DUO

Notice

Duo for violin and piano was my first work to be performed in concert, in Bilthoven. I was still a student on the rue d’Ulm when, on reading a notice of an international competition launched by the Gaudeamus Foundation in the Netherlands, I decided on 18 March 1957 to send this score, which I had written the previous year and which would remain anonymous. If the sea hadn’t sent me back that bottle, I would have thought it normal and unimportant. A few days later, I met Pierre Boulez at the Cité Universitaire. I didn’t yet know of any interesting ways of composing other than his, and Duo was a kind of exercise in which I tried to make expressive dodecaphonic series that were more or less treated like melodies. The big thing then was to abandon composition by theme and development in favour of a multipolar ‘space’. But my aim was less ambitious: to make an atonal counterpoint intuitively sensitive would have sufficed. If I had known the difference between Berg and Webern at the time, I would no doubt have studied Berg in greater depth. But I was very ignorant, and after a short time I turned elsewhere, and, without worrying too much about either of them, I definitively distanced myself from serialism.