Répons

After previous musical portraits of Varèse, Xenakis, Cage and Nono, in this 68th edition of the Holland Festival the spotlights are on French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez (1925). Boulez’s importance in the postwar music world can hardly be overestimated; the master has had a huge influence on both his contemporaries and the generations of composers who have come after him. One of the key compositions by Boulez that the Holland Festival is presenting is Répons (1981-1984).

Répons, which couples traditional instrumentation with sounds generated and transformed by computer, is being performed two times in a single concert at the Holland Festival by the ideal interpreters: Ensemble intercontemporain, the group that Boulez formed in 1976, conducted by Matthias Pintscher. The six soloists are taken from the ensemble’s own ranks: two pianists, a harpist, two percussionists and a cimbalom player. The Ensemble intercontemporain also performed the premiere of the first version of this work on 18 October 1981, during the Donaueschinger Musiktage. In Amsterdam, technique and live electronics are provided by the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) from Paris, an institute that Boulez directed from its founding in 1970 until 2002. The IRCAM has also been involved with Répons since its first performance.

Boulez composed Répons in 1981 and kept polishing the work for several years after that. Version 1 was 17 minutes long, version 2 was 35 minutes (first performed in London on 6 September 1982) and version 3, which so far is the last, takes about three quarters of an hour to present (first performed in Turin on 22 September 1984). Boulez always writes his compositions as works in progress – his love of experimentation calls for a flowing and changing whole, not something that is finished. Répons, which consists of an introduction, eight sections and a coda, is the first major composition in which Boulez demonstrates the possibilities of digital sound manipulation – specifically, the transformation of live sound – afforded by IRCAM. The composer had always wanted to look further than the sound that the average classical instrumentation can produce. He did research at Pierre Schaeffer’s Studio de Musique Concrète and the Siemens Studio in Munich, and ultimately founded and headed up IRCAM.

Boulez sees Répons as a spiralling trajectory that is performed in several stages. He compares it to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which has a gently sloping, spiral-shaped interior. Says Boulez, ‘As visitors wander through the exhibition, they can invariably see what they are to see at close quarters the very next moment, as well as what they have just seen and which is already some distance away. I was much struck by the way in which past and present interact and exactly the same conditions are magnified or transformed as the visitor passes to a lower or higher level. To use a musical term, Répons is a set of variations in which the material is arranged in such a way that it revolves around itself.’ 

The title Répons refers to the Gregorian tradition in which a solo vocalist and a choir alternate with and respond to each other. Boulez also uses this technique, calling ‘répons’ a ‘container’ concept because it introduces various layers: we hear dialogues between the soloists and the ensemble, between the ensemble players themselves, between acoustic and electronic sounds, and between passages that are digitally transformed and those that are not. The sound travels through the space and is flung in all directions. Boulez plays a game with sounds: far away at times, close by at others; agitated rhythms; the piano suddenly demanding lots of attention; the sections flowing into one another yet immediately changing the atmosphere. The opening section, played by the ensemble, introduces the soloists, whose sound is transformed from the very beginning. This effect gives the whole a surrealistic touch. Referring to Répons, Boulez stated that he liked virtuosity, ‘not for the sake of virtuosity, but because it is dangerous’. According to him, music, to be worth anything, can’t stick to safe ground but must entail some risk and effort. The ensemble players, the soloists and the sound engineer continually have to be on their toes and react to one another. The work contains an homage to Paul Sacher; the letters of his name form the basis of the harmonic material.

The instructions for performing this energetic piece make the Gashouder the perfect venue for experiencing the spatial character of the composition in the best possible manner. The audience sits around the ensemble of musicians, whose playing is not amplified or transformed. Set around the audience are various stages for the six soloists. Between the soloists are six loudspeakers. Their contribution is transformed in different ways, for instance by adding artificial sounds and continually changing the place from where the sound is coming through the network of loudspeakers. In the interval, before the second half of the composition begins, the audience can choose different seats.