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 projected across a ring of loudspeakers by the IRCAM-built 4X digital signal processor. 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 simply a staging choice but a compositional one: it enabled sound to travel, rotate, and respond to itself. The electronics did not accompany the musicians; they extended them, giving acoustic sound physical trajectories through space.
The full text examines 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.
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