I recorded Domaines in 2013 but this is a piece I have been playing since UE published it in 1970. I’ve played it many times in the solo version but also a number of times in the ensemble version with Music Projects London, conducted by Richard Bernas and with the London Sinfonietta conducted by Diego Masson (who conducted the first recording with Michel Portal). I spent a few days at the Paul Sacher Stiftung looking at sketches for Domaines as well as those for Elliot Carter’s solo GRA. I’ve written elsewhere about the Boulez (Heaton 2012) but below is an introduction.

Boulez’s Domaines (Areas/Domaines), composed during an extended period between 1959 and 1968, was written for clarinet alone. Boulez turned it into a kind of concerto later by adding six discrete ensembles of one to six players while retaining the original solo part. Domaines follows on from the Third Piano Sonata of 1957 and the large-scale work for soprano and orchestra Pli selon pli (Fold by Fold), which he worked on between 1957 and 1962. There are close links between the three pieces in terms of expressive melodic material, for example similarities between clarinet and vocal writing, and the quasi-aleatoric nature of the notation -  the actual layout on the page of fragments of music.

 A great deal has been written about the Third Sonata and it is clear from Boulez’s own writings, particularly the article ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’, which appeared in English in the American journal Perspectives of New Music in 1963. Boulez refers to Stephane Mallarmé (1842-98) and particularly his poem Un Coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice), written in 1897 and published posthumously in 1914, that he considers one of the most important poems of the twentieth century. The typography, the weighting and size of words and letters, their placing and spacing on the page, is fundamental to the spatial concept of Domaines. There are other influences, particularly the ideas around aleatoric music and chance. There is correspondence about these ideas between Cage and Boulez during the period 1949-1954 (see Nattiez 1993) and similarities with works by Stockhausen and others around the same time, for example his Klavierstück XI (1956) with nineteen fragments on a single page.

Domaines, as is typical with Boulez, had a long period of gestation. The first ideas were in 1959 when he had provisionally entitled the piece Concert or Labyrinthe. The idea of ‘six-ness’, which I’ll come to later, and spatial distribution not only in the musical notation but in the disposition of players in the concert space, was there from the start. The Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, paul-sacher-stiftung.ch) has in its archive a single sheet of hotel note paper dated 9 April 1959 with notes and drawings on the reverse side. The page lists ensembles of instruments, many of which will appear in the later ensemble version, and a star drawing with five ensembles at the five star points with the conductor and audience in the centre. It seems that an ensemble piece, in addition to the solo version, was conceived from the beginning.

During the early 1960s Boulez was working on a theatre piece, a kind of opera provisionally entitled Marge(margin, marginalia) which he never completed, and a short Cantata for baritone and small instrumental group. The Cantata was to be composed in collaboration with the novelist Michel Butor and the project included an art book which would have graphical devices designed in layout along the lines of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés. The Cantata was for the baritone Barry McDaniel based on poems by e e cummings, particularly the collection No Thanks from 1935 and was to be premiered in the concert series in Ulm[1] in 1968 but Domaines was substituted at the last minute played by Hans Deinzer. 

The sketches show that much of the Domaines material related to the Cantata and Marges with some solo clarinet lines in sketch form having text underlayed. These fragments of text are from the e e cummings poem which Boulez later used for the 1969 chorus and orchestra piece ‘cummings ist der dichter…’ . While Domaines exists in two versions, solo and with ensembles, Boulez always considered the piece unfinished or in the process of revision. Minus the cummings text a revised form of the string sextet music used in the Cantata found its way into a new version of Domaines in which the clarinet dialogues with six instrumental groups. The first performance of the ensemble version took place in Brussels, December 20 1968, played by Walter Boeykens and members of the Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Boulez. After Deinzer played the first performance in Ulm Boulez requested that he not play it again until revisions were complete, which never happened. A kind of revision is the piece for clarinet and electronics Dialogue de l’ombre double (1982-5) which takes material from the ensemble music of Domaines but not from the solo part. Universal Edition published the solo part in 1970.  

