Exquisite Labyrinth - Pierre Boulez @ Southbank Centre - 30.09 to 02.10.11

[Guest]

There's a weekend of Boulez's music in a little over a month. If anyone has any tips and recommendations, I'd be interested to have them.

http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/festivals-series/exquisite-labyrinth-the-music-of-pierre-boulez

An orchestral concert on all three evenings - Peter Eotvos conducting London Sinfonietta on Saturday; Boulez himself conducting Ensemble Intercontemperain. All of his piano music on Sunday 02.10 spread across three concerts at noon, 3 and 4.30 pm

I don't know Boulez's music but I have the sense of him as a sort of Pol Pot, music's executioner, advocating an artistic Year Zero. I read an essay of his about Schoenberg's serial music; the gist of the article was that Schoenberg was a sort of apostate who revolutionised music by breaking altogether with tonality but then organised the music conventionally. The point made sense to me - he made it convincingly - but it took 8 pages of highly obscure (admittedly translated) English to make and he makes the point at the end, not the start. I rather supposed this telling of his mind must tell me something about his music.

[Serial_Apologist]

Blimey, I'd love to go to all those! What a chance of a lifetime! Too much of a financial outlay, though.

The first two concerts consist of Boulez's relatively more recent (often re-visited) and imv more accessible work, where his stylistic continuities with French forerunners important to him (Messiaen, Debussy) are more clearly heard than in the earlier, stricter (? - ahem) serial works such as Structures. "Memoriale" derives (pun not intended) straight from Debussy's flute, viola and harp sonata in instrumentation, harmonic and melodic language, and in its sensuous allure.

The talks on day 3 would be right up my street - I have found no satisfactory write-up informing whether or not Boulez still actually uses serialism at all, and I have looked: his music in the amazing clarinet pieces sounds more modal, though complex modal (viz Messiaen) than serial to me.

I thought there was a Third piano sonata from about 1959, sub(?)titled "Formants" with different sections arranged around the page, to be performed according to the performer's inclinations, without repetition of any section? Or am I imagining? If not, has Boulez withdrawn the work?

The final concert of non-Boulez works would only interest me for its inclusion of the Wagner sonata. Every erudite Wagner scribe speaks of his symphonic mastery; mastery it may be, but, apart from the easily detectable sonata structure of the "Meistersinger" overture, this sense of structure is always too stretched out for my ability to discern its developing characteristics minute-by-minute - as appeals to me in e.g. Beethoven or Brahms because one can - owing to the inordinate length of the works through which Wagner eked whatever sense of structure was intended out. The piano sonata - which I hadn't known about - could be instructive, possibly.

I could be wrong, but my guess is that the Boulez of today would repudiate the Boulez who rejected Schoenberg's thematicism as contradicting principles innate in atonal and serial music; I heard him on radio in 1988 using "Rituel" as an example of a work whose continuities - continuities, mind - constituted its very explication - and it is very thematic!!!

Thanks, hackneyvi - so much to keep up with, I seldom follow the classical itinerary!

S-A

[Roehre]

Hackneyvi and S-A,

I am shocked that I am unable to attend , as I am on the continent by then .
Nice overview you offer, S_A.

I'd like to add 2 observations:

I.Boulez's Piano sonate no.3 dates from 1957, as is titled "tropes", pointing at the "different sections arranged around the page, to be performed according to the performer's inclinations, without repetition of any section", a section is a trope. Boulez still acknowledges the work (and an excellent interpretation can be found on Naxos )

II.Any clues which of the three Wagner sonatas has been programmed?

All three are early works and last for some 25-30 minutes:
no.1 in B-flat opus 1 WWV 21 dates from 1831, and is a 4 mvt work modelled after the Hammerklavier.

The Sonata-fantasie in f-sharp minor opus 3 WWV 22 is a one movement work which can be described as an instrumental operatic scene, including extended recitatives.

no.2 in A opus 4 WWV 26 dates from 1832, and shows more Weber-influences (though Beethoven is never far away), and the Symphony in C (WWV 29, also 1832) is definitely in its vicinity.

