Word: boulez
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ONCE he was the enfant terrible of French music who did not scruple to assert the Paris Opera was full of dung. These days, Pierre Boulez is no less sure of his opinions. But he is somewhat more temperate in expressing them, for he has now joined the Establishment to wage the fight from within. His reign as the new music director of the New York Philharmonic begins this week. Over the coming year he will certainly shape the future of that orchestra. He may also, if he has his way, somewhat change the whole direction of American symphonic life...
Most of today's leading composers lament the current state of opera. Most opera managers return the favor, justly abhorring the quality of the operas usually produced by today's leading composers. As a way out of this impasse, Pierre Boulez, the aging enfant terrible of French music, once suggested blowing up all the old opera houses and starting anew. Britten's Owen Wingrave at least suggests that less draconian musical measures are possible...
...Arnold Schoenberg. Rather it brought contrasting tonalities crashing dangerously into one another. With its unexpected clustered stresses and pile-driving climaxes, it raised rhythm to an unprecedented preeminence. Jarring the 20th century out of its lingering romanticism, it was more than "the cornerstone of modern music," as Pierre Boulez calls it. It was one of those works, like Joyce's Ulysses and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, that announced a new consciousness...
...Selon Pli-meaning "fold along the fold"-is based on three poems by Mallarme and was begun in the late 1950s. With piano, guitar and mandolin, it also enlists a soprano soloist and a full orchestra, runs 60 minutes, and is easily Boulez's most ambitious composition to date, outstripping even his 1955 Le Marteait sans Maitre. Severely serial, the work begins with a crash and a delicate wash of impressionism, a mixture of Debussy and Webern. Much of it glitters with the percussive polka-dotting of pointillism; all of it is abstract, moving in tiers of timbres, skeletal...
...Village audience might perhaps take to this austere and demanding creation. If puzzled, though, young listeners had better skip Boulez's stygian liner notes. "The necessary transposition," Boulez writes, describing the setting of words to music, "demands the invention of equivalences; equivalences that may be applied both to the exterior form of the musical invention and to its quality or inner structure." Fortunately, when Boulez talks, he is entertaining and outspoken. So much so that he might even be able to explain those liner notes to the Villagers...