This thread is really a way of (hopefully) continuing the chat about Boulez that's been scattered through various Proms 2012 threads in the last couple of weeks, and maybe opening it out a bit (and avoiding the tedium of scrolling through "it's not music"-type posts!).
Firstly I wanted to mention that my CD of Mémoriale, Dérive 1 and Dérive 2 (Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain conducted by Daniel Kawka) arrived this morning and I've played the last piece three times already. Anyone who enjoyed the Proms performance would like this disc I think - it's a bit less skin-of-the-teeth but not as a result "comfortable", it's crystal-clearly recorded, and the soloistic passages are beautifully characterised.
Listening to it made me think about the fact that while Boulez's conducting repertoire is quite varied (Wagner, Mahler, the Second Viennese School, Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartók and his own contemporaries, with a few relatively recent additions like Bruckner, Liszt, Janacek and Szymanowski), his compositional output is much more single-minded and consistent, to a fault you might say (Dérive 2 and Répons sometimes seem like different versions of the same piece, and I imagine in a certain sense they are); I mean in comparison to many of his composer-conductor colleagues like Eötvös, Salonen and Knussen, and perhaps most composer-performers in general, whose music tends more to be an eclectic kind of reflection of their preferred performing repertoire. This phenomenon shows Boulez's music (particularly in recent years) in a particular kind of light: with his intimate knowledge of a wide range of orchestral repertoire "from the inside", which would presumably put many diverse skills and possible strategies at his fingertips, this (eg. Dérive 2) is what he himself chooses to do: something highly disciplined and one might say limited, which to a great extent eschews contrasts, involves no instrumental techniques which wouldn't have been known a century ago, and so on.
I hope others here have thoughts on these issues (if I haven't already said too much!).
Firstly I wanted to mention that my CD of Mémoriale, Dérive 1 and Dérive 2 (Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain conducted by Daniel Kawka) arrived this morning and I've played the last piece three times already. Anyone who enjoyed the Proms performance would like this disc I think - it's a bit less skin-of-the-teeth but not as a result "comfortable", it's crystal-clearly recorded, and the soloistic passages are beautifully characterised.
Listening to it made me think about the fact that while Boulez's conducting repertoire is quite varied (Wagner, Mahler, the Second Viennese School, Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartók and his own contemporaries, with a few relatively recent additions like Bruckner, Liszt, Janacek and Szymanowski), his compositional output is much more single-minded and consistent, to a fault you might say (Dérive 2 and Répons sometimes seem like different versions of the same piece, and I imagine in a certain sense they are); I mean in comparison to many of his composer-conductor colleagues like Eötvös, Salonen and Knussen, and perhaps most composer-performers in general, whose music tends more to be an eclectic kind of reflection of their preferred performing repertoire. This phenomenon shows Boulez's music (particularly in recent years) in a particular kind of light: with his intimate knowledge of a wide range of orchestral repertoire "from the inside", which would presumably put many diverse skills and possible strategies at his fingertips, this (eg. Dérive 2) is what he himself chooses to do: something highly disciplined and one might say limited, which to a great extent eschews contrasts, involves no instrumental techniques which wouldn't have been known a century ago, and so on.
I hope others here have thoughts on these issues (if I haven't already said too much!).
?) the serial, abstractionist route of "Structures". They of course have an argument, aesthetically: procedures once used by the Darmstadters did indeed as much remove composer from composerly outcomes, in terms of following traditional formal procedures guiding narrative inevitability, in ways that left Schoenbergian aesthetics behind; the listener was as much centred on each moment presenting itself without reference to past or future as s/he would be hearing a work by Cage, or a totally free improvisation. As so often in revolutions, the revolutionary moment is later revealed as more a part of an ongoing tradition than seemed the case at the time. But does this render Boulez a modern-day Hindemith equivalent?
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