Дмитрий Ларош
20.05.2003, 20:15
A towering figure whose words remain as forceful as his work
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 5/18/2003
AMBRIDGE -- ''Tradition,'' says Pierre Boulez, eyes twinkling, ''is merely mannerism transmitted.'' (http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/138/living/A_towering_figure_whose_words_remain_as_forceful_a s_his_work+.shtml)
Clearly the eminent composer and conductor, now 78, has no more use for tradition than he did as a young firebrand declaring Schoenberg dead, booing the latest work of Stravinsky, calling for the destruction of opera houses, and proclaiming that all art of the past must be destroyed in order to create something new.
Boulez was at Harvard University on May 9 for a day of public seminars and interviews and private meetings with students. It was in an afternoon seminar about French Modernism that he described tradition as like the children's gossip game in which you whisper something like ''my handkerchief is not in my pocket'' in the next person's ear, and by the time it has gone around the room, it comes out as nonsense like, ''The cat has eaten some chocolate.''
Boulez has been one of the towering figures in the musical world since the 1950s, and he is still going strong. He likes to draw a distinction between artists who define their time and those who transcend it; he has done both. At Harvard he talked for eight to 10 hours, pausing only to listen to the next question, and there was never a dull moment -- Boulez is fiercely intelligent, opinionated, and far more charming than his intimidating reputation would suggest.
Throughout the day, Boulez focused on the three principal dimensions of his activity: as composer, conductor, and architect of musical institutions. Boulez composed one of the most significant works of the second half of the 20th century, ''Le Marteau sans Maitre,'' in 1954-55. Among other things, it was a brilliant reconciliation of the two conflicting currents in music represented by Stravinsky and Schoenberg -- and a mediation between the poles of total chaos (''boring, because you are losing touch with everything'') and total organization (''also boring'').
Since then, Boulez has primarily been concerned with a relatively small catalog of works that are in a constant state of revision and development. ''I do not want to compare myself too high, but I compose in the way that Proust composed his novel, `Remembrance of Things Past.' He began by putting things side-by-side that wound up separated by volumes; episodes involving one character he finally assigned to another. I do not compose chronologically and do not always know where an idea is going to go.
''Why do I revise my works? Because I am not happy. Sometimes the work is not technically good enough, or too difficult for no reason. Sometimes the proportion is not there; sometimes the effect is not at all what you wanted. Sometimes the ideas are not sophisticated enough; sometimes the development does not correspond to the importance of the ideas.''
At various points during the day, Boulez spoke of the influences that fed into his music -- teachers such as Olivier Messiaen and Rene Leibowitz, who taught him how to analyze music; his contact with John Cage; his interest in African, Japanese, Chinese, and Tibetan music; his friendships with other leading composers of his generation (Gyorgy Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono) and others like Elliott Carter and Harrison Birtwistle; all his wide reading in several languages and his knowledge of painting, architecture, and other arts; and his experiences as a conductor.
''I like music that is professionally composed,'' he says decisively, ''where the composer had a very precise idea of how the music would sound, where the composer controlled the sound because he had intensely heard what he was writing.''
Boulez takes a dim view of pop music, though not for the reason you might think. The waste of talent makes him sad. ''There are gifted people working in this field, but they lack the tools of composition; they even think they don't need technique,'' he says. ''A musical talent is something genuine and natural, and it is a pity when it is not developed. Without training, a composer is a dilettante, and I am not fond of that.''
One of Boulez's unexpected enthusiasms was for the work of Frank Zappa; he conducted a recording of Zappa's ''The Perfect Stranger.'' Asked about Zappa, Boulez says, ''He was aware of the existence of another side of music. He wanted to invent something of his own, away from the road of commercial rock music, and I believe he would have had a very interesting artistic development.''
Finding new ways
Boulez began conducting in the 1950s with the concerts of the militantly modernist Domaine Musicale in Paris. He also conducted his own works because no one else wanted to -- or could have. Later he developed into one of the most compelling interpreters of the parts of the standard repertoire that interest him.
''I am conducting always as a composer; I am interested in how the music works. But one performance is only one performance, and not the score; it is the experience of one individual reading the score.''
