Some notes on Répons

This was originally intended for the thread, ''For two orchestras' - stereo placement,' but it got out of hand.

Premiered in a 22-minute-long version in 1981, expanded to twice that length by 1984, Boulez's Répons (responsory) consists of various interactions between two groups that produce music with sharply contrasting characters. Répons is scored for a forty-piece chamber orchestra made up of winds, brass, and strings and six soloists who play instruments that are either plucked or struck: two pianos, harp, cimbalom, vibraphone, and xylophone, the xylophonist occasionally defecting from his principal instrument to play the glockenspiel. The chamber orchestra is located in the center of the hall and surrounded by the audience, while the soloists are dispersed, roughly evenly spaced, around the perimeter, so that the audience is sandwiched in between the two groups, in the midst of the responsorial effects.

The lines that the soloists play are transformed by a computer program that multiplies them in space and sends them swirling around the perimeter of the hall, engulfing the audience in a halo of sound. Thanks to the program, single lines produced by the soloists are repeated many times, each repetition following rapidly on the heels of the other, slightly out of phase with it, the timbre gradually changing with each out-of-phase repetition, the volume slowly receding. Single lines are perceived as single lines but projected as a sonorous blur. The orchestra plays in the strict time marked by the conductor, while the soloists are granted considerable independence and flexibility, playing out of phase with the orchestra, reacting to periodic cues from the conductor but going their own way. The essential contrast is between the warm, clear, and precise sounds produced by the traditional choirs of sustaining instruments at the center of the hall and the multi-colored glinting and sparkling produced by the jangling instruments around the perimeter, between the contrasting kinds of music these different sources give rise to.

The music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven is dynamic and directional, the first movement of the Eroica a dynamic and directional form. Listening to the first movement of the Eroica, we are constantly aware that we are en route to the next goal at some level of the form, whether toward the cadence at the end of the phrase or toward a climactic point within the work: the listener is located in time by the experience, granted a specific and purposeful orientation. Répons, in contrast, delivers the listener into a perpetual present. The concept of time reflected in the art of the whole French modernist tradition from Manet and Monet to Rimbaud and Boulez could be summed up with a remark by Henri Cartier-Bresson: 'There is only the present. The present and eternity.' And, in Répons, when the activity on the surface becomes particularly frenetic, the underlying harmonies slow almost to a halt, producing 'a kind of furious calm' (as Ives once described some of his music).

'Boulez and the Zen generation as a whole,' as Stravinsky once put it, are not concerned with 'motion from and toward, with 'dynamic passage through,' which betrays an essentially dramatic [or dynamic] concept.' The forms in Répons are decorative rather than dramatic, and the Wildean paradox of decorative

Repons is being expanded to around 1.5 hours.

Yes, but what he's recorded for DGG will not be altered. It will be Part 1 of the completed work, assuming that Boulez lives another century and finishes everything. The rest of Répons will go into another movement. Actually, the first thing that Boulez wrote, the ending of Répons, nobody has heard. He wrote the ending, returned to the beginning, and started writing down toward the ending, but the episodes kept proliferating.

I wish he had divided Répons as we know it into two movements, leaving the original 22-or-so-minute version alone and dumping the rest of it into a second movement. The original version had an extremely convincing overall shape, ending with that long hypnotic section with the character of a funeral march and closing with a remarkable 'fadeout' to a cadence on the Répons chord sustained by the winds. As it stands, the piece is an open series of episodes. There is no reason not to keep adding on more panels based on the same chord, no global form. I'm not sure you can even write a 45-minute movement with a convincing overall form. On the basis of Mahler and Carter, who are 'tonal form' (dynamic, dramatic, directional) rather than 'French form' (decorative, perpetual present) composers, I think 20 or 25 minutes is about the absolute limit. (No, I don't think the second movement of Mahler's 8th is a single movement with a convincing overall form in the same sense that the first movement of the Eroica is. Actually, the Mahler movement begins with a slow movement with a convincing overall form of its own followed by a quasi-operatic setting of the rest of the Goethe text.)

I will admit that the ending of the longer version of Répons is effective, though. The longer version of Répons recorded on DGG ends with a Balinese gamelan-like section, and this section ends with repeated increasingly quiet arpeggiations of the Répons chord from the harp echoing around the perimeter.

-david gable

[snip]

This was my favorite portion of your interesting remarks on this landmark piece, which I hope will be programmed by groups other than the Intercontemporain, eventually. The performance at Carnegie this spring was not only one of the highlights of the season, but one of the most beautiful and engaging things I've probably ever heard.

The performance years ago, at the Columbia University gymnasium, was memorable as 'an event,' but did not have the great Carnegie acoustics to help make its point.

just like cage

A highly debatable comparison.

Répons, in contrast,

(more explicit) like cage

Répons, in contrast,

The gorgeous colors? The chinoiserie? The filiation from Berlioz, Ravel, Debussy, Messiaen, and Stravinsky? Its status as composed music?

-david gable

Even you must admit Cage got extremely close to this (eastern zen?) concept of time and motion (time is motion?) in many of his works, possibly closer than Boulez ever did.

Listen first to any large commited version of say Atlas Elipticalis before making those kind of statements.

French filiation is required is it?

I think Cage's status is pretty secure.

Sure. In order to resemble Boulez. And to be 'just like' (to quote you) means very strongly to resemble.

I have no interest in disputing the distinctions between Boulez and Cage with you, however, since you refuse to acknowledge the profound distinction (readily acknowleged by Cage himself) between what most people the world over mean by music and Cage's 'music.' Assuming you're the same guy who went the rounds on this topic a few months ago.

-david gable

...the though of being suspended in an eternal present surrounded by french filliation is truly frightening.