Pierre Boulez
“Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna” for orchestra in eight groups

Pierre Boulez described his orchestral work Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna as a “ceremony of remembrance” – ‘a ceremony of dying, a ritual of passing and persistence”. The ceremonial character is deeply embedded in the festive sounds of the music: in its bronzed chords and slowly advancing motion. The work is dedicated to the memory of Bruno Maderna – Boulez’s energetic and charismatic ally in reshaping musical life after the Second World War. The Italian composer and conductor died in 1973 at the age of only 53. From 1962, he and Boulez had jointly directed the Kranichstein Chamber Ensemble, the first specialist ensemble for contemporary music, founded in the avant-garde stronghold of the Darmstadt Summer Courses. Maderna, Boulez and their contemporaries, including Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, were united by their desire to reposition art in society, to open up the spatial dimension of music, and to break with rigid concert traditions. Maderna’s sudden death was a deep shock. Though never one for overt displays of emotion, Boulez composed his musical memorial in his friend’s honour and premiered it in April 1975 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra – a group with which Maderna himself was closely associated as a conductor. Rituel is a memorial on two levels: it also incorporates material from Boulez’s composition …explosante-fixe…, which itself had been conceived as a tribute to Igor Stravinsky, who died in 1971. Boulez had recorded Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps in 1969 with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Bruno Maderna had long shown a fascination with spatial acoustics, and Boulez pays homage to this interest in Rituel by experimenting with the spatial distribution of the orchestra. The ensemble is divided into eight instrumental groups of very different sizes – from a single oboe to a brass section of 14 players – arranged far apart from one another, both on stage and in the auditorium. This makes the listening experience a uniquely immersive one. Each group is accompanied by a percussionist who provides a rhythmic framework, while two further percussionists add a resonant, metallic foundation with sounds from tam-tams and button gongs. The use of non-European percussion instruments – including Indian tablas, Japanese woodblocks and a Turkish cymbal – lends the music the aura of a strange, ceremonial procession.

But it is not only spatial structure that makes Rituel unusual: Boulez also organises musical time in an unconventional way. The work is divided into 15 sections of varying length in which two basic types alternate. The odd-numbered sections (1, 3, 5, etc.), marked “very slow” and block-like in character, are led by the conductor. In contrast, the even-numbered sections (2, 4, 6, etc.) are more animated and left undirected. Here, each group plays independently, synchronised only within itself, which creates the impression of free improvisation. The conductor merely cues each group’s entry, choosing the order freely, while the duration of the musical material differs from group to group. As a result, no two performances of the work are ever the same.