Métaboles as a Fork in the Road: Twin Paths in Dutilleux's Later Music

Abstract

Métaboles is known as a pivotal work in Dutilleux's career, and has often been interpreted as a study in gradual, organic change. I suggest that the work's importance lies elsewhere, and that it introduces a new ‘path’ which continues through the rest of Dutilleux's music, one characterised by discontinuity and sudden change, by a primal role for texture, timbre and (therefore)) sonority, and associated with non-human, physical images and processes. In some ways this path prefigures the work of the spectralists. This ‘inorganic’ mode of composition can be set against an ‘organic’ counterpart represented by Dutilleux's fascination with gradual change, resemblances, memories and premonitions, which is prevalent in the symphonies but continues in parts of the later work too; from Métaboles on, his music can be heard in terms of its relation to these two opposed paradigms.