Pierre Boulez a la discothèque (2022 revision)

Pierre Boulez a la discothèque smashes 70’s French avant-garde gestures with early 2000’s house music structures. It’s what Agamben would describe as a Serious Parody. Originally composed in 2001, it was revised in 2005 and then again in 2008 and again in 2009 in preparation for its debut with Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra at the ISCM Festival. The series of overhauls and adjustments, sometimes the smallest of tweaks, is a process perhaps influenced by Boulez’s tendencies to revise and revise again. So, the latest – and most significant - overhaul and revision in 2022, seems to add another layer of that dimension, at a point of artistic maturity for me as a composer. This work is an elaborate ironic joke certainly, but that doesn’t mean that it should be executed with less seriousness. It’s precisely that seriousness is very funny to the outside uninvested observer, and this resonates with French Art music of the period that this work targets. The street – or Rue and Boulevard – references are locations of an imaginary journey the quasi-fictious PB would take after leaving IRCAM, heading to the disco La bôite a frissons being immediately bored because people are talking rather than listening to music, then heading to Le Dépot for some on-site sex, even stopping by the supermarket, before heading to catch the metro home. Pierre Boulez a la discothèque is a work of irony above all else an approach rarely given space on the contemporary orchestral platform.