Lucerne Festival Academy 2

Instead of works, Pierre Boulez composed networks. “For me, a musical idea is like a seed: you plant it in a certain soil and suddenly it multiplies like a weed,” he once remarked. When Boulez weaves a delicate fabric of gentle trills, quivering tremolos, and sparkling arpeggios in Dérive 1, he draws on the same six-note sequence that underlies two other scores: Messagesquisse and Répons. To mark the occasion of Boulez’s 100th birthday, we will continue weaving these threads into the present: four composers have been asked to write new ensemble works paying tribute to the celebrated artist. The fifth world premiere presented in this concert will be by our composer-in-residence Marco Stroppa, who worked closely with Boulez at IRCAM in Paris. Stroppa juxtaposes the accordion with an “electro-acoustic totem”: a tower of loudspeakers that endows the otherwise intangible electronic sound with an almost human presence.