Editing Pierre Boulez (section)

===Works with electronics===
Boulez compared the experience of listening to pre-recorded electronic music in the concert hall to a crematorium ceremony. His real interest lay in the instantaneous transformation of instrumental sounds but the technology was not available until the founding of IRCAM in the 1970s. Before then he had produced ''Deux Études'' (1951) for [[magnetic tape]] for [[Pierre Schaeffer]]'s Groupe Recherche de la Radiodiffusion Française,<ref>Peyser (1976), 67.</ref> as well as a large-scale piece for live orchestra with tape, ''Poésie pour pouvoir'' (1958){{refn|group=n|name=poesie}}. He was dissatisfied with both pieces and withdrew them.<ref>Rocco, 67; "An Interview with [[Dominique Jameux]]", in Boulez (1981), 201–02; Jameux, 114–16.</ref>

The first piece completed at IRCAM was ''[[Répons]]'' (1980–1984).{{refn|The title is a reference to plainchant, in which the solo singer alternates with a choir. It reflects the interplay between the soloists and the ensemble (or, as Samuel puts it: the individual and the community).<ref>Samuel (2013)</ref>|group=n}} In this forty-minute work an instrumental group is placed in the middle of the hall, while six soloists surround the audience: two pianos, harp, cimbalom, vibraphone and glockenspiel/xylophone. It is their music which is transformed electronically and projected through the space. [[Peter Heyworth]] described the moment when they enter, some ten minutes into the piece: "it is as though a great window were thrown open, through which a new sound world enters, and with it a new world of the imagination. Even more impressive is the fact that there is no longer a schism between the worlds of natural and electronic sounds, but rather a continuous spectrum."<ref>Heyworth (1982).</ref>

''[[Dialogue de l'ombre double]]'' (1982–1985){{refn|Dialogue of the Double Shadow. The title refers to a scene in [[Paul Claudel]]'s play ''Le Soulier de satin'' (The Satin Slipper). Boulez acknowledged that the work had a theatrical aspect.<ref name=SamuelBooklet />|group=n}} for clarinet and electronics grew out of a fragment of ''Domaines'' and was a gift for Luciano Berio on his 60th birthday. Lasting around eighteen minutes, it is a dialogue between a solo clarinet (played live, though sometimes reverberated through an offstage piano) and its double (in passages pre-recorded by the same musician and projected around the hall). Boulez approved transcriptions of the piece for bassoon (in 1995) and for recorder (in 2011).

In the early 1970s he had worked on an extended chamber piece called ''[[…explosante-fixe…]]''{{refn|The title of the work is a quotation from [[André Breton]]'s ''L'Amour fou'': "convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, exploding-fixed, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be."<ref name=SamuelBooklet/>|group=n}} for eight solo instruments, electronically transformed by a machine called a halophone, but the technology was primitive and he eventually withdrew it.<ref>Vermeil, 207, 209 and 210; Jameux, 176–77.</ref> He re-used some of its material in other works, including a later piece with the same name.<ref>Campbell and O'Hagan, 297.</ref> This definitive version was composed at IRCAM between 1991 and 1993 for [[MIDI|MIDI-flute]] and two accompanying flutes with ensemble and live electronics. By this time the computer could follow the score and respond to triggers from the players.<ref>Rocco, 68.</ref> According to Griffiths, "the principal flute is caught as if in a hall of mirrors, its line imitated in what the other flutes play, and then in the contributions of the larger ensemble".<ref>Griffiths (1995b)</ref> Hopkins and Griffiths describe it as "music characteristically caught between thrill and desperation".<ref name="Hopkins and Griffiths"/>

''[[Anthèmes|Anthèmes II]]'' for violin and electronics (1997) grew out of a piece for solo violin ''Anthèmes I'' (1991), which Boulez wrote for the Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition in Paris and which in turn derived from material in the original ''…explosante-fixe…''<ref name=SamuelBooklet/> The virtuoso writing for the instrument is captured by the electronic system, transformed in real time and propelled around the space to create what Jonathan Goldman calls a "hyper-violin". Although this produces effects of speed and complexity which no violinist could achieve, Boulez restricts the palette of electronic sounds so that their source, the violin, is always recognisable.<ref>Goldman, 169–172.</ref>