21 series)

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com essential recording
Written in the mid-1980s, Répons represents Pierre Boulez's first major work after his controversial tenure conducting the New York Philharmonic. It's also a demonstration of how live instruments could be used in conjunction with computer-generated sound. He's been strangely hesitant to record it, which is even more mystifying the more one listens to this new DG release. It's one of the longest uninterrupted spans of music Boulez has ever composed. And while not as provocative as some of his early works, it's a marvel, a forest of sound that one wants to return to again and again.

The live instruments (which include a Hungarian cimbalom) are dominated by richly textured percussion, which doesn't exactly make Répons unmelodic as beyond melody. Initially, the effects seem repetitive--alternating activity and stasis--but what later unfolds is a rich, gratifying, thematically unified exploration of sound with a meticulously planned exposition, development, and recapitulation. The companion piece, Dialogue de l'ombre double, is more modest and in some ways more charming, exploring spatial effects and pedal points between the live and computerized clarinet sound. Those interested in the future of music--both in terms of means and content--must hear this. --David Patrick Stearns

Pierre Boulez: Répons / Dialogue de l'Ombre Double (20/21 series), Music, Pierre Boulez, Vincent Bauer, Florent Boffard, Frederique Cambreling, Michel Cerutti, Daniel Ciampolini, Alain Damiens, Ensemble InterContemporain, Classical, Classical Composers, Classical Music, Music for Tape/Electronics and Live Performer(s), Orchestral & Symphonic

Pierre Boulez: Répons / Dialogue de l'Ombre Double (20/21 series)
Average customer rating:

IRCAM's triumph finally recorded

notes across time and space.

A sound trip...

The Sound and the Theory.

an electro-acoustic spiral of sound

Pierre Boulez: Répons / Dialogue de l'Ombre Double (20/21 series)
Vincent Bauer , Florent Boffard , Frederique Cambreling , Michel Cerutti , Daniel Ciampolini , Alain Damiens , and Ensemble InterContemporain
Manufacturer: Deutsche Grammophon
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

All Works by Boulez | Boulez, Pierre | ( B ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Concertos | Forms & Genres | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Symphonies | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music
Deutsche Grammophon: Music | Specialty Stores | Music
Similar Items:

Boulez: Sur Incises/Messagesquisse/Anthèms 2

Boulez: ...Explosante-fixe...

Boulez conducts Boulez

Boulez: The Three Piano Sonatas

Boulez: Pli selon Pli

ASIN: B00000IIZ3
Release Date: 1999-04-13

Tracks:

Repons: Introduction
Repons: Section 1
Repons: Section 2
Repons: Section 3
Repons: Section 4
Repons: Section 5
Repons: Section 6
Repons: Section 7
Repons: Section 8
Repons: Coda
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Sigle initial
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Strophe 1
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Transition I a II
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Strophe II
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Transition II a III
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Strophe 3
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Transition III a IV
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Strophe IV
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Transition IV a V
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Strophe V
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Transition V a VI
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Strophe VI
Dialogue de l'ombre double: Sigle final

Amazon.com essential recording

Written in the mid-1980s, Répons represents Pierre Boulez's first major work after his controversial tenure conducting the New York Philharmonic. It's also a demonstration of how live instruments could be used in conjunction with computer-generated sound. He's been strangely hesitant to record it, which is even more mystifying the more one listens to this new DG release. It's one of the longest uninterrupted spans of music Boulez has ever composed. And while not as provocative as some of his early works, it's a marvel, a forest of sound that one wants to return to again and again.

The live instruments (which include a Hungarian cimbalom) are dominated by richly textured percussion, which doesn't exactly make Répons unmelodic as beyond melody. Initially, the effects seem repetitive--alternating activity and stasis--but what later unfolds is a rich, gratifying, thematically unified exploration of sound with a meticulously planned exposition, development, and recapitulation. The companion piece, Dialogue de l'ombre double, is more modest and in some ways more charming, exploring spatial effects and pedal points between the live and computerized clarinet sound. Those interested in the future of music--both in terms of means and content--must hear this. --David Patrick Stearns

Customer Reviews:

IRCAM's triumph finally recorded.......2006-07-15

For several years after Pierre Boulez launched the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris in 1977, critics wondered why he himself had nothing to show in the field of electronic music. But when he finally unveiled "Repons" in 1981, he showed himself a comfortable with the new technology, and many called the work his masterpiece. On this Deutsche Grammophon disc, part of the "20/21" series of new music recordings, we finally get a recording of "Repons", performed by the composer's own Ensemble Intercontemporain with Boulez himself conducting, along with "Dialogue de l'ombre double" for clarinet and electronics.

