Music Review: Pierre Boulez conducts Pierre Boulez at Carnegie Hall
It was difficult to watch Pierre Boulez conduct his own works at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall last Thursday night without feeling distinctly that this kind of music—rigorously intellectual, formidable in its composition, challenging to the conventional ear—is an endangered species. Not for lack of audience, which, last night, was not only brimming but also emphatically appreciative of Boulez (Was it for his music alone, or also, maybe was it for what he has stood for?), granting him long applause at both ends of the evening. But for what appears to be a marked campaign of critics and composers to disparage the philosophies of serialism, which, granted, were, at their worst, myopically dogmatic and had the potential to make even the most headstrong composers doubt their tastes and talents. This campaign seems only possible at a time when serialism’s chief autocrat, Boulez himself, has lost a certain amount of authority over a creative environment that has stratified to even greater degrees than the beginning of the last century experienced. But listening to his music—described so often with derisive inaccuracy—with its multi-dimensional and sensually crafted textures, seemingly unimaginable sonorities, breathtaking speeds, demand of technical virtuosity, and an expressive palate that sways between tender vulnerability and punitive cacophony, confirmed for me that not only is Boulez’s work still relevant, but, despite the veneer of reverse condescension that suggests his music is not “for the masses,” his music is actually one of the most significant gifts of thought and expression that modern society has ever received from one of its artists.
Thursday’s concert was accompanied by two brief conversations with the composer and conductor who has been controversial throughout his career. It’s funny to imagine that this is the man who has reportedly made so many lives miserable with his music and his dogma; that this is the same person who penned the notorious article, “Schoenberg Is Dead,” part obituary/part manifesto. He spoke amiably–with self-conscious humility (he knows who he is)–about his creative process. Perhaps the best insight he gave was regarding his taste for virtuosity. “I like it. Not for the sake of virtuosity but because virtuosity is dangerous,” he explained as his face lit up with anticipation. I hesitate to make any more metaphors out of Mr. Boulez’s music, but I can agree that, in certain terms, his music is–and may always be–dangerous.
I feel compelled to note that this music must be experienced live; acoustically. It is physical, sensual experience, rather than simply an experience of the mind, as is often and narrowmindedly attributed to Boulez’s music. It is the difference between looking at a painting–where you can see the materiality of the paint and experience its physical effects on your mindspace, and seeing a print or picture of a painting. The difference is monumental. Similarly, relying on recordings to determine our knowledge (read: experience) of music, is like relying on a photographs to inform us of what a person really looks like. The photograph and the recording are both flat, although that has changed some with new audio technologies, but not enough to surpass the three dimensional materiality of acoustic space. Flatness on its own is fine, but it is not a substitute for the physical texture of real objects (musical or visual) and the sensual experience these objects initiate.
One Divine Hammer
“Le marteau sans maitre” (1953-55), or “The Hammer Without a Master,” aside from having possibly one of the most brilliant titles ever, is a seminal work of the twentieth century, a piece that, no doubt, any student of music will have come across. It is arguably one of the first European compositions to exhibit an awareness of global timbers. Based on surrealist poems by Rene Char, and incorporating a mezzo soprano into three of its nine movements, the work straddles the line between song cycle and chamber piece.
The opening movement of the work weaves atonal melodic lines and harmonic structures together. The musical elements owe nothing to anyone. They pass from instrument to instrument at liberty. And brilliantly, as if a musical line were a super string, twisting through space and then meeting another string for a tangential moment, two instruments play the same pitch, creating matter. The orchestrations seem to pull space apart and draw our attention to the materiality of music. When we get to the second movement, steady beats and syncopations from the percussion instruments create a flatter texture through which the alto flute threads hermetic melodic lines. This is soft Boulez; beautiful Boulez.
The third movement, “L’artisanat furieux” (Raging craftsmanship), is the first to incorporate the singer, and, as if to draw extra attention to it, Boulez allows only the alto flute to accompany the voice. Hilary Summer, who appeared in George Bejamin’s “Into the Little Hill” last summer during the Lincoln Center Festival–sung carefully and accurately, but I didn’t find her instrument, with its reedy quality and mix of straight tone and vibrato, to be well suited for these pieces.
The nuance in the fourth movement is the contrast between sustained sonorities and blunt ones. The musical landscape your mind invents is constantly fractured, attaching itself to the clung tones and smarting when they are cut short. As the movement finds it end, a triangle summarizes the series of events that have passed, giving a few chimes that the percussionist mutes with his hand, then letting out one final cling, a tone that sustains and decays (the German indication is klingend) into nothing.
