What is "incises"

vb. (en-third-person singular of: incise)

Incises (1994/2001) and Sur Incises (1996/1998) are two related works of the French composer Pierre Boulez.

Incises (English: interpolations) for solo piano was composed in 1994 as a test piece for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition, where it was first performed on 21 October 1994. Boulez revised it in 2001. Incises was Boulez's first work for solo piano since his Third Piano Sonata of 1955–57/63. It lasts less than ten minutes. The work plays with contrasts of gestures and textures, for instance, repeated pitches or chords in an even tempo interrupted by violent melodic arcs, or sparse chordal interjections without discernible rhythm over long held sonorities.

Boulez wrote Sur Incises a few years later. and dedicated it to Paul Sacher on his 90th birthday. Based on the material of Incises, it is a two-movement work for three pianos, three harps, and three percussion parts, which use a variety of tuned percussion instruments: vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, steel drums, tubular bells, and crotales. It lasts forty minutes. Here the sounds of the piano in Incises are broken into component parts played by the harps and percussion, and they are deployed across space by spreading the three groups apart in the performance area. This kind of reworking of an earlier piece is characteristic of Boulez, the first instance being Structures. Sur Incises was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition given by the University of Louisville. The movements are called "Moment I" and "Moment II". David Robertson conducted the Ensemble InterContemporain in the world premiere of Sur Incises in Edinburgh's Usher Hall on 30 August 1998.

The pitches of the row used in Incises and Sur Incises are based on the Sacher hexachord, the same as those used in the rows for Répons, Messagesquisse, and Dérive 1.

Reviewing of a 2005 performance of Incises, Tim Page described it: "Incises is charged with a bright, cold, hard brilliance, like a spray of crushed ice. It is dense with events even when it is silent for a moment, Boulez's music never really 'rests' but also far more generous in its emotional expression than much of his earlier work."

Anthony Tommasini described a 1999 performance of Sur Incises: Paul Griffiths heard echoes of Debussy's L'isle joyeuse in Sur Incises, while others have noted its debt to Stravinsky's Les Noces or Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Griffiths described the work: Tom Service wrote in The Guardian that "The piece is a narration about sound, about the interplay and transformation of the timbres of the pianos, the harps, and the percussion instruments, into one gigantic super-instrument of infinite resonance and reflection. The drama of the music is how Boulez manipulates his musical textures to create moments of stasis and irresistible energy, and everything in between." He described a 2008 performance: "There's a polish and a voluptuousness about this music that's instantly appealing and gripping for the whole experience of the piece. A packed Festival Hall gave Boulez a rock-star reception after the music's coda."

Of the two works, Allan Kozinn preferred Incises, writing: "that work's Romanticism becomes portentousness in the update, and its sheer virtuosity have given way to abstraction and clockwork precision."