Pierre Boulez and The Suspension of Narrative PDF

14 Pierre Boulez and the Suspension of Narrative
Arnold Whittall
Music is an art that has no ‘meaning’; hence the primary importance of

structures that are properly speaking linguistic, given the impossibility of the
musical vocabulary assuming a simply communicative function (Boulez,
Orientations, p. 32).
Boulez’s ability to provoke took many forms in interviews and essays,

from his transparently caustic comment in the 1960s that the German
wartime occupation ‘virtually brought high culture to France’1 to his
suggestion, early in the same decade, that ‘my present mode of thought
derives from my reflections on literature rather than on music’.2 In 1975
Boulez had noted that ‘Proust completely understood how Wagner
worked, never going back but always using the same motifs, the same
basic resources, in order to achieve a continuous development that is both
extremely concise and extremely free’.3 Later, a Proustian reference
underpinned what at face value is one of his most unguarded affirmations
of a classicising ethos: ‘I want to get rid of the idea of compartments in
a work . . . similar to Proust, where you find that the narration is
continuous.’4 Might that mean that Boulez saw his compositions as narra-
tions? If so, what would he have felt about the entry for ‘narrative’ in
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary? After word-favouring defini-
tions to do with ‘telling a story’ and asserting teleology by providing ‘an
account of a series of events, facts, etc. given in order and with the
establishment of connections between them’, there is a quotation from
Paul Griffiths’s Concise History of Modern Music: ‘Debussy’s music has
abandoned the narrative mode.’5
Before considering some possible connections between ideas about
narrative and Boulez’s compositions, this essay explores some of the stories
told about those compositions. In one of the earliest mentions of a Boulez
work in a British journal, American composer and Congress for Cultural
1 4
Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Di Pietro, Dialogues with Boulez, p. 70.
5
Enigma, p. 25. Griffiths, A Concise History of Modern
2
Boulez, Orientations, p. 143. Music, p. 10.
3
Boulez, Conversations with Célestin Deliège,
pp. 52–3.
354
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Freedom adviser Everett Helm wrote about the Darmstadt première of the
ten-year-old Flute Sonatine: ‘it is a fiendishly difficult work – but it makes
excellent sense. Driving, rhythmic passages give way just often enough to
something more relaxed to save it from the monotony that characterizes
much of the post-Webern music.’6 Helm hits on just that contrast
between moto perpetuo toccatas and ‘something more relaxed’ that is
often found in much later Boulez – in Messagesquisse and sur Incises, for
example. Writing shortly after Helm, and with a wider perspective but
a comparable concern for accessibility, David Drew observed that Le
Marteau sans maître marked ‘a notable retreat from the extreme position’
of Polyphonie X and Structures. Drew’s judgement was that Boulez ‘has
arrived at a point of crisis’ which made it inevitable that ‘he will be forced
to simplify his means of expression’. Here Drew seems to touch on the
possibility of what we might now define as Boulez’s retreat from an avant-
garde to a modernist – perhaps even modern-classic – aesthetic. As Drew
asked in 1957: ‘whether he will extricate himself from this crisis by
strengthening his ties with Debussy and early Schoenberg, or whether
he will be prepared to learn more from the clarity and humanity of
Webern remains an open question. In any event, there is already enough
evidence to suggest that Boulez may, in the future, produce work of the
first importance. There is certainly no French composer of today who
shows greater promise.’7
‘Retreat from the extreme’?

More recent commentators with longer perspectives than either Helm or
Drew often bring Boulez into the orbit of the musicological sub-genre
known as ‘Cold War studies’, which concerns itself more with music as
cultural, social practice than as autonomous and essentially self-
referential. Cold War studies also perform the useful scholarly task of
allowing neglected figures their moment in the historical sun – as, for
example, with Leslie A. Sprout’s discussions of the Messiaen student and
Boulez contemporary Serge Nigg.8 The attraction for some musicologists
of playing detective is understandable: it seems so much more interesting
to emerge from dusty archives with evidence to name and shame Nazi
sympathisers or fellow-travellers than to trace ever more sophisticated or
naive variants of serialism or neo-classicism in the music of the time.
6 8
Helm, ‘Darmstadt International Summer Sprout, The Musical Legacy of Wartime
School for New Music’, p. 490. France.
7
Drew, ‘Modern French Music’, p. 310.
356 Arnold Whittall
So far no unexpected skeletons have been found in the cupboard repre-

senting Boulez’s life between his arrival in Paris, aged 18, in 1943, and
the end of the war. Even that reported remark about the benefits of
German wartime occupation seems to have been part of a determined
attempt to wind up the gullible American journalist Joan Peyser, rather
than an unguarded – or bare-faced – expression of Fascist sympathies.
The young Boulez was notoriously abrasive, of course, and never sentimental
enough to allow any admiration he might have felt for the ways in which René
Leibowitz coped with life under German rule in Paris, or respect for his
pioneering spirit in performing and teaching twelve-tone music, to compen-
sate for what Boulez perceived as Leibowitz’s deeply flawed understanding of
Schoenberg’s actual significance. In this respect, you might infer, Boulez saw
little to choose between Leibowitz and Nadia Boulanger.
As Messiaen expressed it according to Peyser, ‘when he [Boulez] first
entered class [in 1944] he was very nice. But soon he became angry with
the whole world. He thought everything was wrong with music.’9 In this
way, the conviction began to emerge that Boulez evolved as a musician at
odds with established compositional techniques and aesthetic criteria:
and so the key to the Boulez narrative was not (modernist) accessibility,
but avant-garde esotericism. Ben Parsons is on strong ground in claiming
that, by the time Boulez came to compose Structures Ia in 1951–2, he
was not simply producing ‘an act of defiance in the face of pressure
to conform both artistically and ideologically’, as Mark Carroll and
others have argued. Boulez was not holding up ‘a mirror to his audience
to reflect their own ravaged world back to them’, as Schoenberg had
done – especially in A Survivor from Warsaw: rather, he ‘was intent on
smashing the codes and hierarchies of their world – the world whose
values so immanently threatened world peace once again – to clear space
for a new and brave vision of what it could be like’. Parsons quotes contem-
porary press comments (especially by Guy Dumur in the journal Combât) to
support his claim that ‘Structures Ia was produced in a city balanced precar-
iously between the liberation and the early Cold War, a Paris that heard
nascent serial music not as the neat disciplinary utopia of pitch-class set
analysis, but as a deeply contemporary and political reaction to these times’.
As Parsons tells it, ‘Structures Ia was heard as a rallying cry not only for
musical revolution but also for socio-political change.’10
9
Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, of Lutosławski’s ‘equation of moral integrity
Enigma, p. 31. with aesthetic autonomy’, and the argument
10
Parsons, ‘Sets and the City’, p. 63; and that ‘political and artistic detachment’ were
‘Arresting Boulez: Post-War Modernism in the ‘precondition for authentic social
Context’, p. 173. For related discussion of ‘the engagement’, see Jakelski, ‘Witold
complex status of abstraction during the Lutosławski and the Ethics of Abstraction’,
twilight years of the Cold War’ in the context pp. 169–202.
‘Smashing the codes and hierarchies’ of the world according to

