Pierre Boulez 100, 2025
This Week in Classical Music: March 31, 2025. Pierre Boulez. Final week we had been preoccupied with Naples and missed a vital date: March 26th was the 100th anniversary of Pierre Boulez’s delivery. It’s laborious to overestimate Boulez’s significance within the growth of moder music within the second half of the 20th century (we are able to solely consider Karlheinz Stockhausen and perhaps Bruno Maderna being on the identical degree). Grove Music writes: “Resolute creativeness, drive of will, and ruthless combativeness secured him, as a younger man, a place on the head of the Parisian musical avant garde.” But it surely was not simply the Parisian avant-garde that he conquered, it was the entire musical phrase that he reigned for at the least 30 years, from the early Nineteen Fifties to the early Nineteen Eighties.
Additionally this yr is the 70th anniversary of the premier of one among Boulez’s most vital works, Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer with no Grasp). It premiered in June of 1955 in Baden-Baden and the work was met with curiosity by the listeners and praised by the critics and fellow composers. Even Stravinsky, who wrote little or no within the serail mode, was enthusiastic. The piece, regardless of its problem, was then performed world wide; Boulez introduced it to the US in 1957. Le Marteau sans maître epitomized Boulez’s experimentation with the serialism, which he expanded to incorporate not simply the sequence of pitches, but additionally the period, tone colour and depth of every sound. Seventy years later, and you can not hear this seminal composition being performed reside. One thing occurred to classical music. Seventy years is an extended interval, it’s the time, for instance, between the completions of Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Second symphonies (1824-1894), with the entire Romantic interval in between. Each composers had been celebrated in 1894, whereas Boulez virtually disappeared from the musical scene. And who’re the composers of his stature working right now?
Boulez was born in a small city of Montbrison, about 100 km west of Lyon. In his youth his pursuits had been break up between the piano and arithmetic. Upon leaving Catholic college in 1941 he spent a yr in Lyon finding out greater math. In 1942 he moved to Paris. Pierre’s father wished him to attend the Ecole Polytechnique, however as an alternative he went to theParis Conservatory the place he studied concord with Olivier Messiaen. The Paris Conservatory was a really conservative place in these days. Even Messiaen, himself a contemporary composer of big expertise, didn’t train Mahler and Bruckner. Afterward, Boulez would point out in an interview that at the moment in his thoughts “there have been two twins: Mahler, Bruckner.” In the identical interview he mentioned that “German music stopped at Wagner,” so the Second Viennese College wasn’t taught in any respect. Boulez discovered about atonal music from René Leibowitz, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. He had already felt the necessity to broaden his music language and instantly adopted the brand new methods. A yr later, in 1945, the younger Boulez wrote his first atonal piece of music, a set of twelve Notations for piano. He additionally wrote two piano sonatas, the second, massive in scale, revealed in 1950. His music was carried out by the pianists Yvette Grimaud and Yvonne Loriod (at the moment, Messiaen’s spouse), however it was the circulation of the scores amongst musicians that introduced Boulez fame amongst avant-garde musicians. In 1952 Loriod carried out the sonata in Darmstadt to nice acclaim. Thus began Boulez’s affiliation with a gaggle of tremendously proficient and adventuresome composers and theoreticians that turned generally known as the Darmstadt College. Darmstadt Summer time Programs for New Music had been held from the early Nineteen Fifties to 1970. Each different yr younger musicians gathered within the metropolis to current and talk about their music. Formal programs had been taught each in composition and interpretation. Even the abridged checklist of the attendees seems to be very spectacular: along with Boulez, there was Bruno Maderna, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, John Cage – composers who formed the music of the second half of the 20th century. Philosophers and critics reminiscent of Theodor Adorno, offered their concepts. It was round that point that Boulez got here up together with his well-known aphorism: “Any musician who has not felt … the need of the dodecaphonic language is OF NO USE.” In 1952 he wrote a seminal piece, “Le Marteau sans maître” (The hammer with no grasp) for voice and 6 devices. Nonetheless troublesome, even after half a century of music growth, it could possibly be heard right here. Pierre Boulez conducts a small ensemble consisting of the flute, the guitar and a number of other percussion devices. Jeanne Deroubaix is the contralto. The interval between Nineteen Fifties and Seventies was the best for Boulez as a composer. Within the following years he continued to put in writing however devoted a lot time to transforming a few of the compositions of the ancient times.
In 1970 President Georges Pompidou, certain to create a cultural legacy, requested Boulez, who was spending most of his time exterior of France, to create an institute devoted to analysis in music. The outcome was the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, or Institute for Analysis and Coordination Acoustic/Music). It was set in a constructing subsequent to the Heart Pompidou. With the addition two years later of the Ensemble InterContemporain, IRCAM turned a serious analysis and performing heart for avant-garde music.
Boulez began conducting in 1957. First it was principally his personal music and that of his younger colleagues, however finally he expanded his repertoire to Stravinsky, Debussy, Webern and Messiaen. Within the late 50’s he turned the visitor conductor of the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra and took residence in Baden-Baden, to a big extent in protest to the conservativism of the French musical tradition (that was earlier than the IRCAM). An enormous break got here in 1971 when he was, relatively unexpectedly, employed by the New York Philharmonic. Throughout the next years he performed each main orchestra, increasing his repertoire to incorporate a lot of the classics (although he by no means performed both Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich). Boulez turned one of many biggest interpreters of Debussy; we additionally love his Mahler. Right here’s an amazing interpretation of the 4th motion (Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend) of Mahler’s Symphony no. 9 with the Chicago Symphony at its finest.
