Musicians - Pierre Boulez

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	Musicians - Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez (IPA: /pjɛʁ.buˈlɛz/) (born March 26, 1925) is a conductor and composer of classical music.

Life and music

Boulez was born in Montbrison, France. He initially studied mathematics at Lyon before pursuing music at the Paris Conservatoire under Olivier Messiaen and Andrée Vaurabourg (Arthur Honegger's wife). He studied twelve-tone technique with René Leibowitz and went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style. The first fruits of this were his cantatas Le visage nuptial and Le soleil des eaux for female voices and orchestra (both composed in the late forties and revised several times since), as well as the Second Piano Sonata of 1948, a well-received 32-minute work that Boulez composed at the age of 23. Thereafter, Boulez was influenced by Messiaen's research to extend twelve-tone technique beyond the realm of pitch organization, serialising durations, dynamics, accents, and so on. This technique became known as integral serialism. Boulez quickly became one of the philosophical leaders of the post-war movement in the arts towards greater abstraction and experimentation. Many composers of Boulez's generation taught at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany. The so-called Darmstadt composers were instrumental in creating a style that, for a time, existed as an antidote to music of nationalist fervor; an international, even cosmopolitan style, a style that could not be 'co-opted' as propaganda in the way that the Nazis used, for example, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. Boulez was in contact with many young composers that would become influential, including John Cage.

Boulez's totally serialized works included "Polyphonie X" (1951) for 18 instruments, and "Structures I" for two pianos. The latter work was quite successful, and seems to sum up the feelings of zero hour in Europe during the early 50s. "Structures I" was also a turning point for Boulez. As one of the most visible totally serialized works, it became a lightning rod for various kinds of criticism. György Ligeti, for example, published an article in die Reihe that examined the patterns of durations, dynamics, and pitch in "Structures I", and found that a single pitch did not fit the pattern. Ligeti proceeded to question the choice of this pitch in excruciating detail. These criticisms, combined with what Boulez felt was a lack of expressive flexibility in the language, as he outlined in his essay "To the farthest reach of the fertile country", led Boulez to refine his compositional language. He distilled the feel of total serialization into a more supple and strongly gestural music, and he kept his methods for composing secret, to prevent people like Ligeti from discussing the technique, rather than the content of his music. Boulez's strongest achievement in this method is his masterpiece Le marteau sans maître for ensemble and voice, from 1953-1957, one of the few works of advanced music from the fifties to remain in the repertoire. "Le marteau sans maître" was a surprising and revolutionary synthesis of many different streams in modern music, as well as seeming to encompass the sound worlds of modern jazz, the Balinese Gamelan, traditional African musics, and traditional Japanese musics. It seemed to be powerfully relevant and earth-shatteringly cosmopolitan, and it was hailed by diverse musicians, including Igor Stravinsky. At that time, Boulez seemed to control the modern musical discourse. Ironically, the drive to lay bare compositional technique was so powerful that music theorist Lev Koblyakov cracked the code of these new techniques in his 1975-7 doctoral thesis (now published under the title "Pierre Boulez: A World of Harmony"), a feat one could liken to reverse engineering a complex machine. However, Koblyakov accomplished this well after specific flavors of serial technique were controversial among composers; Boulez had already moved on to other things.

After "Le marteau sans maître", Boulez began to strengthen the position of the music post-WWI modern composers through conducting and advocacy. He also begins to consider new avenues in his own work. With Pli selon pli for orchestra with solo soprano, he began to work with an idea of improvisation and open-endedness. He considered how the conductor might be able to 'improvise' on vague notations, such as the fermata, and how the players might 'improvise' on irrational durations, such as grace notes. In addition, he worked with the idea of leaving the specific ordering of movements or sections of music open to be chosen for a particular night of a performance, an idea related to the mobile form of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Interestingly, though the two works sound similar today, and certainly represent the same impeccable craft, "Pli selon pli" was not received as well as "Le marteau sans maître". Stravinsky, who loved "Le marteau sans maître", hated "Pli selon pli". This is perhaps more of a cultural barometer than a reflection on the work itself. During the time that Boulez was testing these new ideas, those colleagues who had never been entirely comfortable with the prominence of a rigorous musical language, such as György Ligeti, had brought a convincing musical counter argument to Boulez's musical ideals. In a poetic twist, Boulez had moved from peerless respect in "Le marteau sans maître", the 'hammer without master', to a seeming defeat in "Pli selon pli", which sets a Stéphane Mallarmé poem about the tripping impotence of a swan, unable to take flight from a frozen lake.

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