The middle movement takes the trill as its main musical idea, first sounding in the viola and then passing to the flute. The vocal lines duck and leap with stealth through the instrumental milieu, losing what little melodic architecture they had in the first place, ending in what sounds like a deft outline of a perfect authentic cadence spread over two octaves.
The final four movements complete the descent of the voice into the role of instrument. You hear first that the voice beings to share notes with the other players, matching a tone with the flute, then finding a unison with a pizzicato from the viola. All of the music begins to synapsize, pulling apart, yet tightening the points of connectivity. The musical material begins to sound more like a series of events. The sharp tones of the xylophone and vibraphone pierce your ears, the claves pound your ear drums, the cowbells cling; all of this–through physical contact and spatial relationships–stimulates consciousness and conveys a deep human intelligence, an existential self awareness.
As the musical content cycles through the economical selection of instruments, its rhetoric loses integrity, and you are left only with sound moments. This is the genius of Boulez. As the gongs appear for the first time at the very end of the work, how does itnot sound non-sequitur? How does it complete some kind of logical timbral necessity? And how can we tell that a high tone from the vibraphone completes the abstract phrase of the mezzo-soprano? As the muddled sound of the gongs find their final permutation in a struck cymbal, silence consumes the composition, until the subway rolls by underground, rumbling the ribs of the concert hall.
Scalpel…
When I write “Boulez Is Not Dead,” of course, I do not only mean literally. What I mean more, of course, is that he and his music are not irrelevant. “sur Incise,” composed between 1996 and 1998 (although, knowing Boulez, it is still under construction), manages to achieve, nearly one hundred years after the birth of the classical avant garde, an innovation. It is scored in triplicate for piano, harp and percussion, so that there are three pianos, three harps, and three groups of percussion instruments. Through the way Boulez allows the musical material to pass rapidly between the instruments–all percussive and centered around the piano, with the harp as a stringed instrument, and the percussion as struck instruments; the piano is both string and struck–Boulez gives us a layered study on the tone and timbre of the piano. Somehow, and contrary to Alex Ross’s comments on Charlie Rose last week, there is still innovation to be made: Even with acoustic instruments; even in a strictly classical idiom.
The music is not frightening or violent, as some might suggest: It even starts in a steady meter of six. Rather, it is emphatic, almost happy, or at the very least, optimistic in its vehemence. You hear harmonies that resemble triadic constructions, but these are no sooner sounded than they are pulled apart by an adjacent collection of pitches, or an eerie echo in another instrument. In concert, you cannot see the hands of the pianists (Anna D’Errico, Oliver Hagen, Jonas Olsson), so you are never quite sure where the music is coming from, which makes Boulez’s copious layering all the more cohesive since you do not have the visual reference to identify the parts. The music is like a cloud of cosmic dust, translucent and hazy, impossibly vast yet finite enough to perceive.
The major third figures largely, resonating positive, major sounding (if maybe only whole-tone) events, with the tritone nearby to dissolve key possibilities. I wouldn’t doubt that the choice of using a “third” is yet one more cleave in the triangular prism of threes.
Midway through the work’s duration, little piano fragments climb high and higher, juxtaposed between vertical configurations of the same pitches in the harps and percussion instruments that seem to aid the ascent, pushing the chords forward through inevitable progressions.
Tremolos and trills also largely feature in the construction of the work. They are related affects, the latter being a one-note expansion of the former. What begins as single-note tremolos in the harps becomes trills of adjacent chords in the pianos and mallet instruments. As the piece concludes, falling in on itself much like “Le marteau sans maitre,” a knife-like jab from the ensemble challenges the diminishing resolution. The strike repeats again a few moments later, as the propellent effort of the musical material succumbs to entropic inevitability.
It would be shameful for us to let Boulez’s musical contribution find the same fate.
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Of course Boulez is not dead, in spite of the concerted efforts on the parts of many folks (some of whom have legitimate gripes, having been wounded in the battles of the 50′s and 60′s as well as others who simply enjoy taking on icons) to inter him and his music. He is thoughtful, incisive and supremely aware of everything that is and has gone on in the new music scene since 1945. The concert was a delight. My 12 year old son was suitably impressed and agrees wholeheartedly with CC that the concert experience far exceeds anything that recording technology can provide us when it comes to music which is still so ‘new’ (keep smiling Mr. Pound).
But the NYT found Le Marteau (at least in places) ‘interminably static’ due to the ‘stern’ serialist language and this will fit with the impressions of those who somehow found it possible to pass this event by.
