Pierre Boulez, composer, conductor, and arch polemicist, described the intention of his 1952 piece Structures I as follows: 

“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.” 

It’s interesting, then, to compare this sentiment with Dialogue de l’ombre double, a piece from three decades later which is indelibly linked to a particularly pungent “foreign body”: the theatre. The inspiration for the piece came from a scene in Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de Satin, an eleven-hour verse epic written in 1929. Boulez’s title, meaning “dialogue of the double shadow,” comes from a moment in Claudel’s thirteenth scene when a man and a woman are projected together onto a wall. The piece uses this as its jumping off point; live clarinet plays with its sonic shadow, a pre-recorded clarinet spatialized around the concert space using loudspeakers. 

The piece is not theatrical, but has a certain literary feel, like one of the long unbroken multi-voiced monologues you might find in the works of James Joyce. The music contrasts between “stanzas” (played live) and “transitions” (prerecorded), and dialogue between the two parts, though this aspect is better imagined as two forks of a split personality than a conversation between two different voices. Dialogue is full of a darting and rhythmic vitality, and serves as a great inroad into Boulez’s art. 

Hugh Morris 2024