Domaines consists of six cahiers labelled A to F. Each of these ‘originals’ has a ‘mirror’ version, making twelve cahiers in all. Each in turn contains six ‘cells’ or fragments. These range in content from just a single note to four dense lines of complex music. The performer must begin by playing all six original cahiers, presenting them in any order; then the six mirror versions are played, again in any order. The six cells on each page may be performed sequentially in one of two ways, either vertically or horizontally. The performer is offered a number of different ways to play many of the cells. These relate to alternative tempo markings (no metronome marks are used), levels of dynamics, optional trills, use of vibrato, flutter-tonguing, and extended techniques such as colour fingerings or trills on one note, use of air sounds, and multiphonics.

Domaines is all about the number six: six cahiers original, six miroir (almost the exact retrograde of the material) and six fragments of material on each page. The piece is serial in that rather opaque Boulezian way. Based on six pitches the sketches show the integral serialist techniques: 12x12 matrices for rhythm and dynamics and a hierarchical structuring of material often using three different colours. The sketches and first drafts clearly show that the pitch, rhythm and even articulation are present in early versions, dynamics appear later and all the ‘extended techniques’ only appear in the final drafts. Domaines is also all about colour and about the clarinet - there is no question that this is a clarinet piece. The notation demands a different and careful approach from the player where, rather than simply being concerned with the mechanics of notes and rhythms, there is an immediate concern with colour - the player explores each fragment and carefully places it in space judging continuity and pauses between fragments and, in the solo version, pages. Ian Mitchell (2006) quotes one of the early performers of the work, Alan Hacker, as saying that Boulez was concerned about the continuity of the fragments suggesting to move more quickly through the material with fewer pauses between. In my clarinet lessons on the piece with Hans Deinzer at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1980 Deinzer also talked about the ‘phrasing’ and the way in which the musical materials of the fragments determined the pauses or lack of pauses between them. Domaines may be fragmentary music but it is not pointilliste in that there is always a sense of the larger structure, the way in which the player travels from material to material and from page to page giving a sense of expressive and coherent continuity. The notation begins to look like the music sounds in the groupings and the placing/spacing on the page but more significantly requires the player to 'interpret' in the relative freedom of expressive timing and placing. It is the radical nature of this notation in Boulez (and other composers in the complex modernist tradition, as well as others using different non-traditional symbols) unlike that of say Elliott Carter, perhaps a similar soundworld but traditionally notated, which militates against the lazy employment of tradition or ingrained ‘musicality’ and by its very nature asks of performers an interpretation without preconceptions, without history or tradition but simply in response to the text.

 [1] Ulmer Konzerte, a chamber concert series begun in 1956. Boulez participated in 1964, 66, 68 and 70. These were mixed programmes of old and new music and Boulez uncharacteristically conducted Vivaldi and a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers (with help in terms of an edition from Leo Schrader the important musicologist who worked in Basel and who wrote the pioneering book on Monterverdi). The Kantate was advertised in the programme but was replaced at the last minute by the first performance of the solo version of Domaines played by Hans Deinzer (September 20 1968). 

Bibliography

Bassetto, L. (2006) ‘Marginalia, ou l’opéra fantôme de Pierre Boulez’. In J-L Leleu and P. Decroupet (Eds) Pierre Boulez: techniques d’écriture et enjeux esthétiques. Geneva: Contrechamps Editions. 255-298.

Boulez, P. (1963) ‘Sonate, Que me Veux-tu?’ Perspectives of New Music. 1/2. 32-44.

Edwards, A. (1989) ‘Unpublished Bouleziana at the Paul Sacher Foundation’, Tempo 169, 4-15.

O’Hagan, P. (1997) Pierre Boulez: ‘Sonate “que me veux-tu?”’. An investigation of the manuscript sources in relation to the Third Sonata and the issue of performance choice. Dissertation Surrey University.

Heaton, R. (1995) ‘The contemporary clarinet’. In The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet. Ed. C. Lawson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 163-183.

Mitchell, I. (2006) ‘Towards a beginning: thoughts leading to an interpretation of Domaines for solo clarinet by Pierre Boulez’. In The Versatile Clarinet. Ed. R. Heaton. New York: Routledge. 109-132.

Nattiez, J-J. Ed. (1993) The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.