There exists a 4th (one-mvt) Sonata in A-flat , but that one is generally known as "Eine Sonate für das Album von Frau M.W." WWV 85 from 1853, and M.W. is ofcourse Mathilde Wesendonck (a schoolbook sonata form, though with an adventurous choice of keys, and lasts just under 10 minutes).

I hope this fires your enthusiasm (it would mine)

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks Roehr

So there WAS a third sonata. It doesn't appear on the programme Perhaps I should then go along and, as a double hommage, kick off a riot!

Only one Wagner sonata is mentioned. If it is early I would probably find nothing instructive in it; I shall continue taking my cues from"Siegfrieds idyll"

[cavatina]

Good grief, what an impressive series...here's hoping I can catch at least some of it.

Have any of you had a chance to read his collected writings? I picked this up years ago, but it certainly bears re-reading:

PIERRE BOULEZ-- ORIENTATIONS: COLLECTED WRITINGS

From the LA Times review:

"Orientations," like everything connected with the feisty chatelain of IRCAM (Institut de recherche et de coordination acoustique/musique), the Paris-based crucible of avant-garde composing and performing techniques, is ferocious in its intelligence, unyielding in its seriousness. It treats at considerable length--and often with mind-boggling learnedness--the relationships between music and poetry, and music and philosophy (Boulez is as intense a reader as he is a listener and writer), a good deal of it drawn from 1960s lectures to colleagues--polymaths like himself--in the futurist enclaves of Donaueschingen and Darmstadt."

[Serial_Apologist]

I haven't read that, but I have been given a copy of his "Boulez on Music Today" (1970) edited by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett - and a harder work either to read or to translate, I can scarcely imagine. Boulez is of that strain of French thinkers who use language to make understanding as difficult as possible, building an impenetrable artex of verbiage in an apparent effort to keep the hoi-polloi out. Which surprises me, having attended one talk in which he was the very fount of clarity - at one point speaking of the thematic references in Berg's Chamber Concerto as "like an ice Berg". If he has let up on the obscurantism, this might be worth investigating, but seeing the books is drawn from when it is, I have my doubts. Anyway, thanks.

[hackneyvi]

Blimey, I'd love to go to all those! What a chance of a lifetime! Too much of a financial outlay, though.

The first two concerts consist of Boulez's relatively more recent (often re-visited) and imv more accessible work, where his stylistic continuities with French forerunners important to him (Messiaen, Debussy) are more clearly heard than in the earlier, stricter (? - ahem) serial works such as Structures. "Memoriale" derives (pun not intended) straight from Debussy's flute, viola and harp sonata in instrumentation, harmonic and melodic language, and in its sensuous allure.

The talks on day 3 would be right up my street -

I doubt I'd understand a word of their yap.

I've rather been thinking I might go to all 3 of the orchestral concerts. £9 to hear Peter Eotvos and Boulez conducting seems like good value and alternate versions of the same piece (Domaines) is intriguing.

The one time I've been, I didn't much like the Festival Hall - the ostentatiously-raised, slow-hand clapped, standing ovations; the Arctic atmosphere; the checked shirts. But listening to pli selon pli on Spotify, the first movement was unexpectedly approachable. The more singing there was, though, - the third movement had a long sung section - the less purpose I found in it. The first, after the opening snatch of song, seemed to be taking rhythms or phrases and presenting them in related and contrasting instrumentation, volume, speed; what of it I grasped seemed to have touches of pop art about it; the same shape repeatedly in different colouring; this made the instrument more the focus of the listening than the notes played by it. A strange experience. I see how this music is still distinctly French because it does seem to be concerned with gracefulness. I had a sense of Boulez as a clinician; if a psychiatrist is someone who isn't able professionally to differentiate between chemistry and behaviour, similarly it feels to me as though Boulez mustn't distinguish between music and the instrumental voice?

Hackneyvi and S-A,

I am shocked that I am unable to attend ...

