Boulez at 80
Boulez at 80
Boulez at 80
In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern’s main purpose was to
convince his audience that the twelve-note method was the natural
outcome of an evolutionary process; that since ‘we compose as before’,
the new was a reinterpretation of the old, not its rejection. Nothing
could have been more soberly practical than the aspiration expressed in
Webern’s claim that ‘we want to say “in a quite new way” what has been
said before’.1 By contrast, it has long been argued that the agenda of the
post-1945 avant-garde, with Pierre Boulez a leading member, might be
summarized thus: ‘we want to say, in as new a way as possible, what has
not been said before’. Adorno based his 1955 critique of the new music
around that ‘levelling and neutralization’ which, he believed, were the
direct result of the technical obsessions of ‘total’ serialism: ‘the effort to
rationalize music completely has something useless and frantic about
it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic’. Adorno claimed that
‘what is needed is for expression to win back the density of experience,
as was already tried during the expressionist period’.2 Composers
should abandon this false form of the new music and begin to
remember its earlier, more authentic manifestation.
As Richard Leppert has usefully glossed Adorno’s text, the philoso-
pher’s desire was ‘for music to refer to its own past, to evoke that past in
order to transcend it’. Yet, while Adorno ‘hears this engagement in
Schoenberg, Berg and Webern […] in the new music of the 1950s
radical serialists Adorno “hears” history’s absence, the past disap-
peared’.3 Leppert may well be right. But such an absolute distinction
between two radical extremes naturally invites dissent, along the lines
that, if history is less ‘present’ in some compositions from around the
years 1909–13 than it suited Adorno to acknowledge, then it is also less
‘absent’ from post-war serial works than he believed to be the case in
1955. And even if, with Boulez at least, what we might term the reap-
pearance of the past is a good deal less prominent in his compositions of
the 1950s and 1960s than is the case later on, as a writer, performer and
entrepreneur, he found it no easier before 1960 to live a life from which
memory and the past were totally excluded than he has done since.
1
Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music (Bryn Mawr, PA and London: Presser/Universal,
1963), p.55. This is Leo Black’s translation of the German original, published 1960, which
was based on Rudolf Ploderer’s shorthand notes of lectures which Webern gave in 1932–3.
2
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor &
Frederic Will, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London:
University of California Press, 2002), p.191.
3
Richard Leppert, ‘Commentary’ in Adorno, Essays on Music, p.108.
4
In 1996, Boulez ended a short contribution to a discussion about
possible types of relationship between classicism and modernism with
the epigrammatic flourish that if modernity was forgetfulness (‘l’am-
nésie’), classicism was – perhaps – remembering (‘la mémoire peut-
être’).4 From the context, it’s clear that he regards the prospect of
forcing some kind of synthesis between these two dialectically-
opposed concepts with considerable scepticism: and the much wider
context of his later writings, especially the complete Collège de France
lectures, Leçons de musique,5 reinforces the image of a thinker who
delights in a whole range of binary oppositions and stand-offs precisely
because they resist synthesis, rather than (classically) seeking it out.
Whether the conjunction in question is between ‘law’ and ‘accident’,
‘signal’ and ‘envelope’, or even ‘safety’ and ‘doubt’, it is the formal,
thematic play between similarity and difference which attracts, not the
potential for burying difference in similarity, contrast in unity.
Whatever the value of such aids to perception as the conspicious repe-
tition of ostinato-like patterns in Boulez’s later music, the effect is less
a matter of sinking grateful listeners into an unambiguously organic,
classical experience than of that ‘intense and far from comfortable
dialogue with the past’ that Martha Hyde has claimed for Schoenberg’s
recourse to ‘dialectical imitation’ in his Third String Quartet.6
Throughout his multifarious writings, Boulez has continued to
resist the blandishments of the more explicitly history-conscious kinds
of neoclassicism, whether in Stravinsky or Schoenberg, and his horror
of Messiaen-like collage helps to determine his scepticism about Berg’s
willingness to allow the subtle textural and formal ambiguities of his
violin concerto to be infiltrated by such found objects as a Bach
chorale and a Carinthian folksong. The overwhelming musical attrac-
tions of opposition and interplay between the convergent and the
divergent, as a manifestation of dialogue between relatively fixed and
relatively free compositional features, was something which even the
newest New Music had difficulty in ruling out altogether. But in
Structures Ia (1951–2), Boulez was able to suppress aural evidence of
fixity (the row forms), and what comes across as a kind of spontaneous
athematicism remains an important aspect of the works which
followed Structures over the next two decades, including Pli selon pli.
