Pli selon pli de Pierre Boulez: Entretien et etudes (review)

The close study of Boulez's compositions remains a risky enterprise, and especially for those eternally provisional works which remain subject to revision and for which definitive study scores have not been published. Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé, is exemplary in its intricately labyrinthine evolution, at least where three of its five movements are concerned. Yet the basic format, with three 'Improvisations sur Mallarmé' framed by large, primarily orchestral movements, 'Don' and 'Tombeau', remains the same as it was for the first complete performance in 1962, and this degree of stability enables the contributors to Philippe Albèra's short symposium to consider its materials and the context of its creation, even though a detailed analytical examination of the published texts, to supplement such existing studies as those by Susan Bradshaw (1986), James McCalla (1988), and Mary Breatnach (1996), is not attempted.

The book's six essays fan out from a short introductory note by Peter O'Hagan (translated into French by Robert Piencikowski) which touches on the history of Boulez's interest in Mallarmé as well as on the other works with which this 'portrait' appears to share certain materials. This exploration of intertextuality remains very much work in progress, although one of the scores in question—the incidental music for Jean-Louis Barrault's 1955 production of The Oresteia—has been discussed in some detail by Martin Zenck (Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 60 (2003), 303–32) since Albèra's volume went to press.

Pascal Durand's 'Les Modèles musicaux de Mallarmé' provides a concise survey of the poet's views on music as 'une anti-communication'—hermetic, esoteric, unencumbered by the mundane semantic connotations which attach themselves to words. However, there is little or nothing here that has not been discussed and debated at greater length in recent English-language work on Mallarmé by Malcolm Bowie and Roger Pearson for example; and it is the contributors who come closer to Boulez and his work who have most to offer in the way of new information and perspectives.

Luisa Bussetto opens up the important topic of the 'eurexcentrisme' of Pli selon pli, identifying both Asian and South American associations in order to highlight what she regards as the work's most ambitious and memorable qualities: 'c'est l'effort de combiner des sources apparemment les plus contradictoires—technique orientale poussée à son plus haut degré d'abstraction d'une part, instrumentalité extra-européenne poussée à son plus haut degré de matérialité sonore d'autre part—c'est de ce "conflit" . . . que l'esthétique boulézienne nous paraît tirer son plus haut degré d'incandescence' (p. 41). Sadly, shortage of space prevents Bussetto from exploring these issues in greater depth, and the more wide-ranging contextual studies by Pascal Decroupet and Albèra himself are better at not raising expectations of analysis-in-depth that they are unable to fulfil. Decroupet's title—'Comment Boulez pense sa musique au début des années soixante'—uses its allusion to the French title of the composer's Darmstadt lectures as the basis for a generalized but illuminating survey of the technical principles which Boulez adopted at the time. Albèra's source is a very different set of texts of the greatest documentary interest—the unpublished correspondence between Boulez and Stockhausen. Seizing on Boulez's claim (in 1959) that his Mallarmé composition 'sera essai d'une synthèse totale', Albèra takes a rather different line from Bussetto: 'La pureté de l'oeuvre n'est donc par gagnée sur une élimination des sources . . . mais elle résulte au contraire d'une assimilation, d'une transformation et d'une fusion de nombreux éléments hétérogènes' (p. 62).

Nevertheless, to the extent that Albèra seems happier writing around Pli selon pli than about its actual structure, character, materials, and methods, his contribution reinforces the impression that this volume is more...