Pierre Boulez

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January 19, 2008

Music Review | Making Music: Pierre Boulez

Revisiting the Works of a Former Firebrand to See if They’re Still Warm to the Touch

By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, NYTimes

In 1952 Pierre Boulez wrote that “any musician who has not felt ... the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is of no use.” A year after this youthful, narrow-minded declaration, Mr. Boulez indulged his open-minded interest in the music of foreign cultures by evoking non-European sounds in a chamber work featuring a groundbreaking combination of instruments.

That nine-movement work, “Le Marteau Sans Maître” (“The Hammer With No Master”), was performed by the dynamic, young Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble on Thursday at Zankel Hall, part of a Making Music concert dedicated to Mr. Boulez’s music and with Ara Guzelimian as host.

Mr. Boulez, on hand to conduct his music, explained that his colleagues thought the unusual scoring for alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylophone, percussion and contralto was not only weird, but that it also posed innumerable challenges because the technique of European percussionists was then rather “primitive.” Mr. Boulez recalled that the percussionists used only two mallets, which seems “prehistoric” (since four are now standard). Percussionists used to play the way he types, he said, using one finger — hard to imagine, given the number of percussion virtuosos who are now active, like those who played with aplomb on Thursday.

There were also fine contributions from the notable contralto Hilary Summers, whose expressive voice and distinctive timbre illuminated the zigzagging vocal lines of the three surrealist poems by René Char in “Le Marteau.” The sonorities in the work, a homage to Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” are often bewitching. But the exotic sounds are still part of Mr. Boulez’s stern serialist language, and the piece sometimes feels interminably static.

But the opposite is true of Mr. Boulez’s riotously kaleidoscopic “Sur Incises,” written more than 40 years later and scored for an equally unusual lineup of three harpists, three pianists and three percussionists. The often relentlessly driven, exuberant piece (based on “Incises,” an earlier short piano work) is sometimes so exhilaratingly intense that you’re almost grateful for the intermittent periods of sonorous calm, as if you were retreating into a quiet corridor from a room crammed with brilliant people shouting out ideas at full blast.

The “organized delirium” (as Mr. Boulez calls it) of “Sur Incises” demonstrates a remarkable mellowing of the organized tedium of early serialism. It was certainly hard to imagine Mr. Boulez, dapper and charming as he amiably chatted with Mr. Guzelimian, as the polarizing firebrand he once was.

“I like virtuosity not for the sake of virtuosity but because it’s dangerous,” Mr. Boulez said before conducting “Sur Incises.” The talented young players of the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble clearly enjoy living on the edge, hurtling through the riotous landscapes of “Sur Incises” with that rare combination of reckless abandon and polished professionalism.

Edited January 19, 2008 by 7/4

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• Biography
  
• Discography
  

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More from composer/conductor Pierre Boulez

David Patrick Stearns

Inquirer Music Critic

Posted on Wed, Jan. 23, 2008

Once the seemingly icy iconoclastic music director of the New York Philharmonic, composer/conductor Pierre Boulez is now, three decades later, a mellow 82-year-old who is embarking on guest-conducting engagements with the Chicago Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra. First, though, he began 2008 with a New York City stop-off to conduct his own music at Zankel Hall and to begin musical celebrations for the 100th birthday of fellow composer Elliott Carter.

As David Patrick Stearns found out during a post-rehearsal conversation with Boulez in New York last week, he was always mellow and never actually icy - and maybe not even a real conductor.

Question: Your conducting life has changed a great deal over the last 10 years. Most obviously, your repertoire is larger.

Answer: I cannot really play the same repertoire a thousand times. I don't find that you learn anything anymore. You just repeat yourself. That's just marketing - good marketing but not good conducting.

Q: You also had a reputation for being emotionally cool. But nobody can say that's the case with your new recording of the Mahler Symphony No. 8 on Deutsche Grammophon.

A: I don't think I was cool. I was simply not completely in command of the technique of the orchestra, and until you're at a certain level, you're careful with what you're doing because you don't want to make mistakes. It was not at all coolness. It was caution.

Q: I associate you with pieces that have a strong cerebral side. But that wouldn't be the Mahler 8th - especially the second movement, which sets long, rarefied sections of Goethe's Faust. What now attracts you to the piece?

A: For a long time I had problems with this piece. Not the first movement; it's very compact, and in the old tradition of the Bach - like a late-Baroque flower. The second movement is much more difficult to organize, in my opinion. It's also a kind of abstract opera. You have scenes that are sometimes very short, sometimes longer, some very dramatic, some naive. It's difficult to create continuity in all of that.