Structures Ia is, arguably, Boulez’s most determined attempt to prac-
tice a modernism devoted unambiguously to forgetting rather than to
any dialogue between forgetting and remembering; and even if we
endorse current thinking about the political dimension of avant-garde
music in Paris around 1950,7 it is difficult to claim that the Utopian
agenda which Structures Ia can be felt to set before its listeners required
them to respond to anything other than the autonomous play of
abstract textures. The possible paradoxes inherent in the
composer/listener relationship in such a work have been well sketched
by M.J. Grant: and her eminently plausible conclusion that ‘the opera-
tion with and integration of extremes emphasises that the aim of serial
4
Pierre Boulez, ‘Classique – Moderne’, in Die Klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des
20.Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Danuser (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1997), p.308.
5
Published by Christian Bourgois Éditeur, Paris, in February 2005. This is a revised and
extended version of Jalons (pour une décennie), (Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1989).
6
Martha M. Hyde, ‘Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music’,
Music Theory Spectrum 18/2 (Fall 1996), pp.220–35.
7
See Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003). Also, Ben Parsons, ‘Arresting Boulez: Post-War Modernism in Context’, Journal
of the Royal Musical Association 129/1 (2004), pp. 161–76.
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8
M.J.Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics. Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.160.
9
Pierre Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper
(London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p.177. Further page references in text.
10
See in particular Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of
the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990).
11
See Whittall, ‘ “Unbounded Visions”: Boulez, Mallarmé and Modern Classicism’, Twentieth-
Century Music 1/1 (March 2004), pp.65–80.
12
First published in English in The Score 6 (February 1952). See also Stocktakings from an
Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.209–14.
6
His genius was both hot-headed – even irrational – and extremely analytical. His
correspondence and his writings show a quite exceptional awareness of his own
evolution, his importance and his impact on others and also of the workings of
his own creative faculty. This self-awareness furnishes us with extraordinarily
shrewd insights into the chief characteristics of his artistic invention and the
main objectives of his artistic quest. (Orientations, 226–7)
These sentences come from an extended introductory essay on
Wagner which Boulez wrote for publication in 1975, just before his
conducting of the ‘centenary’ Ring at Bayreuth. It is natural enough to
regard comments about ‘self-awareness’ and the ‘extremely analytical’
nature of Wagner’s genius as evidence of Boulez’s identification of
qualities which he himself embodies: for example, the ‘hot-headed –
even irrational’ aspect might be linked to that Artaud-inspired ‘delirium’
which bursts out from time to time. In these terms, even that ‘anxiety of
an artist creating a new world that proliferates beyond his rational
control, a dizzy sense of uniting agreement and contradiction in equal
parts, a dissatisfaction with the dimensions recognized by musical expe-
rience and the search for an order less obviously established and less
13
Edward Campbell, Boulez and Expression. A Deleuzoguattarian Approach, PhD Dissertation,
University of Edinburgh, 2000. Jonathan Goldman, Understanding Pierre Boulez’s Anthèmes
[1991]: ‘Creating a Labyrinth out of Another Labyrinth’, MA Dissertation, Université de
Montréal, 2001. Page references to Goldman in text.
: 7
14
The best overview of the changing technical factors involved in Boulez’s music up to the
mid-1980s is still Susan Bradshaw, ‘The instrumental and vocal music’, in Pierre Boulez. A
Symposium, ed. William Glock (London: Eulenberg, 1986), pp.127–229.
15
Peyser’s book was published by Cassell (London) in 1976, Born’s by the University of
California Press in 1995. All page references in text.
16
Jean Vermeil, Conversations with Boulez. Thoughts on Conducting, trans. Camille Naish
(Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1996), pp.87, 88. Further page references in text.
17
Schoenberg, notes for a speech on education, c. 1936. See Joseph Auner, A Schoenberg Reader.
