this piece, Boulez was the archetypal angry young man. The target of his scorn was Schoenberg's 12-note technique, which at that point was hardening into orthodoxy. Boulez lampooned what he called this "lunatic sterility" by writing 12 little piano pieces of exactly 12 bars each, in about three days flat. In fact the restriction actually released something in Boulez, as the pieces are all really striking. The second of them is the angriest, and the shortest.

Notations II for orchestra

Thirty years later, Boulez was reminded of the existence of these 12 little piano pieces, which he'd forgotten about. With all the experience he'd accumulated, he now went back to the Notations and "proliferated" them (to use his own word) for a vast orchestra. So far he's recomposed five of the original 12, and the contrast between the original Notations 2 and the new one is especially striking. The angry 20-second shout becomes a hectic two-minute dance.

Improvisation 1 sur Mallarmé: Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui

Not all Boulez's "proliferations" are improvements. One example of a piece where Boulez's simpler, earlier version for me has the edge over the later one is his Improvisation 1 sur Mallarmé. This is a setting of Mallarmé's famous sonnet about a white swan floating at daybreak over a near-frozen lake. The image is perfectly caught in Boulez's first version of 1957, composed for soprano and seven instruments. It's all there: the uncanny beauty of the morning, the whiteness of the swan, the ice which is pure and also white, but holds everything in its sterile grip. Boulez's later version for big orchestra is fascinating, but it's just too luxuriantly beautiful.