Pierre Boulez: the man who changed the music of the twentieth century – the Nation (Argentina)

died French composer, conductor and fervent promoter of the avant-garde, which forever changed the programming in concert halls

Photo: Corbis

Certain artists, some men conquer a range so broad and deep that debtors have not even know in debt. It is ingratitude. Simply, the conquests of those exceptional men are a reservoir for the origin and needless to ask. With Pierre Boulez, who died the night before last after 90 years in the German town of Baden-Baden, music lost one of those men. You have to put it bluntly: the current music would not be what it is without the presence of Boulez, among other things because what we call “contemporary music” was largely an artistic and intellectual invention hers

The task of Boulez was deployed, at least three fronts: creating one’s own work, the spread of the alien by the direction that dominated masterfully, and institutional organization. But these three dimensions were intimately connected to him from the beginning. When introduced in 1954 the concert series “Le domaine musical” (said he was against the “carelessness of the French ruling class”), intended in the same movement find references to the past (Bach at the time), present near repertoire bad known (Anton Webern, for example) and spread the newest music (Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna and itself).

In the same vein we must understand the foundation of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique-Musique). One was the first ensemble specializing in contemporary music, while the Ircam, Centre Georges Pompidou department, made possible the subsequent research in electronic composition and sound processing.

Except Hermann Scherchen, nobody until then He had done so much to spread the musical modernism, and not for nothing is owed exemplary versions Boulez Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok and Webern. Here’s another fact that can not be overlooked: his tireless work in favor of new music, Boulez forever changed the schedule of concert halls. Without it, I could not hear as often as heard (although never enough) the music of the Second Viennese School in large rooms. To put it in simpler terms, without him, Daniel Barenboim never have come to present at the Argentina programs such as those brought on visits 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2015, with pieces of Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky, Elliott Carter and, Naturally, Boulez.

The French master knew in great detail the music of his time and the music of the past, and knew how to take advantage of each to the other. Pretendieran interpreters Vienna school address could not do if they did not know Wagner. It is not surprising that in Mahler to greet an unavoidable influence, or that a work like Notations (1980) becomes unthinkable without the idea, stemming from its experience with the Wagnerian repertoire of orchestration as a phenomenon of acoustic illusion.

In contrast, the approach that Boulez got to the dramas of Wagner in his heroic performances in Bayreuth (primarily the Parsifal 1966, but also the Tetralogy of the seventies with Patrice Chéreau setting) would have been inconceivable without the intimacy with the music derived from Wagnerian chromaticism. Boulez got past and future will illuminate each other.

He used to say that a real object enough to be born a multitude of virtual objects. If you put a candle in a kaleidoscope a multitude of candles will be obtained. Pierre Boulez introduces comment about the difficulties of adjusting, in the direction, the different speeds of his work Eclat / Multiples, but it is equally valid to understand their way of thinking about music. Boulez’s musical thought was that kaleidoscope, and the deployment of its music, sailing.

Since the 1940s, dominated by parametric control that defined the serialist orthodoxy, to South Incises, part of the second half of the nineties that Barenboim just premiered in Buenos Aires last year, the poetic bouleziana was changing, but always within a permanence. He knew when to be radical and when to be, or to be more precise radicalism how to channel such that the tradition established not invariably a contentious relationship.

But each change, each of times, managed to precipitate a masterpiece: the Second Piano Sonata in 1940, Le Marteau sains maître in 1954, Pli selon pli in 1960, Rituel in memoriam Maderna in 1975 is that perfect miniature Dérive to the years 80 and, of course, South Incises.

poetic That was minted in proximity with the intellectual and artistic movements of the time, with the poetry of Rene Char and painting of Paul Klee, who claimed to have taken the “musical space expanded thinking.” Who is unable to attend the show in his honor mounted last year at the Musée de la Musique in Paris Philharmonie you have seen a strange object, half and half collage book. It was his edition of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust after the effects of a structural task of cut and paste.

He precisely he who could read and hear everything, died almost blind and deaf. Where to find it now Boulez? In any of its many masterpieces, but also in their versions of the symphonies of Mahler or even on his controversial version of Beethoven’s Fifth; in his writings gathered at landmarks and Towards a musical aesthetic. No Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono without without without György Ligeti Stockhausen, contemporary music was left without its last hero. There will be others of this era, but Boulez will remain where a composer, a director or an interpreter feel about their material and put hands to work with the greatest intransigence that is capable.