Schoenberg and Leibowitz was a profoundly avant-garde enterprise, inher-
ently disrespectful of that ‘German high culture’ that had recently been
visited on Parisians and others during the years of occupation – and which
Boulez himself had imaginatively celebrated in the flute Sonatine and Second
Piano Sonata. After 1952, as he retreated from the ‘new and brave vision’ of
Structures Ia (and also from the expressionistic forcefulness he would have
found in writers like Artaud and Char), at least some of the music that
represented German high culture continued to feature prominently in his
life. He was prepared to spend many hours conducting and recording
Stockhausen, Webern, Berg, Schoenberg, Mahler, Wagner – and even
Bruckner. Yet for Boulez the composer the lure of the Germanic proved
less vital. Instead, he nurtured a Gallic core – a love of Mallarmé, Proust and
Debussy complemented by respect for Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault, among
others. And this helped to prompt the kind of exquisitely labyrinthine
dialogue with aesthetic and technical oppositions and interactions
expounded by Boulez’s more recent critical interpreters.
Narrating Negation
Musically, the Gallicly inflected modernism of Le Marteau and Pli selon pli
might have seemed to offer to the world at large the prospect of a non-
avant-garde modernism that responded to Debussy and Messiaen (as well
as to Webern and Cage) rather as Schoenberg had responded to Brahms
and Wagner: as something that laid usefully mainstream foundations for
future development. However, the immediate impact of the Cold War’s
cultural contexts seemed less salient in Western societies than the
new opportunities emerging from revived economic prosperity and tech-
nological advance; and after the 1960s Boulez the private composer
appeared to develop problems about how to respond to Boulez the more
public figure.
Recent scholarship has cast this process in terms of what Edward
Campbell characterises as ‘a fundamentally negational logic’: Campbell
suggests that ‘while negation was clearly a central element within Boulez’s
approach to composition, at least from 1946, it is only with the lecture
“The need for an aesthetic orientation” in 1963 that he provides
a sustained aesthetic reflection on this aspect of his practice. He scrutinises
the nature of the negation which has been undertaken in post-war music and
he questions whether or not creativity can begin with refusal, or whether
destruction is necessary before reconstruction can begin. He challenges the
success of such destruction and wonders if it has not been naive and
358 Arnold Whittall
presumptuous to build “on ruins or on a tabula rasa”.’11 In this way the

compositional stage is set for discourse and dialogue within
a terminological labyrinth bounded by such common conceptual opposi-
tions as avant-garde and modernist, structuralist and post-structuralist,
modern and post-modern. By the 1990s the availability of at least some of
the more complex results of Boulez’s compositional work at IRCAM
elaborated the terminological mix further – most spectacularly, perhaps,
in Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s aesthetic and technical analysis of Répons in
terms of its possible ‘classicism’.
Boulez worked on Répons from 1980 to 1984: and, in Nattiez’s words, he
gave Répons ‘the opportunity to rise to the status of a classic . . . It is not of
course “classical” in the stylistic sense of the term’: but its rejection of that
equalisation of importance between musical parameters which was
a result of the ‘dissolution of tonal coherence’ and the adoption of ‘total
serialism’ means that – in this sense, at least – Répons is ‘the major classic
work that one could have expected at the end of the twentieth century’.
According to Nattiez, ‘the composer of Répons does indeed seem to have
recovered his public because the work obeys some universal principles
that govern perception’. The different levels at which the music is heard
‘reflect the hierarchical organization of the work’.12 And this return to
hierarchy arguably facilitated another return. As both Campbell and
Jonathan Goldman have shown in their recent writings, that play of
thematicism and athematicism, identity and difference, that is to be
found in the flute Sonatine and the first two piano sonatas, is rediscovered
and refined in such post-Répons compositions as Anthèmes 1 and 2, Incises
and sur Incises.
For those who suspect that Nattiez is riskily unguarded in the way
he talks of hierarchies, Campbell has provided a useful refinement in
offering the alternative formal model of the rhizome: ‘in contrast with
the hierarchically structured branches found within [arborescent] tree
systems’, which have ‘hierarchical modes of communication and pre-
established paths, the rhizome is an a-centred, non-hierarchical, non-
signifying system’. Campbell argues that while Boulez’s work ‘comprises
a heterogeneous assemblage of materials, drawn from a variety of different
milieux . . . There is nothing of eclecticism in this approach, and Boulez
dissociates himself entirely from any heterogeneous synthesis of elements
which would amount to a superficial linking of disparate materials.’
As Campbell suggests, this is a kind of expression in which the possibility
of repetition ‘is no longer subject to identity and sameness, but rather to
11 12
Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy, Nattiez, The Battle of Chronos and
pp. 38–42. Orpheus, p. 280.
difference and variation’: ‘it is a return of the same which is ever

