MAKE HIM TALK (2016/2017)
to 'après "l'artisanat furieux"' (from 'Le marteau sans maître', VII) by Pierre Boulez
for flute, vibraphone, guitar and sampler, hammer, thunderbolt (all amplified) - miniature as a birthday greeting for Pierre Boulez
Duration: 3,5 min.
Composition commissioned by the PHACE Ensemble and the Konzerthaus Wien
WP: 13.06.2017, Konzerthaus ViennaPhace-Ensemble, Simeon Pironkoff
Performance material available from Boosey & Hawkes
Programme text
Make him talk! is based on piece no. VII from 'Le marteau sans maitre' (= 'après "l'artisanat furiuex"') by Pierre Boulez. The instrumentation corresponds to the original, but has been expanded to include a sampler with which Boulez's original speech quotations are repeatedly played during the course of the piece. They are taken from a longer television interview that was broadcast on American television in the 1990s.
The pitches and intervals of Boulez's original music are basically retained in Make him talk! The tempi also correspond exactly to the original. However, the temporal-rhythmic level has been completely reorganised by me with the aim of 'verbalising' the music, an intention that runs counter to Boulez'.
In a somewhat exaggerated manner, I take up the content and style of the language quotations and try to 'comment on', 'ironise' or even 'counteract' the texts through rhythmic-temporal arrangement or rearrangement of the music, i.e. with simple musical means. Live music and samples (= Boulez's voice) thus form a dense 'mesh', or a kind of 'dialogue'.
Reviews
Wiener Zeitung, 15 June 2017, Lena Dražić
Boulez references, reverent and iconoclastic
In the penultimate concert of the Boulez series, Ensemble Phace presented "Le Marteau sans maître", one of the composer's major works. However, the ensemble, led by Simeon Pironkoff, was not content with just one rendition, but commissioned eight composers to write miniatures that were played between the nine parts of the "Marteau".
How does the dialogue between that so distant avant-garde and our so retrospective present work? It began that evening with the reviewer's futile desire to know Boulez's work inside out in order not only to categorise the music correctly, but also to decipher the Boulez references in the premieres. Over the course of an intensive hour, it became clearer how the new compositions stood out from the crystalline strangeness of the "Marteau".
...
Some of the answers were ironic, such as... "Make him talk!" by Iris ter Schiphorst, who had the master himself comment (self-)ironically on the evening with the statement that the music of past centuries should be left alone...
Boulezian, Mark Berry, Blog, 14.06.2017
... It was nice to hear Boulez's own voice sampled in Iris ter Schiphorst's Make him talk! and there was, I think, a real sense of that voice becoming part of the ensemble.