"Repons", here in its completed 1984 version, is a piece of massive proportions. It is scored not only for orchestra, but also for six soloists (two pianos, harp, vibraphone, xylophone & glockspiel, and cimbalom), and at the time of its unveiling the electronic manipulation of its sounds depended on the behemoth 4X computer. The work also requires a special distribution of the instruments in the concert hall, with six speakers surrounding the audience.

It might sound complicated and eggheaded, but the musical structure Boulez builds out of these parts is ingenious and instantly likeable. The first of its ten sections is a simple chugging along by the orchestra, which sounds just like any ensemble effort. But then, this traditional music is torn asunder by the entrance of the soloists playing six simultaneous chords, amplified and bounced around the hall from speaker to speaker. Each of the soloists then plays individually an arpeggio, whose individual notes are captured by the electronics and themselves broken down into an arpeggio. Then, after a brief orchestral interlude, the soloists play arpeggios again, and this time the electronics generate an arpeggio of an arpeggio of arpeggio. What does this sound like? Just think lots of glittery, metallic sounds that are brilliantly chromatic. And that's just the beginning. Over the course of the work, Boulez displays such electronic wizardry as imposing one instrument's timbre over other sounds (Klangfarbemelodien), sustaining sounds into a shimmery continuum, and repeating certain sounds, with each appearance possessing a different alteration in pitch and rhythm. Finally, the piece has a clear dramatic arc, rare for Boulez, where we warm up slowly, hit a massive climax in the seventh section, and the gently cool down.

"Dialogue de l'ombre double" for clarinet and electronics was written in 1985 for the sixtieth birthday of Luciano Berio. The "dialogue" of the title is between a live clarinet and a pre-recorded and electronically treated clarinet. The work again makes use of the performance space, with the live clarinettist lit while performing and the pre-recorded portions played in darkness and projected from speaker to speaker. The music is lyrical and musing, and the soft interplay of the two elements is quite soothing after the bustle of "Repons". Boulez's writing for clarinet has clearly matured after his earlier solo piece "Domaines", and here Alain Damiens expertly handles Boulez's virtuoso material.

It's a pity that the rich spatial dimensions of the two works are collapsed here into a stereo recording--would that DG reissue this disc in surround sound. Nonetheless, a team at IRCAM developed special software for bringing the stereo sound as close as possible to the live experience, and this recording does indeed make for pleasurable listening. The liner notes are also relevatory, consisting of a description of the two pieces, an interview with Boulez, and IRCAM technician Andrew Gerzo's explanation of how the sound was adapted for stereo. Still, liner notes can only do so much, and if you really want to know more about the technology and theory behind "Repons", I'd recommend Dominique Jameux's PIERRE BOULEZ (Paris: Fayard/Sacem, 1984, with English translation Harvard University Press, 1991).

All of Boulez's late works are exciting, so if you're unsure about this disc, check out "Sur Incises" or "...explosante-fixe..." (also on DG). But any Boulez fan should eventually encounter these brilliant electroacoustical works.

notes across time and space........2006-03-27

As with many post-serialist Boulez works, _Repons_ is a self-contained universe of musical rules. Serialism, while in some ways structurally liberating, does have essentially concrete, mathematical forms that one can fundamentally grasp, if only vaguely. _Repons_ is quite a different sort of work: it is alien, oblique, and pervasively structured with only the most counter-intuitive relations of harmony. I guess, depending on one's perspective, it could be completely dissonant or completely consonant.

Pierre Boulez likens _Repons_ to a spiral. But what supports the spiral? I liken it more to a big serpent with its tail in its mouth, where each musical idea is mutually reinforces each other idea. So fluid and aurally tight is the sound that it seems that if you could take any individual pitch at any given moment and trace it through all of its spatio-compositional relations you could see the entire piece. It would all be there. This is unrealistic, of course, but the whole is so vital in this work that to understand each individual moment in the music you will have no choice but to know how each is related to each. This is not uncommon in understanding art, or in understanding the nature of things. Hegel offered an argument that in order for a thing to be at all, it must be this rather than that, and the properties encompassed in "rather than that" were as essential to its being as the "this." "Something is in this relation to Other from its own nature and because otherness is posited in it as its own movement: its Being-in-Self comprehends negation, through which alone it now has its affirmative existence . . . it is just as this cancellation of its Other that it is Something." A rather obtuse way of making a very simple argument, but it applies so importantly here because _Repons_, as a musical experience, lacks much in the way of `emotional' connection (as in the feelings people typically associate with the term "emotional") and appeals to a rather different impulse. The emotion it satisfies, if there is any, is like the satisfaction when a mathematician completes an elaborate proof. It _is_ different, but it does satisfy in its own way.

