Word: boulez
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...listening to music as thoroughly organized as, may, Le Marteau sans Maitre, one does not hear the grammar. Commenting in Die Reihe on another work of Boulez, Gyorgy Ligeti observes: "Seen at close quarters, it is the factor of determinism, regularity, that stands out; but seen from a distance, the structure, being the result of many separate regularities, is seen to be something variable and chancy, comparable to the way the network of neon lights flashes on and off in main street; the individual lamps are indeed exactly controlled by a mechanism, but as the separate lights flash...
...this macroscopic level that the audience was equipped to hear Boulez Friday night: even the professors of music brought or borrowed scores and pored over them, while Boulez himself sat behind the reserved section looking on. And, short of a 40 page analysis with tables and charts, one can only describe the three works on the program macroscopically, phenomenologically...
...opening Sonatina for Flute and Piano (1946) was, in Boulez' words, "my first stage on the path of serial composition." Boulez likened the four sections which follow the introduction of this single-movement work to the four movements of the sonata. At the same time, he says, there is an opposition between quasi-thematic motifs derived from the fundamental series of the work, and athematic uses of rhythmic cells, i.e., short rhythmic groups...
...occasional rhythmic stability, gave it the clearest coherence of the three works. Even after hearing the Sonatina repeatedly on records, it is impossible to say whether the performance was good or bad; one lacks a stylistic frame of reference. Only Charles Wuorinen, piano, Harvey Sollberger, flute, and Pierre Boulez can tell...
...sounds. At the same time, Ligeti has suggested, the breakdown of the tonality which required playing in one direction (forward) only, has created forms that can be passed through in several directions in time. As a result, Ligeti says, in the Third Piano Sonata, performed by Leonard Stein, Boulez makes "the interpreter the chauffeur, who can drive in any one of a number of directions along the routes planned by the composer and signposted in advance." In its initial form (Boulez always leaves himself the option of modifying his works), the sonata consists of five segments or "formants" which...