After the biennial first part has been broadcasted online last January, the second part will take place at the Philharmonie from June 28 to 30 with reschuled concerts. Pierre Boulez biennial. Piano and chamber music. Piano Recital. He boasts a vast repertoire but is particularly masterful in the works of Beethoven and Brahms.
With this recital, he continues his exploration of works by his composers of predilection: Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. His recital is devoted to two monuments in the repertoire, Bach and Beethoven. Movies with live musical accompaniment and experimental audiovisual projects. Music and image. Concert avec images. Philippe Druillet—a cult figure from the French sci-fi and comic world—teams up with cosmic electro group Zombie Zombie for a concert studded with futuristic images.
Welcome to the fourth dimension! The Kronos Quartet, an adventurous string quartet exploring ever-broader musical horizons since the s, performs the French premiere of Sun Rising , a sweeping and entrancing piece by Terry Riley inspired by the conquest of space.
Whilst humans endeavour to travel to Mars, music has long transported us into the ether. The performances on this CD are beyond reproach. The recording is clear and detailed. This is great music but undoubtedly challenging.
It is, however, important and of lasting value. Gary Higginson. And it is not at all of the European sphere. And that, for me, is very important, that we absorb other cultures: not only in terms of musical content, but also in terms of the way they are transmitted — and hence, in terms of sound. This brings to mind Debussy, who was immensely influenced by the World Exhibition in Paris and the music which he discovered there.
Boulez: Certainly. But in his case, some of his work was influenced quite generally by the musical content, and some of these works were more superficial, with the pentatonic scale and so on.
You mentioned sur Incises : you use steel drums there, but not for exotic reasons if I understand you correctly. Boulez: No, I like the sound of steel drums because of their innate possibilities: first in terms of the sound itself, but also because when you do a crescendo, or a very strong sforzato, you have a resonance which is very interesting in and of itself, because the sound is so modified that it ends up being practically another sound. And I like this transformation. But with the steel drums you have a modification of the sound which sometimes even approaches electronic sounds — putting it closer to an electronic sound than to the sound of a normal acoustic instrument.
If you agree: is this style related to your understanding of how lyrics function in contemporary music? Boulez: Well, that depends. Of course, with the voice, you have two possibilities. You express the text directly, or you take the text as it is but extract from it the possibilities you want to extract. And you can destroy the text, too — in a positive sense, if I may say so.
So, how many syllables? The number eight becomes very important, because the verse is composed of eight syllables. Rhyming is important, as well — whether you can transmit the rhymes via the structure. The first strophe is styled as a melodic line with a lot of ornaments. The second set of four verses I find to be syllabic, entirely syllabic. And then, when I come to the third set with its alternating rhymes, I constantly alternate the syllabic method of setting the text with the more melodic method.
You are no longer interested in composing or orchestrating lyrics, this being merely "lyrics and music"? Boulez: Well, if you take simply the meaning of the poem, you miss quite a lot of the relationship which you can establish with the text. Coming back to Le Marteau : apart from revising the instrumentation immediately after having composed it, you have left it alone — which is absolutely unusual for you. It is as if you recognize the special status of Le Marteau.
Would you agree? Boulez: Yes, certainly, it was a period where a long-held doubt had passed. Without doubt, you finish — and with doubt, you have a tendency never to finish. But there are some works which are unfinished not because I gave up, but because the reflection on the content of the work, on the structure of the work, was not very clear to me.
It was then that I saw that this narration was finished, and that I could not add anything — the addition would have been totally artificial. You know, I have a relationship with my work which is very sentimental … yes, certainly.
Similarly, the concept of the end of Derive II was also already there fifty years ago, but it was too soon: so I composed it, and knowing that I would compose a long development in between, well, I jumped to the end — certainly, because the end was already there. And sometimes you think of the end long before the rest of the piece. And therefore I keep it in reserve. Speaking of Derive II , it was preceded by Derive. And there, as in many works, you used the Sacher hexachord.
Can you say something about how you found this chord and why it became so important for you? Boulez: Well, I did not discover the chord myself — the series of six pitches. That was given to me for a homage to Paul Sacher for his 70 th birthday.