I conducted it a long time ago in New York and London. I wasn't at all satisfied by the result. I think I can manage it now. The motifs - there aren't very many and they're repetitive. How to you repeat that without being boring? And to give life to these motifs and their different aspects? I realize that better than I did several years ago. Also, I've conducted [Wagner's] Ring in between. And in the Ring you learn how to manage leitmotifs! That was a good lesson for me to approach this Mahler symphony.

Q: Last year you conducted your first Janacek opera, From the House of the Dead, that comes out on DVD this spring directed by Patrice Chereau, your collaborator on the famous Bayreuth Ring cycle. I know you've done some Janacek concert works here and there. I also know that your visits to the opera house are increasingly infrequent and possibly now a thing of the past. What appealed to you about this bleak opera, based on the Dostoevsky novel set in a Siberian prison camp?

A. I find that the most interesting of all his opera works. It's three operas in one, when the characters tell about their lives and experiences. Therefore, when the opportunity came [to conduct it], I took it. I don't regret it. It took a lot of time to establish the character of the music. It has a reputation for being a boring opera. But no!

Q: You've often been a conductor who revises a piece's reputation.

A: I'm not a conductor, as a matter of fact. I'm a kind of outside conductor. Composition is more interesting and composers are more interesting - when they have a lot to say.

Q: Like C.P.E. Bach? I recently came across a very early recording, possibly from the 1950s, of you conducting that composer.

A: Oh, my God, yes! With Jean-Pierre Rampal! That was like the horse ride in Faust because he was so quick. I tried to match him but it made no sense. I wasn't very proud of this effort.

Q: In decades past, you've been caught making disparaging remarks about Verdi. Do you think you'll ever conduct his music?

A: I'd like to conduct his Quattro Pezzi Sacri (Four Sacred Pieces), but it's too late now. I would've done them, maybe, but you cannot do everything.

Q: I've observed you in rehearsal being extremely patient and relaxed with musicians, and never more so than while preparing the Elliott Carter festival at the Juilliard School of Music (titled "Focus 2008: All About Elliott," beginning Friday, Jan. 25, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York).

A: When you put players in a situation where they become nervous and unsure, that's not good at all. You try to give them some security. You have to know the difference between mistakes that have to be corrected and mistakes that are just an error. You look at the musician. He knows, we know - simply. I'm not obsessive about precision, but precision brings sonority. The good sound of an orchestra, for me, is tied to precision. If an orchestra is imprecise, the sound is blurred. You are an artisan. You're making a sound and know that you have to spend time to reach the level that you want.

Q: In past conversations I've had with you, I've contended that American audiences have become much more sophisticated about contemporary music compared with when you were New York Philharmonic music director more than 30 years ago. And I don't think you've agreed with me. To what extent do you still see a problem?

A: Mostly, the performers are lazy. The performers want to impose authority and knowledge on a piece, and cannot do that with contemporary music. You can organize things. But you can't convince the audience if you aren't convinced yourself.

Q: One person you've often supported is Elliott Carter. You've commissioned new pieces from him and made some fine Carter recordings. Why him?

A: I like people who are not satisfied with themselves. And for me, his rhythmic world is very interesting and something from which I could benefit. I'm very egotistical. I like a composer from whom I can take something. And profit from that.

Q: Take something? As a listener or a composer?

A: As a composer!

Edited January 30, 2008 by 7/4

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For Boulez debut, exacting practice

By David Patrick Stearns

Inquirer Music Critic

Orchestra 2001 is mobilized - and on this occasion, it so has to be.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/...s/14175311.html

The Philadelphia premiere of the Pierre Boulez masterwork Le Marteau sans Maitre - a nine-movement suite for voice, guitar, flute and percussion that changed the classical music world in 1955 - is looming, and with it the responsibility of dispelling misconceptions among audiences who know the piece more by name than by sound.

"I lost you a while ago," says guitarist Jason Vieaux, peering up at Orchestra 2001 conductor and artistic director James Freeman. Others at Tuesday's rehearsal at Swarthmore College talk of requested tempos "within reason" while pondering enigmatic notes affectionately named "the little squiggly guys."

That's why the concerts, at 8 p.m. Saturday at Independence Seaport Museum and 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Lang Concert Hall at Swarthmore, are getting 10 rehearsals in a world where half as many would be generous.

That probably will be just enough, said Boulez, 82, who is now in New York conducting a series of concerts. News of the Philadelphia premiere - hatched because Orchestra 2001's Freeman simply decided it was about time - left Boulez visibly pleased: Often cities have to wait for the composer himself to arrive and assemble and conduct a performance of this piece. And as someone who also has an international career, with ongoing relationships in London, Chicago and Cleveland, and who just finished recording all the Mahler symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon, Boulez can't take it upon himself to conduct Le Marteau everywhere.

