Avec Boulez, Mallarmé, et Foucault

Avec Boulez, Mallarmé, et Foucault is a forty-five-minute work for experimental ensemble built through the encounter of materials that already carry their own histories: Pierre Boulez’s Notations pour piano, the poetry and prose of Stéphane Mallarmé, writings and conversations by Boulez, and texts by Michel Foucault. I approached these materials as objects capable of being placed under renewed compositional pressure, allowing quotation, reading, performance, fragmentation, and recomposition to alter the relations through which they had previously been heard or understood. The work consequently developed less as an arrangement of sources than as a space in which those sources could act upon one another, sometimes through recognisable citation, sometimes through displacement, and sometimes through the more unstable condition of a material whose origin remains present even as its function changes. 

The title marks this encounter deliberately. Boulez, Mallarmé, and Foucault are brought together because each, in a different register, places pressure on form, language, interpretation, and the conditions under which an inherited structure remains available to thought. Mallarmé’s writing provides a verbal world in which language repeatedly turns upon its own sounding, recurrence, fracture, and disappearance. Boulez supplies both musical material and a conception of modernity sharpened by suspicion towards the museum-like preservation of musical works, particularly where historical reproduction begins to substitute for present production. Foucault widens the problem by asking how contemporary music relates to the larger transformations of twentieth-century culture, how habits of listening become sedimented, and how an encounter with a work might alter the person who undergoes it. These positions are not assembled into a philosophical commentary. They become part of the temporal and performative substance of the composition itself. 

The work begins from Foucault’s description of writing as an experience through which thought may be transformed. In the performance scheme, the spoken text reaches the sentence “This is an experience,” and the music begins immediately after it; the phrase therefore acquires a structural force before the ensemble has sounded a note. What follows unfolds across a forty-five-minute duration punctuated by precisely placed verbal interventions. Passages from Mallarmé, Foucault, and Boulez appear at different temporal points, sometimes opening a conceptual horizon for the music, sometimes interrupting what has already taken shape, sometimes returning the act of listening to questions that the performance itself has begun to make audible. 

This temporal organisation allows speech and music to remain in a changing relation. Mallarmé’s Le Démon de l’Analogie, with its strange recurrence of a phrase that detaches itself from ordinary signification and returns through sound, sits particularly close to the compositional problem of the work: language can become material through repetition, yet repetition alters the thing that returns. Elsewhere Foucault’s reflections on contemporary music, technological transformation, form, distance, and accessibility place listening itself under scrutiny, while his remarks on familiarity and the crystallisation of habit expose another pressure that matters to the piece: repeated access can stabilise expectation so completely that what is most familiar begins to determine what remains perceptible. 

Boulez’s presence sharpens the historical dimension of this problem. His critique of a culture absorbed by documentation and the reconstruction of supposedly privileged performances asks what happens when the past becomes so technically recoverable that its preservation begins to weigh upon the possibility of present artistic action. I was interested in placing that argument inside a performance which itself depends upon inherited materials. The historical work remains audible, yet its authority is disturbed by what performers can do with it now: fragments can be detached, combined with speech, subjected to new temporal relations, and carried into circumstances for which their original form did not provide. The act of interpretation thereby acquires compositional consequence. 

This is also why the work belongs closely to the experimental practice through which I founded CueMe. Experimentation here concerns what a work can become when interpretation is allowed to exert sufficient pressure upon it. A score, a poem, a philosophical statement, an archival trace, or an inherited performance practice can retain its history while acquiring another relation to the present. The ensemble becomes the place where these relations are tested in real time, across instrumental playing, recitation, quotation, interruption, and collective action. What emerges is intentionally heterogeneous: several historical voices remain perceptible, although none is permitted to organise the whole from a stable centre.

Near the end, the textual sequence contracts around questions of musical difficulty and the resistance of unfamiliar forms to already learned habits of hearing. Foucault’s observation that listening becomes more difficult as composition releases itself from recognisable repetitive cues is followed by Boulez’s question concerning the apparent persistence of such difficulty across generations. The final spoken intervention returns to Mallarmé. Music ceases immediately after the recited line “Seems good in that I chose to end it,” allowing an apparently slight poetic phrase to determine the physical end of a large musical span. The ending interests me because it makes closure itself an act of interpretation: after forty-five minutes of materials surviving through transformation, the work stops at the moment language declares that an ending has been chosen. 

Avec Boulez, Mallarmé, et Foucault was composed in Cambridge in 2022 for flute, clarinet, saxophones, strings, guitar, piano, and voices, and realised with the Cambridge University Experimental Music Ensemble under my direction. It was first performed at West Road Concert Hall, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, on 10 May 2022, followed by a second performance at Lee Hall, Wolfson College, on 14 May 2022.

Creator and Director: Saman Samadi

Coby O'Brien, flute 

Ella Nixon, clarinet
Eric Petzoldt, saxophone

Valentina Ciniglio, saxophone

Dan Phillips, violin

Alice Drury, violin

Emily Abbott, violin 

Bethany Norman, violin

Nicky Swett, cello

Gregory May, double bass 

David Cotter, guitar

Kristin Barone-Samadi, piano
Lea Luka Tiziana, voice

Reuben Bance, voice

PERFORMANCES

Cambridge University Experimental Music Ensemble (dir. Saman Samadi)  cam.cueme.uk

MAY 10, 2022, West Road Concert Hall, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. VIDEO

MAY 14, 2022, Lee Hall, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. VIDEO