Musicians on Pierre Boulez

[John F]

Boulez's 90th birthday is Thursday. He says that the form and the expression of most Western art music come from the harmony. There's a lot of truth in that; I'd say it's true about the expression, less so about the form.

Musicians Discuss the Influence of Pierre Boulez
By ZACHARY WOOLFE
MARCH 20, 2015

Pierre Boulez, the distinguished composer, conductor, pianist and theorist, turns 90 on Thursday. He’s peerlessly influential, yes — but how, exactly? Six musicians explored the different facets of that influence in interviews; their replies have been condensed and edited.

AS A MUSIC WORLD TITAN

ESA-PEKKA SALONEN, conductor and composer: Young people are attracted to black-and-white statements. At least I was. And Boulez was like a black-and-white statement machine. He said, “This is wrong, and this is right.” The statements Boulez made were kind of refreshingly categorical. Like the famous one from the ’50s: “If a composer has not experienced the necessity of dodecaphonic technique, he is useless.” That’s a good sentence because it tells you what is what. It takes the guessing out of the equation.

ANTHONY CHEUNG, composer and pianist: I don’t immediately prostrate myself at his altar. It’s an ambivalent relationship. But as far as respect for him as a musician and what he’s done, I have infinite respect. He’s an enormous influence on how recent composers have dealt with instrumental groups.

SALONEN I got to know him in the early ’80s when I worked quite a bit at IRCAM [an avant-garde music institute founded by Mr. Boulez] and was conducting his Ensemble InterContemporain. And it was the closest to Louis XIV I ever saw in my life. It was impressive and scary for a young person, but mostly impressive. I still think, if someone had to have that kind of power, why not him?

AS A PIANO MASTER

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD, pianist: The piano was his instrument, so he could experiment directly on it. In the “Notations,” we see a young composer, still a student, who composed a set of miniatures. And in many of them, we recognize what will become landmark gestures of Boulez, the basis of his language: violent lightenings illuminating the whole space of the instrument, permanently varied arpeggi, short unexpected gestures going in any direction.

By the first piano sonata, it’s completely Boulez and only Boulez. It’s a short piece, compact, but profoundly intense and presenting a basic dialectic for Boulez’s music, between a very active music and a music that is more observing the life of the sounds. It’s probably one of his most free compositions. There are passages that sound as if they were almost improvised. There is a kind of lyrical abstraction there that is very personal.

AS A CONDUCTOR

FRANZ WELSER-MÖST, music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, which Boulez first conducted in 1965: He has this unbelievable gift to convey something without showing it in his expression. The image of a conductor today is so much molded on Leonard Bernstein. Pierre is the total opposite, but nevertheless he gets these results that are not detached. They’re just very clean, very to the core of the music. Conducting is partly show business, but he never looked at it that way.

SALONEN He always said that the form and the expression of most Western art music come from the harmony. If you don’t know the harmony well, you cannot understand, let alone convey, the sense of the form to anybody. On a practical level it means you have to go through every chord when you go through a score. It sounds obvious and trivial, but if you study, say, “Götterdämmerung” or “Elektra,” to get a clear idea of the harmonic structure takes a lot of time. There are no shortcuts. You have to learn what the principles of the harmony are, and then you can plan your so-called interpretation.

WELSER-MÖST, on a memorable Boulez performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony: Some people give everything away in the first movement, and then you have to sit there for another hour. He didn’t. It was almost irritating at first. But later on, you understood why he was doing what he did, and in the end it was so much more moving. He made Mahler’s music sound pure...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/arts/ ... oulez.html

The piece goes on to discuss Boulez's music and his influence.

[some guy]

Nice article. I wish it weren't condensed, but it's better than nothing.

Boulez's 90th birthday is Thursday. He says that the form and the expression of most Western art music come from the harmony. There's a lot of truth in that; I'd say it's true about the expression, less so about the form.

This is intriguing. I would have thought that the whole equal temperament thing back in the day, which made modulation possible and hence all the various forms of Western art music from Bach to the present, would mean "more so" about form, not less.

[John F]

I'm thinking of the whole of western music, not just sonata-allegro form, which is indeed based on the play of tonality (related to harmony but not the same thing). I wouldn't say that of other forms and periods, from a Bach chaconne or fugue to Schoenberg's Klavierstücke. If you would, then we'd disagree.

[some guy]

I'm thinking of the whole of western music, not just sonata-allegro form, which is indeed based on the play of tonality (related to harmony but not the same thing). I wouldn't say that of other forms and periods, from a Bach chaconne or fugue to Schoenberg's Klavierstücke. If you would, then we'd disagree.

I'm not really interested in the agreeing or disagreeing part of it.

I would have thought that equal temperament, which covers from Bach to Schoenberg, would have meant that harmony--the harmonic relations it makes possible, or at least practical--is a prime component of form.

Earlier, not so much.

That is, I have a vague sense of the forms of pre-Bach music being different, less formal (as it were) than the ones that arose afterwards.

Sonata-allegro is indeed one of many forms that arose after modulation became practical, and I was thinking of all those, too, but even if it had been the only one, its influence on musical thinking would still mean, I would think, that form most definitely comes from harmony after equal temperament. But it has been a long time since I was in any sort of music theory class and almost as long since I read anything in any detail about CPT.

So I was maybe a little bit thinking that you might have some information about pre-modulation harmony and its effect on form and even that you might have some information about post-modulation harmony and its effect on form. That is, I asked not because I have an answer so much as because I was intrigued by your conclusion. I want to know how you got to your conclusion. I already know how I got to mine, so that's not as interesting to me. I don't know how you got to yours, so that is interesting to me.

[John F]

If you'll read again what I said, I agree with Boulez that "the expression of most Western art music comes from the harmony," but say that this is less true of form. Note: less true, not untrue. This isn't about "information" but about impressions, necessarily so where expression is concerned; a mere diminished seventh can pack an expressive wallop. Just a passing observation, no big deal, and I'm not going to argue with you about it.

If you want to read the complete Times piece, click on the link. Here it is again:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/arts/ ... oulez.html