Documents from a Life (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003), p.276.
8
he wants’, in keeping with his comment about his sister and himself in
relation to their parents: ‘they were strong, but we were stronger’(47).
Peyser’s tale hinges on what she portrays as a tragic situation. As
someone dedicated to protecting his personal privacy, Boulez
embodied ‘the ultimate condition of modern man’ (262), and although
‘a person so alienated, so divided, must attempt to restore wholeness
with what he has to hand’, we have to confront the fact that, in Peyser’s
stark phrase, ‘his revolution did not work’ (249). The revolution in
question was getting subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to like
contemporary music of the kind Boulez admired. In his role of post-
Bernstein Pied Piper, Boulez had failed: and, we infer, it remained to be
seen whether that ‘other kind of music’ (265) to which the then-
nascent IRCAM was dedicated would succeed, and whether IRCAM
itself would succeed, as the model of an institution allegedly very
different from anything that had existed before.
Georgina Born’s Boulez could hardly be more different. Unlike
Peyser, Born decided at the outset of her study ‘not to speak directly to
Boulez’, since it seemed to her ‘far more to the point to report the
representation of Boulez, and the sense of his impact, through inform-
ants’ testimony and my own observations rather than to invite being
overwhelmed by his own authoritative, and better-known, account of
things’ (9). By the time Born’s study of IRCAM in 1984 was published,
eleven years later, it had acquired an interpretative slant clear from the
very first sentence of the epigraph, from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power
– ‘Modern art is an art of tyrannizing’: and there’s an ironic counter-
point between Born’s initial quote from Boulez, declaring the need for
harmonious collaboration between technician and creator, and the
record of argument, dissent and frustration to which she devotes so
much space. From an early stage the uninterviewed Boulez is charac-
terized as a charismatic but dictatorial force ‘who has controlled every
aspect of musical discourse: its production, but also the conditions of
its production – its reproduction (performance, theorization, diffusion
through education) and so its legitimation’ (80). In producing her vivid
scenario of Boulez’s acquisition and exploitation of power, Born
makes much of what she calls the ‘profound parallels’ with Wagner
(94): and she details how Boulez’s ability to dispense patronage
connects with the appearance of ‘hagiographic texts of different kinds
that promote his authority’ (93) – texts whose ‘mythic’ exaggerations
encouraged subordinates to refer to him, however sardonically, as ‘the
king’ or even as ‘God’ (146–7).
Born is deeply sceptical about the assumptions concerning social
legitimacy and aesthetic value that go with the kind of composition
Boulez favours. Even so, she acknowledges Boulez’s own ambivalence
about the nature of IRCAM, as an institution committed to research
yet expected to produce artistically valuable results: and she appreci-
ates that this ambivalence can be related to a fundamental aesthetic
stance in which Boulez sees music not purely as ‘architecture’, but as
the ‘architecture of emotion’ (147). Ambivalence also plays an essential
part in Born’s highly pertinent judgements about the extent to which
IRCAM, at least in the mid-1980s, perpetuated working practices
which were ‘largely a leftover from earlier forms of music making’,
fuelling ‘a reification of individual authorship replete with the
romantic conception of the heroic and individualist artist – a striking
romantic survival within a present modernism, and evidence of the
continuity between romanticism and modernism’. Yet, since at the
same time IRCAM promoted practices ‘in which authorship becomes
multiple and in which it may be difficult to reconstruct the lines of
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Proust, but the work has to be read in one go. That for me is one of my main
goals in music (for large works). I don’t want any breaks in the music, but you can
introduce new ideas and abandon some other ideas, like the characters in a
novel.20
Is it possible that Boulez in the late 1990s is simply teasing di Pietro,
just as he had teased Joan Peyser 20 or more years before? Apart from
the blithe suggestion that Proust must be read ‘in one go’, the apparent
refusal to countenance difference, assemblage, doesn’t quite fit with
the comment to di Pietro that ‘I need, or work, with a lot of accidents,
but within a structure that has an overall trajectory – and that, for me,
is the definition of what is organic’ (25). But it’s right and proper than
an element of ambiguity should persist in connexion with Boulezian
notions of organicism, and, for that matter, classicism. Like his compo-
sitions, Boulez’s writings and interviews bear consistent witness to the
modernist stratum in his thinking about music.