For this I wrote Messagesquisse, which was very short, because it was meant to be played in a concert for which a great many composers had written very short works. So it was a short occasional piece. In my composing, process is an important aspect.
So I look and have some quite spontaneous reactions. And so it went with the Sacher material. And those are in sketches.
Because when I have such ideas or make such deductions, I write them down immediately, or as immediately as I can. Doing so is difficult sometimes, so one often ends up doing so after a delay. But I mean, that's spontaneity, I would like to say. And if you go to the Sacher Foundation, you can see this material.
So can we say that you found out only coincidentally that the potential of the Sacher chord is that immense? Boulez: That was not completely by chance, but I used this material like I would use any other material. I mean by this that the point was not to make reference to Paul Sacher each time — certainly not, although sur Incises is dedicated to him.
But I did not really write sur Incises just to dedicate it to him — I wrote it because the material was there, and because I asked myself what I would do with this material. When we look at the characters of Derive I and Derive II : although they come from the same material, they are totally different….
Boulez: They do come from the same material, but they are totally different because the first — Derive I — was improvised, practically speaking. Sir William Glock, who was head of music at the BBC, engaged me for that broadcaster, and he was also head of a festival.
And since he was about to leave this festival, the musicians — who knew that I was very close to him — requested an homage. It was just a short, last-minute piece. I remember being in Los Angeles, performing a series of concerts and working between the rehearsals so that I could send the score at the last minute. There is a quotation of Gustav Mahler according to which he said: "the material composed him. Boulez: Yes, definitely. I think that if you have an interesting and productive relationship with the material, the material certainly will compose for you.
But you must know how it is composed. And I find it wonderful to think of it such that the material in fact composes with you, and you compose with the material. Because to me, this is just another way of expressing the idea of deduction.
You have material. What do you do with it? So if you look, for instance, at pieces which are in some way "derived" — such as Number Two of my Notations — and compare the length of the original piece and the final score then the work is ten times longer and the material is exposed much more forcefully than it was in the small piano piece. But I did nothing with it at the time … so what can I do with it now?
Twenty years passed in between. And the way he reflected on himself — it was something that really struck me when I conducted the Ring. But the interesting thing about the Notations is that you had forgotten that these pieces existed. Boulez: I had not really forgotten — it all comes back spontaneously, after all. And when I saw the text, I said: oh, that's interesting.
But these I did. On the contrary, I do find such ideas interesting, and I desire to magnify them. Boulez: They were. The manuscript got lost, and then it got lost again. I studied together with a composer named Serge Nigg, and I had not seen him for quite a while.
It was around the time when I returned from my six years in New York that I received a letter from him to the effect that the radio wanted to organise a broadcast on the early students of Messiaen. They wanted to use the pieces those students had composed while studying, and Nigg asked me if I would allow it.
So he sent me a photocopy of the manuscript, and I said: yes, you can. I was a student of Messiaen when I wrote that, and it was perfectly justified to use it as an example. So it was lost and then lost again. You once told me that with these Notations you wanted to make "fun" of twelve-tone composition. Boulez: Yes, because with Leibowitz, the academism of his analysis and so on was unbearable to me, and in a funny way particularly unbearable after having experienced Messiaen.
While I did not agree with all that Messiaen was doing, at least he was inventive. And he had his own world. But Leibowitz, that was just kind of salt on nothing; it was so dry and so unimaginative, only one-to-twelve, twelve-to-one, six-to-one, one-to-seven and so on … it was dreadful. And so I said to myself, well, I can do this too. So I did twelve pieces of twelve bars each, and each piece begins with one, with two, with three, with four and so on. But the pieces were not fun. They were just spontaneous pieces, because I composed them within two or three days — I don't remember exactly.
Boulez: No. And that was it. After my second piano sonata, I wrote a symphony concertante for piano and orchestra. And then I went to Cologne to see Stockhausen at the studio there, and there was this Putzfrau who cleaned the room … and the piece disappeared — totally. But to me, it seems that Notations demonstrates your distance from any kind of dogmatism.
Boulez: Yes. In none of the works that I compose do I actually look for it, but … if there is an accident — I mean, something which makes me take another route which I did not foresee — then I like it, and I just continue along this "byway".
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