different, and in which each return is a unique manifestation of the
virtual, which is inexhaustible in its possibility, and which has no
primary term’.13 This notion of the virtual, promoting a modernism
whose profound ambiguities go beyond anything classical, is also
a feature of the narratives about Incises and sur Incises by Goldman
and Tom Coult, considered later.
There is a relish for paradox in such thinking, an embrace of ambi-
guity rather than a simple falling into vagueness and imprecision, that
fits well with the character of much music which I would place within
the modernist mainstream. Hierarchic, yet not totally hierarchic (after
the model of Schenkerian diatony); classical, yet not traditionally
classical (and certainly not neo-classical): poststructuralist but not post-
modern. It was a sense of dissolving the ‘vegetal’ rhizome into liquid
form, while nevertheless responding to the siren-like call of Nattiez’s
claims for bestowing the accolade of ‘classic’ on Répons, which lay
behind my 2004 discussion that something worth terming ‘modern
classicism’ was a governing if not all-determining quality of Boulez’s
music as early as Pli selon pli.
One of Boulez’s most striking general formulations comes in the 1968
lecture ‘Where are we now?’ ‘What really interests me is a work that
contains a strong element of ambiguity and therefore permits a number
of different meanings and solutions. Profound ambiguity may be found in
a great classical work, though there it is limited by precise length and basic
structural data . . . On the other hand in today’s music and today’s means
of expression it is possible to investigate this ambiguity, giving the work
multiple meanings that the listener can discover for himself.’14 This might
seem to lead almost too neatly to that later Boulezian affirmation: ‘I need,
or work with, a lot of accidents, but within a structure that has an overall
trajectory – and that, for me, is the definition of what is organic.’15 Or,
as he put it slightly differently earlier on, with an even more overtly
verbal and literary focus on certain ‘classical’ virtues, the task was ‘to
reconstitute from the void all the morphological, syntactic, and rhetorical
qualities needed for an organic discourse to come into being’.16 I have
argued elsewhere that the Mallarméan view of music as ‘the totality of
relationships existing between everything’ might have encouraged Boulez
to promote ‘that modern-classical shift to subordinating disjunction to
combination which is . . . allusively anticipated in “Improvisation III”
13 15
Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy, Di Pietro, Dialogues, p. 25.
16
pp. 143–7. Nattiez, The Battle of Chronos and
14
Boulez, Orientations, p. 462. Orpheus, p. 262.
360 Arnold Whittall
from Pli selon pli, and comes to fruition in . . . Répons, . . . explosante/

fixe . . ., and sur Incises’.17 And by so clearly linking his thoughts on
‘organic discourse’ to literary, verbal, poetic tropes and techniques,
Boulez might be thought to allow for the possibility that his musical
discourse could approach the characteristics of a narrative.
Words, Music, Narrative

Earlier I mentioned The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary’s use of
Paul Griffiths’s declaration that ‘Debussy’s music has abandoned the
narrative mode’. In its original context, this comment comes within the
argument that Debussy ‘had little time for the thorough, continuous,
symphonic manner of the Austro-German tradition, the “logical” devel-
opment of ideas which gives music the effect of narrative’. In the Prélude à
l’après-midi d’un faune and after, Debussy’s music rejected ‘the coherent
linkage projected by the conscious mind; its evocative images and its
elliptical movements suggest more the sphere of free imagination, of
dream’.18 Griffiths wisely distinguishes between ‘the effect of narrative’
and the real thing, for as Nattiez has pointed out, ‘if music could, in itself,
constitute a narrative as language can constitute a narrative, then music
would speak directly to us, and the distinction between music and
language would disappear’. Citing Adorno’s playful claim that music
‘is a narrative that narrates nothing’, Nattiez nevertheless allows that
‘musical discourse’ not only has ‘semantic possibilities’ – as shown by
works ‘with explicitly literary titles’ – but a ‘syntactic dimension’ invol-
ving ‘techniques of continuity’: ‘musical discourse inscribes itself in time.
It is comprised of repetitions, recollections, preparations, expectations,
and resolutions.’ It follows that ‘music is not a narrative, but an incite-
ment to make a narrative, to comment, to analyze’.19
In classical music, with its organicising essence, it is difficult if not
impossible to avoid all sense of ‘the effect of narrative’: and even when
classicism yields to modernism’s fractures and discontinuities, this does
not necessarily mean that such an ‘effect’ – as both semantics and syntax –
is completely lost. As a composer intensely aware of his Debussian
inheritance, Boulez also prioritised ‘the sphere of free imagination’ over
‘the coherent linkage projected by the conscious mind’ – the kind of
dialogue or interaction described by Goldman as ‘a dialectical play of
17 19
Whittall, ‘Unbounded Visions’, p. 71. Nattiez, Music and Discourse, pp. 127–9.
18
Griffiths, A Concise History of Modern
Music, p. 10.
recognition and surprise’.20 In recent times, Boulez has sometimes

