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Boulez's ‘Doubles’ and ‘Figures Doubles Prismes’: A Preliminary Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Allen Edwards
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Extract

When in 1957 Igor Markevitch and Georges Auric commissioned the 32-year-old Pierre Boulez, fresh from the success of his Marteau sans maître, to write a work for the Société des concerts Lamoureux, the result was an eightminute symphonic torso, Doubles, whose gripping intensity, heroic utterance, and vivid orchestral imagery marked it as potentially one of the composer's most important creative efforts. Announced at its Paris première on 16 March 1958 as the beginning of an ambitious work-inprogress, it was not heard again until January 1964, when the first ten minutes of a revision entitled Figures Doubles Prismes were presented by the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Basle. Instead of adding the expansive second stage of Doubles – which had been mapped out and in part actually composed in particell – the revision opened up the existing first stage by interpolating new episodes of contrasting character. Though the plan of the revision called for a total duration of about 30 minutes (toward which an additional five minutes of music were composed and introduced at the Hague by Het Residentieorkest in 1968), a shift of career focus by the composer in 1971 to conducting and electronic research brought progress on this and several other major projects to an indefinite halt. As a consequence, the intended but still unrealized overall shape of Figures Doubles Prismes, as well as of its forerunner, Doubles, can be appreciated, at least for the time being, only from manuscripts on deposit at Switzerland's Paul Sacher Foundation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 185 , June 1993 , pp. 6 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 The timings in this essay and in the related diagrams are based on the tempi originally marked in the score, and followed by the composer in early performances of the work. His recently-released recording of Figures Doubles Prismes on Erato proceeds at a speed approximately one third slower (20 minutes, versus the total of 15 minutes indicated here). Bruno Maderna, except for his error in inserting a pause between phase 1 of ‘Violon chinois IV’ and ‘Rappel/Effacement’, gives a good sense of the work's original pacing in his 1968 performance recently issued on Stradivarius STR 10028.

2 Cf. Tempo No.169, ‘Unpublished Boulcziana at the Paul Sacher Foundation’.

3 All the series making up the themes of Doubles are extracted from a common prototype by means of procedures called chiffrages (for the durational series) and multiplication de frequences (for the pitch series). These procedures are described in ‘Eventuellement’ (in Rekvés d'apprenti, pp. 153–4, 158 and 168–9). Boulez had used the prototype series earlier for the Third Piano Sonata.

4 The themes were never to be transposed nor inverted – hence their pitch-classes were to remain constant, though regularly reassigned to new registers by changing registral grids, and regularly supplemented by freely chosen auxiliary pitches.

5 See Boulez, Pierre, Le Pays fertile – Paul Klee (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989) passim Google Scholar.

6 The interruption of work on Doubles in 1958 resulted from an urgent commission from the composer's principal patron and champion of the time, Heinrich Ströbel of the Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk, for Poésie pour pouvoir. The composer's later resumption of the Doubles project, in the revised form of Figures Doubles Prismes, was likewise supported by a commission from Ströbel.

7 Based on further research into the archival material, the present diagram supersedes the one published as Diagram 2 in ‘Unpublished Bouleziana …’

8 Whereas the highlighted pitches of Violon chinois I are clearly borrowed from the neighbouring fast serial themes of Doubles – in the case of Example 9, theme d those of Violon chinois II cannot be readily traced on the basis of the available sketches. In Violon chinois II, moreover, the characteristic ‘tick-rock’ pulse does not simply roll out an available pitch collection (as. it does in Violon chinois I) – rather, in much of the central ‘claviers’ section, it is the cleverly arranged result of intricately interleaved durational organizations all based on multiples (or fractions) of the eighth note. (See Komponisten des 20ten Jahrhunderts in der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basle, 1986 Google Scholar, front cover, showing the sketch of measures 88 through 101 of Violon chinois II).

9 The reformulation of the rhythmic structures is based on substitution of different durational reducers, of die type illustrated in Example 6, so as to allow the expression of greater or lesser numbers of different durational values. The rhythmic values are in rum systematically subdivided into sixteenth notes or triplet eighth notes, resulting in the ‘frenetic’ audible rhythmic surface.

10 In Effacement – canons d'intensités (écho) this is carried out by means of a serial process nearly identical to the one described by the composer on pages 158–159 of Penser la musique aujourd'hui: superstructural elements drawn from the stage 1 écho of the slow theme's segment 4 (the voices of its canons d'intensités overlay) are each thickened harmonically before being conflated into a single, durationally augmented resultant rhythm of chords; die chords then provide the matrix for a continuous arching violin line (a mélisme par excellence) overlaid across the new texture.

11 Many of the formal divisions of Figures Doubles Prismes referred to above may be aurally identified from commercial recordings using the following start-point reference timings (Boulez '85/Maderna '68): Accords lents (slow theme segments 1, 2, 3): O'00′/0'00′; 10 développement vif: 1'03′/0'55′; Accords lents (slow theme segments 6, 5, 4, plus échos): 1'53′1'33′; 20 développement vif (phase 1): 4'22′/3'20′; Violon chinois I: 6'07′5'35′; Violon chinois II (phase 1): 10'15/7'29′; ‘claviers’: 11'07′/8'10′; Rappel c – 1st half 13'30′/10'12′ (in Madema's case, following an erroneously inserted 12-second pause); Effacement – canons d'intensités (écho): 13'51′/10'30′; Rappel b – 1st half. 18'58′/14'OO′; Rappel d – 2nd half: 19'57′/14'40′. (Ending time: 20'38′/15'13′.)