Répons is a composition by French composer Pierre Boulez for a large chamber orchestra with six percussion soloists and live electronics.
Répons was the first significant work to come out of Boulez's endeavors at IRCAM, an institute in Paris devoted to making technological advances in electronic music.
[4] Boulez selected the solo instruments, all pitched percussion, based on the ability of the computer equipment to "exploit their resonating characteristics to the limits of the technology available at the time".
For a performance at New York's Carnegie Hall, "[t]he stage will be extended to cover the entire parquet level, with musicians both within and surrounding the audience, and speakers issuing the electronics from the perimeter and above.
The Ensemble InterContemporain conducted by Boulez presented the 1981 premiere in Donaueschingen of the original version's five sections lasting about twenty minutes.
It was hard to imagine how Répons, as performed here in a particularly cold and inhospitable space ... could be thought of as anything more than a highly elaborated version of spatial ideas that Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and others have given us many times.
The familiar Boulez style of composing, with its spasmodic gasps and lurches, did not permit much variety, even though the amplified sounds that issued from various corners of the hall could sometimes be savored as purely acoustical events.
At odd moments it was superficially stimulating in the way a cold shower can be, but as music it added up to little more than a series of unconnected tone clusters, arpeggios and pedal notes....
Perhaps at 10 or 15 minutes it might have kept one's attention better, but that is conjecture.A 2003 performance in Carnegie Hall met with an enthusiastic reception, including "notable numbers of young people in bright T-shirts and scruffy jeans, who whooped and whistled after each work".
And when the soloists entered, trading dizzying outbursts and ruminations–jazzy riffs from the xylophone, scurrying piano figurations–the sheer visceral excitement of being caught in the middle was like nothing else in music.
"[12] Alex Ross noted the performative aspect of the conductor's role at the center of the action: "Boulez managed to give precise cues back over his shoulder, his force field radiating three hundred and sixty degrees.
[15] The piece is also praised for its use of a wide variety of modern compositional resources, "including electronic processing, the manipulation of spatial acoustics, and even a quasi-Minimalist use of repetitive cells.