appeared to aspire to a reprioritising of traditional images of narrative
coherence, as in his comment, quoted earlier, about analogies with con-
nectedness in Proust. However, when the prospect of devising an opera
arose, he did not suggest a Proustian theme, rather the kind of absurdist
plot that resists plotting exemplified by Samuel Beckett’s En attendant
Godot.
Just as musical modernism has not proved so rigorously anti-classical as
to jettison all contact with tonal ways of structuring, so musicology has
responded to the post-classical fascination with post-tonal modes of
semantic characterisation and syntactic continuity in ways which explore
the possibility of keeping the effect of narrative in play, along with
hierarchic or rhizomatic modes of formation. As a result, ‘non-narrative’
and ‘anti-narrative’ must remain contested as terms describing certain
kinds of music; another troublesome term is present in the following
statement. ‘One might . . . speak of zero-degree narrativity when
a composer does not intend even ostensibly programmatic music to be
understood narratively: Déserts is one of Varèse’s few pieces with
a programmatic conception, but it is not narrative . . . In rejecting the
narrative approach Varèse said: “There will be no action. There will be no
story. There will be only images. Purely luminous phenomena.”’21
As Varèse saw it, Déserts sought ‘to erase or preclude narrative, whether by
working against a listener’s expectations or by finding ways to discourage
a listener from imposing a narrative reading’. But as Byron Almén and
Robert Hatten painstakingly enquire, ‘can any temporal medium like
music ever be devoid of narrative? Put another way, how might
a composer signal that his or her intention is to be non-narrative, even if
some kind of narrative interpretation is unavoidable?’22 The implication is
that simply saying so, as Varèse does, is not enough. If, however, Déserts can
be talked about in the same way as Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, the
situation might change: ‘the teleology of Spiegel im Spiegel seems to deny
choice and therefore the possibility of narrative. If the end result is pre-
ordained by the process set up from the start, then there is no development
that is responsive to events, no significant change, no transvaluation. Despite
the illusion of motion and change, the effect is of a global topic –
a kaleidoscope image or a mystical ritual – rather than of a narrative
trajectory.’23
20
Goldman, The Musical Language of Pierre and Other Traditions in American Music,
Boulez, p. 184. p. 304.
21 22
Almén and Hatten, ‘Narrative Engagement Almén and Hatten, ‘Narrative Engagement
with Twentieth-Century Music’, p. 70. with Twentieth-Century Music’, pp. 60–1.
23
E. Varèse, ‘My Titles’, in Broyles, Mavericks Ibid., p. 81.
362 Arnold Whittall
‘Transvaluation’ is a term used by Almén and Hatten to identify

a necessary condition for narrative; a category to which a composition
must be shown to conform if the presence of narrative is to be pro-
posed. And this goes with the claim that a composition might create ‘a
lyrical or trance-like effect that denies teleology and, therefore, narra-
tive’, by following the principle of juxtaposing ‘the narrative mode’ with
‘the lyrical mode . . . which tends towards a spatial rather than
a temporal signification: what is aimed at is a mood, reflection, or
state of being rather than a significant temporal change. Narrative can
also be juxtaposed with a ritual mode, in which the performative
enactment of an established sequence is foregrounded, or with trance,
which attempts the transformation of ordinary consciousness onto
another level, as if to convert the temporal into the eternal. These
other modes of representation signify in their own right, yet they are
not in themselves essentially narrative.’24
Since I will be concerned with music by Boulez that arguably moves
from the trance-like to the teleological, the lyrical to the dramatic, the
constraints of the Almén/Hatten definition of narrative will come into
question, as will its usefulness in relation to any music that might be
termed ‘modernist’ in its aesthetic and technical orientation. Almén and
Hatten resist the argument that the absence, in Stravinsky’s Symphonies of
Wind Instruments, of ‘internal narrative logic’ amounts to a move away
from ‘causal narrative and logical argument to psychological association’.
If, as they inexorably conclude, ‘narrative conceptions of music can be
remarkably flexible and durable’,25 that flexibility might therefore allow
not just for the possibility of presence or absence, but of presence in
absence – as resistance to or suspension of narrative rather than simple
anti- or non-narrative – even if this ‘presence in suspension’ does not take
the form of those ‘transvaluations that guarantee narrative coherence’
according to the Almén/Hatten criteria.
Only Images
Among the myriad analyses of the ways in which French composers treat
interactions between words and music, Carlo Caballero’s comments on
Fauré and Mallarmé provide another possible context for the present narra-
tive, which I made use of in an essay first published in 2004. Fauré never
actually set any Mallarmé, but Caballero justifies bringing them together on
the grounds that Fauré’s ‘attempt to eliminate from his music time, places, or
24 25
Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 82.
preordained images whose precision would allow it to signify manifest his

concern, independent of Mallarmé’s but parallel to it, to abolish the creator’s
elecutionary persona from the finished work’. Fauré’s aesthetic complements
the poet’s recognition that ‘if music seems capable of offering the contem-
plative modes of lyricism without the anecdotal presence of a speaking
author, it does so through a “language” which is not language, a distinctive
musical syntax’. Caballero claims that ‘what is most musical (and Fauréan)
about Mallarmé’s ideal is its preference for words – rather than rhetoric,
narrative, or description – as a vehicle for personal sensibility’, for although
‘Mallarmé’s poetics would not forgo all subjectivity’ they would ‘evade
mimesis, and particularly the elaborate naturalism of his contemporaries’.
Caballero therefore concludes that ‘whereas Fauré had the advantage of
being a musician who wishes to compose music, Mallarmé was a poet who
wished to do much more than write verse. He set himself the task of
rendering music back to its original domain, as it had been on Mount
Parnassus, by subsuming its most abstract expressive abilities in Poetry,
the supreme Music.’26
When, in 1963–4, Boulez declared that ‘in fact my present mode of
thought derives from my reflections on literature rather than music’, it
was Mallarmé who stood for the kind of literature he most valued: and
while Boulez dismissed ‘mimesis’ and ‘elaborate naturalism’ no less
vigorously than Mallarmé himself, he found in the poet’s sonnets
a discipline that opened up the prospect of a modernism whose
purity did as much to reinvent classicism as to reject it, and which
would ultimately lead him away from texts altogether. Retaining some
of Caballero’s terminology, my 2004 essay explored ‘Improvisation III’
from Pli selon pli, suggesting that ‘the absence of that narrative element
that the presence of an “elocutionary persona” might furnish
encourages critical interpretation to shift away from “meaning” and
back to form’.27
A little later, this ‘shift’ prompted the comment that ‘just as Mallarmé’s
“music” – his word-play – compensates for lack of “sense” and draws
coherence out of pervasive correspondences of pure sound, so Boulez’s
music compensates for its rejection of traditional harmonic processes
by emphasizing other kinds of relationships, notably the melodic hetero-
phony and homogeneous timbral interactions which promote flexible
consistency and fragile but sustained coherence, in both structure and
atmosphere’. My 2004 argument culminated with the declaration that
26 27
Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Whittall, ibid., p. 69.
Aesthetics, pp. 123–4, 253–6; Whittall,
‘“Unbounded Visions”’, 66–7.
364 Arnold Whittall
‘Mallarmé’s view of music as “the totality of relationships existing between

