Structures (Boulez)

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.

[1] A partial premiere of book 2 was performed by the composer and Yvonne Loriod at the Wigmore Hall, London, in March 1957.

[2] 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.

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.

Olivier Messiaen 's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités highest of three unordered divisions of the mode,( [ 4 ] [ 5 ] or, less precisely, "three series forms [caption: 'for pitch, duration, dynamics, and articulation']...treated as unordered collections", [ 6 ] —which Boulez, "the pupil intending to teach the master a lesson", adapted as an ordered series for his Structures Ia . [ 6 ]