Boulez had to develop his own formidable and original conducting technique. ''I needed to learn how to conduct my own music, to create the gesture that would correspond to what I wanted to hear,'' he says. ''Often I went too fast, creating the wrong kind of excitement; I went fast because I was eager to get past the problems, to get rid of them. I need to perform a piece in order to know it. The more you know, the more intuitive you become; the less you know, the less intuitive you can be.''
Over the years Boulez has built a formidable library of recordings, which he says he never listens to. ''My recordings are photographs of what I did at this one time. I am not one of those people who are hypnotized by photos of themselves when they were younger.''
Boulez has rarely conducted the Boston Symphony, and it is not because the orchestra hasn't repeatedly tried to engage him. He prefers to continue relationships with other orchestras he has worked with for decades. He knows what to expect of them, and they know to expect the unexpected from him. He says he needs to be careful about his own phenomenal memory; he doesn't want to re-create his old methods and solutions.
And he will conduct only music that interests him -- there is a lot of music that doesn't. He rarely conducts Beethoven or Brahms; he can be witheringly dismissive of pieces such as Stravinsky's neo-classical works (''Who wants to listen to `Apollo'?'' he asks. ''It is useless for me'').
Boulez has only contempt for much in the world of contemporary opera (''I do not think of exciting staging and bad music as a form of evolution; using the old recipes for new operas is not interesting''). Of all music, he asks the same question: ''Can I escape it or not? If I don't need a confrontation with this music, then it is not important.''
In 1977, Boulez was invited to create IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a center for advanced musical research in Paris, and its resident state-of-the-art new-music group, the Ensemble InterContemporain. Later he was involved in the planning of the Cite de la Musique, also in Paris, a project that began in 1981-82, opened its first stages in 1995, and is ongoing. The large concert hall is still undesigned and unbuilt.
''It should be historically oriented but also oriented towards the future,'' he says. ''And the environment is as important as the hall itself -- the environment should teach audiences in a modern way, the way the museums do. The Tate Modern in London is a great success because it is so well organized; people can spend the whole day there teaching themselves without realizing that is what they are doing. Without this kind of environment, a hall is only another hall, and maybe a bad one. You have to know what you want and be willing to fight for it. I like utopias, but reality is also important.''
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 5/18/2003
AMBRIDGE -- ''Tradition,'' says Pierre Boulez, eyes twinkling, ''is merely mannerism transmitted.'' (http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/138/living/A_towering_figure_whose_words_remain_as_forceful_a s_his_work+.shtml)
Clearly the eminent composer and conductor, now 78, has no more use for tradition than he did as a young firebrand declaring Schoenberg dead, booing the latest work of Stravinsky, calling for the destruction of opera houses, and proclaiming that all art of the past must be destroyed in order to create something new.
Boulez was at Harvard University on May 9 for a day of public seminars and interviews and private meetings with students. It was in an afternoon seminar about French Modernism that he described tradition as like the children's gossip game in which you whisper something like ''my handkerchief is not in my pocket'' in the next person's ear, and by the time it has gone around the room, it comes out as nonsense like, ''The cat has eaten some chocolate.''
Boulez has been one of the towering figures in the musical world since the 1950s, and he is still going strong. He likes to draw a distinction between artists who define their time and those who transcend it; he has done both. At Harvard he talked for eight to 10 hours, pausing only to listen to the next question, and there was never a dull moment -- Boulez is fiercely intelligent, opinionated, and far more charming than his intimidating reputation would suggest.
Throughout the day, Boulez focused on the three principal dimensions of his activity: as composer, conductor, and architect of musical institutions. Boulez composed one of the most significant works of the second half of the 20th century, ''Le Marteau sans Maitre,'' in 1954-55. Among other things, it was a brilliant reconciliation of the two conflicting currents in music represented by Stravinsky and Schoenberg -- and a mediation between the poles of total chaos (''boring, because you are losing touch with everything'') and total organization (''also boring'').
Since then, Boulez has primarily been concerned with a relatively small catalog of works that are in a constant state of revision and development. ''I do not want to compare myself too high, but I compose in the way that Proust composed his novel, `Remembrance of Things Past.' He began by putting things side-by-side that wound up separated by volumes; episodes involving one character he finally assigned to another. I do not compose chronologically and do not always know where an idea is going to go.
