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9 minute read
Newcomer and Master
Music by Pierre Boulez
Paul Griffiths
The first half of this afternoon’s concert zooms us through three decades, from Pierre Boulez’s explosive beginnings as an artist to his full maturity—from the moment when, immediately after the Second World War, he was convinced Schoenberg’s serialism set the path ahead, to a time when spinning harmonies, serial only in spirit, were proposing a labyrinthine future, one made more of spirals than straight arrows.
We begin at the beginning. At the time he wrote his Sonatine for flute and piano, Boulez was just 20 and starting out. Though a work of his had been broadcast the year before (Trois Psalmodies for piano), and though he was later to retrieve his intervening Notations, this Sonatine stood for decades as his Opus 1 and almost demands interpretation as the violent eruption of a new musical personality. Where it alludes to the past, it does so only to contradict. The medium is quintessentially that of an elegant French classicism from which Boulez distances himself as far as possible. And though the singlemovement form was prompted by the example of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony (which Boulez had heard his teacher René Leibowitz conduct in December 1945, immediately before writing the Sonatine over the next two months), there is no imitation of the developmental style that made Schoenberg’s form possible: except in its scherzo, the piece is not really thematic at all but abruptly motivic, and its developments are more in the nature of continuations, gaining in intensity through fiercer and more contorted statements of the same basic ideas. The piano writing may, as Boulez himself suggested, show how important Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 were to him at this period, encouraging rapid change and a use of the whole compass, but the music is emphatically contra-Schoenberg in its flickering interplay of motifs—two notes, three notes, five—in a manner extrapolated from Messiaen.
At the same time, the piece implicitly criticizes Messiaen’s way of assembling his music block by block in showing that the most fragmentary material could be sustained for 510 bars of uninterrupted declamation. Perhaps most of all, the Sonatine is determinedly antiLeibowitz in insisting that rhythmic profiles could gain independence from their usual role in shaping melodic-harmonic substance. In his book Schœnberg et son école, published in 1947, Leibowitz used the example of his own Flute Sonata of 1944 to show how constant rhythmic variation could work together with a metrical frame in defining a polyphony of melodic lines. Boulez, in his article Propositions the next year, countered with a quotation from this Sonatine to demonstrate a counterpoint of abutted rhythmic cells where there is no underlying meter, no fusion with any pitch structure and no separation of lines, except in that one of them belongs to the flute.
Boulez drew the notion of rhythmic structure as primary from Messiaen and Stravinsky, and also from the African and Asian music he admired, though because there is no alliance of rhythmic figure with interval pattern, the effect of the organization is often to produce a welter of darting lines whose shaping has to come from a steady crescendo. However, the crash of structure into chaos— how systematic compositional procedures can result in disorder and simple motifs be hammered beyond recognition—contributes mightily to the work’s power. Elaborations so highly ramified burst through the categories: polyphony becomes cloud, the distinction between harmony and melody dissolves in so much arpeggiation, metrical rhythm is battered down into constant irregularity or, in the work’s scherzo and finale, intensive pulsation, even the two instruments are sealed together when the flute is shadowed or doubled by the piano, which often reverses roles and makes the flute accompanist. In form, the Sonatine inverts the order of internal movements in the Schoenberg, so that the slow, capricious introduction (with Schoenberg’s central fourth replaced by the determining figure of a major seventh or minor ninth containing a fourth or fifth plus a tritone) leads to a short quick movement introduced by a statement of the twelve-note row in flute motifs, for Boulez was already reconceiving the Schoenbergian series as a sequence of small harmonicmelodic units. Then comes the slow movement, whose trills and cascades look right forward to the works of 20 or 30 years later that will follow on this program. The ensuing scherzo (marked, uniquely for Boulez, “avec humeur”) works towards and around a skipping theme and has a trio that is more a premature attempt to end the work. This is followed by the triple rhythmic counterpoint to which Boulez drew attention in his essay, a piano cadenza, and eventually the finale, led by the piano. The ending seals the work’s nature as an incantation, in the spirit of the one adopted mentor the young Boulez had no wish to oppose: Antonin Artaud.
Three decades later, Boulez was no longer the boldly contrary tyro, of course, but a central figure, travelling the world to conduct and soon to take over an institute created for him in Paris. While waiting for that, in 1976, he contributed to a bouquet of 70th-birthday musical offerings to the Swiss philanthropist Paul Sacher, whose patronage he and many other composers had enjoyed. Mstislav Rostropovich was to present the gift, which accordingly comprised mostly solo cello pieces. Boulez, however, in his Messagesquisse (“Messagesketch”), multiplied his forces to add six more cellos. The message is simply that of the dedicatee’s surname, spelled out in Helvetically appropriate German plus French terms as Es–A–C–H–E–Ré (E flat–A–C–B–E–D) and jittered, too, in Morse code. This ur-motif, with E flat its starting point, links the piece into the “…explosante-fixe…” project, of works (including the orchestral Rituel) based on another sketch, one Boulez had drafted five years before as a memorial to Stravinsky. The piece is almost a set of five variations on the sphinx-like announcement of the Sacher motif at the start: six sections in all for the six letters, just as there are for the same reason six additional musicians to double and amplify the soloist.