I hope this fires your enthusiasm (it would mine)

Mixed feelings. Boulez has seemed to me dogmatic about music and I'm doubtful about dogmatic people. I'd expect him to think me pleb and bourgeoise. Still, with pli selon pli under my belt, perhaps I can appreciate His Masterpieces. and

Good grief, what an impressive series...here's hoping I can catch at least some of it.

Is it likely to be recorded and broadcast?

[Serial_Apologist]

Is it likely to be recorded and broadcast?

If you are able to make much of Pli Selon Pli I take my hat off, hackneyvi, though admittedly it's many years since I heard it. Maybe I'd not find it as difficult now as I did then. I was however always impressed by the work's colnclusion, when following a prolonged and seeminly mountingly chaotic build-up, the music stops, the piano strikes some of the most amazing chords I have ever encountered, and the voice comes in.

I've no idea if the programmes will be broadcast, but my hunch is, probably not.

[hackneyvi]

If you are able to make much of Pli Selon Pli I take my hat off, hackneyvi, though admittedly it's many years since I heard it. Maybe I'd not find it as difficult now as I did then. I was however always impressed by the work's colnclusion, when following a prolonged and seeminly mountingly chaotic build-up, the music stops, the piano strikes some of the most amazing chords I have ever encountered, and the voice comes in.

Truthfully, I've still got 2 movement to go. But the first yielded something - there's a passage where roughly the same phrase (chord?) is repeated perhaps 5 times in a row but with a different instrumental combination each time. I can't think of the right word for this - it's not 'synonym' but something like it; the combinations seem to show how closely very different instrumental sounds can be 'accented'; it's like hearing the accent of Shetlanders and recognising the nordic in what one thinks of as one's countrymen or seeing a nordic/germanic word written and feeling oneself in some respect to be germanic because we use the same word but the germanic preceded ours.

There seems to be something actually linguistic about Boulez' orchestration. This habit or intention of (or instinct for) relation and distinction (for definition by comparison?) seemed to run through that first movement.

I feel I'm hearing it backwards. A number of times I found myself listening to the essence of Tippett's Byzantium in the percussion and vocal steps. Also, there are sounds which seem to be almost generic in modern music - the string/woodwind shrieks, the brass grumbles. This felt at times like much modern music's direct ancestor, its paternal grand- or even great grand-father.

If I could get the SB centre's website to work, I'd have booked for Friday and Saturday. The QEH is the happiest concert hall that I know of; however remote the music, the hall 'helps' me digest it.

[Serial_Apologist]

Truthfully, I've still got 2 movement to go. But the first yielded something - there's a passage where roughly the same phrase (chord?) is repeated perhaps 5 times in a row but with a different instrumental combination each time. I can't think of the right word for this - it's not 'synonym' but something like it;

Chords in music are when two or more notes are sounded simultaneously - as opposed to melodies and/or musical lines, consisting of notes in sequence. Simultaneous musical lines can of course give rise to chords when notes "land" simultaneously. Whether they are heard as chords or whether the resulting music is heard as lines depends on how the listener hears it - and this will be determined by how s/he makes out the ongoing logic of the musical discourse. (Tones would be more precise than notes, ahem).

It could well be that in the passages you refer to in which the same passages are repeated in different instrumental colours are where the relationship between tones and their instrumentation have been subjected to inter-permutational techniques of the kind Boulez is, or was, interested in using, I could of course be quite wrong!

[Roslynmuse]

The Wagner Sonata concert (the A flat) is in December and not part of the Boulez Fest at all. The connection is Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Rituel is the Boulez piece I found easiest to grasp - clear and logical structure, attractive and approachable. I have explored Pli selon pli and - like the Mallarme verse that Boulez uses - find my understanding of it comes in and out of focus. The beauty of the soundworld is always evident, however. I'm not a great fan of the piano music - I find the gestures rapidly tiring. Notations I prefer in their orchestral guise - how many has he orchestrated now? I think I've only heard the original set of four, but am aware of more.

