Boulez, Pierre

PIERRE BOULEZ

Born: Montbrison, France, 26 March 1925

Genre: Classical

Best-selling album since 1990: Pierre Boulez Edition: Stravinsky, Pétrouchka/Le Sacre du printemps Pierre Boulez is arguably one of the twentieth century's most innovative composers. A conductor, author, and lecturer of international renown, he helped reshape the course of music after World War II.

Early Innovations and Conductor by Accident

Coming of age during the Nazi occupation of his native France, Boulez initially studied mathematics. His first important compositions date from the mid-1940s, when he emerged from compositional studies at the Paris Conservatory with French composer and mystic Olivier Messiaen and René Lebowitz, who had been a pupil of Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez's Second Piano Sonata (1947-8) marked his own radical and mature adaptation of the atonal twelve-tone method pioneered by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Boulez would go on to apply serial principles to rhythm, register, dynamics, and all other aspects of music in his Structures I for two pianos (1951–52), fully developing that style in two large-scale works with strong literary references: Le marteau sans maître ("The hammer without a master") (1953-5), after the poems of surrealist René Char, and Pli selon pli ("Fold upon fold") (1957-62), set to poems of Mallarmé.

Attending a rehearsal prior to a performance of Marteau in the late 1950s, Boulez noticed that the conductor and musicians were completely lost trying to make sense of the music, and so Boulez stepped in. Boulez's subsequent conducting was initially devoted to performing new works that otherwise would not have been heard, but over time his repertoire expanded to include music of the recent past as well. Boulez was chosen by George Szell in 1969 to become the Cleveland Orchestra's principal guest conductor so that Szell's audiences would be able to hear large doses of twentieth-century music that Szell himself felt unable to present convincingly. Boulez's Cleveland Orchestra recording of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring had a transparency and power that forever changed the way the public thought about the work. In 1971, Boulez went on to simultaneously accept the music directorships of London's BBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. The New York years were particularly stormy ones, with Boulez constantly taxing the ears, minds, and endurance of post-Bernstein audiences with experimental and unpopular scores and with what more than one critic labeled his "French arrogance."

After a stunning success with Wagner's Parsifal at the composer's own theater in Bayreuth (in Germany), Boulez was invited by Wagner's grandson to conduct his first Der Ring des Nibelungen (a cycle of Wagner operas) for the Ring centennial in 1976. A controversial contemporary staging of the work by Patrice Chéreau caused an uproar among Wagnerian traditionalists.

New Materials, New Music

In 1974, French president George Pompidou was courting Boulez to come back to the land he had left in self-imposed exile because of what Boulez considered to be government limitations on artistic freedom. Boulez insisted that he would return only if the conditions could be set up for researching the most advanced technology available that could be applied to the composition of new music. To that end Boulez founded the Paris-based IRCAM—The Institute for Research of Coordination between Acoustics and Music—in 1976. IRCAM's goal has been to enlarge the domain of materials used for music, a goal that has been embraced by musicians of all genres, including rock artists such as Frank Zappa.

According to Boulez a crisis had emerged in the late twentieth century because composers' imaginations had gone beyond the tools that were then available. To illustrate his point, he noted how architecture had been completely transformed when the new materials of concrete, glass, and steel replaced stone and wood as building materials.

A Greek Temple or a Gothic Cathedral, Boulez argued, could no more be built with steel and concrete than a skyscraper could be built with marble or sandstone. Likewise, composers had been using the same acoustic instruments for centuries, and the possibilities of music making that existed with them had been exhausted. Electronic media, still in its infancy, opened up a new frontier for an entirely new type of music where new tuning systems and new sounds not achievable through traditional means would be possible.

Boulez has written a handful of works incorporating the cutting-edge technology that had been developed at IRCAM, excerpts from one of which—Répons (Responses) (1981–1988)—was the centerpiece of an extraordinary and groundbreaking series of concerts when Boulez's L'Ensemble InterContemporain toured the United States in 1986. "The sound," as Boulez himself described it at the time, "was everywhere yet nowhere." Entire ripples of sound made up of digital transformations of conventional instrumental timbres made in real time engulfed the listener from every direction. Unlike early electronic music pieces, which had to be created layer by layer on tape, the transformations for Répons —the recording of which won a Grammy Award in1999 and pushed the limits of recording technology—were made in real time. This same effect is employed for a large-scale stage work that Boulez was working on as the new millennium began.

