Pierre Boulez, RIP

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm a big fan of Boulez, and of Classical Music. However, as freely stated , his death represents the end of an era. What era might that be, and what will or is replacing it?

When I used that phrase, I meant specifically the era of European composers, born in the mid(-ish) 1920s and whose careers emerged from the devastation of WW2, who created a new way of Music-making that at first seemed to break with what had gone before it, but which later revealed deep connections with (and rejuvenated) those earlier traditions. Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Berio, Barraque, Xenakis, Ligeti ... all now dead.

What comes next - well, several things have already occurred: the influx of ideas from the United States (first Cage, Feldman, Tenney, Wolff, Brown ... then LaMonte Young, Riley, Reich, Glass), Musique Concrete Instrumentale, New Music Manchester, New Complexity, Spectralism, Holy Minimalists ... There is so much available for composers to discover their own preferred means of expression, that I think that the "Era" that has come to an end with Boulez is the last in which a single type of composing methodology could dominate ... making the others "useless". In fact, in that respect (and in that respect only) we can consider ourselves well rid of it.

[ardcarp]

Did Boulez take composition students?

Listening to a lovely piece for string orchestra on today's Sunday Morning (Reflections of a 16th century tune) by Richard Rodney Bennett, I was moved to look up how long ago he died. Whilst doing so I came across:

He [RRB] ..... spent two years in Paris as a student of the prominent serialist Pierre Boulez between 1957 and 1959

Quite a surprise.

[Serial_Apologist]

Listening to a lovely piece for string orchestra on today's Sunday Morning (Reflections of a 16th century tune) by Richard Rodney Bennett, I was moved to look up how long ago he died. Whilst doing so I came across:



Quite a surprise.

I'd completely forgotten about RRB! Of course!! And he spent quite a lot of time stating how hard he had tried to extricate himself from Boulez's influence, or at any rate, the feeling of the Master looking disapprovingly over his shoulder at his young apprentice. I think it was the Third Symphony in which he felt he had successfully managed to do so. Shame he had to make disparaging remarks about 12-tone serialism in this connection, since to my mind some of his best music (like Goehr's) was composed using it, without sounding in the slightest like Boulez. The orchestral song cycle "Voices", for example.

[ahinton]

I'd completely forgotten about RRB! Of course!! And he spent quite a lot of time stating how hard he had tried to extricate himself from Boulez's influence, or at any rate, the feeling of the Master looking disapprovingly over his shoulder at his young apprentice. I think it was the Third Symphony in which he felt he had successfully managed to do so. Shame he had to make disparaging remarks about 12-tone serialism in this connection, since to my mind some of his best music (like Goehr's) was composed using it, without sounding in the slightest like Boulez. The orchestral song cycle "Voices", for example.

RRB was apparetly not only Boulez's only private student but on of his first students and he did speak well of him - but he could turn his hand to so many ways of writing with such ease and without any sense that one of them might be perceived as in irresoluble conflict with any other - no mean achievement, in my book!

[Tapiola]

So farewell then M. Boulez
"Burn down the opera houses" you once said.
And yet you mellowed to espouse pieces such as Bruckner and Mahler 8 ffs
You were a giant of 20th Century Music
But perhaps mainly for the works of others you elucidated for so many, including me
Though you left us with a few great works of your own.
Keith's mum hopes that no one comes after you to write a nasty and ungrateful obituary outlining your supposed irrelevance to the development of Western art
To further their own career.

[Quarky]

When I used that phrase, I meant specifically the era of European composers, born in the mid(-ish) 1920s and whose careers emerged from the devastation of WW2, who created a new way of Music-making that at first seemed to break with what had gone before it, but which later revealed deep connections with (and rejuvenated) those earlier traditions. Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Berio, Barraque, Xenakis, Ligeti ... all now dead.

What comes next - well, several things have already occurred: the influx of ideas from the United States (first Cage, Feldman, Tenney, Wolff, Brown ... then LaMonte Young, Riley, Reich, Glass), Musique Concrete Instrumentale, New Music Manchester, New Complexity, Spectralism, Holy Minimalists ... There is so much available for composers to discover their own preferred means of expression, that I think that the "Era" that has come to an end with Boulez is the last in which a single type of composing methodology could dominate ... making the others "useless". In fact, in that respect (and in that respect only) we can consider ourselves well rid of it.

Many thanks, fhg, for those wise and informative comments!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Many thanks, fhg, for those wise and informative comments!

