Carnegie Hall

French composer, conductor, and writer Pierre Boulez was one of the signal figures in postwar contemporary music. He first came to prominence in the 1950s, a decade described by musicologist Joseph Auner as “the era of all-encompassing theories that sought to explain human actions in terms of systems.”

Despite not being a technologist himself, Boulez exercised extraordinary worldwide impact on the development of computer music composition and technology. In 1977, he founded the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), now the world’s best-known center for computer music. Boulez’s vision for IRCAM promulgated a model of collaboration between composers, scientists, performers, and engineers that exemplified his view, as stated in his essay Technology and the Composer (1978): “In the end, musical invention will have somehow to learn the language of technology, and even to appropriate it.”

IRCAM’s research into psychoacoustics and the computer analysis of instrumental timbre provided a key ground for the continued development of spectralism, a widely influential aesthetic of instrumental and electronic music whose pioneers—including composers Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt, and Gérard Grisey—based pitch and orchestration structures not on chord progressions or serial pitch collections, but on the overtone features of sounds themselves.

IRCAM strongly supported the development of computer-based tools for sound analysis, and Kaija Saariaho—who declared in 1987 that the computer already occupied “a key position in the evolution of contemporary musical thought”—realized her works from this era using the compositional assistance language FORMES, together with the CHANT program for sound synthesis and processing, both developed at IRCAM by the team of Xavier Rodet, Yves Potard, and her husband, intermedia composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière.

Saariaho described this early period in her work as manifesting a notion of musical form based on the principle of oppositions—of dynamism and stasis, of sound and noise. In the later chamber work Sombre, Saariaho systematizes spectral materials as a way to create dialogues with the last paintings of Mark Rothko, which she experienced as “super-imposed fields of living color” during a 2012 visit to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. According to Saariaho, the overall structure of the work was determined by the forms embedded in fragments of Ezra Pound’s last Cantos.

Another crucial figure who emerged from IRCAM’s 1980s experimentation was Philippe Manoury, who began working at the institute in 1981. His research from this period gave rise to Zeitlauf (1982) for mixed choir, chamber ensemble, synthesizers, and tape. This was followed by his series of interactive works created in close collaboration with Miller Puckette, the inventor of the visual programming language Max, now used by composers, performers, and interactive artists around the world. Manoury’s Sonus ex machina set of concertos for live instruments and computer (1987–1991) began with the classic “Jupiter” for flute and interactive electronics (1987), a work that functions along with the others in the cycle as a kind of rhizome in which materials from different works transform each other, evoking what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called “striated space-time,” a concept that the two French philosophers drew from Boulez.

Hypothèse du sextuor takes a repetitive motif from Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige as a starting point for experimentation with the notion of hypothesis—“not as a quotation, but as a possibility of convergence” that never quite achieves its goal. According to Manoury, “The sextet never really unites around a common idea—like six people who can’t get on the same wavelength.”

Throughout his long life, Boulez frequently returned to previous works and not only recomposed them to reflect new thinking, but also reused elements from them in new pieces. We see similar recombinative impulses in Tyshawn Sorey’s Sentimental Shards, in which Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” (1932) and the “Sentimentals” movement from John Adams’s American Standard (1973) function as a kind of corpus, recalling current developments in machine learning at IRCAM and elsewhere. The piece received its world premiere by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble and wildUp, and its French premiere in 2019 by the Boulez-founded Ensemble intercontemporain. Here, Sorey’s signature double consciousness of stasis-like affect and slowly developing modulations presages his 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning saxophone concerto, Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith), which in turn recalls an aspect of Boulez’s work as a composer that Arnold Schoenberg termed “developing variation,” a technique in which initial themes recur in ever more novel combinations to express a telos.

Boulez’s own Anthèmes 2 (1997) presents another aspect of this recombinatorial mode of composing. Based on the 1991 solo violin work Anthèmes, Boulez conceived and composed the later work at IRCAM, with a realization by long-time Boulez collaborator Andrew Gerzso. With Anthèmes 2’s emphasis on live performance—an outgrowth of IRCAM’s mid-1980s shift away from fixed media—all electronic material is generated in real time during the performance, with the assistance of an automatic “score-following” program that listens to the violinist and compares his or her playing with the score, allowing precise synchronization between score and performer. The electronics modify and extend the sound structure of the violin, while allowing performer expressivity with regard to time and dynamics to affect the projection of sounds in musical space.

During the time that I was a resident composer at IRCAM, Boulez’s Répons (1981–1984/1985) was premiered. This key early work deployed six percussion soloists, a chamber ensemble, and one of the most advanced digital signal-processing machines of the era, the IRCAM-designed 4X, which was capable of assembling sounds in real time and sending them literally flying in complex spatial trajectories around the performance space. But even as he was creating Répons, Boulez already foresaw the ever-increasing power of microprocessors. Today’s smartphones are far more powerful than yesterday’s room-sized mainframe computers, and now the latest breakthroughs in machine learning, cognitive modeling, corpus-based generation, responsive music-performance technology, and creative AI come together in this evening’s world premiere, Pliages, featuring IRCAM’s Somax2 environment.

Somax2 deploys real-time machine improvisation agents that can autonomously interact in a rich and creative way with musicians or with each other. Appearing both as an autonomous, self-guided system and—as with ICE member Levy Lorenzo this evening—an instrument steered by a human musician, Somax2 blends in real time the music produced by the ensemble on stage and the layers generated by the machine, where humans and artificial agents react to each other. Here, as Boulez foresaw in Technology and the Composer, “creative thought is in a position to examine its own way of working, its own mechanisms.” Trained on a musical corpus of Boulez’s works, Pliages is an homage to the creator of the institute where this research was born.

—George E. Lewis