Since the 1990s Boulez has been more visible as a conductor than as a composer. In addition to seminal concerts and recordings with the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, in 1995 Boulez became the principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra following years of sold-out Boulez-led concerts and a string of landmark Grammy Award–winning recordings Boulez made with that ensemble (Boulez has won twenty-three Grammy Awards since 1967). Ironically, these awards highlighted recordings of earlier twentieth-century masterpieces by other composers. In fact, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's music director, Daniel Barenboim, has actually conducted more of Boulez's music with the CSO than Boulez himself has.

Formerly a radical and outspoken enfant terrible who advocated that concert halls and opera houses be burnt to the ground as dead monuments to an irrelevant past, Boulez would paradoxically spend the twilight of his career primarily as an interpreter of that past. His provocative statements—which in the spirit of Boulez's philosophical mentor Friedrich Nietzsche were intended metaphorically—came back to haunt him in the weeks after September 11, 2001, when, while on tour at a music festival in Basle, Switzerland, the seventy-six-year-old Boulez was dragged out of his hotel bed in the middle of the night by police, handcuffed, and held for three hours as a terrorism suspect before a formal apology was made. Notoriously late for commission deadlines, including a decade-old CSO commission, and a composer who frequently returns to older works to revise them, Boulez admits that he has difficulty predicting the amount of time it will take him to enter into a work and, harder still, how long it will take to escape out of a new work once it has come into being: "To me, each of my compositions is like a labyrinth, and a labyrinth can go on forever."