''Why do I revise my works? Because I am not happy. Sometimes the work is not technically good enough, or too difficult for no reason. Sometimes the proportion is not there; sometimes the effect is not at all what you wanted. Sometimes the ideas are not sophisticated enough; sometimes the development does not correspond to the importance of the ideas.''
At various points during the day, Boulez spoke of the influences that fed into his music -- teachers such as Olivier Messiaen and Rene Leibowitz, who taught him how to analyze music; his contact with John Cage; his interest in African, Japanese, Chinese, and Tibetan music; his friendships with other leading composers of his generation (Gyorgy Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono) and others like Elliott Carter and Harrison Birtwistle; all his wide reading in several languages and his knowledge of painting, architecture, and other arts; and his experiences as a conductor.
''I like music that is professionally composed,'' he says decisively, ''where the composer had a very precise idea of how the music would sound, where the composer controlled the sound because he had intensely heard what he was writing.''
Boulez takes a dim view of pop music, though not for the reason you might think. The waste of talent makes him sad. ''There are gifted people working in this field, but they lack the tools of composition; they even think they don't need technique,'' he says. ''A musical talent is something genuine and natural, and it is a pity when it is not developed. Without training, a composer is a dilettante, and I am not fond of that.''
One of Boulez's unexpected enthusiasms was for the work of Frank Zappa; he conducted a recording of Zappa's ''The Perfect Stranger.'' Asked about Zappa, Boulez says, ''He was aware of the existence of another side of music. He wanted to invent something of his own, away from the road of commercial rock music, and I believe he would have had a very interesting artistic development.''
Finding new ways
Boulez began conducting in the 1950s with the concerts of the militantly modernist Domaine Musicale in Paris. He also conducted his own works because no one else wanted to -- or could have. Later he developed into one of the most compelling interpreters of the parts of the standard repertoire that interest him.
''I am conducting always as a composer; I am interested in how the music works. But one performance is only one performance, and not the score; it is the experience of one individual reading the score.''
Boulez had to develop his own formidable and original conducting technique. ''I needed to learn how to conduct my own music, to create the gesture that would correspond to what I wanted to hear,'' he says. ''Often I went too fast, creating the wrong kind of excitement; I went fast because I was eager to get past the problems, to get rid of them. I need to perform a piece in order to know it. The more you know, the more intuitive you become; the less you know, the less intuitive you can be.''
Over the years Boulez has built a formidable library of recordings, which he says he never listens to. ''My recordings are photographs of what I did at this one time. I am not one of those people who are hypnotized by photos of themselves when they were younger.''
Boulez has rarely conducted the Boston Symphony, and it is not because the orchestra hasn't repeatedly tried to engage him. He prefers to continue relationships with other orchestras he has worked with for decades. He knows what to expect of them, and they know to expect the unexpected from him. He says he needs to be careful about his own phenomenal memory; he doesn't want to re-create his old methods and solutions.
And he will conduct only music that interests him -- there is a lot of music that doesn't. He rarely conducts Beethoven or Brahms; he can be witheringly dismissive of pieces such as Stravinsky's neo-classical works (''Who wants to listen to `Apollo'?'' he asks. ''It is useless for me'').
Boulez has only contempt for much in the world of contemporary opera (''I do not think of exciting staging and bad music as a form of evolution; using the old recipes for new operas is not interesting''). Of all music, he asks the same question: ''Can I escape it or not? If I don't need a confrontation with this music, then it is not important.''
In 1977, Boulez was invited to create IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a center for advanced musical research in Paris, and its resident state-of-the-art new-music group, the Ensemble InterContemporain. Later he was involved in the planning of the Cite de la Musique, also in Paris, a project that began in 1981-82, opened its first stages in 1995, and is ongoing. The large concert hall is still undesigned and unbuilt.
''It should be historically oriented but also oriented towards the future,'' he says. ''And the environment is as important as the hall itself -- the environment should teach audiences in a modern way, the way the museums do. The Tate Modern in London is a great success because it is so well organized; people can spend the whole day there teaching themselves without realizing that is what they are doing. Without this kind of environment, a hall is only another hall, and maybe a bad one. You have to know what you want and be willing to fight for it. I like utopias, but reality is also important.''
