Word: boulez
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...grammar of Boulez' works is serialization. From the compositions of Schoenberg, Boulez took the technique of serializing notes (technically, "areas of pitch"). There are 12 notes in an octave; to oversimplify, the composer arranges the 12 notes in time, that is, selects a series, and builds an entire composition from this series. The series may be played forward in time, backward in time, upside down in pitch, and upside down and backward. By choosing this series, the composer organizes the votes of the entire composition...
...Pierre Boulez' best-known work, Le Marteau sans Maitre (Hammer Without a Master), was first performed for a public of more than musical specialists at the 1955 festival in Aix-en-Provence. The critics from the newspapers of Marseille who had come up for the festival reviewed the work. In Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez, Antoine Golea remarks that the critics were "very prudent, as if walking on tip-toes." Probably much of the audience at Friday evening's concert of music by Boulez, Horatio Appleton Lamb Lecturer 1962-63, would have understood their prudence; for whether one reacts initially with...
...Boulez' is a consciously strange tongue. In the first concerts of modern music after the Liberation from the Nazis, Boulez, then a 20 year old student, led a riot of students "to protest the neo-classical works of Stravinsky." In 1960, at a symposium on "Where is True Tradition?" Boulez proclaimed, "For me there is no tradition. That is a word of the theoreticians of music... The work is the important thing. The past takes on a new face after a work. I make tradition; I do not have tradition behind...
Learning the grammar of Boulez' music is a first step to understanding his language. The grammar has a metaphysic: it will be rational. "One system is no better than another," Boulez says. "Our Occidental tradition is no better than the Oriental or Arabic. To me, every system is good if it is consistent. The composer has a theory, from which he composes works, and when the works are consistent and in agreement with the theory, it's a good system and everthing is in order...
...Pierre Boulez, composer, conductor, and planist, arrived from London this afternoon at Apthorp House, having evaded a large welcoming committee at Logan Airport. The famous musician will live in Adams House and teach Music 218a, "Studies in 20th-century music...