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger and Other Works (EMI, 1984); Boulez, Rituel/Éclat Multiples (Sony re-release, 1991); Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (Sony re-release,1991); Ravel, The Orchestral Works (Sony re-release, 1991); Varèse, Arcana/Ameriques/Ionization/Density 21.5/Offrandes/Integrales/Octandre (Sony re-release, 1991); Webern, Complete Works (Sony re-release, 1991); Bartók, The Wooden Prince/Cantana profana (Deutsche Grammophon, 1992); Stravinsky, Pétrouchka/Le Sacre du printemps (Deutsche Grammophon, 1992); Debussy, Images (Deutsche Grammophon, 1992); Schoenberg, Die Glückliche Hand/Variations for Orchestra/Verklärte Nacht (Deutsche Grammophon,1993); Schoenberg, Gurre-Leider/Four Songs (Sony re-release, 1993); Schoenberg, Pierrot lunaire/Lied der Waldtaube/Erwartung (Sony re-release, 1993); Stravinsky, The Firebird/Fireworks/Four Studies (Deutsche Grammophon, 1993); Boulez, Structures [I, II] (Wergo, 1993); Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra/Four Orchestral Pieces (Deutsche Grammophon, 1994); Boulez Conducts Ligeti (Deutsche Grammophon, 1994); Ravel, Boléro/Ma mère l'oye/Miroirs (Deutsche Grammophon, 1994); Debussy, Orchestral Works (Sony re-re-release, 1995); Bartók, Divertimento/Dance Suite (Deutsche Grammophon, 1995); Berg, Altenberg Lieder/Early Songs (Sony re-release, 1995); Berg, Chamber Concerto/Three Orchestral Pieces/Violin Concerto (Sony re-release, 1995); Boulez, Pli selon pli/Livre pour cordes (Sony re-release, 1995); Carter, A Symphony of Three Orchestras/ Varèse, Deserts/Ecuatorial/Hyperprism (Sony re-release, 1995); Messiaen, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum/Couleurs de la cité céleste (Sony re-release, 1995); Messiaen, Chronochromie/ La Ville d'en haut (Deutsche Grammophon, 1995); Stravinsky, Pétrouchka/Le Sacre du printemps (Sony re-release, 1995); Boulez, Schoenberg, Berio, Carter, Kurtàg, Xenakis (Erato, 1995); Boulez, Le visage nuptial/Dérive I/cummings ist der Dichter (Erato re-release, 1995); Debussy, La Mer/Nocturnes (Deutsche Grammophon, 1995); Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé/La valse (Deutsche Grammophon, 1995); Mahler, Symphony No. 6 (Deutsche Grammophon, 1995); Boulez, Piano Sonata No. 2 (Deutsche Grammophon re-release, 1995); Boulez Conducts Boulez . . . . explosante-fixe . . . Notations IXII/Structures II (Deutsche Grammophon, 1996); Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin/Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (Deutsche Grammophon, 1996); Birtwistle, Secret Theatre/Tragoedia (Deutsche Grammophon, 1996); Mahler, Symphony No. 7 (Deutsche Grammophon, 1996); Schoenberg, Moses und Aron (Deutsche Grammophon, 1996); Berg, Wozzeck (Sony re-release, 1997); Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique/Tristia (Deutsche Grammophon, 1997); Mahler, Symphony No. 5 (Deutsche Grammophon, 1997); Messiaen, Poémes pour Mi/Sept Haikai/La Réveil des oiseaux (Deutsche Grammophon, 1997); Bartók, Bluebeard's Castle (Deutsche Grammophon, 1998); Mahler, Symphony No. 9 (Deutsche Grammophon, 1998); Schoenberg, Pierrot lunaire/Herzgewächse/Ode to Napoleon (Deutsche Grammophon, 1998); Bartók, Violin Concerto No. 2/Rhapsodies (Deutsche Grammophon, 1999); Boulez, Répons/Dialogue de l'ombre double (Deutsche Grammophon, 1999); Ravel, The Piano Concertos (Deutsche Grammophon, 1999); Mahler, Symphony No. 1 (Deutsche Grammophon, 1999); Scriabin, Poeme de l'extase/Piano Concerto/Promethée (Deutsche Grammophon, 1999); R. Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra/Mahler, Totenfeier (Deutsche Grammophon, 1999); Boulez, Orchestral Works and Chamber Music (Col Legno, 2000); Boulez, Trois sonates pour piano (Disques Montaigne, 2000); Boulez, Sur Incises/Messagesquisse/Anthèmes 2 (Deutsche Grammophon, 2000); Bruckner, Symphony No. 8 (Deutsche Grammophon, 2000); Complete Webern (Deutsche Grammophon, 2000); Mahler, Symphony No. 4 (Deutsche Grammophon, 2000); Messiaen, 80th Birthday Concert (Disques Montaigne, 2000); Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms/Symphony in Three Movements (Deutsche Grammophon, 2000); Boulez, Domaines (Harmonia Mundi, 2001); Berg, Lulu (Deutsche Grammophon re-release, 2001); Boulez Conducts Varèse (Deutsche Grammophon, 2001); Boulez Conducts Stravinsky (Deutsche Grammophon, 2001); Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde (Deutsche Grammophon, 2001); Schoenberg, Piano Concerto (Deutsche Grammophon, 2001); Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (Philips re-release, 2001); Boulez, Pli selon pli (Deutsche Grammophon, 2002); Mahler, Symphony No. 3 (Deutsche Grammophon, 2003).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

J. Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma (New York, 1976); P. Boulez, Boulez on Music Today (London, 1979); P. Griffiths, Boulez (London, 1985); H. Barth, Wagner: A Documentary Study (Preface by Pierre Boulez) (London, 1986); P. F. Stacey, Boulez and the Modern Concept (Lincoln, NE, 1987); P. Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings (Cambridge, MA, 1990); L. Koblyakov, Pierre Boulez: A World of Harmony (London, 1990); P. Boulez, Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship (London, 1991); J. J. Nattiez and R. Samuels, The Boulez-Cage Correspondence (Cambridge, MA, 1993); G. Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, CA, 1995); J. Vermeil, Conversations with Boulez: Thoughts on Conducting (Portland, 1996); J. Peyser, To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe Since the Rite of Spring (New York, 1999); R. Di Pieto, Dialogues with Boulez (Lanham, MD, 2001).

WEBSITES:

www.ircam.fr/index-e.html; www.cso.org/conductors_pboulez.taf.

dennis polkow