Still reading the book on 20th century French poetry I ran across this brief passage:
Tu es dans ton essence constamment poète, constamment au zénith de ton amour, constamment avide de vérité et de justice. C'est sans doute un mal nécessaire que tu ne puisses l'être assidûment dans ta conscience.
In translation:
In your essence you are always a poet, always at the height of your love, always hungry for truth and justice. It is no doubt a necessary evil that you cannot be one steadily in your conscience.
The author is René Char (1907 - 1988). The name is familiar because he was the author of the poetry used in Le Marteau sans maître, a chamber cantata by Pierre Boulez, composed in 1953/54. So that's two old friends. Another is Thomas Merton who translated much of the poetry of René Char.
If you don't know Thomas Merton, he wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, one of the most compelling accounts of a spiritual journey ever written.
I credit myself with great restraint for not titling a post "Boulez est mort!" in riposte to Pierre Boulez' famous essay "Schoenberg est mort" published in 1952, the year after Schoenberg died. However, as you will see from the link, not everyone was so restrained. On the occasion of Boulez' passing last week, I decided to do a couple of posts on his music which, frankly, has never made much of an aesthetic impression on me.
Most of Boulez' music was garnished with austere, remote titles like "Structures" or "Pli selon pli" ("Fold by fold"), but there is one early piece, and one that I had in my LP collection from the mid 70s, that not only has an evocative, if enigmatic, title, but also seems to relate to an earlier composition by Schoenberg. I am referring to "Pierrot Lunaire", a song-cycle by Schoenberg written in 1912 on German translations of 21 poems by Albert Giraud. Then, in 1955, Boulez completed a setting, in nine movements, of three poems by René Char titled "Le Marteau sans maître". Both compositions are for voice and chamber ensemble, both are settings of French poetry and both are innovative classics of modernism. Both also have a duration of about 35 to 40 minutes. The Schoenberg is for voice and five instruments, the Boulez for voice and six instruments. Both pieces even use the same vocal technique of Sprechstimme. The parallels are striking, but while it is likely that they exist, I have not run across any discussion of relations between the two pieces. So let's do it!
First problem, unless I order a copy of the study score from Universal Edition and wait a couple of months, I can't provide musical examples for the Boulez. The Schoenberg is available at IMSLP. There is a brief excerpt from Le marteau sans maître at Wikipedia. Here is the flute part from the beginning of the third movement:
Click to enlarge
Let's just have a brief look at that example. This is ridiculously difficult to play from a rhythmic standpoint: a septuplet in 3/8 with a fermata on the last note, tied to the first note of a four-note group of grace notes in the new time signature of 4/4, and during this you crescendo? Then a long F natural while you decrescendo, another group of two grace notes to a very high G. An eighth rest. Four quarter notes in the new time signature of 2/2 with a couple of grace notes, new time signature of 3/8 but with a hemiola so it sounds as if it were 6/16, quintuplet on the first beat of a new 3/4 measure and the final measure of the excerpt is 5/8. Every single measure is in a different time signature and on top of this, the rhythms themselves are very difficult. Honestly, playing this is an exercise in insanity. And the final insult is that the tempo indication is "moderate without rigor", i.e. don't play the rhythms too strictly!
I don't want to accuse Boulez of writing music that he cannot hear accurately--I'm sure he can. But I question whether anyone else can, apart from the poor musicians who have to learn this. And what is the point? As a number of other composers have shown, you can get pretty much the same results with indeterminate notation and fewer musician suicides. But the real problem I have with this is that it is aesthetically incoherent. If you want to depict chaos and despair, then I suppose this is just the thing, but that and nothing but, is an aesthetically disagreeable cocktail.
Here is the first page of the Schoenberg:
Yes, also very difficult, but not insanely so. The difficulties are surmountable, not just for the performers, but for the listener as well. There is enough rhythmic consistency to make the music, while certainly eerie, at least listenable. What Schoenberg was doing was a kind of extension or stretching of musical forms and techniques. He uses canon, fugue, passacaglia and other forms but with more than usually complex rhythms and with atonality. This piece lies in the transition from when he wrote in the usual extended tonality of the late 19th century to his use of twelve-tone serialism. You might think of this as tonality stretched to the point of no return.
Here is an English translation of that first song from Pierrot Lunaire:
The wine we drink through the eyes
The moon pours down at night in waves,
And a flood tide overflows
The silent horizon.
Longings beyond number, gruesome sweet frissons,
Swim through the flood.
