About this Piece

Contemplating the astonishing paradox represented by Notations, music that Pierre Boulez composed as a youthful radical and then transformed as a mature master, conductor Dennis Russell Davies offers a vivid proposition: “Perhaps the easiest way for a new listener to approach Boulez’s masterpiece is the way I tried to fully appreciate Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—first reading it (with a dictionary!) and then seeing it on stage.” 

The transformation Davies implies is illuminating. The Notations for solo piano, completed in 1945 but unpublished until 1985, conjure Boulez at age 20: fiercely intellectual, firmly grounded in science and mathematics, and newly committed to 12-tone compositional procedures absorbed from Schoenberg and Webern. 

In Notations, Boulez tested his own mettle with an extraordinary challenge: Limiting himself to the number 12, he undertook the composition of 12 piano pieces all based on the same 12-tone scale, each exactly 12 bars long. What might sound arid and rigid instead reveals Boulez’s insights into what the instrument he had played since childhood could do. Each Notation is a world unto itself; together, the pieces also catalog lessons the young composer had absorbed from Messiaen (his teacher at the Paris Conservatoire), Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. 

Later in life, Boulez revisited his earlier works with increasing frequency: refining and revising some repeatedly; repurposing others as raw material for newer creations. In 1978 he created extravagant orchestral elaborations upon Notations I–IV, which were given their premiere performances by Daniel Barenboim with the Orchestre de Paris in 1980, and then revised by Boulez in 1984 and 1987. Notations VII, again for Barenboim, had its premiere at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1999. 

Hearing the original and orchestral versions of Notation IV and Notation VII played in sequence should prove illuminating. In its original form Notation IV (“Rythmique”) can feel monomaniacal, pitting anxiously repeating rhythm patterns in the left hand against brittle right-hand gestures. In the orchestral version, rhythmic intensity remains but is diffused through the prismatic colors of a modern symphony orchestra equipped with eight percussionists, three harps, and celesta. 

Notation VII (“Hiératique”) undergoes a more astonishing transfiguration, growing from roughly one minute in duration to nearly 10 minutes in its orchestral guise. Reviewing the Chicago premiere for The New York Times, Paul Griffiths likened the transformation to the process by which an oyster forms a pearl: “As if irritated by the original piano piece, the composer has given it a sumptuous, dense, and opalescent coating, not only expanding it but also, in a way, withdrawing its shock. The violent new influences of 1945 are, in the recomposition, being wiped away.” —S.S.