Written tn 1949, ‘Boulez’ Livre pour quatuor (Book fot
Quartet) was not premiered until much later — the first two
parts in 1955, the fifth and sixth in 1961, and the third finally in
1962. It is not the usual cycle, but really a “book,” an anthology
of musical pieces that lend themselves to separate performance.
Those presented here are Ia, Ib, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, and V.
The Livre pour quatuor is, as regards its significance more
than its chronology, bound up with one of the most important
moments in modern musical history. Boulez was, as we all know,
the outrider of a musical renaissance, one of the really inspired
seekers of a new language, in the wake of World War II. The
Livre pour quatuor is one of those works that reveal the poetic
powers of a style still a-borning. It is a page from history, to be
sure, but, more importantly, it is a living testimony of irreproach-
able expressive gifts.
How many glib pages have been written over the past several
years about the composer’s present-day liberation and about the
“inhuman” strictness of the not-too-distant past! But it is precisely
in such strictness, in the formalism required to move from gram-
mar to style (or, in Boulez’ own terms, from semantics to
rhetoric) — the very rigors to which the Livre pour guatuor bears
witness — that the beauty of the work lies. For it is proper to
speak of beauty here to the degree that whatever is big and daring
in concept, conscientious in structure, and pure in expression is
beautiful.
It is when styles are being created — in music as in archi-
tecture — that the greatest tensions prevail. Languages evolve,
are transformed, but works that survive the birth or rebirth of
the word itself preserve their youth unchanged. This is true for
Machaut, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Webern, and it is true for
Boulez.
‘Whatever may be the state of the language of serialism today,
and however many exist who still use it, the Livre pour quatuor
remains for the realm of serial music, and for that of con-
temporary music generally, a key work. The tradition, which was
already in process of being transformed, saw itself then and
there taken over exclusively by one artist; it was to receive the
Len of a personal imagination before it ever saw the light
of day.
Timings:
Side1: 3:41 - 2:53 - 3:47 - 2:40 - 1:46 - 3:43 / 18:45
Side 2: 22:21
In the Livre pour quatuor, the serial formula that controls the
harmonic space seems to coexist with a rhythmic development and
with a diversification of intensities and timbres that are truly
incredible. Such diversification and development inevitably demand
an overriding organization. An obvious principle of control, codi-
fied according to all the elements of musical discourse, is imminent
here, and will be clearly evidenced in Boulez’ next work,
Structures I. Actually, this principle is secretly being realized in
the chemistry of the Livre pour quatuor. For example, ‘‘chapter’
Ia arranges timbres “‘serially,’ as Illa does with durations and
IlIc with intensities and attacks.
If in this brief sketch I contrive to suggest what this work
seems to me to offer that is important in the history of modern
music, I have done so to re-emphasize the poetic power that is
spun off by this visionary achievement and that transcends it. In
this sense, the Livre pour quatuor, though a historical work, re-
mains on the lee side of time. It reminds one of something that
Stravinsky said not long ago about Beethoven’s last quartets: ‘The
work that is born modern lasts forever.”
‘Twenty years separate the Livre pour quatuor from my Archi-
pel 2 (Archipelago 2). Languages have changed and continue to
change ceaselessly — that of Boulez like those of all contemporary
composers. But have such evolutions (or perhaps fisstons is more
accurate) modified the instrumental agencies that clothe musical
ideas in flesh? Though the electronic experience has not wholly
supplanted the classic instruments, it has taught us to see them in
a new light. The poetics of the “open work’’ — the piece that
changes from one performance to the next — has, on the other
hand, enabled us to find a new meaning in the human relation-
ships of music-making. Thus the string quartet, regarded as a
“family’’ these two centuries and more, maintains its reason for
its existence, as we see it, by modernizing it. For it is not so much
in its devilish adaptability, as in the nature of the human rapports,
so unlike all others, which govern it, that its ability to go on
living, evolving, and looking ahead — in short, its youthfulness—
reside.
ert ads 2 for string quartet (1969) is an open, unstable work
that confronts each of the players with two scores — two states
of mind, two states of time. One of these scores, the one in which
each performance begins and ends and to which it constantly
returns, lies, as it were, on the borders of time — a mind per-
petually seeking a certain memory that it can never recapture quite
as it was. Embarking from a central nucleus, the four players are
soon scattered according to the free and always-new itinerary
adopted by each one, sometimes venturing quite far apart, but
always remaining closely united in their seekings, thanks to that
intuitive —- nay, clairvoyant — musical communication that
characterizes the quartet alone.
Into the patternless weft of the first score — actually a single
sound that changes in register, density, color, vibrations, and
overlap — the other score injects, sometimes violently, the present
moment, the happening. The arrangement is free, in that any such
happening may precede or follow any other. By announcing the
Greek letter that indicates it, any player may “summon” it at his
discretion, and the others are expected to confirm its message and
follow it up.
The string quartet, the one adult among all means of express-
ing music, is, for all of us, fraught with the burden (and a lovely
burden it is!) of its history; it is encrusted with memories. Is it
all to be ““dumped’’ with a stroke of the pen? In trying to rethink
the quartet in modern terms, I preferred to evoke those memories
that do indeed haunt us. The listener should therefore be able to
recognize —- sometimes exposed, sometimes shrouded in mist,
depending on the climatic conditions under which the performers
pursue their navigations — certain lighthouses, certain scattered
notes from masterpieces both familiat and unfamiliar: street-lights
or exorcisms, as you will. ...
The word “rouge” (red) spoken softly indicates that the
performance is to coast to an end. Within a closed circle — that
is to say, a circle open to a multitude of possible points of arrival
and departure — the wreath of red structures encompasses the
beaches of the first score. Silence has its place here. In it, each
player becomes increasingly conscious of his aloneness. The
“group” falls apart and separates as hope of landing or returning
to port dissolves. The end — what end? — reveals that this
nocturnal voyage has no terminus.
ANDRE BOUCOURECHLIEV
(Translated from the French by David Mason Greene)
Recorded by Erato
Library of Congress Catalog Card Nos.:
Boulez: 73-752712
Boucourechliev: 77-752713
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