In 1981, Pierre Boulez unveiled Répons — a work unlike anything heard before. Soloists surrounded the audience from raised platforms at the edges of the hall, their sounds captured, transformed in real time, and flung across a ring of loudspeakers by one of the world's first digital signal processors, the IRCAM-built 4X. Music moved through space like light through a cathedral.

Répons is at its core a spatial work. The placement of soloists on equidistant platforms was not a staging choice but a compositional one: it enabled sound to travel, rotate, and respond to itself. The electronics didn't accompany the musicians — they extended them, giving acoustic sound physical trajectories in space. By combining real-time synthesis, spatialization, and live performance, Boulez realized an idea he had been pursuing for decades: a "virtual" cathedral, reflecting on two Bach chorales while pointing toward a new future for the concert hall.

This article explores how Répons came to be — the institution Boulez built to make it possible, the machines invented to perform it, and how the music itself works.

Pierre Boulez, IRCAM and Répons

After World War II, and without trying to justify the steps that led to a multitude of styles and lack of innovation of our immediate predecessors, Boulez calls for a new establishment and the creation of new grammar and language: a new solid foundation for contemporary music. This foundation should bring long-term solutions trying to avoid being a simple architectural fashion. Like any established language, it should address its long-term solutions of formal and linguistics problems. Beginning with questions of aesthetics, after a codification (serialism) of the language, composers moved to as many different directions as personalities, sometimes, in great opposition to each other. (Boulez, 1986: p. 446)

Boulez's critique of contemporary music trends highlights a divergence from his envisioned path for musical evolution. He observed a proliferation of diverse approaches that, in his view, often masked regressive inclinations. Boulez argued that many composers were essentially recycling past ideas under the guise of innovation, rather than genuinely pushing the boundaries of musical expression:

What am I trying to say about contemporary music? That there are a lot of different tendencies -- but I must eliminate from the start all that are backward-looking, all "restorations", which are not so much tendencies in fact as nostalgias. (Boulez, 1986: p. 447)

The composer's stance reflects a desire for a forward-looking, unified direction in contemporary music. He sought to distinguish between genuine innovation and what he perceived as nostalgic retreats to familiar territory. Boulez advocated for eliminating these "restorations" from consideration as valid contemporary tendencies, viewing them instead as manifestations of personal longing for past musical forms.

This perspective underscores Boulez's commitment to forging a new musical language that would break free from historical constraints. His vision for contemporary music emphasized the need for authentic progression and the development of novel compositional techniques, rather than repackaging traditional elements in modern wrappings.

But Boulez's primary preoccupation was the unity and co-coordination of activities among different fields. Boulez was a visionary, who looks for a return to the future trying to find a universal language to give contemporary music the chance to become truly universal. He looks for a general organization of music and its relationship to the public instead of falling into the dialectics about the contrasts between electroacoustic, acousmatic and instrumental music. Recognizing the difficulty of the problem and calling for a multidisciplinary effort, Boulez proposed changes such as building new and specialized concert halls without orchestras, but instead with a consortium of performers getting rid of expanded nineteenth-century norms that can only perform old repertoire making it difficult, if not economically impossible, to play contemporary music. (Boulez, 1986: p. 448)

"As a composer who enjoys music from different parts of the world as much as European music, listening to Japanese Gagaku or Noh, Indian, Balinese or Aztec music, is to me as satisfying an experience as listening to European music". (Boulez, 1986: p. 449)

The composer views this museum-like tendency as a wall to incorporate other cultures and to form an opinion of examples of our own contemporary evolution; without altering our present conception of musical life, it is impossible to put today's audiences in contact with the creative forces at work, of course these forces include the design of new concert halls and a system that allows for an alternative to the old-fashioned orchestra. Only then, the specialized public who only listen to classical music or music from the renaissance, or contemporary music, will be able to support their own museum-like activities with forward-looking tendencies or current activities.

For the most part --and I feel very strongly about this-- these specialized publics, whether it be for contemporary or baroque music, specialist conductors or specialist performers, are all specialists in nothing, because they are incapable of corroborating their own special interest with present day activities. And until we have the means for this practical synthesis, our musical life will continue to lack any real sense. It is not possible to judge simply as a specialist, as one might judge Chinese prints (Boulez, 1986: p. 449) .

