...explosante-fixe... & Mémoriale Programme Notes

Tracing the lineage of Pierre Boulez’ body of work can be like sleuthing through the tangled limbs of a person’s ancestry. Few pieces illustrate this better than Mémoriale (1985) and …explosante-fixe… (1971), two intimately connected works that begin with a modest sketch and grow into expansive tributes. 

Mémoriale was seeded by …explosante-fixe…, which Boulez first conceived in 1971 as a simple text for the English music journal Tempo, written in memory of Igor Stravinsky (who had died in April). “As is often the way, I was asked to prepare a realisation myself,” Boulez later recalled. “And when I tried simply to use my text and the formulae I had given I found myself compelled to enrich it, so that my version is infinitely more complex than the text which I sent to the journal. This is quite normal where the process of evolution is at work.” 

That evolution led to multiple realisations of …explosante-fixe…, from Boulez’s initial piece for clarinet, flute, and trumpet into a version for octet and electronics. Out of this process, a germ blossomed into a new work entirely. In 1985 Boulez reconceived the material as a memorial to Lawrence Beauregard, a gifted young flautist of Ensemble InterContemporain, who had died at just 28. Mémoriale pays tribute not with solemnity but with vitality, paying tribute to the young experimenter by creating a workout for the lungs and entire mouth, making frequent use of flutter tongue, tremolo, and other special effects. The flute – here exotic, sparse, alien – is given centre stage, with its string and horn compatriots restrained by practice mutes and soft dynamics. The ragtag chamber ensemble flits, pecks, and scratches around the wandering, shivering, sputtering flute line. Strained harmonies close in on warm tonality and then pull out again into a harsher climate. 

…explosante-fixe…, in its definitive incarnation, returns to Stravinsky. At first glance, the score seems to divide into four groups - the solo flute, two “co-soloist” flutes, ensemble, and electronics. Yet the ear quickly perceives another kind of organisation. Rather than a dialogue of soloist and accompaniment, the entire work radiates from the flute, which is endlessly refracted by its three “doubles”: the two flutes that ornament it, the ensemble that amplifies and enriches it, and the electronic part that multiplies it. The soloist is placed at the centre of a shifting, proliferating texture, sometimes illuminated, sometimes nearly submerged in its reflections. 

Together, Mémoriale and …explosante-fixe… show Boulez at his most personal: an experimentalist probing the limits of sound and form, while also a composer deeply engaged in remembrance - first of Stravinsky, then of Beauregard. Both works memorialise through transformation, each taking a single nucleus of musical material and letting it proliferate into something luminous, searching, and alive.