Word: boulez
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...evening did just that. The program of Webern's Six Pieces, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Bartok's Violin Concerto was not just another variation of the workhorse-standard esoterica-classic modernist admixture. It penetrated the analytic encrustation of ten thousand musicologists, from the turbid intellectualism of Boulez to the ornithological rhapsodizing of Messeian to the volcanic dogmatism of Stockhausen, to reach the foundation of twentieth-century music...
...lofty forehead reminds one female worshiper of Beethoven. To most people, however, Conductor Pierre Boulez looks more like a career librarian...
...Boulez, who lives in Baden-Baden, knows better than most conductors how the music of his own time should sound, since he himself has composed some of the best of it (Eclat, Le Marteau sans Maítre). When he takes to the podium, he brings along insight, evangelism, an insider's care, and the ability to get what he wants from an orchestra. This is why he has become one of the most sought-after guest conductors in Europe and the U.S. It helps explain why, in the space of only a few years, his recordings of Schoenberg...
...Aggressive. In his early critical writings, just published in Notes of an Apprenticeship (Knopf; $8.95), Boulez criticized almost every leading composer except his idols, Debussy and Webern. While praising Stravinsky's rhythmic innovations in Le Sacre du Printemps, Boulez rapped him for his unwillingness to surrender diatonic melody-and reliance on the tonic and dominant-in favor of serialism. As for the father of serialism, Arnold Schoenberg, Boulez took him to task for failing to apply the serialistic principle of melodic organization to other aspects of music like timbres and intervals between notes...
...turned out, this was the kind of carping that a student aims at the teachers who mean the most to him. In 1948, for example, Boulez castigated Berg for having introduced a polka into the atonal fabric of Wozzeck. Today, admitting that he "may have been a little too aggressive," he praises the way in which Berg joined music to dramatic expression in the same opera. "In Wozzeck, the contradiction between pure and theatrical music has completely disappeared." Boulez's recent recording of the opera (CBS Masterworks) signals this change of attitude with its unfailing projection of just...