"I'm surprised [the piece hasn't been done in Philadelphia] but I'm also surprised for the good," he said last week. "I write what I think is for me necessary to write. And I try to give performances that justify what I've written. After that, what can you do?"

The single biggest reason for the piece's neglect - even though it's the first great work by Europe's most lionized living composer - are the reasons it opened a new world of music: its instrumentation. Part chamber piece, part song cycle with vocal settings of surrealistic René Char poems, Le Marteau has a unique scoring that includes alto flute, viola, vibraphone, guitar, bongos, and any number of other percussion instruments.

Few preexisting ensembles, aside from the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain that Boulez himself founded, have that kind of lineup, which means a Marteau ensemble must be assembled for each performance. That's feasible for Orchestra 2001 because it's more a loose collective - one used to accommodating the innovative demands of George Crumb - than a permanent ensemble.

Coming from a generation whose composers felt duty-bound to reinvent as many aspects of music as possible, Boulez refused to accept the standard 19th-century instrumentation under the argument that no great painter would use the same colors time and again.

Once the group is assembled, hardly a note passes without directions for volume or articulation in a score that asks for details so minute - and details that interlock so intricately with others - that some of the Orchestra 2001 players are dumbfounded.

Guitarist Vieaux spent a month play-conducting the piece at home to a recording to get a feeling for the whole. Even now, he wonders, "Does this guy really hear this stuff when he demands something so specific?"

The surprise of Le Marteau sans Maitre (variously translated The Master Without a Hammer and The Hammer Unmastered) is how often both performers and listeners find the music to be "sexy." Freeman goes further: "Incredibly sexy."

"I hear raindrops," says flutist Christa Jennings. "With the alto flute, there are flutter tonguing [effects] along with the percussion."

"Red caravan on the edge of the nail" and "executioners of solitude" are images in the piece's poems, ones that mezzo-soprano Freda Herseth can't interpret as the typical 19th-century German doorways to emotion, but as more modern portals into dreamlike landscapes. "You can't read the poetry and say that it's about this or that," she says. "I experience it moment by moment. I hear even as it occurs."

That's the spirit. Boulez admits he was often inspired not by the words' meanings but by their sonority. Some vocal lines, he says, are treated like another instrument; others are like operatic recitatives.

The paradox many of the players are experiencing - most of them are modern-music specialists imported from Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Mich., and Colorado for the occasion - is that the more they follow the composer's micromanaging directions, the more liberated they feel. "It's a pleasant shock when you hear how the piece all goes together," said violist Matthew Dane.

Echoes of jazz can be heard here and there - or so it seems. In fact, Boulez was an early student of what's now called world music. At times, the guitar sounds like a Japanese koto, and rhythms are straight out of Africa. "I knew an anthropologist who was a specialist in African music," he said. "There were some ceremonies that were very interesting, I must say."

Though Le Marteau has sometimes been viewed as a manifesto for serialism (the strict, cerebral method of composition often credited with driving away audiences), the piece more reflects the increasing globalization that followed World War II. And, in fact, the piece isn't serial; Boulez had gone beyond that years before. In a way, he is assumed to be the leader of a movement that wasn't his.

"I know," he said with a sigh. "I can't write a denial each time" the piece is performed.

Even the most learned audiences approaching Le Marteau, then, should leave all preconceived notions at the door, and, as Igor Stravinsky once said, enjoy the music's exotic succession of sound.

"Then you invent your own trajectory," Boulez said. "You know, it's not the writer who makes the novel. It's the reader that makes the novel . . . and his own story with it. I find that's just fine."

Edited January 30, 2008 by 7/4

[Larry Kart]

Two Morton Feldman passages about Boulez:

"It is Boulez, more than any other composer today, who has given system a new prestige -- Boulez who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only in how it is made. No painter would talk that way.... The preoccupation with making something, with systems and construction, seems to be a characteristic of music today. It has become, in many cases, the actual subject of musical composition." (1965)

"Yes everybody keeps saying that ["One must learn the rules if it's only to" -- or "in order to" -- "break them"]. I've never understood it. I never understood what I was supposed to learn and what I was supposed to break. What rules? Boulez wrote a letter to John Cage in 1951. There is a line in that letter I will never forget. 'I must know everything in order to step off the carpet.' And for what purpose did he want to step off the carpet? Only to realize the perennial Frenchman's dream ... to crown himself Emperor. Was it love of knowledge, love of music, that obsessed our distinguished young provincial in 1951? It was love of analysis -- an analysis he will pursue and use as an instrument of power.