everything”’ prompted that ‘modern-classical shift to subordinating dis-
junction to combination which is, I believe, allusively anticipated in the
currently definitive version of “Improvisation III” and comes to fruition in
Boulez’s major works of the IRCAM years, Répons and . . . explosante-
fixe . . . as well as the later sur Incises’.28
Lost Presence
Reference to the ‘absence’ of a ‘narrative element’ in this 2004 text seems
to require the simple binary opposition between absence and presence,
between the setting of a non-narrative Mallarmé poem and the kind of
narrative-tracing verbal text with a sequence of events and actions (even
one without ‘elaborate naturalism’) that is to be found in a work like
Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. That 2004 discussion keeps its
distance from the possibility of some intermediate category between
presence and absence such as Lawrence Kramer has since offered in
comments about Debussy’s Jeux. After surveying a range of remarks
about this work, including Boulez’s claim that it ‘marked the arrival of
a kind of musical form, which, renewing itself from moment to moment,
implies a similarly instantaneous mode of perception . . . The general
organization of the work is as changeable instant by instant as it is
homogeneous in development’, Kramer suggests that ‘such a “form” or
“organization” – the terms are vestiges of the very mentality that the
music abandons – entails the withholding or suspension of narrative,
which depends on significant repetition’.29 However, if the presence of
narrative depends entirely on ‘significant repetition’, and the absence of
narrative implies that no such repetitions can be shown to occur, does
‘suspended narrative’ indicate the presence of ‘significant’ subjects but the
absence of ‘significant’ events and actions?
This might well fit the scenario of Jeux. The setting – a tennis court – is
much more naturalistic than abstract, and the evenly balanced musical
dialogue between changeability and homogeneity does not exactly move
the work away from all associations with the presentation of a situation
about which the telling of a story seems perfectly possible. That story is
not told, and its nature is by no means obvious. But it is held in suspense
rather than eliminated altogether. After all, what is to prevent us from
thinking of the tennis-playing quartet as similar to the stressed-out pairs
28 29
Ibid., pp. 70–1. Kramer, ‘Narrative Nostalgia: Modern Art
Music off the Rails’, p. 167.
of lovers in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream whose story

temporarily ends with a magical intrusion?
‘Changeability’ and ‘homogeneity’ might be mapped onto ‘modernism’
and ‘classicism’ to serve as aesthetic and technical markers for the Boulez
style in ‘Improvisation III’, while calling Mallarmé’s sonnet ‘a siren song’
brings a specific subject and a specific genre into the mix. Is a narrative
about the consequences of encountering a singing siren alluded to in ways
which make it plausible to speak of its suspension, rather than its presence
or absence? Is ‘Improvisation III’ also a siren song? If ‘there is a certain
degree of convergence between Mallarmé’s poetic tissue of phonemic
echoes and analogies and the balanced sequences of resonance in
Boulez’s play with heterophonic and homogeneous textures and
materials’30 then – as the comments quoted earlier about how poem
and composition both ‘compensate’ for comparable kinds of ‘absence’
suggest – the music supports the poem’s suspension of narrative, and
might therefore be felt to provide a metonymic version of that suspension
within its own materials.
It is not just a matter of locating ‘coherence’ in ‘temporal organization’,
so that ‘in Jeux the consistency of time replaces the consistency of narra-
tive’. Here Kramer seems on the verge of moving from suspension to
absence: ‘in its checkered, fluctuating, episodic movement, Jeux produces
what in classic Aristotelian terms would be precisely an anti-narrative
process’. But he then retrieves the suspension trope with the point that ‘as
each potential kernel of narrative disappears to be replaced by another
in this chain of chains, one hears narrativity continually looming and
dissolving away’. Ultimately, ‘the source of both the irony and the plea-
sure [in Debussy’s score] is a narrative that persists in the scenario of Jeux
by appearing there as an object, not a process. This object, however, is not
given but withheld, withdrawn, and the form of its withdrawal is, so to
speak, its retirement from its office. It is not a mere absence but . . . a lost
presence, something that persists while – persists by – remaining out of
reach.’31
Kramer’s persistent playing with words can easily turn counterproduc-
tive when its roots in aesthetic principle and compositional style are lost
sight of. But in any case the thematic and tonal features of Jeux seem to
have no parallels in ‘Improvisation III’, or in Pli selon pli as a whole.
Ironically, perhaps, the degree of convergence between such Debussian
features and Boulez’s style in his later works might have as much if
not more to do with his feeling for the productive tension between
Proustian continuity and Schoenbergian – post-Wagnerian – post-tonal
30 31
Whittall, ‘Unbounded Visions’, p. 70. Kramer, ‘Narrative Nostalgia’, pp. 168–71.
366 Arnold Whittall
methodology. Boulez might never have come to appreciate that