Boulez’s tendency to associate classicism with remembering might
explain his preference for restraint, his fastidious refusal to confuse
memorial recollection with ‘delirious’ lament. The brief prose poem
which prefaces Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974–5) stresses
formal aspects – ‘perpetual alternation … recurrent patterns changing
in profile and perspective’ which dialectically promote a ‘ritual of the
ephemeral and the eternal’, and create a sense of ‘the images engraved
on the musical memory – present/absent, in uncertainty’. This seems
to embody the composer’s sense of the work’s form as expressing the
fundamental ‘uncertainty’ which its materials reflect, and which
listeners inevitably confront. For the musical memory, the presence of
one image requires the absence of others which, in the dialogue
between the ephemeral and the eternal, are no less essential to the
ceremony: and it is a short step from ceremony conceived in these
terms (something present memorializing someone absent) to the kind
of formal presence/absence dialogue which ‘live’ electronics makes
possible.
In a recent article (see Note 11) I discussed the third Mallarmé
Improvisation from Pli selon pli in terms of its magical, siren-like associ-
ations, and the kind of aesthetic enslavement depending on sounds
whose sources are unseen which has been much discussed of late.
There seems to be a natural progression from Pierre Schaeffer’s notion
of hidden sounds ‘whose invisibility forced the listener to concentrate
on the morphology of sounds rather than their origin’21 to the aura of
Boulez’s IRCAM works, in which the listener at a live performance
registers the disparity between what is visible and audible and what is
audible yet invisible: and the ‘various spatialization techniques’ which
Andrew Gerzo uses in the 1996 DG recording of Dialogue de l’ombre
double are designed to construct ‘an imaginary hall in which the sound
sources seem to the listener to move horizontally or vertically, closer
or further away’.22 The effect is evidently the result of something
mechanical: and yet the aesthetic impression can transcend mere
mechanics, as that trace of magic refuses to be erased.
20
Rocco di Pietro, Dialogues with Boulez (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), p.70. Further
page reference in text.
21
Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001),
p.148.
22
Andrew Gerzo, booklet notes with DG recording 457 605-2 (1998).
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23
Béatrice Ramaut: ‘Dialogue de l’ombre double de Pierre Boulez: analyse d’un processus cita-
tionnel’, Analyse Musicale 28 ( June 1992), pp.69–75.
12
the assertive. That marked ‘agité, mais murmuré’ circles within a rela-
Example 1: tively narrow, low register: that marked ‘comme une brusque interjec-
Piano Sonata No.1, second
movement © Copyright Amphion tion’ uses quintuplet semiquavers to launch its increasingly extended,
Editions Musicales, Paris ascending flourishes (Ex.3).
: 13
Example 2:
Incises © Copyright 2001 by
Universal Edition A.G., Wien
14
Example 3: Initially distinct, these two types of material evolve into a more
Dialogue de l’ombre double, beginning interactive phase (from bar 27), preserving a distinction of tempo
of ‘sigle final’ (‘double’ only).
© Copyright 1985 by Universal (‘agité’ as against ‘plus modéré’) but tending increasingly towards the
Edition A.G., Wien single ascending or descending trajectory. Then, in the second part, a
degree of synthesis is reinforced by the persistence of the dialogue
between the ‘live’ clarinet’s single, reiterated high Cs and the varied,
florid approaches to the same pitch in the ‘double’, approaches which
integrate elements from the first part’s distinct ‘agité’ and ‘brusque’
materials. In this way, Dialogue ends with a reiterated cadence that is
surely intended to resolve rather than to dissolve, and which wears its
classical associations very firmly on its sleeve. Yet that final sustained
and repeated cadential pitch is not quite the all-pervading, all-control-
ling tonic of tonal tradition: most of the work is far too febrile, if not
actually frenzied, to support such a judgement, and in the ‘Sigle final’
it is as if the pre-recorded, invisible ‘double’ is vainly attempting to
escape the triumphantly single-minded presence of the implacable and
immobile principal clarinet.