Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)

[Karl Henning]

As I said in my previous post I want specific examples and details, not these vague accepted rumors. Not just to show that he had strong loud opinions and squabbled with people - there's plenty of that to go around in the music world - but to show that he actually ruined people through the blackballing performed by himself and his clique. Got any examples?

James's enthusiasms blind him to facts.  This leaches into his most lamentable tendency to mistake his opinions for facts.  For James, "opinion" = "anything someone else has to say."

[ritter]

A belated--the CD appeared two years ago IIRC, but with haphazard distribution--review of the Diotima Quartet's recording of Livre pour quatour, by Andrew Clements in The Guardian:

It was never subjected to the same number of reworkings and expansions as some of his later works, yet Livre pour Quatuor, Pierre Boulez's only string quartet, remained in a state of compositional flux for the last 60 years of his life. Boulez began the original six-movement version in 1948, when he was 23 and had just completed his Second Piano Sonata. The title, Livre, was a homage to Mallarmé and to the poet's idea of a book in which the individual chapters could be shuffled: Boulez intended that the movements of the quartet could be reordered, or even detached and performed separately. His original manuscript has no bar lines and few tempo markings and dynamics and, at that stage, it seems, he planned to publish two versions, the original form and in a score with time signatures that would make it much easier to perform. In the event, though, only the first two movements were performed at the premiere in 1955, and the full score was eventually published three years after that as a five-movement work (the fourth was omitted, though the original numbering of the movements was retained).

Performances of the remaining movements and eventually of the whole work followed over the next decade. In the late 1960s, Boulez expanded two of the movements as a work for a string orchestra, Livre pour Cordes. But performances of the original remained rare, mainly because of its sheer difficulty. At one point, Boulez himself suggested that any group would need a conductor to solve all the problems, and later admitted that the score was "overloaded with information". But though he never realised his plan to make a performing version of the missing fourth movement, between 2002 and 2012 he did make revisions and clarifications to the other movements, the last of them in sessions with the Quatuor Diotima.

The result was never going to be a definitive version of Livre pour Quatuor, but what Diotima have recorded will remain Boulez's final thoughts on a piece that defined a crucial point in his rapid development as a composer in the years after the second world war. It was his first work to abandon traditional music forms, and the one in which the two most significant influences on his early music, Messiaen and Webern, were finally fused into a coherent style. It's music that, as the composer himself said, veers between "intentionally austere bareness" and "the most proliferating exuberance" – both qualities that the Diotima's performance catches vividly. It's sometimes rapturously beautiful, sometimes chillingly detached; in many ways it's the most revealingly personal work that Boulez ever composed.

Full rewiew here

[North Star]

A belated--the CD appeared two years ago IIRC, but with haphazard distribution--review of the Diotima Quartet's recording of Livre pour quatour, by Andrew Clements in The Guardian:

Full rewiew here

You might want to edit the quotation a bit, Rafael

[ritter]

You might want to edit the quotation a bit, Rafael

Fixed! Thanks for the heads-up, Karlo!...the quotation was incoheernt, to put it mildly 

[snyprrr]

I've had a recording of this one for a few years now .. I wouldn't say it's anywhere near his best, or the best of the medium.

Perhaps I'll dig it out and give it another listen. 

Is that with the Parisii?

I happen to think the 'Livre' is one of the behemoth epochal SQs- and certainly the largest by any Modern Composer (well, you know). It's just an endless tour of an overgrown garden, lots of prickly things, but I find the density comforting- like a mild Ferneyhough or Babbitt but with just as many notes.

I actually prefer it to his later style in a way...


Early Boulez is wonderfully quaint, in the best sense of the word

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/05/who-was-pierre-boulez.html[/size]

I really don't understand the importance of an article like this. The most informative anecdotes on his music and character are the ones that come from the musicians who worked with him and learnt from him.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

But even the detractors learn. And it's always nice to read a different point of view, someone from the outside looking in. It has it's merits. Personally, as much as I liked Boulez and some of his music, I don't see it really having much legs into the future. As a composer he was a heroic failure (much like how he himself, described Schoenberg), and a 'lone figure' in the end.

I still prefer an evaluation of his work overall when considering his impact in the world of music. The point of view expressed in the article is interesting to read but all it does really is show that Boulez is still a controversial figure.

[Uhor]

Livre pour quatuor ≈ apotheosis of Webern.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Livre pour quatuor ≈ apotheosis of Webern.

I think it's a bit longer than the things that Webern composed.

[Uhor]

Aren't the individual sections (I-VI) independent?

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Aren't the individual sections (I-VI) independent?

Yes, but that doesn't change my point about their length.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Webern came up with some brilliant, inventive and beautiful miniatures, but, for me at least, none of his pieces exclaim energy and excitement like Répons.

[Karl Henning]

Webern came up with some brilliant, inventive and beautiful miniatures, but, for me at least, none of his pieces exclaim energy and excitement like Répons.

Good.

[snyprrr]

"WEBERN SUXXx"

(Graffitti on a wall just down the street from the Boulez household)

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

"WEBERN SUXXx"

(Graffitti on a wall just down the street from the Boulez household)

omg

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Répons is too long and derivative. There are Webern pieces that are a billion times more exciting and energetic imo.

[Karl Henning]

Another day, another fatuous pronouncement . . . .

[ritter]

The breadth of musical inventiveness found in Répons is amazing, but I daresay that full effect of the piece can only fully be appreciated in live performnace, as the real-time electronic treatment of the solsoists and the spatial distribution of sound is impossible to reproduce on media. Seeing Répons live here in Madrid in 1992 was one of the highlights of my concertgoing life.

[Mirror Image]

Répons is too long and derivative. There are Webern pieces that are a billion times more exciting and energetic imo.

Said the guy who puts Stockhausen up on some kind of godly pedestal. Please...

[snyprrr]

we should all have those giffey things here... would come in handy...