"....You were asking about the rules. There's a parable of Kafka's about a man living in a country where he doesn't know the rules. Nobody will tell him what they are. He knows neither right nor wrong, but he observes that the rulers do not share his anxiety. From this he deduces that the rules are for those who rule. What they do is rule. That's why all my knowledge doesn't make me understand what Mozart did that I should also do in order to reach a state of artistic grace." (1967)

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Although some folks may have seen this already, here's a link.

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Although some folks may have seen this already, here's a link.

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'I am not shy'

Composer and conductor Pierre Boulez has endured poisonous rows on the new music scene and vilification in the press, yet he insists that disagreement is helpful

Nicholas Wroe

Saturday April 26, 2008

The Guardian

Pierre Boulez might have made the familiar journey from enfant terrible to grand old man, but he has neither renounced his project nor found that popular opinion has come round to his way of thinking. His incendiary comments from the 50s and 60s - for instance, that contemporary classical music which does not follow Schoenberg's lead with sufficient rigour is "useless", and that "the most elegant solution for the problem of opera is to blow up the opera houses" - can still cause him problems. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the opera remark led to a dawn raid on his hotel room by Swiss police and the seizure of his passport - if only for a short time.

Despite his apparent intransigence, however, it has become recognised over the decades that Boulez has been engaged in a much less narrow, even accessible, musical project than popularly assumed. As a conductor of his own and others' work, he has proved a revelatory conduit through which to view both contemporary and core repertoire music. His obsession with precision has been applauded for ridding Debussy of its habitual "impressionist cloudiness", while his revision of the traditional funereal tempi of Wagner's Parsifal has been seen as a force for undercutting the more offensive intimations of German nationalism.

When rehearsing the Scharoun Ensemble, comprised of members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Boulez is an avuncular presence, coaxing and suggesting rather than imposing his vision of the work. "The effect is amazing," says viola player Micha Afkham. "We'd been working on a Webern concerto before he arrived and all the individual elements were very good. But when he took us, it was as if it were a different piece of music. It was so much more fluid. The individual contributions seemed the same, but the whole was completely transformed."

There is an opportunity to witness Boulez as both conductor and composer in the next few weeks at the Barbican. He will conduct two London Symphony Orchestra programmes featuring work by Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky and a British premiere from the young German composer Matthias Pintscher. There is also a chance to hear Boulez as both young man and mature artist in the same work. He composed Notations, a dozen fragmentary piano sketches, in 1945 when he was just 20. Then, in the mid-70s, he was asked if he would mind the works being performed in a tribute broadcast to his former teacher Olivier Messiaen.

"I was in Bayreuth conducting The Ring and had lost contact with those pieces. I found it difficult to compose in Bayreuth, but I could take the ideas in these tiny works and expand them for a large orchestra. In a funny way, the influence was Wagner. Not stylistically, but in the way there are scenes and motifs invented in the early 1850s that he didn't use until the late 1870s, by which time he makes completely different use of them."

Thirty years into the project, Boulez - who reworks his music so much that his entire corpus has been described as a work in progress - has orchestrated only seven of the pieces. "Number eight is a little longer, and the ideas and possibilities a little richer. But I will get there. It is so interesting to compare your own ideas across time. They are like objets trouvés, but the object was mine. I hope to add some maturity and experience, but I still want to hear the young man who made them. You gain many things with age, but you lose a certain naivety. And I do like encountering the naivety of that young man I once was."

Boulez was born in 1925 in Montbrison, 60 miles from Lyon. He showed an early aptitude for both maths and music, and says his first exposure to modern music came aged 13 when his piano teacher gave him Debussy and Ravel to study. "And also Honegger, who was the best-known figure in contemporary music at the time. It sounds tame now, but Ravel was still alive and Debussy had not been dead long. This is what modernity was, and I was fascinated by it."

Despite his musical precocity, he was steered by his engineer father towards studying maths in Lyon after he left school. "It was wartime and things were very difficult. My parents were so far from the music world that they couldn't conceive how you could make a living. But for me it was the only solution for the rest of my life."

In 1943, he moved to occupied Paris, to study at the Conservatoire. He attended early evening pre-curfew concerts of core repertoire and premieres of new work. "And that's how I came across Messiaen's music and learned he was a teacher with a reputation for being outside of the usual musical conventions." Boulez enrolled in Messiaen's now legendary harmony class - Messiaen recorded in his diary that "Boulez is a man who likes new music" - and was also taught by Honegger's wife, Andrée Vaurabourg, and René Liebowitz, who introduced him to the second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, composers he would spend the rest of his career exploring.

