Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1973, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center premiered a new work by Pierre Boulez for solo flute and seven instruments, plus interaction with an electronic computer program, which generated sounds that reacted to (and interacted with) the solo flute. The piece was titled “explosante-fixe,” which translates as “exploding-fixed.” At the time, however, Boulez was frustrated by the still primitive computer technology. “You still had connections with wires and so on,” he recalled. “It was clumsy and unreliable.” Twenty years later, Boulez presented a new version of “explosante-fixe,” employing updated computer technology and midi-flute, controlled by a computer. This version was recorded, in effect “fixing the explosion.” Boulez once quoted with approval the French dramatist Antonin Artaud, who described music as “collective hysteria and spells.” Yet Boulez carefully plotted out his compositions in obsessively meticulous detail. And, speaking of explosions, Boulez once suggested that as a radical break with the past, all opera houses should be blown up. Yet, as a conductor, Boulez was a devoted interpreter of some past composers, such as Debussy and Stravinsky—and, if you listen closely, echoes of their music can be heard in his own.