Word: musication
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most of his career, Poons has been heavily influenced by his musical training. He started out as a guitar player with a high school hillbilly band in Queens, N.Y. Next he studied at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music for two years, then switched to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (he still plays the guitar as a hobby). His earliest paintings were hard-edged and geometric attempts to present Bach's counterpoint in visual terms. When Poons moved to New York in 1958, he discovered Mondrian-in particular, the syncopated squares of Broadway Boogie...
Glamour, image and sex appeal are not his bag. At a rehearsal, he is one plain musician talking to others. He may interrupt the music to say, "Take some of that color out of the A flat," or "Make this more crescendo." But he never indulges in exhibitionism or talkfests, which often earn other conductors only the scorn of their players. At a concert, he makes few flourishes in the direction of the audience. "I have no patience," he says, "with those conductors who, though their backs are physically turned to the spectators, spiritually face the ticketholders in an expressionist...
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...
...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...
...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 the right emotion, mood and orchestral detail...