Schoenberg’s remarkably productive (and successful) balancing of mod-
ernism and classicism had the suspension (rather than just the extension,
or the rejection) of tonality at its core in his twelve-tone compositions.
Nevertheless, as analysis of one of his most extended late works, sur
Incises, suggests, his own balancing of contrasting impulses involved the
post-Debussian suspension of narrative – the distancing of a subject in the
absence of text – in ways as resourceful and provocative as any of
Schoenberg’s own suspensive routines.
Portrait de Sacher?
By calling Pli selon pli ‘portrait de Mallarmé’ Boulez left open the possi-
bility of regarding aspects of his music as equivalent to aspects of the
poetry. Rituel, in memoriam Bruno Maderna gives no comparable hints of
reflecting aspects of Maderna’s music – or personality – in Boulez’s work,
and as far as I know no-one has plausibly suggested any such reflections.
Otherwise, however, he kept the names of dedicatees out of his titles,
almost as if it were more important to present a portrait of himself as
provider of a suitably serious gift to a valued friend or colleague. Both the
works Boulez dedicated to Paul Sacher – Messagesquisse and sur Incises –
make much of basic contrasts between arioso, or fantasia, and moto
perpetuo, and both ‘embody’ Sacher by using the hexachord of pitch
and interval classes which Boulez derived from the Sacher surname.
But there is no suggestion that Sacher was alternatively whimsical and
vehemently volatile, fitting this pair of musical personae, and even if
this were so that would not ‘portray’ him much more distinctively
than millions of other similar characters. In 1984 Boulez had shown his
concern to distance the ‘subject’ of a dedication from the ‘subject’ of the
musical processes by basing Dérive, an 80th birthday tribute to William
Glock, on the same Sacher hexachord. On balance, then, it seems that sur
Incises is less a ‘portrait de Sacher’ than an embodiment of a celebratory
ritual whose sonic opulence and volubility parallel Sacher’s energy and
generosity of spirit.
That sur Incises is a ceremony celebrating a long life in the service
of music is perhaps suggested by the spectrum-rich resonances of the
instrumental sound with its embodiment of ‘nineness’ – three pianos,
three harps, and three percussion groups comprising two vibraphones,
marimba, glockenspiel, tubular bells, steel drums, crotales and cylindrical
drums (timbales). The music has a double source – the Sacher hexachord,
and the piano piece Incises whose first version Boulez produced for
a piano competition in 1994. (An expanded version, adding fourteen

pages to the ten-page original, and published in 2002, followed the
completion of sur Incises in 1998.) Apart from centring on ‘Cis’
(C-sharp), which provides the ‘0’ of the Sacher hexachord transposition
used as the music’s principal element, Incises suggests an incising or
cutting-in strategy which, given Boulez’s Proustian hostility to compart-
mentalisation, presumably aims to enhance continuity by increasing the
sense of magnetic attraction between distinct figures or types of gesture.
But rather than speak of anything that suggests a ‘cut and paste’ techni-
que, Boulez once described the most sharply profiled element in Incises as
a ‘gifle’, a slap in the face.32 If this gesture is generalised into the active,
aggressive opposite of more reflective, passive material, then the character
of Incises emerges as ‘a play of recognition and surprise’ – continuity and
discontinuity – that is highly specific in musical terms, much less so (at
least, unless Boulez had supplied a scenario or a suppressed text) in
‘dramatic’ terms. The prospect of creating a ‘proper’ narrative is therefore
held at bay.
Incises/Multiples?
Jonathan Goldman describes sur Incises as ‘one of Boulez’s most contin-
uous, through-composed pieces’,33 as if it might have been meant to
embody that Proustian quality, and also – possibly – to recollect
the kind of ‘classicism’ which, according to Jean-Jacques Nattiez, distin-
guishes Répons. This level of through-composed continuity is, naturally
enough, the result of the relationship spelt out in the title. The first part of
sur Incises elaborates the original piano piece in ways which are
less concerned with enhancing the drama of opposition or ‘incisive’
interaction between Incises’s two basic modes of expression than with
the multiple mirrorings and echoings that result from what Tom Coult
defines as ‘a kind of nine-headed compound instrument’ ensuring that
‘even antiphonal effects are ones of transition rather than opposition,
moving smoothly from one side to another’.34
Prioritising smoothness, Coult writes of the work’s ‘unique unity of
Boulez’s luxurious, lustrous side with the kind of hard-edged rhythmic
precision more typical of his earlier work’. But at the same time he does
not seek to deny the work-spanning role of that ‘polarity’ – deriving from
the piano piece – when ‘the lavish rhythmic incertitude and stasis of the
32 33
Goldman, The Musical Language of Pierre Ibid., p. 185.
34
Boulez, p. 176. Coult, ‘Pierre Boulez’s sur Incises’, p. 5.
368 Arnold Whittall
opening section are contrasted with the toccata’s regularity and rapidity’.
Coult quotes my own suggestion that this polarity ‘can perhaps be
thought of as Boulez’s version of the Nietzschean confrontation between
Dionysus and Apollo’. But Coult would, I imagine, also agree that there is
little aggressiveness or personal animosity evident in sur Incises’s textural
and gestural confrontations: and this is because ‘the “refraction” process –
the splitting up of elements to produce multiple differing forms of that
element – . . . affects the piece’s construction at every stage. Localised
gestures, harmonic fields, rhythmic figures, even the piano’s sound itself
are passed through filters, their make-up analysed and their distillate
viewed from multiple perspectives. It is the typical Boulezian hetero-
phony raised to a higher power – as well as heterophonic textures, we
get harmonies, rhythms and melodies presented as superimposed varia-
tion strata (a heterophony of heterophonies, perhaps).’35
Coult further underlines how Boulez’s concern for the kind of
‘comprehensibility’ that comes from connectedness and continuity
does not simply map itself onto a traditional, Schoenbergian, under-
standing of thematicism. With an echo of Goldman’s explanation
of ‘the virtual theme’, especially in Anthèmes, Coult argues that ‘it is
as if sur Incises refers at every level to something virtual, an idealized,
unseen gesture, phrase or harmony whose derivations exist even
when the original is gone. These absent idea(l)s form the basis of sur
Incises, as a short piano piece is placed in a hall of mirrors to produce
flickering images of sparkling beauty and cogent argument.’36 And
Coult usefully illustrates this quality in his detailed description of
how sur Incises’s first 18 pages (Figures 1 to 14) ‘compose out’ the
first page of Incises.
The piano piece’s initial, single ‘gifle’ is prolonged to provide
a heterophonic segment woven from ‘18 successive statements of the
gesture in its abstract, idealised form (an F preceded by a five-note
coloration that together form a SACHER hexachord). It is as if we are
viewing the object from multiple perspectives, no single one definitive
but together edging closer to the object’s “essence”.’ That ‘essence’
connotes maximum uniformity can be inferred from the fact that
‘when the gesture does appear in its original (Incises) voicing at the
start of the sixth bar (the first time all three pianos play the same thing)
it precipitates a statement of the ten-note downwards figuration’ which
followed the original voicing in Incises’s first bar. Yet this rapid, 32nd
note consequent to the slap-chord’s antecedent has been anticipated in
the ‘coloration’ to the successive Sacher chords provided from b. 1 by
35 36
Ibid., pp. 20–1. Ibid., p. 21.
Marimba 3, an effect that further erodes the ‘pure’ opposition found in

