Résumé
A landmark work, Pierre Boulez’s Répons (1980-82) was written to showcase the technological potential of IRCAM, the Parisian Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music that Boulez founded in 1977. This piece, like many others, was considered a work-in-progress at the time of the composer’s death in 2016. Existing associated scholarship for the most part reiterates Boulez’s commentary on this work, such as the importance of the concept of a spiral. On the aesthetic level, the spiral clearly illustrates the idea of a constantly evolving, unfinished work (DiPietro 2000), but Boulez’s explanation of how it applies to the musical materials is somewhat vague “Répons is a set of variations in which the material is arranged is such a way that it revolves around itself” (Derrien 1988). In this paper, I will show how the model of a spiral is essential to the conception of this piece in two additional ways, one at a technical, pitch generation level, the other a larger formal level. In this way, I will elucidate interesting aspects of the harmonic structure of the piece, its overall form, and their relationship to Boulez’s broader aesthetic outlook.
The third version of Répons (1984) consists of an introduction, eight sections and a coda. An early version of the piece (1981) ended after the fourth section. My paper will comment on the evolving quality of Boulez’s works by examining the relationship between section four and the immediately ensuing section—added in the following version (1982) (Jameux, 1989). Significantly, the material for this fifth section is based on a retrograde reworking of the material from section four, composed to create a sense of process, characteristic of his late style. This is the essence behind the formal concept of a spiral: a new, but intensified cycling through materials that are related at a deep level.
Both sections feature materials derived from a “wallpaper,” recorded material played in the background during section four (Driver 1982, Williams 1994, Tissier 2011), which, as I will show, is based on a fascinating pitch generation technique (Example 1) that is related to, but distinct from techniques he used previously in his career. It is a spiral-like adaptation of a rotational array through which he composes out the SACHER chord. Common to many of Boulez’s later works, the use of this chord constitutes an homage to Paul Sacher. The spiraling process results from precise pitch-space considerations illustrated by the fixed boundary pitches and the arrows shown on the sketch. His application of this array illustrates how serial techniques can generate a background pitch organization, constituting a perfect illustration of the harmonic principle that underlies all his music from 1955 on: the use of successions of chords with large-common subsets, where some notes change (Losada 2023). An understanding of the harmonic organization elucidates crucial aspects of Boulez’s ingenious solution to the difficulty of synchronizing live performance and recorded materials without robbing the performance of its vitality (Boulez 1985), one of the most striking and influential aspects of this work.