All of this is, on consideration, a rather unhelpful way to discuss music. Most people would never want to listen to anything like this. But the reason that it might be helpful in this case is that some adventurous types might still want to check it out, and most musical experience does not deal with anything so abstract. Traditional Western harmony coheres to its relations in the major and minor scales; serialism coheres to its relations in mathematical forms. The rationale of _Repons_ is not so familiar. It operates at what must appear to the listener as a bewildering system. But with a goal towards seeing the whole, _repons_ becomes more intelligible and then VERY rewarding.

Let me try to give you an idea what the music is actually like. As a technical feat, the piece is daunting: it is scored for six percussive soloists (two piano, harp, vibraphone, xylophone/glockenspiel, and cimbalom) modified by live electronics and a live 24-piece orchestra. The electronic processors serve to reposition sounds - in live performance, spatial relations for performers and listeners alike. The audience surrounds the orchestra, and is surrounded in turn by six soloists with loudspeakers arranged to transform sounds.

Boulez says that he was interested in the ways past and present interact. The acoustic instruments produce raw material which is transformed and relocated so as to interact spatially and harmonically with its own reproductions and the sounds of the orchestra and soloists. This illustrates what I mean by the serpent analogy: the conclusion of the piece reveals that everything was included in it all along. The essence of each musical idea is drawn across myriad links, its essence changing as its relationship to other ideas is understood and seen as different but always identified with the original. Like a labyrinth of mirrors, its sonic images are reflected and distorted in so many ways it could induce vertigo. Its pervasive dissonance can be interpreted as an almost coherent harmony once every last piece is in place and the system is laid out completely. (I add the "almost" as a qualifier since this is one of Boulez's "works in progress" - this is the third and longest version of the composition and so perhaps the most complete.)

The complexity of its internal system makes _Repons_ is one of the most difficult pieces of music I have ever listened to. The musical argument is truly arduous to follow, and it places great responsibility on the listener to pay attention. It is not something I can listen to often and enjoy. This review is crap, seriously, and I don't recommend this album to ANYONE! But you should listen to it if you think you might find it rewarding.

A sound trip..........2002-07-11

... and good pieces too def. worth having because Boulez is one of this centurys greatest living composers.

You could easy buy Boluez last four or five record if you like modern contemporary classic music and you have pure enjoy for a lifetime. This sounds great too... a "trip" in that positive manner.

The Sound and the Theory........2001-11-08

Arnold Schoenberg once dropped the zeugmatic question: "Am I the only one who thinks Msr. Boulez' music is mindlessly pretty, and pretty mindless?" Since Schoenberg couldn't have heard much beyond the first piano sonatas, the question is forgivable. Often I also wondered, while listening to early works like the Gurreliederesque song-cycle Le Visage Nuptial, why Boulez was ever considered so intractable in the first place. For all his dry-as-dust theorizing, the music itself was clearly intended to be the next step onward from Debussy, luxuriating in sound qua sound, with little to no intellectual content besides the creation of new sounds, new and ever more ear-tickling combinations of instruments. The massed note clusters in those piano sonatas aren't choquant, percussive Bartokian wallops, intended to rattle the dentures of the Schumann-loving concertgoers, but three-dimensional, non-linear mini-universes. The point, as with New Age music today, was to lose yourself. How bourgeois -- even if the bourgeois didn't get it.

Repons both is and isn't different. It's his most tropical profusion of pure sound yet, but at the same time, it illuminates the lifelong Boulez project while deepening it incommensurably. What makes Repons special, and separates it from all the IRCAM compositions that followed in its wake -- since they're all reactions for or against the father-figure Boulez, they're automatically disqualified from Repons' peculiar purity -- is the feeling that it's self-generating, that it HAS NO AUTHOR. By way of contrast, Iannis Xenakis, that other leader of the 20th cent. European avant-garde, was always up front and center in his compositions. Even when a piece was entirely rendered on a computer or based on some arbitrary astronomical formula he would carefully select and arrange the preprocessed musical information to get across a specific effect that bore the stamp of his distinctly saturnine personality. As a result, you could always sense his volcanic need to get his suffering across. The only time we sense Boulez here, though, is in the very first bar, as he nudges the little tiny snowball down the hill with his toe. What inevitably follows gives off the impression, the illusion, that he's watching this fearsome, village-threatening accretion from the sidelines along with us.