In a few days Boulez will be back on the podium conducting Stravinsky, Varese, Carter and himself. the program is a blast from the past, yet how many younger composers working today have even tried to absorb the contributions of these folks? Talk to your friends who teach composition classes in universities, ask them what background the kids who want to learn composition have. Not a pretty picture. If you don’t do the work to learn the techniques and understand the thought processes in previous music you can have no hope of making innovations.
But, as always, innovations will come.nd when they do, each significant innovation will make us reread the lessons of the past in new ways….the way Mendelssohn’s A minor quartet makes us rethink Beethoven’s…for better or worse! David
In my opinion, Boulez’s music is being kept alive only by being on an “intellectual respirator”. I’m not sure what rewards the music-loving public is supposed to find in it aside from trying to trace his tone rows by ear or by looking at his scores and admiring their construction.
To be sure, much fine music is constructed using intellectual devices but, if that’s all that is apparent to the ear, it really isn’t worth the effort.
Yes, I certainly familiarized myself with twelve-tone technique in my younger days and saw its worth in creating post late-Mahler “melodies”. But it led to a limited style and, worse, a kind of crossword puzzle music which I think Schönberg probably didn’t intend.
Intellectual “music” is for those without the heart or talent for poetic understandings of the world. Boulez’ phobia about being catagorized, as well as his general inability to complete a work despite copious revisions, demonstrates for me that any talent he has relates more to sonic manipulation and shock value than anything else. Were it not for his insidious arrogance, I feel certain more composers would take him seriously. While he may find a legacy for himself in the 20th century, his disparagement of tradition will likely result in his becoming a musicological footnote – despite the best efforts of elitist and self-centered critics who view serious art as a vehicle to make themselves feel superior to others. Facing reality has never been a talent for those who think the world revolves around themselves. Ezra pound is an excellent analogy to Mr. Boulez; after all – WHO READS EZRA POUND???
I agree fully about Boulez! !
The problem is that we haven’t had writers willing to spend the effort and time – and risk their careers if they are faculty in conservatories or music schools – removing the mask from the Boulezes and from the solipsism inherent in the contemporary musical establishment. In fact, in my judgment, less in-your-face contemporary composers may be more damaging to classical musical development than Boulez. After all, when he said “burn down the opera houses” everybody knew he was an revolutionary whose identity was tied up with smiting the bourgeoisie (“epater les bourgeoisie”). Unlike Boulez’s compositions like “Eclat/multiples” that send signals about their intellectual/academic content to ordinary music lovers, Corigliano, e.g. in “The Red Violin”, etc. gives the impression that his music is intended for audiences. And indeed, he is played up to by musicologists: “Corigliano is, anbove all else, a communicator. His work is accessible, unstrained, and with few of the pseudo-romantic agonies associated with self-conscious avante-gardism”. (Morton & Collins, eds., CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS, St. James Press, 1992).
Nothing of the kind! Corigliano is insistent that the worth of his music can only be understood and appreciated by those with the training to read his scores and follow the structural design of his music. He said so in an interesting debate with Newsday music critic Justin Davidson in a lost, lamented British classical music web site, “Andante.com”. Indeed, like many other pseudo audience-oriented contemporaries, his music may evoke an imminent melodic climax in the traditional manner, only to veer away at the last minute into obscurity or a new unresolved buildup. There may be clever musical effects that keep audiences’ attention while they are listening to a composition, but the net effect on those not seduced by musical eye-candy is ultimately boredom.
The goal of musical composition before contemporary paradigm involves composers’ self actualization along technomusical lines (which may be genuinely stimulating to peer professionals), combined with the pretense that this music represents a continuation of the great compositional tradition of the past. This has cowed many older American concertgoers. Assured by musicologists or writers of program notes of the high quality or even greatness of compositions in which they find no musical interest, they ultimately come to accept the idea that they are too unmusical or untrained to appreciate the beauties of contemporary music.
Older audiences KNOW that classical music potentially holds great rewards and beauties. They are willing to hang in there and suffer through the contemporary compositions brightly offered as though they will be enjoyed like the classics. Unintimidated younger people, most of whom may lack familiarity with the classical idiom, simply don’t bother with it. The question is – when is the hypocrisy going to be exposed resoundingly and often enough to chase it into private obscurity?
OOPS – typo – omitted critical phrase (as readers might have noted with puzzlement) .
“The goal of musical composition before contemporary paradigm was communication. the contemporary paradigm …..”