Boulez - 12 Notations pour piano (1946) (with score)
Boulez's Douze Notations for piano were written during the final phase of his private studies with Leibowitz and Messiaen. Having discovered the 12-note method in early 1945, the 20-year-old composer first tried it out unsystematically in several still unpublished piano pieces and a quartet for Ondes Martenot. Then, for the first time, he used it as the basis of an entire piece. The design of Notations can be seen as a musical homage to the number 12: it consists of 12 short pieces, each of which is 12 bars long. Each of these miniatures has its own distinctive character, with sharp contrasts not only between the pieces but sometimes within a single piece. The element they all have in common is a 12-note row that is employed in different ways throughout the pieces, thereby creating coherence on the level of the musical material (see the music example). But Notations is not a rigidly 12-note work, for Boulez treats the technique he learned from Leibowitz with great freedom. The row is used not only horizontally and vertically but also in permutation, split and fragmented into segments. There are also many repeated notes, clusters, glissandos and various forms of ostinato.
The form of this quartet evolves from and expounds features of a basic twelve-tone series.
Babbitt makes his processes as intelligible as possible and leads his listener from one step to the next after all the possibilities have been investigated. The result is an exhilarating piece, self-contained and exact. And the beauty is not purely formal: there are many incidental pleasures in the springing deployment of string effects, as well as elegant changes of gear at the junctions between the four principal sections. (Paul Griffiths)
The pitch material is developed gradually in the opening bars. An interval of a rising minor third predominates in bars 1–3, followed by a concentration on falling major thirds in bars 4–6. The following bars continue in this way, presenting a single interval or pair of intervals, beneath which groupings defined by dynamics and register develop patterns suggested by these intervals, eventually involving all aspects of the musical structure. The quartet alternates such sections of intervallic exposition with sections that develop the intervals presented up to that point, until eleven different ordered pitch-class intervals have been presented and developed until, in a moment referred to by Babbitt as "telling you the butler did it", the set that controls the entire musical structure is revealed by a process of "disambiguation", as Babbitt himself described it.