"But it was a problem getting hold of this music," he recalls. "Getting a score from Vienna could take months. Even after the war, communications in Europe were just broken." Liebowitz, who had contacts in Vienna, was the source of scores, but Boulez had little time for his teaching. "It was too pedantic and uninteresting, so after a few months I said goodbye. The contrast with Messiaen couldn't have been greater. He pushed your imagination and helped you think for yourself. That is what you want from a teacher. I always think the relationship between a teacher and a student should be short and maybe violent. You don't need to spend years together. All you need is an explosion: you are the material to explode, the teacher is the detonator."

Boulez's detonation came with his second piano sonata, composed in 1947-48. The score was published in 1950, and by 1952, when it was performed at the Darmstadt music school by Messiaen's wife, Yvonne Loriod, it was one of the most eagerly anticipated musical events since the war. "Some works are more important than others. There are moments when you not only look for something new and worthwhile and interesting, but you actually find it. It's more than a great feeling: it's an important feeling."

His reputation was sealed with the 1955 premiere of his work for chamber ensemble and voice, Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master). It was conducted by Hans Rosbaud, who, with his Südwestfunk orchestra, devoted 50 rehearsals to its preparation, a meticulous approach that Boulez adopted for himself. It was because of Rosbaud's later ill health that Boulez's conducting career proper began. "Just as when Bruno Walter was sick they asked Bernstein to conduct, when Rosbaud became sick they asked me." Boulez had been an occasional conductor since the mid-40s, as music director of the Renaud-Barrault Theatre Company. "It was a very practical thing in that the theatre needed a conductor. I didn't realise until years later that I had been so influenced by theatre work. A director working with actors is not so different to a conductor working with soloists."

He started out conducting only his contemporaries' works, but soon extended his repertoire to pieces from earlier in the 20th century. "I am for polemic, but not in a vacuum. There has to be a concrete outcome. I began to organise concerts so we could better discuss the work." From the beginning, even for small concerts, he insisted that the musicians were paid and there was time for rehearsal and study. "I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience."

He regarded some of the earlier performances of even the Viennese school in the 40s as so poor - "although put on with the best intentions" - that they were "counter-propaganda" for the music. "I said if I ever conducted I would always give myself the best chance to succeed - though some-times, despite everything, you still fail."

His move into the mainstream repertoire came in 1966 with a production of Parsifal at Bayreuth directed by Wagner's grandson, Wieland. "The summer before, I had been at Darmstadt, so it was a big change. And people found my tempi controversial," he remembers. "But I hadn't set out to be quicker. It was the conjunction of the text and the music that persuaded me what speed to go."

He says he doesn't enjoy controversy, "but if you feel something deeply, then you shouldn't fear polemic". He has endured poisonous rows on the new music scene and vilification in the mainstream press for the work of the computer music research centre IRCAM in Paris, which President Pompidou had asked him to set up in 1972. "But while the exchange of ideas can be rough, it is within your power to defend yourself, and answering criticism helps you to define yourself and your positions."

Wieland Wagner died in the same year as the staging of Parsifal and Boulez thinks it likely that his career would have taken a different path if he had lived, as they had planned an extensive series of opera productions. Until then, Boulez had been a guest conductor with orchestras, but afterwards he took posts with the New York and Cleveland orchestras, as well as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with whom he will be reunited this summer at the Proms.

"I think of my time in London very fondly. It was so interesting to attempt to find a new audience." His concerts at the Roundhouse are still talked about, and he was recently rather moved when Simon Rattle - whom he conducted as a 15-year-old percussionist in the National Youth Orchestra - said he remembered a Webern piece they performed and had used those memories in a Berlin Philharmonic performance of the same work. "It's not just touching, it is very instructive about how music education works." He cites a recent Rattle initiative in Berlin in which orchestra members attended schools where they introduced pupils to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. "The Rolling Stones still attract more people than concerts of Beethoven's ninth. But Rattle got these children dancing to Stravinsky and some of them will realise that rhythms used in 1913 are more interesting than Mick Jagger's rhythms today."

He says little has changed in the music world since he started out, in that "20% are very interested in new things, 50% can be persuaded and 30% are in their coffins before their time. It is not a matter of good times or bad times. You always have to make an effort and you always need a strong personality to get things done. If you are timid and unadventurous, no matter how good your ideas, nothing happens. Me, I'm not a shy man. I am willing to have a go. Then it is for others to judge its worth."

Inspirations

Olivier Messiaen

Arnold Schoenberg

Alban Berg

Anton Webern

Arthur Honegger

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