Claude Ballif

condition (record/cover): NM / NM Gatefold sleeve. Un Coup De Dés finds Claude Ballif on Harmonia Mundi, the title borrowed from Stéphane Mallarmé's revolutionary poem where words scatter across the page like dice thrown against fate. Ballif translates the visual spatialization of the text into sonic terms: notes disperse across orchestral space as Mallarmé's words dispersed across white paper.

This isn't "setting" poetry to music but thinking musically through poetry's implications. Pierre Boulez attempted something similar with his Improvisations sur Mallarmé, but Ballif arrives from a different angle, less interested in serial structure than in the vertigo of open space. The disc documents a composer who read with his ears, who understood that Mallarmé's revolution was acoustic as much as visual.