Incises, and strongly suggests that sur Incises involves not simply
prolonging the basic elements of the source but smoothing over the
differences between them.
Coult argues that ‘the fact that the music only proceeds once the
original gesture . . . in its original voicing is heard verbatim illustrates
a key facet of this section of sur Incises, that of “crystallisation”.
Frequently, a gesture from Incises, rather than being stated then devel-
oped, will seem to gradually emerge as a consequence of the music.’37
Coult then narrates how the remaining figures from Incises’s first page are
‘presented from multiple viewpoints, being allowed to emerge organically
and crystallise into the original form’ – what Coult – edging ever closer to
conventional analytical terminology – calls ‘motivic proliferation’. Only
later does he present the more general claim that ‘Boulez’s later music
never seems like a capitulation to regressive tendencies’, by way of ‘a
genuinely dialectical relationship between a modern language and the
structural principles of earlier music, without the simplistic juxtaposition
of objets trouvés or comforting neoclassicism’.38 So is the result
a synthesis – that ‘unique unity’ – that paradoxically permits the persis-
tence of a fundamental polarity within it? Or does talk of ‘unity’ tilt
the scales too strongly in the direction of classicism and away from
modernism? Is it possible that the resonant homogeneity of sur Incises’s
‘nine-headed compound instrument’ drives Boulez to reinforce the
irreconcilability of sober ritual on the one hand and exuberant hedonism
on the other? That the music’s acoustic reality remains productively at
odds with its formal design?
Music in Two Parts

It has become all too easy to characterise Boulez as a composer who,
having turned his back on his own early explorations of Germanic
expressionism, and having become no less disillusioned with both the
systematic and anti-systematic extremes of avant-garde experimentalism,
should have settled for the more accessible modernist middle-ground
excoriated by Heinz-Klaus Metzger in 1962, in a diatribe that might
have been designed to counter the line taken earlier by David Drew:
‘more than a decade ago, Boulez was the only clear representative of
musical progress and the only composer of any relevance’. But after the
abortive Polyphonie X of 1951, which Boulez himself withdrew, ‘the
37 38
Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 19.
370 Arnold Whittall
regression of musical language was all-too apparent’. The fatal step with
Le Marteau, according to Metzger, was to try to reconcile the new music
with what the public would find acceptable, and Pli selon pli was, of all
things, a ‘masterwork’ of a kind that had lost all legitimacy since the early
twentieth-century time of Mahler. As Metzger sardonically concluded,
‘whatever Boulez took from his theoretical knowledge of Debussy is
artfully cashed in here to make a hit, worthy of the avant-garde.
The work [Pli selon pli] stands under the sign of a new suavity, smearing
a kind of sweet glaze over the ears of its listeners . . . The work has a bad
conscience.’39
For most of those qualified to judge today there is usually more than
enough multivalence and subtlety – or Mallarméan glassiness – in the
later Boulez to counter any hint of sonic candyfloss. But the most
important consequence of this ambiguity-enhancing, modern-
classicising tendency is the way it has steered his music away from the
dangerous rocks of that kind of Artaud-inspired expressionistic ferocity
that some of his earliest works acknowledged. In later Boulez there is
energetic exuberance in abundance, in all that moto perpetuo, toccata-
like writing; and this can be very effectively complemented by more
lyrical, poetically resonating materials. On the whole, however, the
Boulezian labyrinth – post-1960 – is not a place of fearful, anxiety-
ridden disorientation: and here I will cite David Metzer’s commentary
on Rituel.
Metzer approaches Rituel by way of the central position of the lament
genre in modernist aesthetic practice, and he uses Ligeti’s Horn Trio for his
first detailed analysis of the expressionistic power that lamenting topoi can
acquire in a post-tonal musical world. With Boulez, he notes the tendency to
write works that embody aspects of remembrance, but as ceremonial cele-
bration rather than grief-stricken sorrowing: and of Rituel Metzer says that
‘lament would seem to be one way to grasp the composition, so practised is it
in loss, memory, and the obedience paid to structure. Yet the work resists
designation as a lament, or any specific genre. Its resistance, though, makes
the lament all the more relevant, for the piece appears to be designed to
prevent a lament from forming.’
Metzer’s commentary is nothing if not multivalent. He claims that ‘Rituel
erects the architecture of what could be an impassioned lament’: as with
Ligeti’s trio, ‘the texture grows denser, the melodic lines sprawl, and energy
builds to a climax’. However, ‘the similarities end there. In Rituel the form
does not animate a rushing emotionality. . . . This is not to say that Rituel is
39
Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt,
pp. 301–2.
an inexpressive work. It has expressive qualities, but they remain difficult to