Majestic, no? Repons could only be the upshot of Boulez' extensive conducting in the 1970's, where, in order to earn his keep, he had to try to develop some sympathy for people he previously reviled, and here I'm primarily thinking of that most famous devotee of orchestral bloat: Gustav Mahler. Mahler said music should contain the world and everything in it; Boulez, with Repons, takes this concept even further. Instead of transcribing natural phenomena into musical notation, making the mountains sing and the oceans upheave, and dabbling in proto-Messiaenic birdsong along the way, Boulez creates his own highly rarefied world and decides what it should and should not contain. He plays god, and for the forty minutes that Repons takes to unfold, you are his vassal, subservient to his rules.

How does this differ from listening to any piece of music or reading any book where we're at the mercy of an author and his very specific ethos? Simply because, as long as an author is implicit, he's there for us to gauge our closeness to ( or alienation from. ) Repons, having no author -- that's the conceit, at least, and it's an extremely believable one when you listen -- exists in an uncritical, unmediated space, a law unto itself. If you play it, you are it -- "it," of course, being Pierre Boulez. Almost every artist has dreamed of taking himself out of the picture, of letting the work speak for itself, but those who have succeeded can now be counted on one finger. By effacing himself utterly, Boulez has discovered new heights of creative megalomania.

an electro-acoustic spiral of sound.......2001-07-14

"The piece is cast in the form of a spiral, which I created in several stages... Repons is a set of variations in which the material is arranged in such a way that it revolves around itself." --Boulez from liner notes

"Repons" is by turns ethereal, mysterious, and declamatory -- it dances, swirls, and even marches (in Section 4 and the Coda). The timbre is dominated by light instrumentation -- piano, harp, vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel, and the exotic cimbalom -- with real-time electronics, which creates a ghostly sheen. I can't say that I find this somewhat tinny timbre, which seems to have been generally favored by Boulez throughout his composing career, to be compelling. A further drawback to the piece, as far as I'm concerned, is that the arpeggios that are featured in several sections remind me too much of Glass. Ironic, I know, given that Glass was part of the minimalist movement against the high modern serialism of Boulez!

Nonetheless, "Repons" is fascinating, a clear realization of a particular vision with state-of-the-art technology and musicianship. I enjoy listening to "Dialogue de l'ombre double" even more (the second piece on this disc), which is solo clarinet and its electronic double. For those interested in the overall sound of "Repons," I recommend Ligeti's orchestral works, particularly those of the late 60s and early 70s found on "Cello Concerto/San Francisco Polyphony" on Wergo, and on the LIGETI PROJECT II disc (see my review). For those interested in electro-acoustic music, I recommend Luigi Nono, particularly the ominous "guai ai gelidi mostri" (1983) on LUIGI NONO 3 on Montaigne (see my review). And if you are adventurous, by all means listen to Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble on ECM (TOWARD THE MARGINS and DRAWN INWARD -- see my reviews of both), which combines free improvisation and real-time computer processing!

I suspect that Boulez' future reputation will loom larger in musical theory (ie, the serialist school) and institution-building (ie, IRCAM in Paris) than in composition. His greatest contribution, in fact, may be in his relentless championing of the 20th century avant-garde through his conducting, pushing to expand the stultified concert repertory.

Music Review:

Music Review

music review

Music Review

I Believe [Import] [Limited Edition]

Sounds and Sweet Airs

Sergei Prokofiev: Romeo And Juliet Excerpts

Legion of Boom [Enhanced]

Sin, Win & Grin

Summer Storm

Tabla for Accompaniment or Practice - Boxed Set

The Best of Gary Hoey

Spaced Out [Import]

Richard Strauss - Capriccio / Schwarzkopf, Wächter, Gedda, Fischer-Dieskau, Hotter, Ludwig, Moffo, Philharmonia Orchestra, Sawallisch

Soul Station

Ricardo Arjona: Canto Nuevo

Romanticos de Nuevo

Antonio Rosetti: 5 Wind Partitas

Steppin' Out/Very Best of Joe Jackson