[Roehre]

The Wagner Sonata concert (the A flat) is in December and not part of the Boulez Fest at all. The connection is Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Rituel is the Boulez piece I found easiest to grasp - clear and logical structure, attractive and approachable. I have explored Pli selon pli and - like the Mallarme verse that Boulez uses - find my understanding of it comes in and out of focus. The beauty of the soundworld is always evident, however. I'm not a great fan of the piano music - I find the gestures rapidly tiring. Notations I prefer in their orchestral guise - how many has he orchestrated now? I think I've only heard the original set of four, but am aware of more.

Roslynmuse,
Boulez seems recently to have orchestrated all (12) of them (well, he started in 1978...).
Remarkable you found Rituel the easiest piece to grasp. Though it is (for Boulez' standards ) an approachable piece, my encounter with Le Marteau sans Maitre won me over for Boulez. I might be biassed, as it was for me the very first time I came across Boulez' music, but that "early-ish" piece for me is the easiest to "get into".

[hackneyvi]

Chords in music are when two or more notes are sounded simultaneously - as opposed to melodies and/or musical lines, consisting of notes in sequence. Simultaneous musical lines can of course give rise to chords when notes "land" simultaneously. Whether they are heard as chords or whether the resulting music is heard as lines depends on how the listener hears it - and this will be determined by how s/he makes out the ongoing logic of the musical discourse. (Tones would be more precise than notes, ahem).

It could well be that in the passages you refer to in which the same passages are repeated in different instrumental colours are where the relationship between tones and their instrumentation have been subjected to inter-permutational techniques of the kind Boulez is, or was, interested in using, I could of course be quite wrong!

I think you're right, SA. The fourth movement seems to make alot of its music from instrumental 'similies'; the guitar is played brittlely with xylophone (and glockenspiel?), he bends notes out of a harp/guitar, the movement seems to finish with something like an organ, connected by its keyboard to a celeste (perhaps?) and that to bells. The guitar part is grandly dry. Though the instruments are only natural materials, there's something almost of their nature as materials that he seems to strike for in his sound. Hard for me to imagine what his technique could do with the piano, with a single instrument; maybe the music gets subtler still?

The Festival Hall and the piece between them would make me gloomy but it's unexpectedly wonderful to hear on headphones (with the added thrill and skill of dropping the volume or pulling the headphones off smoothly before the lastest cod-Spanish Vimto ad hacks off the music).

[hackneyvi]

The Wagner Sonata concert (the A flat) is in December and not part of the Boulez Fest at all. The connection is Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

They've muddled this up a bit. There are two Aimard concerts of Liszt and with the three Boulez performances, these comprise a 5 concert series, Liszt and Boulez - Composers of the Future, no less.

http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/festivals-series/pierre-laurent-aimard-liszt-and-boulez-composers-of-the-future

[hackneyvi]

Rituel is the Boulez piece I found easiest to grasp - clear and logical structure, attractive and approachable. I have explored Pli selon pli and - like the Mallarme verse that Boulez uses - find my understanding of it comes in and out of focus. The beauty of the soundworld is always evident, however. I'm not a great fan of the piano music - I find the gestures rapidly tiring. Notations I prefer in their orchestral guise - how many has he orchestrated now? I think I've only heard the original set of four, but am aware of more.

I was surprised by pli selon pli, that I could make sense of some part of it, hear its repetitions (by contrast, Roehre, I've been struggling with the Peter Maxwell Davies). Perhaps PB is simply so daunting by reputation (and so influential) that his music can never be as difficult as we fear. And by its influence on much other music of the last 40 years, his successors - the beneficiaries of his explorations - have already broken the ground for us without our knowing?

Remarkable you found Rituel the easiest piece to grasp. Though it is (for Boulez' standards ) an approachable piece, my encounter with Le Marteau sans Maitre won me over for Boulez.

Has Boulez re-written all of his music? There seem to be various versions of many pieces. In fact, there don't seem to be that many pieces but an oeuvre swollen by variations of them.