The work was written after the death of Boulez's fellow composer Bruno Maderna. The work makes use of multiple groups of musicians (each with different instruments), widely separated across the performance space, as in many of Maderna's works (e.g. Quadrivium, 1969). There are eight groups, each one featuring different instruments, with every group but brass conducted by a percussionist keeping the individual tempo of the group; thus the groups have a rhythmic independence of each other, though there is a larger scale organization directed by a primary conductor.
Boulez based the tonal structure of "Rituel" largely on a set of seven tones, corresponding to the number of the letters in the name "Maderna".
References
Bibliography
- Jameux, Dominique (1991). Pierre Boulez. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Saturday March 08, 2008 at 18:57:17 PST (GMT -0800)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
Copyright © 2008, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.