It’s impossible to imagine contemporary music, and in fact the entire musical world, without Pierre Boulez. As a composer he defined the image of the iconoclastic avant-garde in his music of the 1940s and 1950s; as a polemicist he gave post-war music some of its best aphorisms - “anyone who has not felt… the necessity of the dodecaphonic [12-tone] language is OF NO USE”, that the best solution to the problem of opera would be to blow up the opera houses, that some contemporary composition amounted to frenetic arithmetical masturbation”, and dozens of others. He showed his brilliance as a political and cultural operator wgeb in the 1970s in Paris he established the underground laboratoire of IRCAM, that labyrinth of computer-music possibility that you tread on top of if you’ve ever been to the Pompidou Centre; and as a conductor and teacher he has done more than anyone alive to create a performance practice for 20th century music, from Mahler to Mantovani, from Stravinsky to Schoenberg, from Berg to Birtwistle - and his own music.
The first thing to do when thinking about Boulez’s music is to prise it apart from the phenomenon of Boulez the man’s power, influence, and personality. One misconception of his output is that there really isn’t that much of it. admittedly, after two decades of non-stop composing up to when he was in his early 40s, Boulez’s actual rate of musical production does seem to have slowed down dramatically. There are precious few new pieces from the 1970s and 80s, and still fewer in more recent decades. That’s exactly when his conducting career took off (in the 1970s, he was simultaneously in charge of the BBC Symphony and the New York Phil), and setting up IRCAM and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Was he then, and is he now, simply conducting too much to have any time to compose? He has been saying for the last 10 years that he wants to find more time to write, to complete the series of exponential orchestral explosions of a set of piano miniatures he composed in 1945, the 12 Notations, which he started in the late 1970s. Yet even now in late 80s, he continues as busy as ever on the podium, teaching - as he puts it - the world’s great orchestras and assemblages of young players how to play the music he knows and loves the best: Stravinsky, Bartók, Webern, Mahler, Schoenberg.
All is not as it seems with Boulez’s compositions. For him, each work is a potentially ceaseless torrent of musical energy that demands continual exploration, interrogation, and a near-permanent state of revision. But when you hear the latest state of being of his relatively recent music, like Sur Incises or Dérive 2, there’s nothing provisional about their power and impact, and they teem with a kaleidoscopic sensuousness of sound and colour. If you want one piece to convince you that the highest achievements of contemporary music are the opposite of desiccated, solipsistic experimentalism, listen to Boulez’s orchestral versions of his Notations. It’s music that shimmers with bejewelled brilliance, that takes Debussy and Ravel’s orchestral techniques as a starting point and builds on them with voluptuous excess.
That connection with earlier music is something that’s true of Boulez’s seismically influential earlier music, too; it’s just that it’s part of the story of his work that didn’t fit with the post-war necessity of creating a new world of musical expression that had nothing, or as little as possible, to do with what Boulez saw as music’s tainted past. Le marteau sans maître incarnates a new way of thinking about vocal music - with the alto line’s feverish unpredictability, and new combinations of instrumental colour (there are no real bass instruments in the piece’s resonantly exotic lineup ensemble of alto flute, guitar, viola, xylorimba, vibraphone, and percussion), but it’s also a piece that couldn’t have happened without Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire four decades earlier, or Webern’s chamber music, or Debussy’s late sonatas. Similarly, the power and ferocity of the Second Piano Sonata comes in part from the way the piece warps, destroys, reforms and rebuilds conventions such as sonata form and fugue. More than that, Boulez’s essential compositional concerns are in many ways identical to those of the composers whose conventions he was supposedly rupturing. Take Pli selon Pli, his fabulously surrealist song-cycle on poems by his beloved Stéphane Mallarmé. At a performance at the Royal Festival Hall last year which Boulez himself conducted, the piece was revealed to be a gorgeously expressive work, and, in the standing ovation that followed, it felt like a victory of the music over the polemic, that the sumptuousness of this piece had at last broken the shackles of perception that so much post-war music has suffered from.
To be honest, Boulez’s polemics have often been part of that perceptual problem. It comes when you take sound and fury in his writing of the 1950s at face value. Boulez today conducts the music he once reviled as utterly beyond the pale, Schoenberg’s late music, say or Wagner’s Ring Cycle, whose interpretation he changed forever at Bayreuth in Patrice Chéreau’s centenary production in 1976. Recently, he has spoken of how Mahler and Bruckner were the real influences on Sur Incises, how he learnt to structure large-scale structures from these late-romantic symphonists, and movingly said how his music is indivisible from his personality and his expressive concerns, an artistic credo that chimes as much with any romantic composer as it does with the apparently forbidding avant-garde.
It’s possible there’s been a loss that has accompanied Boulez’s accommodation with the sweep of music history and his transformation into pillar of the musical establishment: listen, for example, to his first recording of Le marteau, a shocking blast of febrile, scarcely contained energy, and compare it with the perfect technique but slower tempos and more limited expression of his latest version.
There’s a perfect opportunity over the next couple of weeks to put his music centre-stage again, when Daniel Barenboim plays a Boulez work in each of the concerts of his complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at the Proms. Don’t believe the polemics or the preconceptions: trust your ears instead, and relish some of the most ravishing music you will ever experience.
Five key links
Sur Incises: Boulez’s own illustrated explanation
Boulez in interview
Next week: Michael Finnissy
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion