Incises

The work plays with contrasts of gestures and textures, for instance, repeated pitches or chords in an even tempo interrupted by violent melodic arcs, or sparse chordal interjections without discernible rhythm over long held sonorities.

Here the sounds of the piano in Incises are broken into component parts played by the harps and percussion, and they are deployed across space by spreading the three groups apart in the performance area.

As the music unfolds, episodes of sustained, quasi-lyrical dreaminess alternate abruptly with outbursts of pulsating intensity that suggest "organized delirium", in the term Mr. Boulez has used to describe an effect he is after in his works.

Perhaps after a couple of decades of neo-Romantic works by composers craving appreciation, the audience found it bracing to hear Mr. Boulez's wildly colorful, almost crazed and uncompromisingly difficult music.Paul Griffiths heard echoes of Debussy's L'isle joyeuse in Sur Incises,[5] while others have noted its debt to Stravinsky's Les Noces[6] or Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.

At least the first two of the high-speed chases are thrilling, and there are marvelous moments when steel drums come in with their exotic disintonations, or when the harps fall silent for an ominous summons of pianos and bells.Tom Service wrote in The Guardian that:[8] [t]he piece is a narration about sound, about the interplay and transformation of the timbres of the pianos, the harps, and the percussion instruments, into one gigantic super-instrument of infinite resonance and reflection.