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PIERRE BOULEZ/ 2011
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 3 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0223 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"[A]ny musician who has not experienced — I do not say understood, but truly experienced — the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch."
- Pierre Boulez ("Eventuellement...", 1952)
"Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'."
- Pierre Boulez ("Sonate, que me veux-tu?", 1960)
Pierre Boulez -
Pierre Boulez (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ bu.lɛːz]) (born 26 March 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.
Serialism:
Boulez's totally serialized, punctual works consist of Polyphonie X (1950–51; withdrawn) for 18 instruments, the two musique-concrète Études (1951–52), and Structures, book I for two pianos.[6] Structures was also a turning point for Boulez. As one of the most visible totally serialized works, it became a lightning rod for various kinds of criticism. György Ligeti, for example, published an article that examined its patterns of durations, dynamics, pitch, and attack types in great detail, concluding that its "ascetic attitude" is "akin to compulsion neurosis", and that Boulez "had to break away from it... And so he created the sensual feline world of the 'Marteau'".[7]
These criticisms, combined with what Boulez felt was a lack of expressive flexibility in the language, as he outlined in his essay "At the Limit of Fertile Land..." had already led Boulez to refine his compositional language. He loosened the strictness of his total serialism into a more supple and strongly gestural music, and did not publicly reveal much about these techniques, which limited further discussion. His first venture into this new kind of serialism was a work for 12 solo voices titled Oubli signal lapidé (1952), but it was withdrawn after a single performance. Its material was reused in the 1970 composition Cummings ist der Dichter.[8]
Le marteau sans maître:
Boulez's strongest achievement in this method is his masterpiece Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master) for ensemble and voice, from 1953 to 1957, a "keystone of 20th-century music",[9] and one of the few works of advanced music from the 1950s to remain in the repertoire.[citation needed] Le marteau was a surprising and revolutionary synthesis of many different streams in modern music, as well as seeming to encompass the sound worlds of modern jazz, the Balinese Gamelan, traditional African musics, and traditional Japanese musics.
Boulez described one of the work's innovations, called "pitch multiplication", in several articles, most importantly in the chapter "Musical Technique" in Boulez 1971. It was Lev Koblyakov, however, who first described its presence in the three "L'artisanat furieux" movements of Le marteau sans maître,[10] and in his 1981 doctoral thesis.[11] However, an explanation of the processes themselves was not made until 1993.[12] Other techniques used in the "Bourreaux de solitude" cycle were first described by Ulrich Mosch,[13] and later fully elaborated by him.[14]
Experimentation:
After Le marteau sans maître, Boulez began to strengthen the position of the music post-WWI modern composers through conducting and advocacy. He also began to consider new avenues in his own work. With Pli selon pli for orchestra with solo soprano, he began to work with an idea of improvisation and open-endedness. He considered how the conductor might be able to 'improvise' on vague notations, such as the fermata, and how the players might 'improvise' on irrational durations, such as grace notes. In addition, he worked with the idea of leaving the specific ordering of movements or sections of music open to be chosen for a particular night of a performance, an idea related to the polyvalent form of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Interestingly, though the two works sound similar today, and certainly represent the same impeccable craft, Pli selon pli was not received as well as Le marteau. This is perhaps more of a cultural barometer than a reflection on the work itself.
During the time that Boulez was testing these new ideas, those colleagues who had never been entirely comfortable with the prominence of a rigorous musical language, such as György Ligeti, had brought a convincing musical counter argument to Boulez's musical ideals. In a poetic twist, Boulez had moved from peerless respect for Le marteau sans maître to seeming defeat with Pli selon pli (Fold upon fold), which sets a Stéphane Mallarmé poem about the tripping impotence of a swan, unable to take flight from a frozen lake.
Controlled chance:
From the 1950s, beginning with the Third Piano Sonata (1955–57/63), Boulez experimented with what he called "controlled chance" and he developed his views on aleatoric music in the articles "Aléa" and "Sonate, que me veux-tu?".[16] His use of chance, which he would later employ in compositions like Éclat (1965), Domaines (1961–68) and Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974–75), is very different from that in the works of, for example, John Cage. While in Cage's music the performers are often given the freedom to create completely unforeseen sounds, with the object of removing the composer's intention from the music, in works by Boulez they only get to choose between possibilities that have been written out in detail by the composer—a method that, when applied to the successional order of sections, is often described as "mobile form".
References:
7. ^ Ligeti 1960, 62
8. ^ Hopkins, G. W., and Paul Griffiths. 2006. "Pierre Boulez", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy Retrieved on 13 November 2006
9. ^ a b Hopkins and Griffiths 2006.
10. ^ Koblyakov 1977.
11. ^ Koblyakov 1981, published as Koblyakov 1990.
12. ^ Heinemann 1993
13. ^ Mosch 1997
14. ^ Mosch 2004.
16. ^ Boulez 1991c and 1986.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Boulez
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