Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)

Started by bhodges, January 17, 2008, 09:54:31 AM

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CRCulver

#1520
Quote from: Karl Henning on December 23, 2023, 12:09:10 PMSur Incises. I don't know how the true Boulez fans feel about various times when the composer fiddled with various scores, and I guess that my writing that indicates that my own fandom is somewhat at arm's length, but I find this an unalloyed success.

You know how a bon mot about a piece you like can sometimes alter your appreciation of it? I've never been able to listen to sur Incises since without recalling Samuel Andreyev's comment (in his Ferneyhough interview, IIRC) that this piece only has two kinds of material for its forty minutes: either quick driving rhythmic passages or more soupy, ambient music.

Karl Henning

Quote from: CRCulver on December 23, 2023, 04:59:42 PMYou know how a bon mot about a piece you like can sometimes alter your appreciation of it? I've never been able to listen to sur Incises since without recalling Samuel Andeyev's comment (in his Ferneyhough interview, IIRC) that this piece only has two kinds of material for its forty minutes: either quick driving rhythmic passages or more soupy, ambient music.
I can hear the sneer in that remark, and I think I can promise that it will not color my hearing of the piece. (I'll put it to the test tomorrow.)
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

CRCulver

#1522
There was no sneer in Andreyev's remark. At least not to my ears. After all, Andreyev is sympathetic to high modernism. Moreover, Andreyev is not the only person to detect this feature of Boulez's music. I just came across this quotation by Jonathan Goldman (in Cagney's article on the early Grisey):

QuoteThe fundamental dichotomy which obtains in Boulez's work [. . .] opposes pulsation to resonance. [. . .] Boulez famously distinguished between "smooth" and "striated" time. An alternation between a pulsed, rhythmic conception of musical discourse and another, in which musical time is undifferentiated and continuous, remains the key to Boulez's sound world.

So if the dichotomy in sur Incises is too plain to sustain interest over a forty minute work, that's a matter of taste, but a reasonable opinion.

Karl Henning

Quote from: CRCulver on December 24, 2023, 04:11:17 PMThere was no sneer in Andreyev's remark. At least not to my ears. After all, Andreyev is sympathetic to high modernism. Moreover, Andreyev is not the only person to detect this feature of Boulez's music. I just came across this quotation by Jonathan Goldman (in Cagney's article on the early Grisey):

So if the dichotomy in sur Incises is too plain to sustain interest over a forty minute work, that's a matter of taste, but a reasonable opinion.
Good points.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Mandryka

#1524
Quote from: CRCulver on December 24, 2023, 04:11:17 PMThere was no sneer in Andreyev's remark. At least not to my ears. After all, Andreyev is sympathetic to high modernism. Moreover, Andreyev is not the only person to detect this feature of Boulez's music. I just came across this quotation by Jonathan Goldman (in Cagney's article on the early Grisey):

So if the dichotomy in sur Incises is too plain to sustain interest over a forty minute work, that's a matter of taste, but a reasonable opinion.

Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that Boulez's  distinction between smooth and striated time is equivalent to music with a pulse (or rhythm? - Goldman conflates the two) and music with no clear pulse/rhythm. Then isn't it inevitable that all music, at this level of abstraction, is made of passages of smooth and striated time?  I mean - what would the third option be?

If the idea is that in Boulez there's nothing more to the music than alternate passages of strongly and less strongly pulsated music, then that's a very strong claim - and a contentious one. Goldman says "the key". - deliberately vague!
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Karl Henning

Quote from: CRCulver on December 23, 2023, 04:59:42 PMmore soupy, ambient music [....]
This is what seemed like a sneer to me. A hostile listener might remark similarly about Le sacre du printemps, "there are fast bits, there are slow bits." One could say that it is poetic justice that Boulez, whose attitude was "any new music which I don't approve of is worthless," being the object of a not entirely dissimilar critique. At any rate, having now revisited Sur Incises, I can confirm that I like it very well, and I stay by the recommendation, though of course, not everyone is going to (nor ought to) like all the things I like. But that's what drives one's recommendations, of course.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

brewski

#1526
So many choices to celebrate the birthday boy, but for now and new to me, this sparkling reading of Notations (1945, orch. 1980 and 1999), with Manfred Honeck and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, recorded in 2015.


-Bruce
"I set down a beautiful chord on paper—and suddenly it rusts."
—Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)