Boulez Ex Machina

By Michael Walsh

The composer turns to computers for a major new work

If there is one international musical figure who can truly be described as protean, it is Pierre Boulez. The former enfant terrible of French composers, who combines a brilliant mathematical mind with an expert musical ear, Boulez has been the chief theoretician of the postwar serialist movement. During his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1971 to 1977, he introduced audiences to unfamiliar repertory by familiar composers like Liszt, and startled them with lucid, penetrating readings of standards like Debussy's La Mer. Under his baton the orchestra reached a level of technical precision that it had lacked for years under his predecessor, Leonard Bernstein. From 1976 to 1980, Boulez presided over the controversial Patrice Chereau productions of Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth--an incisive interpretation of the mythological saga, which can now be heard, in digital sound, on Philips Records (16 discs; $150).

For much of the past decade, though, Boulez, 56, has been absorbed in his work as director of IRCAM--the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/ Musique. The institute, part of the Pompidou arts center in Paris, is devoted to research and collaboration between scientists and musicians. It is here, on the front lines of music's progressivist movement, that Boulez for the first time in his career has turned to modern computer technology to produce his newest work Repons (response).

As performed under Boulez's direction last week, it is the most impressive piece yet to emerge from the hitherto uneasy marriage of music and technology. A formidable technical achievement, it is also a work that makes a direct appeal to the emotions, the sign of a masterpiece in any era.

Repons is scored for three groups, arranged in a large rectangle. An instrumental ensemble of 24 musicians sits on a raised platform in the center, facing the conductor. Stationed symmetrically around the room are six soloists, also on platforms, playing two pianos, electric organ, harp, cimbalom, vibraphone and xylophone, with each instrument wired for sound. A half-dozen technicians operate a bank of machines on ground level behind the conductor. The most important is the advanced 4X computer developed at IRCAM that can alter and transform live musical sounds with a speed that allows it to function as effectively as a new instrument itself. The performance--the French premiere--took place in suburban Bobigny in an auditorium resembling a gymnasium, because no hall could be found in Paris to suit the nonproscenium requirements of the piece.

The 18-minute work falls into easily understandable sections, each based on the classic principle of tension and release. The first section is for the instrumental ensemble only, unaided by electronics. The tension is created by rapid, repeated-note figurations and massed sonorities. The release, such as it is, comes from a series of eerie tremolos and trills reminiscent of the doom-laden flute flutterings in Strauss's opera Salome. The soloists enter with a computer-assisted arpeggio, vibrating and echoing over the six large loudspeakers that are stationed around the hall. Then the soloists and the ensemble interact, responding to each other in the manner of Renaissance polyphony.

As the piece develops, a furioso section for the ensemble is followed by electronic responses from the soloists until the entire orchestra begins to fragment, a violin jutting out here, a trombone blasting there. Repons gradually increases in rhythmic complexity as held notes in the brass arch over the busily insistent sound beneath. The impression is of the turning of a gigantic wheel in space. The piece ends quietly on a stationary but disquieted chord; rest is achieved at last, but not peace.

And this is only Part 1. Commissioned by the Southwest German Radio and premiered in October at Germany's Donaueschingen festival, Repons will soon acquire a second half from Boulez. No matter how that turns out, it is already clearly a major work by a composer who is still boldly extending music's horizons.

--By Michael Walsh

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