Electric Boulez! From the Ondes Martenot to IRCAM

Early Sonorities: Ondes Martenot and Musique Concrète

Pierre Boulez had an amazing ear for instrumental colour, whether he was writing for a small ensemble or a full orchestra. All the time, though, he was looking for the new sounds and new processes that only electronics could open up. To begin with, he was fascinated by an electronic instrument from the 1930s, the Ondes Martenot, whose sound could be soupy or spooky. Playing it at the Folies Bergère paid his rent while he was writing wild music for it among his first compositions.

At the same time he took part in the initial experiments made in Paris using elementary electronics to transform and assemble recorded sounds on disc. The pioneer here was Pierre Schaeffer, a radio engineer, who called the results musique concrète: music that was concrete in being made with the very stuff of sound. Young Boulez, at the piano, provided Schaeffer with sounds he used in two of the first pieces he created, in 1948.

For a few months in 1951–52, Schaeffer opened his studio to compaosers who were starting to make a name. Boulez was one, by now deeply into serial processes for organizing the basic elements of sound: pitch, duration, colour. For this abstract way of thinking, the electronic domain proved very appropriate. Synthesis could be measured; measurement could be precise. Boulez may not have known it at the time, but he was working in parallel with composers at one of the other early electronic music studios, at the radio station in Cologne.

He came out of Schaeffer’s studio with two studies, each of them under three minutes long. The first he made from one sound, on a cello, the second from six, but though that gives this second an enjoyable variety, it is Étude I that is the more impressive, for its concentration and evident development. Both end with a ‘That’s all, folks!’ gesture of a soft double knock.

Mechanisation and Abstraction

In later years Boulez was dismissive of Schaeffer, but in 1955 he was still on good enough terms to go back and produce music for a short film by the extravagantly named Jean-René Pierre Goetgheluck Le Rouge Tillard des Acres de Presfontaines, who set aside the weight of his patrician birth by calling himself Jean Mitry. The footage for this Mitry’s Symphonie mécanique is all of machines rotating or shuttling back and forth, always in fast repetitive motion, as if the camera were captivated by factoryline production. Boulez’s music keeps its distance from these rapid reiterations, unfolding in its own world of strangeness and abstraction, sometimes echoing the rush of reverberant sounds one hears in his live music.

In the late 1950s he moved to Baden-Baden with the encouragement of Heinrich Strobel, head of music at Southwest German Radio. One attraction was an orchestra used to playing new music. Another was the electronic music facility. Boulez used both in Poésie pour pouvoir (Poetry for Power), for an orchestra on three levels with electronic music on tape along with recited fragments of a poem by Henri Michaux. In what was becoming a way of life, he withdrew the piece after its 1958 first performance.

There followed a long hiatus. Through the 1950s Boulez had worked in the studio on three, increasingly demanding projects: the Études, Symphonie mécanique and Poésie pour pouvoir. None had been gratifying. On the other hand, his live works of the decade, including Le Marteau sans maître, were widely admired. Moreover, it was into the world of live performance that his growing activity as a conductor was taking him.

Toward Real-Time Transformation

However, the opening of Southwest German Radio’s Experimental Studio in 1971 prompted him at last to start a new electronic project: the first version of ‘…explosante-fixe…’, for eight instruments (he had recorded a very similar group for Symphonie mécanique) with live electronics. Having electronic transformation happen in real time, in the concert hall, was a recent breakthrough exploited notably by Stockhausen, whose Mixtur for orchestra with ring modulation Boulez conducted in London early in 1972. For  ‘…explosante-fixe…’ he had the advantage of apparatus devised by Hans Peter Haller to alter sounds and project them in space, but after several performances in 1973–4, this became another piece Boulez withdrew.

By now a new opportunity was about to arrive: an institute in Paris, funded by the French government thanks to the support of President Georges Pompidou, that would bring together composers, electronics engineers and programmers under Boulez’s overall direction. When this Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique.Musique (IRCAM) opened in 1977, Boulez brought to it his abandoned ventures, on which he worked with Andrew Gerzso as technical collaborator. Poésie pour pouvoir was transformed out of recognition into an early IRCAM showpiece, first presented in 1981: Répons, for six tuned reverberant instruments (pianos, harp, keyed percussion), electronically extended, and small orchestra. Part of a solo clarinet piece, Domaines, was turned into Dialogue de l’ombre double (1985), for the same instrument in dialogue, indeed, with its electronic shadow. Then came ‘…explosante-fixe…’, thoroughly and spectacularly reborn as the piece we hear this evening. Boulez retired from administrative duties at IRCAM in 1992, but remained to bring this work to fruition and returned to create an offshoot from the same project in Anthèmes 2 for electric violin (1997).

IRCAM and the Renewal of Form

Boulez’s early electronic projects are all easily found on YouTube, the Études with or without snazzy oscilloscope visuals by Sebastian Ars Acoustica. For Symphonie mécanique, the post mistakenly labelled ‘Symphonie Mechanique 1970' seems to offer Boulez’s music, without the film. The film is also available, but with other material intercut. For Poésie pour pouvoir there is just one option, at least until the work is revived in Paris in a couple of months time.

All four of Boulez’s IRCAM pieces are included in the Deutsche Grammophone set of his works and thereby available on YouTube or Spotify. YouTube also sports a two-hour documentary on Répons, with Boulez participating, recorded by a San Francisco Bay Area radio station in 1986, as well as several alternative versions of the work, including filmed performances from Salzburg in 1992 and Tokyo in 1995. There seems to be no film of Boulez conducting ‘…explosante-fixe…’, but YouTube has a radio recording of the initial octet form, prefaced by a short interview with the composer. The same source offers various accounts of Dialogue de l’ombre double and Anthèmes 2.

As a Frenchman stereotypically has his wife and his mistress, so Boulez continued to compose for purely instrumental lineups during these years, in new versions of old works (Notations for large orchestra) and entirely fresh ones (sur Incises, for pianos, harps and percussion). Work in the underground studios of IRCAM had renewed his zest for creation, which he could take back to his former love.

Paul Griffiths