»… Play-rew-forward-stop …« audio-video music serie 2.5

Rew as replay, return, memory,
5 explosive memories of invasive poetry: Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Lennon and Pierre Boulez

Venice, Palazzo Cini at San Vio
4 July 2009, 5.00pm

Fifth session: SUR INCISES

by Pierre Boulez, 1996-1998
for 3 pianos, 3 harps and 3 mallet percussion instruments
in two movements: Moment I – Moment II
A film by Andy Sommer and Hélène Jarry, 2008

Sur Incises is a lesson-concert Boulez gave on the hidden architecture of this composition (1996-1998) for nine instruments (3 pianos, 3 harps and 3 percussion instruments) performed by instrumentalists from the Ensemble Intercontemporain. The shaping of the work is retold in the composer’s words in a series of images (this time figured), which are useful, not only for understanding the music, but also for more practical performing purposes.
Sommer’s fine film provides us with a rapid key to accessing the music, which in the absence of clear points is liable to be greatly misunderstood.
On the subject of the composition and its architecture of resonance, Boulez speaks of bridges between incises (groups of notes), of an interstice of alien silences in every statement, a dwelling that makes incisions on a greater entity. Journeys with few real apparitions, with momentary awareness of the road chosen at the crossroads, narratives of the creation, visions of the place we have been or the road we have taken, with no rules or maps, grasping the opportunities and making them roads with reasons, at times “main roads”, irremissible, but nonetheless ours. To be in/of the incises, by chance, is a kind of aesthetic duty.
Casting nets into the sea of sound, refining the mesh of the nets, which are increasingly close-knit, ready to hold the rhymes of the sensible; working on the respondences, migrations and specular plays so that everything vibrates and flows from one place to another: in all the places of this incised perspective, everything responds and is held; it morphs into body – our body – and is dense meaning. Giving in to all this, letting everything continue in us, after later, in the caught-up-with delay, something like an incise (parenthesis) in the usual sense of the term takes place, but in a way that might be our whole life, the intensification, present or recalled, which is internal, or there somewhere in the music around us. By now what does it matter, in this co-involvement in which there is no individual voice and at the same time a globality of the field? In which all that is given is the transmittable taste of the converging, of the form of “a stronger voice no longer own voice", of writing re-entrusted to that event-voice urging the ink to return to its pen.