Boulez is not only criticizing the supporters of museum-like settings for music; the concert hall itself is a problem where more time is spent arranging the space for each piece than the music itself. The concert hall becomes something that is impeding the musical flow of the performance and the music is presented as an object of contemplation thus the audience does not take any part besides contemplating the masterpiece. Boulez asserts that the concert hall is no longer necessary because there are no masterpieces in contemporary music, there are no fixed forms, no rules regarding the number of performers or orchestral forces. In so rigid a framework as this, the concert form is no longer really necessary, as performance is perpetually interrupted and any desire for communication will simply be frustrated. (Boulez, 1986: p. 450)

The same is true for new electroacoustic music or electronic (tape) music where the audience sits facing loudspeakers and in some cases the lights are turned completely off. There is no regard for the visual aspect or interest of the performance. The same effect can be achieved by playing a record in a room with friends or a small group. Closing the eyes, falling asleep or lack of attention are the inevitable results of these dull performances unless there is something to see or some deduction to be drawn. Boulez proposes many ideas to solve the problem of communication between audience, performers, loudspeakers and contemporary music. Firstly, in order for an audience to accept something new without knowing the number of conventions there has to be a way to synchronize the visuals with the music. [^1]

In opera, the first thing that takes our attention is the mouth of the singers. We are aware of this, we accept it, and then we focus our attention to the music. Electroacoustic music, especially when electronic sounds are not synchronized to the physical gestures of performers, creates a challenge to our senses and expectations, thus, taking our attention. Seeing one thing and hearing another will get our brain working for a moment. This is especially true for real-time and interactive music where the members of an audience will try to decipher the correlation or mapping between physical gesture and the sounds coming from loudspeakers. As a composer/performer, one must be careful not to confuse gesture with gesticulation and not to get music accepted for other elements that are secondary and have nothing to do with music.

Another problem in contemporary music is architecture, not the architects, who have not been given the opportunity to design concert halls for new music. [^2] The Berlin Philharmonic is an example of a new design with its vineyard-style seating arrangement, and it became the model for other concert halls, such as the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Disney Opera House. According to Boulez, the whole central conception remains unaltered. The conception of music as an object of worship does not change with these new "old" designs. In fact, each member of the audience is overwhelmed by the architecture whose layout makes any participation impossible. Putting a large piece of modern sculpture in the main foyer or having a flying-saucer ceiling will not alter the sense of a hall. (Boulez, 1986: p. 452)

Boulez felt that these circumstances led to the creation of a number of small niches that did not have direction and therefore remained scattered and isolated as composer and performers tried to experiment without a lab, and without the means to communicate with the audience. Without promoting false solutions to solve the problem, starting in 1953, Boulez organized avant-garde concerts with the idea of letting the public judge certain things. The idea was to create a well-educated public and to do musical experiments that sometimes were not successful but were good enough for giving the audience something to judge.

Boulez is also concerned with science and the relationship between aesthetics and technical problems. He thinks all electronic music studios failed simply because of lack of coordination between engineers, composers and musicians. That is to say, there was no collaboration between the inventor, experts and players. He thought that no serious work had been done between these collaborations or established a relationship between science and music. Music is not science, it is an individual means of expression and lacks scientific rigor but according to Boulez, the language has not been put under the microscope for almost two centuries.

To create an understanding between multiple disciplines, there is a need for a laboratory where researchers can find solutions to the problems mentioned above. Electronic and electroacoustic music creates the need for the expansion of instruments, therefore the intervals found in Western music. It is possible to obtain sonorities from sources other than vibrations from objects. The creation of these machines require a collaborative effort between scientists, engineers and artists. Although many electronic or electroacoustic studies have been written, Boulez criticizes the lack of aesthetics mainly from the angle of the material itself, and emphasizes how satisfying it is to discover sounds and sonorities and that are transformed into something that has never been heard before. (Boulez, 1986: p. 46)

In his major work Le marteau sans maitre (1952-5), Boulez already shows his ideas regarding new orchestral combinations to create new sonorities, especially those unfamiliar to the niche listener. Favoring resonating instruments in the middle range (guitar, marimba, viola, alto flute, vibraphone and percussion) which are typical of the Boulezian instrumentarium for their capabilities of producing a continuum of sonorities, the composer may be evoking the music of Japan, Central Africa and Bali. Although part of his compositional style, the idea of the continuous sonority also found in Eclat (1965) finds its acme in Répons (1980-1984).
After Le marteau sans metre, the first unsuccessful attempt to create a dialogue between an orchestra and a tape was Poesie pur pouvoir (1958). The composer, who considered the tape part inadequate, withdrew it from the catalog after its first performance. (Jonathan Goldman, 2011: p. 10)

