New York
The windows of Pierre Boulez's hotel suite look down on Central Park, but the view, he regrets, is imperfect. The picture of the wintery green rectangle is marred by the bleak concrete tip of a skyscraper jutting into the southeast corner. The 85-year-old composer and conductor shrugs. "C'est dommage," he says. "It's a shame."
Among musicians and concert-goers there are many who accuse Mr. Boulez of foisting the musical equivalent of gray concrete towers on them by composing and promoting pieces that are unlovable, incomprehensible and, in the words of one recent author, "willfully ugly." A founding member of the Darmstadt School, a group of composers who came of age in the years after World War II, Mr. Boulez helped set the agenda of modernist music, rejecting tonality and classical forms in favor of new styles that employ exquisitely intricate systems of organizing notes and yet sound, to the uninitiated, bewildering.
Past statements about composers being "useless" unless they recognize the need for this new musical language have contributed to a view of Mr. Boulez as imperious and dogmatic, yet his days on the barricades are long past. In conversation, he is thoughtful and courteous; as a conductor he is well-loved by players who revere his infallible sense of time. Now, far from dismissing his critics as ignorant fools, he continues to pour his energy into bridging the distance between audience and composer and transmitting his passion for new music.
Not that his judgment is any less severe when it comes to those contemporary composers who have abandoned not only the language but also the ethos of modernist music, treating historical styles like colors in a box of crayons.
"They say, oh well, everything is discovered now, you just have to make a kind of melting pot of everything. That's not interesting to me," he says. "You have the possibility like [Luciano] Berio did to have a kind of collage that you can take from the visual arts to music. Or you have to transcend context and content, to have the point of view of the 18th century with more mechanical rhythms, for instance. Then you can say that's something very abstract. But if you quote and quote and quote, I don't think it's very exciting."
Nevertheless, Mr. Boulez admits that his generation was uniquely motivated to break with the past. "We wanted everything," he says, gesturing as if sweeping crumbs from a table. "That was the context. Imagine a young German like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen discovering new music after 12 years of Nazi time. Can you imagine? The desire to get out of that! . . . Maybe there are Chinese composers who will do what we did, because they are in a country where everything is set anew."
The same context explains why what started out as a loose group of like-minded composers became a movement that dominated Western art music for half a century—across universities, orchestras and grant-giving bodies. In postwar Germany, the cultural elite had been tainted by Nazism and was replaced by a generation for whom modernism was a moral choice. And with television still in its infancy, a large part of the regional broadcasting budget went to radio, funding orchestra commissions of new music that allowed composers to explore and take risks.
"One has the view now that the School of Darmstadt was trying to impose to the whole world its way of thinking," Mr. Boulez says. "It was not at all like that. It was very free."
In 1966 Mr. Boulez abandoned the annual summer workshops at Darmstadt to conduct the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany—a step, he remembers, nearly as shocking and incomprehensible to his fellow composers as his music was to some audiences. He was then 41 and too old, he felt, to be teaching. His conducting career blossomed, bringing him to lead, among others, the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In Paris, he founded and led the Ensemble InterContemporain, dedicated to the performance of avant-garde music.
Each position provided an opportunity to present, promote and explain new music. That it requires an explanation, he says, has nothing to do with any unreasonable demands it might make on the ear. Unlike the visual arts, contemporary classical music does not benefit from the kind of involuntary repeated encounters that, say, a new building enjoys, and which allow an initially shocking new work to gradually "grow" on the public. Fashion also, Mr. Boulez says, is "permeated by contemporary art, so people get accustomed to it. Music is something else." Since even within music "there is such a difference of levels [between], let's say, jingles and the music of our time, we cannot establish any kind of relationship, even intuitively," with modern classical music without some help or guidance.
Nor does it help that "the concert is open at 8 like a restaurant and is finished at 11 at the latest. And then the cook has gone. You cannot have anything more." A better approach, he feels, is the one taken by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with its Beyond the Score series of concerts, in which the first half is devoted to analyzing a score, followed by the work's performance. Easier access to recordings, he says, would let audiences familiarize themselves with new material. And he feels music needs to be brought to venues outside of the concert hall.
Conducting has also shaped his compositions by bringing him up against the realities—and limits—of performers. Mr. Boulez's compositions of the '50s involved experiments with Total Serialism, an attempt to finely calibrate not only pitch, but duration, dynamic and even the tone color of individual notes. Some, such as his Piano Sonata No. 2, bordered on the unplayable.
"I had a lot of utopias in the beginning," he admits. "And it was good, because you try something and you see, well, if you rehearse that bar for one hour and even then you are not sure that you can perform it consistently, then something is wrong. My experience as a conductor has done quite a lot—not to still this thirst for novelty, but to see how I can really bring this novelty under possible conditions."
Among the most recent developments in new music, it is the use of technology that most interests Mr. Boulez. "You can have intervals that you never had possible with instruments, and also you can have rhythms which you can hear but you cannot do because they are too complex. And that's very intriguing, this margin between perception and making.
"Then there are works where the placement of musicians is not conventional at all and you get out of the stage, and that's very important. You want the sound to go everywhere."
He adds, "The more you grow, the less you are attracted by the sound in front of you and which remains there."
Ms. da Fonseca-Wollheim writes about classical music for the Journal.
