Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)

[Karl Henning]

Well, and Tippett enjoyed Wonder Woman, so who would fault Pierre for digging The Simpsons?

[springrite]

Well, and Tippett enjoyed Wonder Woman, so who would fault Pierre for digging The Simpsons?

Lest not forget Herr Henning and South Park...

[Karl Henning]

Lest not forget Herr Henning and South Park...

Get Smart ! 

[springrite]

Get Smart !

Doh!

Missed it by THAT MUCH!

[San Antone]

Not quite and it's what we do .. separate the best from the rest. Welcome to reality.

Who's we?  My reality is one where people discover the best from the rest for themselves.  I am not going to apply my taste to limit their selections.  Once you create a list and open a door to that small group of works, often you are closing them off to a much greater world of music.  What I prefer is for people to simply enjoy the process of discovery.  If I ever try to do anything it is to encourage them to take the journey and find new music for themselves that no one has proselytized to them as "the best".

[Karl Henning]

Separating the best from the rest:  that's why I have no time for James's opinions, come to think of it.  There's a proper application of the principle.

[chadfeldheimer]

When did it have? I have a feeling that this is always posthumous creation, the winners writing the history of the cultural wars. . .

I guess the last few dozen post's belong to a battle of the cultural war you're speaking of. 

[San Antone]

Come on, wake up seriously. Lists by minds like Boulez do not inhibit exploration they often encourage more of it. i.e. I liked that piece let me explore more from this composer etc. ... .. .. then the branching out begins. They are often reference points to more, not FINAL endpoints.

This is his list:

I. Edgard Varèse, Ameriques
II. Alban Berg, Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6
III. Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring
IV. Béla Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
V. Anton Webern, Six Pieces for Orchestra
VI. Luciano Berio, Sinfonia
VII. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gruppen
VIII. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 6
IX. Arnold Schönberg, Erwartung
X. Pierre Boulez, Repons

Here we are 15 years into the 21st century, and he is talking about Mahler.  Several of those works are from not just the first half of the 20th century, but the first quarter.  Much of the best new music has nothing to do with any of those composers. Other than for some vague idea of his understanding of music history, I am not very interested in the works Pierre Boulez considers the most important, or why. 

Maybe you think this kind of list will inspire people to find new music, but for me all it does is drag down the discussion with the weight of the past.  Instead of trying to point people to "the best" of the last 100 years, just point them to something that is being done, today.

[Karl Henning]

I guess the last few dozen post's belong to a battle of the cultural war you're speaking of. 

Ken was joking;  and, typically, our certain someone doesn't get that it's a joke 

I will honor his birthday in the most appropriate way. I will try to have other composers' music suppressed.

[Karl Henning]

This is his list:

Allow me to add dates—

I. Edgard Varèse, Ameriques (1918–1921; revised 1927)
II. Alban Berg, Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (1913-1915)
III. Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (1912-13)
IV. Béla Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936)
V. Anton Webern, Six Pieces for Orchestra (1909–10, revised 1928)
VI. Luciano Berio, Sinfonia (1968)
VII. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gruppen (1955–57)
VIII. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 6 (1903–04)
IX. Arnold Schönberg, Erwartung (1909)
X. Pierre Boulez, Répons (completed 1984?)

So:

* 6 out of 10 works from the first quarter of the XX-c.
* 7 out of 10 works from the first half of the XX-c. (and elsewhere, James sneers at GMG-ers who are "stuck in" the first half of the XX-c.)
* Of the remaining three works, he wrote one, and the other two were written by close friends (that's bad tone when anyone else does it, but when one of James's idols does it, it's just another aspect of his genius)

[Ken B]

Ken was joking;  and, typically, our certain someone doesn't get that it's a joke 

Actually I picketed the DSO. They were about to perform Shostakovich! Thankfully my sirens are loder than their strings. The 10th was averted!

[snyprrr]

so... much... text,.. so,... sleepy,...I..I...I....

[springrite]

so... much... text,.. so,... sleepy,...I..I...I....

You don't have to read it, you know.


OK, time to listen to pli selon pli ... no text...

[Robert]

The Sensuous Radical: Pierre Boulez at 90
MARCH 26, 201512:49 PM ET



Once there was a young firebrand whose revolutionary ideas forever changed the shape, feel and sound of classical music. No, we're not talking about Beethoven. We're talking about Boulez. Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor, turns 90 years old today.

The young Boulez was a rebel, even a rabble-rouser right after World War II, both in his music and in his musical philosophy.

"I see music as a kind of continuity, like a big tree," Boulez told NPR in 2000. "Of course there are many branches, many different directions. I think music is in constant evolution, and there is nothing absolutely fixed and rigidly determined."

But there was one thing fixed in Boulez's mind: the need to shake music up. Early on, he and some like-minded buddies disrupted a Stravinsky concert, complaining about the composer's neoclassical style. Later, Boulez declared that one solution to opera's problems would be to blow up the opera houses.

"In Britain we had this phrase 'angry young man,'" says Paul Griffiths, author of the book Modern Music and After. "Boulez was very decisive about how things should go for himself at a very early age and rejecting anything that stood in his way or that seemed to be backpedaling on the way to the future."

The young Boulez was disillusioned after the war. How could European culture spawn such carnage? Music, like Europe, Boulez thought, would have to be rebuilt. But first he had to tear it down.

"The only way to assert himself," Griffiths says, "was to be against everything else, to push through barriers and through destruction to bring about something new."

What Boulez created was a new emphasis on sound, color and the very building blocks of music.