encapsulate. An austere mournfulness and a rigorous inevitability are two
impressions that come to mind. These qualities are achieved through an
elaborate structural scheme, which is elevated in this piece, lifted up to the
status of a ceremony.’40
This ceremony, Metzer might have added, depends totally on the calm,
controlling design of the master of ceremonies, the conductor out front.
And there might even be a connection here with the kind of thinking that
led Michael Tippett, in the early 1950s, to write that he considered ‘the
general classicizing tendency of our day less as evidence of a new classic
period than as a fresh endeavour . . . to contain and clarify inchoate
material. We must both submit to the overwhelming experience and
clarify it into a magical unity. In the event, sometimes Dionysus wins,
sometimes Apollo.’41 Just as the Tippett authority David Clarke can
suggest that Tippett’s images of the visionary signify ‘not an escape into
a different world, but a challenge to the existing one’,42 Boulez’s occa-
sional hints of the Dionysian after Pli selon pli could signify not an escape
from the Apollonian alternative, but a challenge to it, to be resisted – in
turn – in the true spirit of modern classicism. As with Boulez’s great
friend and colleague Elliott Carter, celebrated in Dérive 2, remembrance
and response to loss required stoicism and the offering of something that
might have a melancholic tinge but does the lost subject of remembrance
the honour of shunning hysterical expressions of grief. Other composers –
Ligeti, Kurtág, even Birtwistle come to mind – are less accepting of
what they might see as a dilution of the strongest human feeling, with
its attendant risks of leaving the late-modernist artwork as something
relatively inhuman, or even subhuman.
Maybe, however, Boulez’s modern classicism is in some ways even more
unsettling within the cultural practice of late modernism than the more
transparent expressionism of Ligeti or Birtwistle. Writing about sur Incises
a decade ago, I suggested that the balance of eloquence and exuberance in
that work might be regarded as a ‘late-century equivalent to Stravinsky’s
1920s “sacrifice to Apollo”’. I then suggested that ‘sur Incises avoids any hint
of pathos, of tragedy, or of the gently sorrowful spirit that steals into the final
vocal passage of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, or the chiming Postlude of Requiem
Canticles’.43 It is also in many ways a complement to Rituel – celebrating
a living rather than deceased colleague – in shunning ‘austere mournfulness’.
While there is nothing that matches the ‘Artaud-inspired expressionistic
40 42
Metzer, Musical Modernism at the Turn of Clarke, The Music and Thought of Michael
the Twenty-First Century, pp. 167–9. Tippett, p. 205.
41 43
Tippett, Tippett on Music, p. 208. Whittall, Exploring Twentieth-Century
Music, p. 197.
372 Arnold Whittall
ferocity’ of Le Visage nuptial, it is not unlike Répons in embracing what Coult

terms ‘moments of high drama’; and nothing is more dramatic in sur Incises
than the response made by Part 2 to the ‘éclat’ of Part 1.
Part 1 (to page 109) is not separated from Part 2, despite the blank page
in the original score. But it is preliminary, preparatory, in setting out the
basic contrast between Rituel-like sobriety and the exuberant toccata
music that then alternate, with the recurrences of the slower material
homing in on C-sharp (‘Cis’) centred chords (those used again at the end
of the revised Incises). In Part 2 the alternations and interactions are
between very fast material deriving from the initial toccata and freer,
more cadenza-like flights that are less ‘ritualised’ than Part 1’s slower,
quieter contrasts. They thereby bring a more dynamic quality to
exchanges that begin to suggest nothing less than a dialogue between
collective, disciplined élan and freer, more individual flamboyance.
The difference between the brittle restlessness of the textures at
Fig. 36 (p. 164) and the motoric force of the resumed Prestissimo at
Fig. 42 (p. 168) generates an unusually lyrical energy that becomes
irresistible by Fig. 52 (p. 184).
The whole point is that both qualities are positive, both necessary to the
life of the work, and the outcome is not the absorption of one by the other
but advance to a final contemplative phase against which the dramatic
action preceding can be measured. Nevertheless, it is time to suspend this
verbal narrative before it falls into the trap of turning the music into
a drama with characters who experience a logically determined sequence
of events. In the end, the suspended narrative of Jeux is a more direct
model for sur Incises than the ecstatically socialised rituals of The Rite of
Spring or Les Noces. Nevertheless, for a composer who claimed to be so
affected by literary, poetic associations, Boulez (after cummings ist der
dichter) remained unusually abstract, perhaps as the most efficient way of
ensuring that his musical narratives embodied those multiple ambiguities
to which his highly personal brand of modernism had such effective
recourse.

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14 Pierre Boulez and the Suspension of Narrative

Music is an art that has no ‘meaning’; hence the primary importance of

Boulez’s ability to provoke took many forms in interviews and essays,

‘Retreat from the extreme’?

So far no unexpected skeletons have been found in the cupboard repre-

‘Smashing the codes and hierarchies’ of the world according to

presumptuous to build “on ruins or on a tabula rasa”.’11 In this way the

diﬀerence and variation’: ‘it is a return of the same which is ever

from Pli selon pli, and comes to fruition in . . . Répons, . . . explosante/

Words, Music, Narrative

recognition and surprise’.20 In recent times, Boulez has sometimes

‘Transvaluation’ is a term used by Almén and Hatten to identify

preordained images whose precision would allow it to signify manifest his

‘Mallarmé’s view of music as “the totality of relationships existing between

of lovers in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream whose story

methodology. Boulez might never have come to appreciate that

a piano competition in 1994. (An expanded version, adding fourteen

Marimba 3, an eﬀect that further erodes the ‘pure’ opposition found in

Music in Two Parts

an inexpressive work. It has expressive qualities, but they remain diﬃcult to

ferocity’ of Le Visage nuptial, it is not unlike Répons in embracing what Coult

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