When Pierre Boulez brought his Residentie Orchestra of the Hague to Budapest in March 1968, I had already heard his name, though none of his compositions. It had a classical ring to it, even a patina, which means that I must have come across it repeatedly for a number of years.

It was natural for me, then, to take a tape recorder to his concert at the Erkel Theater (a hall of notoriously poor acoustics). I turned up in the artist’s room during the interval and he was quite happy to reply to my questions, even though he might just as well have preferred to take some rest.

The program looked like this:

It proved far too hard a nut to crack for many people in the audience, including myself. Webern was in those years hardly known in Hungary; even Bartók’s music posed difficulties for the ordinary music lover. Éclat brought a message from a world we did not know even existed.

I did not hesitate to confess to Boulez the many question marks in my head and was struck by his unassuming and friendly response, the understanding he showed for my perplexity, and his readiness to explain what he “meant” by composing Éclat. While maintaining that music could not be expressed in words, he agreed to what he termed “translating” the piece without attempting to spell out its “content.”

He said: “In this little piece I wished to write contemplative music—one which has no direction or perceptible development. The subject itself does not develop—the basic feature of the music is its timbre. This applies in particular to the main group of instruments, the sound quality of which cannot be modified. When they play together, a new kind of sound arises: improvisation affects the sonority directly. That is why I say that this music has no direction. I cannot tell you more—even this much is far too prosaic, far too vulgar. I could perhaps liken Éclat to the behavior of fish in an aquarium. They hover motionless for a long time—all we can see is the slow gliding of colors.