Editing Pierre Boulez (section)

===''Douze notations'' and the work in progress===
Boulez completed ''Douze notations'' in December 1945. It is in these twelve aphoristic pieces for piano, each twelve bars long, that Bennett first detects the influence of Webern.<ref>Bennett, 54.</ref> Shortly after the composition of the piano original, Boulez attempted an (unperformed and unpublished) orchestration of eleven of the pieces.<ref>O'Hagan, 38–47.</ref> Over a decade later he re-used two of them{{refn|Nos. 5 and 9.|group=n}} in instrumental interludes in his ''Improvisation I sur Mallarmé''.<ref>O'Hagan, 44.</ref> Then in the mid-1970s he embarked on a further, more radical transformation of the ''Notations'' into extended works for very large orchestra,<ref>Samuel (2002), 428.</ref> a project which occupied him to the end of his life.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://explorethescore.org/pgs/boulez/history_and_context/musical_metamorphoses.html |title=Musical Metamorphoses |last1=Bleek |first1=Thobias |website=Klaver-Festival Ruhr |access-date=10 December 2023 |archive-date=10 December 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231210082111/https://explorethescore.org/pgs/boulez/history_and_context/musical_metamorphoses.html |url-status=live }}</ref>

''Notations'' was only the most extreme example of Boulez's tendency to revisit earlier works: "as long as my ideas have not exhausted every possibility of proliferation they stay in my mind".<ref>Griffiths (1978), 49.</ref> Robert Piencikowski characterises this in part as "an obsessional concern for perfection" and observes that with some pieces "one could speak of successive distinct versions, each one presenting a particular state of the musical material, without the successor invalidating the previous one or vice versa"—although he notes that Boulez almost invariably vetoed the performance of previous versions.<ref>Campbell and O'Hagan, 93 and 96.</ref>