The wine we drink through the eyes
The moon pours down at night in waves.
The poet, slave to devotion,
Drunk on the sacred liquor,
Enraptured, turns his face to Heaven
And staggering sucks and slurps
The wine we drink through the eyes.
Here is an English translation of the text of the first sung movement of the Boulez, "L'artisanat furieux:
The furious craftsmanship
The red caravan on the edge of the nail
And corpse in the basket
And plowhorses in the horseshoe
I dream the head on the point of my knife Peru.
This is even more surrealist than the Giraud.
Now let's listen to the two pieces. First the Schoenberg, conducted by Pierre Boulez with Christine Schäfer and the Ensemble InterContemporain:
And now the Boulez, again with Boulez conducting with Hillary Summers and the Ensemble InterContemporain:
I am not going to do an analysis: for one thing it would take a very long time and there already exist analyses of the Schoenberg and even of the Boulez. For brief analyses of both pieces have a look at the Wikipedia articles I linked above. The Boulez article is particularly useful.
But what I think would be very useful to do is listen to both pieces and notice what you hear and say what you think about what you hear. The comment section awaits!
I am always conscious of two dangers in talking about music and aesthetics in the early 21st century. You might call them the Scylla and Charybdis of music blogging. On the one hand we have the rocky shoal of the politicizing of music and on the other the whirlpool dragging us down into the isolation of music in a hermetically-sealed chamber away from messy politics. I try to steer a middle course by noticing politics from time to time when it seems relevant and looking at music as it is in itself the rest of the time.
One issue that I have brought up from time to time is the ideology of modernism in music which condemned all those composers, like Shostakovich and others, who continued to write tonal and melodic music despite the proclamations of the avant-garde that this was now "music of the past" and therefore bad. I have described this as kind of a Deuteronomy of music history: Schoenberg begat Berg and Webern and they begat Boulez and Stockhausen and also of their tribe were Cage and Bartók. To my mind, aesthetic quality is not determined by ideological purity.
I just ran across an item at Slipped Disc titled in Norman Lebrecht's usual over-heated style as "French rage: Michel Legrand accuses Pierre Boulez of ‘acting like a Fascist’." The comment section is a kind of MRI scan of the various opinions on this question. I was rather surprised, though I shouldn't have been, that there are so many commentators with whom I would, roughly, agree.
Legrand's claim is that:
‘For 40 years Boulez and his ‘family’ have closed all possibilities for all other composers to be performed. He decided that the musical past would be wiped out and we would start from scratch. He shut the door to all other composers. Composers like me could not have made a living because we had no access to the concert hall.’
Here is a sample comment:
What you say is true and perceptive; however, in the USA there are still large pockets of powerful and intolerant ‘orthodoxy’ who control much of the funding for new music. Some of these pockets are accidental, caused by locals coincidentally banding together. But too many are of course in the hands of various influential academics, musicologists, or commentators who still subscribe to a totalitarianism, perhaps mildly modified by a grudging acknowledgement of John Adams and others, but a totalitarianism still ‘armed’ by a general rejection of anything with a relationship to traditional melody, a pulse, and general tonality.
This is the general political problem of our time in a nutshell: there is a class in our society that takes on a leadership role based largely on career opportunism and credentials and seeks to control discussion and funding of those things they consider important. They don't want to have a free and open discussion, because they don't want their basic assumptions revealed, let alone questioned.
In music, I believe I have summarized these basic assumptions in a number of places, but they include the view that the music of the past is dead and irrelevant and the music of today and the future must be structured in entirely new ways. It is not to be either the personal expression of the composer or an appeal to the tastes of the audience. It is instead to be an exploration of novelty in various ways.
As a matter of fact, I think that this ideological movement, which I usually call "modernism" or "high modernism" has failed. Performances of this kind of music are dwindling as other competing models come to the fore such as the new consonance, minimalism, process music and a lot of other similar music that does not benefit from a handy catchphrase.
I notice that one sign of the failure of the modernists is that they no longer seem to control the purse strings of the major competitions. Philip Glass was just given the Glenn Gould prize and John Luther Adams was given the Pulitzer Prize in Music last year. These are both composers who customarily use consonance and a regular pulse.
So, since all too many people are agreeing with me, I need to reconsider and refine my position! Is it not the case that, while the modernists were over-complex and contemptuous of their audience, the new consonance composers are perhaps too bland and pander to the audience?
