Structures I (1952) and Structures II (1961) are two related works for two pianos, composed by the French composer Pierre Boulez.
Contents
History
The first book of Structures was begun in early 1951, as Boulez was completing his orchestral work Polyphonie X, and finished in 1952. It consists of three movements, or "chapters", labelled Ia, Ib, and Ic, composed in the order a, c, b. The first of the second book's two "chapters" was composed in 1956, but chapter 2 was not written until 1961. The second chapter includes three sets of variable elements, which are to be arranged to make a performing version (Häusler 1965, 5). A partial premiere of book 2 was performed by the composer and Yvonne Loriod at the Wigmore Hall, London, in March 1957. This was Boulez's first appearance in the UK as a performer (Griffiths 1973). The same performers gave the premiere of the complete second book, with two different versions of chapter 2, in a chamber-music concert of the Donaueschinger Musiktage on Saturday, 21 October 1961 (Südwestrundfunk n.d.).
Structures I was the last and most successful of Boulez's works to use the technique of integral serialism (Hopkins and Griffiths 2001), wherein many parameters of a piece's construction are governed by serial principles, rather than only pitch. Boulez devised scales of twelve dynamic levels (though in a later revision of the score these reduced to ten—Ligeti 1960, 40–41), twelve durations, and—from the outset—ten modes of attack (Ligeti 1960, 43), each to be used in a manner analogous to a twelve-tone row. The composer explains his purpose in this work:
I wanted to eradicate from my vocabulary absolutely every trace of the conventional, whether it concerned figures and phrases, or development and form; I then wanted gradually, element after element, to win back the various stages of the compositional process, in such a manner that a perfectly new synthesis might arise, a synthesis that would not be corrupted from the very outset by foreign bodies—stylistic reminiscences in particular. (Boulez 1986a, 61)
Structures II is, on the other hand, a reconstruction of Structures I: its material is reused and rewritten, transformed into a new work with a more fluid means of expression. This kind of reworking of an earlier piece is quite common among Boulez's compositions, for instance recently the violin piece Anthèmes (1991) was transformed into Anthèmes II (1997) for violin and electronics, or the solo piano Incises (1994/1997/2001) into Sur Incises (1998).