ABSTRACT
Boulez found a productive tension within the question of time: not to cast music into dimensionality, but bring dimensionality into musical experience-as Deleuze aptly summarized, “to make sound the medium which renders time sensible.” Boulez sought to bring the two together by taking up again the classical contrast between the continuous and discrete with his own version of smoothness. The instructions to the singer, though, are purely negative: do not create any sense of equality. The accomplishment of smoothness is thus handed over to the singer in many ways. If she can avoid introducing any sort of regularity into the phrase, then the experience of this passage escapes the implied periodicity that leads to an expectation of continuation. By attempting to construct music without partition, Boulez brought dimensionality into experience.