Pierre Boulez is one of the few remaining iconic figures of 20th century modernism. My most recent post on him is here, where I talk about his list of ten important pieces of 20th century music. Boulez' stance is that of high modernism, which I have also talked about a lot. While recognizing that some great music, like the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Bartók, has been written in this style, my sense is that things went rather astray after the Second World War when "progressive" music took rather a radical turn with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Possibly the most influential composer of this generation was and is Pierre Boulez, who celebrates his 90th birthday this year.
One of the acts that gave him considerable notoriety in his early career was an essay he wrote titled "Schoenberg est mort" ("Schoenberg is dead") published in 1952, just a year after his death. You can find a summary of its main points here. For Boulez, Schoenberg was just not radical enough, and retained too many features of pre-serial music. Anton Webern instead was to be the model for post-war composers. It is very tempting, of course, to wait for the suitable moment and then write an essay titled "Boulez est mort", but two wrongs don't make a right! Notice that it was as much for his polemics as for his compositions that Boulez became known. Later on he was better-known to the general public in his role as conductor than as composer. Indeed, he expiated his sins regarding Schoenberg (and Bartók, about whom he also was rather unkind, and for the same reasons) by making definitive recordings of much of their music. If you want really outstanding and accurate recordings of Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky, Debussy and others, those of Pierre Boulez are the ones to look for. Many of these have been reissued in inexpensive boxes (that devoted to Schoenberg has eleven CDs) quite recently.
However, in this even-numbered birthday year, Alex Ross notes that, in America at least, the music of Boulez is oddly neglected:
Mark Swed, in the LA Times, recently noted a shortage of American orchestral tributes to Pierre Boulez in his ninetieth-birthday year. The New York Philharmonic, Boulez's former base, programmed nothing by him this season; likewise the LA Phil. Instead, as Swed observed, on Boulez's birthday both orchestras were playing works by John Adams.
Ouch! Mind you, the neglect is not total:
this Sunday in New York, David Robertson and the Juilliard Orchestra will perform Boulez's Rituel and the Originel from “…explosante-fixe…," alongside Debussy’s Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun" and Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Winds.
That looks like an interesting program; one I would like to attend. Let's try and recreate it here with the aid of YouTube. First, Rituel, a hommage to Bruno Maderna:
Next, Originel from explosante-fixe:
A good piece to pair with that might be the Debussy, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Here is Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra:
And finally, that very unusual piece by Stravinsky, the Symphonies of Winds. Here is Boulez conducting a 1985 live performance:
I have to admit that I am of two minds here. Obviously the long-term influence of Boulez and evaluation of his music is still very much up in the air. Perhaps a hundred years from now the 20th century can be weighed more judiciously, just as the 19th century is in the process of being weighed today. But it seems clear that, in the short term, the lighter-weight minimalism of John Adams, John Luther Adams, Philip Glass and Steve Reich has a much higher profile in the classical music world--even though the last two of these had to put together their own ensembles to play their music in the early days. Boulez has accused more traditional composers, like Shostakovich, of "playing with clichés" because of their use of tonality and rhythmic and melodic gestures that resemble those of tonal music. But he does not seem to realize that the rhythmic and melodic gestures that we often find in his music, take for example the flute solo at the beginning of Originel, also can start to sound like clichés--clichés of high modernism. The rapid flurries of arpeggiations ending with a mid-range trill, the jerky rhythms, the leaping from one end of the range to another, all these things are heard over and over again in the music of Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Ferneyhough and others of that generation. Are they not now, along with the continuing dissonance, a cliché? Certainly to my ears, which is one reason why I find it hard to love that music. But maybe we just need another hundred years...
There are a few interesting things about Pierre Boulez' list of 10 great compositions of the 20th century. Perhaps the most striking thing about it is not so much what it includes, a lot of justifiably famous 20th century pieces, but more what it excludes. First of all, let's have a look at when the pieces he selects were composed:
Varèse, Ameriques: 1918-1921, revised 1927
Berg, Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6, 1913-1915
Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, 1913
Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, 1936
Webern, Six Pieces for Orchestra, 1909-10, revised 1928
Berio, Sinfonia, 1968-69
Stockhausen, Gruppen, 1955-57
Mahler, Symphony No. 6, 1903-04, revised 1906
Schönberg, Erwartung, 1909
Boulez, Répons, 1984
There are two enormous omissions, at least they seem enormous to me. The first is a surprising one: a composer who is not only one of the most influential of the century, but one who shares his nationality with Boulez: yes, of course, Claude Debussy. We might argue as to which piece to mention, perhaps Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (even though it was composed in 1894),perhaps his late ballet Jeux. But I think few would disagree with how Wikipedia describes Debussy's influence:
So why would Boulez omit him? Perhaps because Debussy contradicts one of Boulez fundamental assumptions: that great music cannot at the same time be popular. This is a core assumption of 20th century modernism in music, at least up until the mid-century. But just looking at the list above shows that Debussy's influence was very, very broad. Why ever would Boulez include a piece by Mahler and not one by Debussy?
