Pierre Boulez in conversation with Wolfgang Fink about Pli selon Pli WF: The title Pli selon Pli is a reference to Mallarmé, yet it doesn't occur in the poems you selected. Would you explain that? PB: I took this title from the sonnet Remémoration d'amis belges, which describes the brightening mist that gradually, "fold by fold" ("pli selon pli") like a curtain opening, reveals the stone (in this case the buildings of Bruges). So it was with the creation of this work: it came about little by little, and in the beginning I had no idea as to what sort of piece it would become. At first there was only an Improvisation, which I sketched for myself without any external prompting. The second Improvisation was then composed to a commission by North German Radio (NDR) in Hamburg. The third Improvisation then followed and - on the occasion of the Prince of Fürstenberg's death in Donaueschingen - the first version of Tombeau, which I later greatly expanded. Don came still later, when a definite tendency in the work had become clear. In Don considerations of content and form now played a role, considerations that had arisen in the course of composing the other movements. You've reworked all five parts of Pli selon Pli a number of times and then withdrawn the original versions or intermediate stages, insofar as they were published at all. Improvisation I exists in two differently scored versions, both of which can be performed... Improvisation I began as a playful work, written as relaxation after the Third Piano Sonata. When I want to relax I always think of a very simple melodic line, one which is certainly not dodecaphonic. This may surprise you, but I've often found the obligation to use all twelve tones to be unbearable, because the result is so predictable. In this melody there are repetitions, polarities are formed which interest me. The first version of Improvisation I essentially revolves round this phenomenon. For its articulation I went back to sketches for my Notations, which I've interpolated between these melodic segments. The form is thus elucidated by means of a self-quotation. If you look at the original versions of the five movements of Pli selon Pli, you'll observe a "crescendo" in the scoring from Don (at that stage for piano alone and voice), by way of ImprovisationI(for several instruments and voice), to Improvisation III and Tombeau (very large forces). I then noticed that the first Improvisation lacked adequate weight in relation to the third. The new version of Improvisation I is not only an orchestration, but also an expansion and intensification - I enriched the melodic line with echoes, imitations etc. As a consequence, I also had to expand Don in the same direction. Now, in a complete performance of all the movements, there is a "decrescendo" to the middle and a "crescendo" to the end. The formal tendency has therefore been totally altered. Mallarmé's language is marked by a formal strictness and concentration hardly found in lyric poetry written before or since. The syntax is highly complicated and the semantic content so heavily charged that the web of references is almost impenetrable. This language with all its hermetic aspects, one reads, belongs to the 19th century, while your musical language virtually renounces tradition. Do you not see a contradiction in that? Why these classifications? Why should something written in the 19th century not be valid for us today? You said it yourself: after Mallarmé there was as good as no further formal development, at least not in the direction that Mallarmé himself followed. That represents an extreme position, one which is unsurpassable. My aim has been nothing other than that of transposing this formal strictness into music. You once spoke of the three Improvisations as representing, in their various ways, a kind of analysis of sonnet structure. How do you mean that? In the first Improvisation the four strophes simply follow one another. I've already mentioned that the basic material is a relatively simple melodic line. These three components - the poem by Mallarmé, the melodic line and the occasional inserted bits from Notations - have nothing to do with each other at first, the context that develops between music and language is thus of a rather playful nature. In the second Improvisation the correspondence of word and tone, poetry and music, is far more advanced. Proceeding from sonnet structure: two different vocal styles correspond to the two quatrains and two tercets, namely a strictly syllabic and a decoratively ornamental articulation. Each of these two fundamental modes of articulation offers a great number of possibilities for handling texts. One can stay very close to the text or else make it completely unintelligible, either by carrying the decorative element to excess or by making the intervals between individual syllables so great that the listener perceives only the sound of each discrete syllable. The first strophe is strictly ornamental, the second strictly syllabic, with the ornamentation becoming increasingly extravagant, on the one hand, and the intervals increasingly wide, on the other. In the tercets the alternation is applied to the rhyme scheme: AAB / CBC has the resulting articulation "ornamental, ornamental, syllabic / ornamental, syllabic, ornamental". In this context I'd also like to point out that the number eight plays an important role in Improvisation II: the strictly octosyllabic metre of this sonnet serves as a basis for the music's structural framework. That means in the first Improvisation one is observing the sonnet from the outside, so to speak, while the basis of the second is a kind of analysis of the strophic structure? Exactly. In the third Improvisation it becomes still more complicated, because there I've addressed the structure of each individual line of verse and its significance within the overall form of the poem. In short, my aim there was to find for every line a form of its own. In the Improvisations, consequently, the form of the sonnet is permeated musically, layer by layer. In the outer movements, however, the musical element is largely superimposed on the textual... In Don I've used only one line of the poem at the beginning and in Tombeau one line at the very end. But the probing of Mallarmé is important at every level of the composition. At one moment the poetry is the centre of attention, a moment later its presence is obscured. You see, in dealing with the problem of form that greatly occupied me at the time of my Third Piano Sonata, I found a convincing literary correspondence only in Mallarmé. If I'd found that in poems written in 500 BC or in Aeschylus, I'd have made reference to them and chosen texts from that time. The 19th-century aspect of Mallarmé is of no importance to me and is completely relegated to the background. He quite transcends this period. In principle you place a great deal of value on textual intelligibility - the text should be recognizable and not broken up into its constituent parts, as it were, pulverized, as for example with Nono... The body of the text is important to me, although I'm also playing with the text when, for example, I ornament a syllable to the point where one can hardly follow the text any longer - because the ornamentation of the melodic line is so distracting that one loses the thread. I have never used an imaginary language, for the reason that literary language is far more interesting and far less predictable than an imaginary language. All these Dadaist experiments etc. I find quite nice at best, yet ultimately very simplistic. What really interest me are the transitions between complete intelligibility and comprehensibility and ever decreasing intelligibility. The interstices, the varying degrees of the intervals, which so highly charge a sentence or a word with "information" that, for example, at the end of a sentence or word one no longer knows how it began, simply because after a certain length of time continuity turns into discontinuity: that provides far more scope to the imagination than if you regard language from the outset merely as phonetic material. At every level of which we've just spoken, the poem offers far more possibilities than any imaginary language. From a conversation that took place in May 1999 at IRCAM in Paris (Translation: Richard Evidon)

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