Boulez’s unfinished Dérive 3 to receive world premiere in Paris

A previously unheard work by Pierre Boulez will receive its world premiere in Paris on September 19, ten years after the composer’s death.

Dérive 3, for brass and percussion, will be performed by the Ensemble intercontemporain under its music director Pierre Bleuse at the Cité de la musique, as part of celebrations marking the ensemble’s 50th anniversary.

The premiere brings together two strands of Boulez’s legacy. The French composer, conductor and musical thinker founded the Ensemble intercontemporain in 1976, while Dérive 3 is the result of a compositional process that occupied him intermittently for more than two decades and remained unfinished at his death in 2016.

A score rediscovered in the archives

The path to the premiere began in 2023, when musicologist Alain Galliari was researching Boulez’s archives for a catalogue of the composer’s works.

At the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Galliari discovered a photocopy of a page from a score bearing the title Dérive 3. He subsequently travelled to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, where material from Boulez’s home in Baden-Baden had been transferred after the composer’s death.

Among several manuscripts of unfinished works, Galliari found Dérive 3. The score, believed to date from around 2010, had already been typeset digitally and appeared close to a performable state.

There was, however, a significant complication: the score contained only the brass parts.

A second manuscript, also bearing the title Dérive 3, contained percussion parts written by hand in blue ink. The two sources did not correspond exactly, although the discrepancies were considered reconcilable. Musicologist and Boulez specialist Peter O’Hagan was entrusted with preparing the material.

From Le Visage nuptial to Dérive 3

The musical origins of Dérive 3 stretch much further back.

Its basic material comes from several bars of Évadné, the fourth movement of Boulez’s cantata Le Visage nuptial. In a 1993 conversation with Peter Szendy, Boulez himself explained that Dérive 3 grew from arpeggiated material — particularly in the horns — that he had used only briefly in the revised Le Visage nuptial and wanted to place in a new context where it could develop further.

Some of that material had already resurfaced on June 7, 1987, when Boulez wrote Initiale, a short work for seven brass instruments for the inauguration of the Menil Collection in Houston.

Five years later, he returned to the material for another occasional work. On November 19, 1992, an expanded version of the first three sections of Initiale was performed in Chicago under the title Fanfare, marking conductor Georg Solti’s 80th birthday. Boulez enlarged the brass forces to four trumpets, six horns, four trombones and tuba, divided into two groups.

The transformation into Dérive 3 followed almost immediately. An edition contract dated December 21, 1992 already identifies the work by that title and specifies percussion alongside the two brass ensembles.

An ending Boulez never completed

The most delicate question facing those preparing the 2026 premiere was how — or whether — to finish the piece.

The surviving evidence indicates that Boulez did not regard Dérive 3 as complete. He left sketches suggesting how the work might continue, including a handwritten note referring to bells, static chords and permutations.

Galliari has drawn a parallel with the ending of Boulez’s sur Incises, where the musical material eventually dissipates. The sketches for Dérive 3 suggest that Boulez may have envisaged something comparable for its coda.

But the surviving material is insufficient to reconstruct that ending with certainty.

Rather than attempting to compose a completion on Boulez’s behalf, O’Hagan, the Ensemble intercontemporain and Bleuse have chosen to stop at what can be regarded as the work’s “first” ending. The result is therefore a posthumous premiere of the surviving work rather than a speculative completion of Boulez’s unrealised final plans.

Fifty years of Ensemble intercontemporain

The premiere will be the centrepiece of Juke-box contemporain, the opening concert of the Ensemble intercontemporain’s 50th-anniversary celebrations.

Founded by Boulez in 1976, the Paris-based ensemble became one of the central institutions in the performance and development of contemporary music.

For the anniversary concert, more than 500 listeners were invited to vote from a selection of 50 works to help determine the programme.

Alongside Dérive 3, Bleuse and the Ensemble intercontemporain will perform György Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, Unsuk Chin’s Gougalon, Kaija Saariaho’s Semafor and Gérard Grisey’s Partiels. British-Iranian composer and turntablist Mariam Rezaei will also give three performances during the evening.

The concert takes place at 7 p.m. on September 19 at the Cité de la musique in Paris.

France Musique will record the performance for a later broadcast. It will subsequently be made available for streaming through France Musique and the Radio France app.

For an ensemble created by Boulez half a century ago, the anniversary thus begins not only by looking back at its founder, but by bringing one of his unfinished projects into sound for the first time.