[Bryn]

I was working last night, so missed the Radio 3 In Concert Boulez at 80 tribute broadcast. For what ever reason, and despite the announcement which followed the broadcast to the effect that it would be available to listen to for 30 days on the Radio 3 website (that announcement to be found at the start of the programme which followed it) it is not available on the iPlayer Listen Again facility. Did any one here perhaps record it last night?

[ahinton]

When I used that phrase, I meant specifically the era of European composers, born in the mid(-ish) 1920s and whose careers emerged from the devastation of WW2, who created a new way of Music-making that at first seemed to break with what had gone before it, but which later revealed deep connections with (and rejuvenated) those earlier traditions. Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Berio, Barraque, Xenakis, Ligeti ... all now dead.

What comes next - well, several things have already occurred: the influx of ideas from the United States (first Cage, Feldman, Tenney, Wolff, Brown ... then LaMonte Young, Riley, Reich, Glass), Musique Concrete Instrumentale, New Music Manchester, New Complexity, Spectralism, Holy Minimalists ... There is so much available for composers to discover their own preferred means of expression, that I think that the "Era" that has come to an end with Boulez is the last in which a single type of composing methodology could dominate ... making the others "useless". In fact, in that respect (and in that respect only) we can consider ourselves well rid of it.

Excellent sense, as usual from you - although it might reasonably be argued that this particular era had already come to an end well before the death of Boulez for the very reason to which you draw attention, namely the dissipation of the (perceived) dominance of a single type of composing methodology, especially to the extent of its being perceived as potentially or actually divisive and factionalising; so many other movements, not least those that you mention, have been making their mark and exerting their influences without asserting any such supremacy for up to 70 years - in other words the entire duration of Boulez's own composing career!

It might therefore be argued that the ways espoused by Boulez and perhaps endorsed as if some kind of creed by a number of one-time "Darmstadt composers", however forcefully, had always in reality been obliged to coexist with those of other movements in music and, whilst the former may well have been noted as making a good deal more noise (at least in 50s and 60s central Europe) than, say, the symphonies of Rubbra, Simpson and Arnold, those and other symphonists were never coerced by Boulez et cie into falling into line with some kind of "musical modernist" practice - and then there was, for example, Britten mainly in Britain and Shostakovich over large parts of the Western music listening world each making a very considerable impact.

I'm not therefore convinced that the "useless" arguments of those of authoritarian autocratic persuasion (perhaps most notably Boulez himself) cut quite so successfully forceful a swathe through Western music making as a whole since the end of WWI as some have sought to have us believe; lots of argumentative sound and fury, to be sure, but parhaps signifying rather less than such "modernist" (allegedly) past-rejecting advocates might have hoped.

Another interesting, if by comparison incidental, fact about Boulez that I've read since his death is that two British composers have declared that they find most of his music emotionally unengaging. Two composers from similar camps, one might think - until realising that they are Richard Barrett and David Matthews!...

[makropulos]

I was working last night, so missed the Radio 3 In Concert Boulez at 80 tribute broadcast. For what ever reason, and despite the announcement which followed the broadcast to the effect that it would be available to listen to for 30 days on the Radio 3 website (that announcement to be found at the start of the programme which followed it) it is not available on the iPlayer Listen Again facility. Did any one here perhaps record it last night?

I missed it too, so can't help with a recording of last night's concert. But the whole thing is currently buried on the iPlayer in its video version:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p013s7yh/boulez-at-80

Hope that's some consolation.

[Roslynmuse]

I missed it too, so can't help with a recording of last night's concert. But the whole thing is currently buried on the iPlayer in its video version:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p013s7yh/boulez-at-80

Hope that's some consolation.

Looking forward to watching this later.

[Beef Oven!]

Looking forward to watching this later.

I was at that concert.

IIRC, Harrison Birtwistle was sitting next to Peter Maxwell Davies (a few rows in front of me to my right).

Will also watch it later.

Was anyone else from the forum there?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

We studied Boulez at university - 44 years ago. The basis of it was an essay by Ligeti on "Structures 1". I'm still not convinced by the complexities of it.

But it's stuck in my mind ever since.

[gurnemanz]

Before Pelléas at the Barbican yesterday, Simon Rattle grabbed a mike and paid tribute to PB, dedicating the performance to him and recalling having first met him aged 15.

[Tapiola]

We studied Boulez at university - 44 years ago. The basis of it was an essay by Ligeti on "Structures 1". I'm still not convinced by the complexities of it.

But it's stuck in my mind ever since.

IIRC, Ligeti, in an interview broadcast on Radio 3 some years ago, mentioned that in his analysis of Structures, he found some mistakes in Boulez's workings-out. Boulez was not a bit pleased and cut his ties with the Hungarian (before, obviously, a later rapprochement).