"This music is as seductive as any on the planet," says St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director David Robertson. The conductor spent most of the 1990s in Paris leading Boulez's Ensemble Intercontemporain. He's quick to point out the sensual side of Boulez's music, as in Notation No. 1 for orchestra, which began its life as a piano miniature in 1945.

"When Notation No. 1 enters," Robertson notes, "you have this different layering of the instruments between the harps and the violins in such a way that it's almost as though we're laying out different types of silk fabric that interweave. And they are not clearly folded. They are being draped on the musical landscape."

You may not be able to hum Notation No. 1, but Griffiths feels that's not the point.



"You have to change your idea of what melody and harmony are," Griffiths says. "The thing is, we're all brought up with this huge education in the harmonic system that governed Western music for so long. And that music has taught us how to listen to that music and it hasn't taught us how to listen to other music."

Other music from other countries, for instance, or the 12-tone style of music developed by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s, which inspired Boulez. There's a little of both, Griffiths says, in Boulez's 1955 breakthrough Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master).

"He forms a completely new kind of chamber ensemble," Griffiths says. "It now sounds standard because it has become almost the norm. But then it was completely new." Think of ensembles like eighth blackbird today.

In Marteau there's a singer and a percussionist, plus flute and viola. Then a guitar which hints at Spain, a vibraphone that evokes Indonesian music and a xylophone that conjures up African music.

"It's a kind of world music long before we were talking about world music, but re-formed in completely his own way," Griffiths says.

The piece was evocative, and even something of a hit for Boulez, but it was also complicated. Early on, the composer was the only one who understood his music well enough to conduct it. And that's how Boulez backed into a second career as a conductor, leading major orchestras in London, New York, Chicago and Cleveland, conducting a width swath of classical music from Handel to the contemporary British composer George Benjamin (who has returned the favor).

By transforming himself into an all-purpose conductor, Boulez could cushion concerts with audience favorites while introducing contemporary pieces.

It's another Boulez innovation still influencing the concert experience today, according to Griffiths: "The conductors from the next generation, and the generation after that, like Esa-Pekka Salonen or Simon Rattle, are able to do a much wider repertoire with much more new music than was possible before Boulez was on the podium."

Over the years, the angry young man has mellowed a bit, but not completely. Boulez has harsh words for composers today who look only to the past and write pretty melodies.

"I find that's lazy, especially," Boulez says. "They don't try to revive anything. They just copy, and copy badly, and that's really for me the worst of sins, when you're not imaginative at all, when you are just complacent with yourself."

And when quizzed about the ferocity of his opinions, Boulez is still rapier quick: "I'm not ferocious at all. I am defining what I think. If you call that ferocity, ferocity is a very cheap way of living."

But no one will accuse Boulez of living cheaply, especially Robertson. "There is no B.S. in anything that he is doing," Robertson says, "either on the page or conducting."

At 90, Boulez remains a protean force for new music through his own compositions and institutions that he founded, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the high-tech experimental music lab, IRCAM, in Paris. And, for a younger generation of artists, such as Robertson, Boulez is still a beacon, a musical thinker, a provocateur, a pioneer charting new ground.

"It's that real singular devotion to the music which I think will be his greatest legacy," Robertson says. "There are relatively few people who have this impact on the world, and Pierre is definitely up there among the major personalities of the 20th and 21st centuries."

James,
I hate to bring this up. But this article reminds me a bit about that John Coltrane discussion we had. He was also sick and aging,  You said he put his Sop Sax away. Do you thing that Boulez would put his Baton away??  Inquiring minds want to know.....

[Karl Henning]

so... much... text,.. so,... sleepy,...I..I...I....

[Karl Henning]

He's right. though:  His ferocity was cheap.

"The only way to assert himself," Griffiths says, "was to be against everything else [...]" and there are some who think that's "new," right?

[Christo]

One of the two main characteristics of Modernism, according to Peter Gray (the book met with a lot of criticism, but this was not the point in that IMO) is the 'ruthless exploration of the self en self expression' (in Charles Taylor terms). Some lived after this idea.

[TheGSMoeller]

I'm a little late with the birthday celebration, but I searched for what was my first introduction to Pierre Boulez. It was a 1992 televised concert commemorating the 150th anniversary of the NY Phil, I believe it aired on the New York PBS station when I was living in Jersey. It was also my introduction to Le Mer. I recorded it on VHS back then and must have watched it 30 times. I'm really thrilled to have located it.
The concert also featured a conductor-less Candide Ovt, Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel with Mehta and Dvorak's New World Symphony with Masur.

https://www.youtube.com/v/5XVHLO9k3HI

[Karl Henning]

One of the two main characteristics of Modernism, according to Peter Gray (the book met with a lot of criticism, but this was not the point in that IMO) is the 'ruthless exploration of the self en self expression' (in Charles Taylor terms). Some lived after this idea.

Well, and that sounds like an extension of Romanticism.

[Karl Henning]

I'm a little late with the birthday celebration, but I searched for what was my first introduction to Pierre Boulez. It was a 1992 televised concert commemorating the 150th anniversary of the NY Phil, I believe it aired on the New York PBS station when I was living in Jersey. It was also my introduction to Le Mer. I recorded it on VHS back then and must have watched it 30 times. I'm really thrilled to have located it.
The concert also featured a conductor-less Candide Ovt, Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel with Mehta and Dvorak's New World Symphony with Masur.

https://www.youtube.com/v/5XVHLO9k3HI

Très cool!