Sacher’s name is sounded at first by the principal player in harmonics, each note sustained by one of the others so that a six note chord is built up. During the first variation this is successively dismantled in favor of Morse messages on E flat while the soloist plays the five transpositions of the theme that contain E flat, all reordered to begin with this note. The second variation is a Sachersaturated polyphony in rapid regular 16th notes, punctuated by bursts of fortissimo unanimity. In contrast with this impatiently driven toccata come trilling chords, each a transposition of the Sacher set, while the soloist winds down. (Similar and very Boulezian contrasts of pulsed and pulseless music—“striated time” and “smooth time,” in his own terms—were already present in the Sonatine.) The fourth variation is a solo cadenza in six verses, each ending on E flat, and the last another moto perpetuo, short, to be played as fast as possible, again circling through the transpositions that contain the honored initial. In 2000 Boulez sanctioned a version by Christophe Desjardins with violas, which conveniently allows the piece to be programmed with the viola-heavy Éclat/Multiples.
All the way back in the Sonatine there was an interplay not only of two different experiences of time but also of an opposition of sound, between the sustained (from the flute in this instance) and the momentary, which can continue only as resonance. Boulez’s interest in resonance effects was confirmed by his Le Marteau sans maître, Third Piano Sonata, second book of Structures for two pianos and, most particularly, Pli selon pli, where the orchestra was centered on tuned percussion instruments (including the piano) as previously on bowed strings. Then, for his 40th-birthday concert in Los Angeles, Boulez brought this essence of himself fully forward in Éclat, whose title suggests something sudden and brilliant, a lightning bolt to be echoed and reflected in the further music of Éclat/Multiples. In Éclat a tuned percussion group of nine instruments—piano, celesta, harp, glockenspiel, vibraphone, mandolin, guitar, cimbalom, and tubular bells—is set against a sustaining sextet made up of pairs of woodwinds (alto flute and cor anglais), brass (trumpet and trombone), and strings (viola and cello). Of the percussion, only the cimbalom had not appeared in Pli selon pli; it is perhaps a memento of Stravinsky’s Renard, combined with the quasi-gamelan of Messiaen’s orchestral scores and the serenading mandolin and guitar of Mahler, Schoenberg, and Webern to make a synthesis of Boulez’s sources that was also a striking image of himself, the ensemble characteristic in its gestures and its mobility of operation. The instruments lend themselves to splashes of varied color, glittering trills, and long reverberations, and they tend to flash with extreme rapidity or else hang motionless, in either case providing no sense of tempo. Moreover, their music frequently leaves fine details of timing, ordering, and dynamic level to be decided spontaneously by the conductor, who thus improvises on the multi-manual keyboard of these nine instruments. The effect in much of Éclat is of a free, fluid concatenation of luminescent events, but the outer sections put the reverse case for order and direction. An opening piano cadenza comes in with a chain of basic chords (comparisons with both the Sonatine and Messagesquisse may easily be made), the last quietly held by the windstring sextet, and continues with a toccata in even values (such as again can be found in those other two pieces). From here the full percussion ensemble takes over with scintillations, followed by a slow middle section and more quick shimmering that brings back the sextet and, with it, more purposeful rhythm in a brisk chase of staccato chords that amazes the percussion group into subservience. With this the premises have been set out. What happens as the music continues into Éclat/Multiples is that, in Boulez’s words, “the multiple reflections of the original ideas interfere with each other and create divergent perspectives, such as Paul Klee imagined in certain of his paintings.” The idea was that each new “cahier” of the work would multiply one instrument of the sextet to make a whole ensemble and also add a member of the previously unrepresented clarinet family. In 1970 Boulez introduced the first cahier, adding nine violas and a basset horn to create a work lasting almost half an hour, but then the central situation, of percussion solo group with sustaining orchestra, was taken over by Répons. As the extra violas come in, the rapid, jerky music that ended Éclat goes on, with their support. But energy is soon dissipated, and the basset horn enters to move the music towards a slow, wide-ranging melody, played by the wind-string group joined after a while by decorations of glissandos from the violas and clanging arpeggios from the percussion. Thus the two types of sound, alterable and resounding, reflect each other across the cantus firmus. The melody—a shaping of intervals and harmonic tensions first outlined in the central section of Éclat—and its components are then disassembled and reconfigured into quickly pulsed homophony, where counterpoints appear to be weaving through the texture because the instrumentation changes on every eighth note. The race soon stalls, though, and the melody takes over again, in whatever recollections and transformations, through whatever harmonic pools. Meanwhile, ideas clash, merge and proliferate, and we are left straining to imagine the course these miscellaneous conflicts might take were the music to move on into ever broader circles.
Paul Griffiths wrote the first book on Pierre Boulez in any language in 1978. He is the author most recently of O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!, a Beethoven pasticcio commissioned for the opening of the City of Bonn’s “BTHVN 2020” celebrations, and Mr. Beethoven, a novel to be published in April 2020.