Happy Birthday, Boulez

Pierre Boulez’ 100th birthday would have been this month. Along with John Cage, I would argue he was the most influential - if divisive - classical figure of the 20th century. (Actually, the John Cage - Pierre Boulez correspondences may be the most important classical documents of the century).

He was a first-rate composer who defined the sound of an era, and a brilliant pianist. He conducted the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, and founded Ensemble Intercontemporain (for which I auditioned in Paris in 2021), among many other endeavors. For my money, his recordings of Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Bartok with the Cleveland Orchestra may be the pinnacle recordings of all those works.

Of course, if you argue the same could be said about Leonard Bernstein (and a few others) as composer and conductor and pianist… but Boulez single-handedly changed the post-war classical scene in Paris at the age of 17, influencing even the way that his composition professors (e.g. Olivier Messiaen) composed, in real time.

The Force

Unfairly, I often think of John Cage as Obi-Wan and Pierre Boulez as Darth Vader. John Cage said that music was all around us, everywhere, and that the definition was that sound had been organized in time. Boulez believed that music should be an expression of genius and devised all sorts of new ultra-intellectual ways to create rules that govern the logic of pieces.

Light side of the force (all around us) / dark side of the force (total control, mechanistic).

Podcast

Here’s Samuel Andreyev’s deep-dive podcast, which I really enjoyed this morning, even if we disagree about the late works ;)

Here’s Boulez conducting Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring ballet… with horses.

My connection

I’ve had the pleasure of playing a few [very difficult] pieces by Boulez, including Derive I, the huge excerpt from Derive II, and the solo to his 7-cello piece, Messagesquisse, which was written for Mstislav Rostropovich in ’76.

Messagesquisse
Here’s my favorite recording, with Alexis Descharmes overdubbed playing the whole thing himself. What a beast!

The Moto Perpetuo movement starts at 2:22… and it’s as tough as it sounds lol.

What I love about this piece is how clearly the other cellos have their own agenda vs join the notes of the solo line. It’s chamber music with and against the soloist.

Impact on my composing

That second movement of Messagesquisse influenced the 5th movement of my Soliloquy for 5 cellos, which starts at 18:20.

And in my 40 Variations on Schindler’s List, Variation #31 (below) is an Homage to Boulez. He uses very cerebral operations to compose [“total serialism”] and I used them for this variation. It was surprising it was to make all the math work out in a way that didn’t sound dumb.