for String Sextet

Program Notes

The sextet Die Innere Grenze, scored for two violins, two violas and two cellos, belongs to a larger cycle of instrumental works. It is the third piece of the cycle, which includes also: So er for twenty instruments, and Lichtung for ten instruments. The formal conception of the three works is centered around a similar idea which was developed in various ways in the cycle: in each case the musical material on which the piece is built is not expressed at the beginning, but appears only at the end. The origin of each work is thus progressively "revealed", as the piece comes to a close. To this fairly linear process I have added in the sextet another dimension by inserting at specific points excerpts from a piece I wrote several years before, my string trio. The structural and formal organization of the trio had nothing to do with that of the sextet. The fragments of the trio underwent several types of transformation, from simple ones which did not alter their basic identity, to complex ones which destroyed any chance to recognize the original in them. Because of the widely changing aspects fo the fragments, it is very difficult to put them in relation while listening to the sextet. They do not seem to form a unified whole, because their character varies considerably from one occurence to the next. As opposed to a polyphonic line which comes to the surface then disappears again in the texture, and relies on its own identity to be recognized when it comes back again, the fragments form a highly irregular, constantly changing surface. This double organization is in its complexity an image of a problem with which I have been concerned since I started the cycle: how far can one go in the refusal of a type of structural organization where all the elements are closely related to each other - where the form can be perceived as unitary - before the result becomes chaos and the form totally ungraspable by the listener. I believe this problem to be a central one in the music of our time. Die Innere Grenze was written for the Schoenberg Sextet and is dedicated to Maryvonne le Dizès