Perhaps this unsatisfying experience with regards to electroacoustic and electronic music and Boulez's interests on finding new sounds led to the creation of IRCAM, an autonomous institution devoted to the research and development of sound and music with emphasis in real-time interactions between technology and musicians. "IRCAM must be created as an institution, which is to have musical research as its function, acoustics as its subject, and the computer as its instrument". Boulez was never attracted to working with a tape that is synchronized with the performers, such as in Davidovsky's Synchronisms (Jameux, 1989: p. 169) [^3] [^4] [^5]

In addition to the difficult task imposed on the untrained performer, the act of synchronizing with a click track or by carefully studying the piece, may act against the musical flow constraining the expressiveness of a performance; in the case of a piece for a larger ensemble or orchestra it would hinder the role of the conductor.

Well, of course in the beginning, my experiences with electronic music were fraught with difficulties. I had rather bad experiences with the medium of tape music, and listening to loudspeakers in general was not at all satisfactory. But what was really restrictive from my point of view was the idea of the performer following the tape in a kind of straitjacket, which I found to be very detrimental to the performance in general. It was because of this that I pushed research at IRCAM toward live electronics. In this way I wanted the electronic element (which over the years had evolved to the use of computers) to be geared toward the concert situation. (Di Pietro, 2001: p. 67)

This preoccupation with "real-time electronics" was put into practice in several works such as Dialogue de l'ombre double (1985), ...explosante-fixe...(1973-74), Anthèmes 2 (1997), and Répons. [^6]

The idea of an institution for sound research was not new for Boulez or the French. There were many experimental sound studios around the world such as GRM in France, and other institutions and radio studios outside France such as the Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Milano in Italy (1953), and Studio for Electronic Music (WDR) in Cologne, Germany (1951). [^7] Perhaps the most "international" studio was the Columbia-Princeton, which attracted composers from many different countries, most notable the Argentinian Mario Davidovski. [^8] These studios and the hundreds of studios that were created around the world during the 1950s and 60s mainly focused on the production of musique concrete (Shaeffer) or electronische musik (Stockhausen). On the other hand, IRCAM, although with roots in the French tradition focused --still today-- on technological research and real-time electronics. [^9]

The institution was inaugurated by Boulez in 1977 with negotiations with the French government going back to the 1960s. This unique organization took a cross-disciplinary path involving composers, scientists and engineers. Boulez assembled a remarkable team including Luciano Berio, Jean-Claude Risset, Vinko Globokar and Max Mathews. The institution, part of Centre Georges Pompidou, created hardware and software for the transformation of sound in real time such as Max, the precursor of Cycling'74 Max/MSP[^10] and Pure Data (PD)[^11] developed by Miller Puckette in the mid-1980s at IRCAM. (Jonathan Goldman, 2011: p. 11) [^12]

Max is the result of Boulez wanting to make computer languages more intuitive for the composer who does not think in terms of hertz, and does not have the patience to wait hours for a computation to finish--something that engineers and technicians might enjoy--. Boulez's ideas about technology and a multidisciplinary collaboration between scientists and musicians changed as the institution grew and more scientists-musicians or musicians with a great understanding of computer science were favored by the seven research teams IRCAM has today. [^13]

One of the first pieces of hardware developed and created at IRCAM was the legendary 4x and the Matrix 32, a computer (instrument) that was used in Répons and deserves special attention. In addition to sound generation using additive synthesis, envelope following, frequency and ring modulation, both computers were also used for spatializing sounds in real-time, something that was groundbreaking at the time.

Conclusion of the Preview

What began as Boulez's frustration with tape music and passive concert halls became one of the most ambitious works in the electroacoustic canon. Répons transformed the concert hall into an instrument — soloists calling, electronics responding, sound orbiting the audience in real time. The full article continues with a deep analysis of the 4X machine, the spatial architecture of the piece, its harmonic language, and a section-by-section walkthrough of the music.

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