The other omission is more subtle: notice how, with just a couple of exceptions, the list avoids any mention of music written after the mid-century. Note the inclusion of Boulez' own Répons, which is the newest piece on the list! Setting aside that, there are only two pieces written after 1950, Gruppen by Stockhausen which is just barely after 1950, and the Sinfonia by Berio. Boulez includes his Pantheon of great pieces, meaning the ones that were very important to him, but at the same time omitting perhaps the most important, Debussy, while avoiding any hint that the course of 20th century music has changed since the maximal complexity of the mid-century.
So we pose the question, what might we suggest are some great works from the second half of the century, as Boulez has not troubled himself with that? Some names that seem to be important are John Cage, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Thomas Adès and Esa-Pekka Salonen. These figures are likely anathema to Boulez because they repudiate some of his fundamental beliefs about music: that you cannot write great music and be popular, that music, in order to be taken seriously has to always strive for the maximum complexity and that tonality is dead.
I think my list of 10 great pieces of 20th century music would look something like this:
Debussy, La Mer, 1903-05
Sibelius, Symphony No. 4, 1910-11
Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire, 1912
Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, 1913
Berg, Wozzeck, 1914-22
Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, 1936
Cage, 4'33, 1952
Pettersson, Symphony No. 7, 1966-68
Reich, Drumming, 1970-71
John Adams, The Death of Klinghoffer, 1991
A lot of this list needs no special justification. You could argue for a different piece by Debussy and the only reason I did not cite the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is that it was composed in 1894. There was another odd omission in Boulez' list, no opera or vocal works, and I have tried to correct that by including the obviously most important piece by Berg, Wozzeck, and Pierrot by Schoenberg. A couple of pieces might be surprising to readers of this blog: the silent piece by Cage and the very controversial opera by Adams which Taruskin accused of "moral blankness and opportunism", both of which might be true. But both these pieces, for different reasons, have had an important and wide influence so I thought they needed inclusion. As for the Pettersson, I honestly can't think of a more powerful work from the 1960s, a decade really dominated by the Beatles. And I continue to believe that the most radical work of the century has to be Drumming by Steve Reich, whether you like it or not. It pared music down to its absolute essence and rebuilt it--you don't get more radical than that.
I would very much have liked to include something by Shostakovich, either the Symphony No. 5 from 1937--perhaps it could share billing with the Bartók--or the String Quartet No. 8 from 1960. Certainly, if I were to follow my own taste I would drop the Cage in favor of the quartet. But I think that my list leans as far as possible in the direction of historical importance while also considering aesthetic importance.
Hmm, what to pick as a musical envoi? I suppose the most unfamiliar piece on the list is the symphony by Allan Pettersson, so let's hear that. Here is Sergiu Comissiona conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra:
This week was the 90th birthday of one of the central figures in 20th century music after World War II. Born in 1925, Pierre Boulez has been one of the great conductors of the last several decades and a composer of great influence. For Soundcheck he recently provided a list of the ten works that he thinks are the most significant in 20th century music. This, along with his comments, is well worth taking a look at. Here is the article. If you accept the basic assumption, that the most important criteria is technical novelty, doing something as differently as possible from what has been done before, then there is not much to argue with in this list.
The thing is, that while I am in complete agreement with a lot of the pieces, I don't think that every piece, in order to be great, has to be so difficult, both for the performers and listeners, all the time. I think that aesthetic greatness has more criteria: expressive intensity, humanity, breadth of expression and so on. Nearly all of Boulez' choices, including his music, are harmonically dissonant, dynamically extreme, rhythmically jagged and with pointillist texture. I don't think all great music must be like that, even in the 20th century. But that being said, yes, these ten works are classics of 20th century music.
I think I will make up my own list so we can argue about it. Some pieces I would consider including would be something by Steve Reich, something by Sibelius (if Boulez can include Mahler, I think I can include Sibelius), and something by Shostakovich.
But there is no arguing about this piece, which would easily make my list as it did Boulez'. Here is Boulez conducting the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta of Bela Bartók played by the Vienna Philharmonic in a live concert in 2007:
