ABSTRACT
Given Boulez’s self-confessed love of working with objets trouvés, it is unsurprising that after the hiatus in production following the abrupt curtailment of Incises and its subsequent publication, he should have turned to a project which had occupied him intermittently over a number of years. Begun in 1988 to mark Elliott Carter’s eightieth birthday, Dérive 2 received its first performance in 1990. Like its eponymous predecessor of some four years earlier, it was based on material originally generated for the Répons project, and in its original form was of similar modest proportions to Dérive 1. A revised and extended version of the piece was performed at the Lucerne Festival in 2002, but this in turn proved to be an intermediate stage in the revision and some four years later an enormously expanded Dérive 2 was first performed at the Aix-en Provence Festival. Even this score, which formed the basis for the published edition (UE 32528), was not quite the end of the saga, since Boulez continued to make various adjustments up until 2011.2
Meanwhile, following an invitation to compose a contribution to a ‘Piano Project’, a collection of pieces for students, being assembled by Universal Edition (UE 33662), Boulez responded with a brief piece entitled Une page d’éphéméride (‘A Calendar Page’). The published score of the piece is dated 2005 and the previous year in an interview at the Barbican Hall prior to a London performance of Dérive 2, he had described his compositional procedure in the following way: ‘When I write a piece I have a lot of sketches which are not always used. You know that it’s like pages of a diary which I take and then amplify and expand.’3 The comparison is revealing, and as close as Boulez came to explaining the title of a commission which must already have been on his mind. As it stands, Une page d’éphéméride is a fragment, not dissimilar in its proportions to that of the original version of Incises, consisting of a slow introduction in free time exploiting various effects of resonance, followed by a Rapide section in pulsed time. Echoing the climax of Incises, an accelerando culminates in a reiterated six-part chord fff,
marking a return to the resonances of the opening, and a gradual dissipation of the energy of the Rapide. Indeed, one of the most immediately striking features of this piece is its unmistakable stylistic kinship with Boulez’s preceding piano works, the tensions between sections in pulsed and free time recalling those of Structures deuxième livre, chapitre II as well as Incises itself.
