Pierre Boulez
This is a highly dense and technical book dealing with the musical theories and compositions of one of the most respected avant-garde composers of the 20th century. Boulez died January 5, 2016. His thoughts and work represent the ‘state-of-the-art’ in contemporary music.
Quoting from the book, “Pierre Boulez is unquestionably one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His personal development mirrors the history of Western concert music: an essential figure in the history of artistic modernism, he is perceived as leader and illustrious representative of the musical avant-garde since 1945. Having been appointed principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony (both in 1971), as well as conducting countless other orchestras, he has always sought to change the listening habits of the concert-going public by initiating them through concerts and recording into the classics of modernism from the first half of the twentieth century (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Bert, etc.). Pierre Boulez has also had a significant impact on the development of musical institutions, especially in France, having conceived projects that led to the establishment of the Domaine musical, the Institut de recherché et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM), the Ensemble InterContemporain and the Cité de la musique.” We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas how to use Max/MSP, which was developed originally at IRCAM.
In order to put in context the musical journey of Pierre Boulez, one needs to understand the musical and historical framework in which he began as a composer. By the early 20th century, the traditional treatment of the equal-tempered scale, handed down to us from the Classical and Romantic composers of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, had been developed to a place in which acoustical foundations of harmony were abandoned. Arnold Schoenberg shattered traditional harmony, replacing it with a technique called Serialism. His thoughts and works spawned what is now known as the 2nd Viennese School, from which such pre-eminent composers as Anton Webern and Alban Berg arose.
Serialism, or 12-tone technique, was a tool to create thematic patterns by way of a matrix of numbers. Each number corresponds to a note in the chromatic scale within an octave. (i.e. ‘C’ = 0, ‘C#’ = 1, etc.) Using the matrix reveals the Prime melodic phrase, by reading it from left to right. Reading it from right to left shows the Retrograde of that melody. Reading it from top to bottom reveals the Inversion, and reading it from bottom to top reveals the Retrograde/Inversion of that melody. All transpositions of the above can also be easily viewed. In its strictest use, no note may be used until all notes of the 12-note chromatic melody had been completed. We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas how to implement serialism in modern composition.
It was in this discipline that Pierre Boulez began composing. What is unique about Pierre Boulez is how he eventually broke away from the strict Serialism technique and developed yet another approach to musical composition. In the book’s preface, the author clearly states that, “Boulez should not be relegated to the historical dustbin of twentieth-century serial excesses.”
“As a contemporary music composer practicing in the second half of the twentieth century, Pierre Boulez could not unreflectively accept the forms handed down to him by tradition. For most of the serious artists and tinkers of this period, the fundamental experience of the first half of the century was a profound sense of rupture with the past.”
Discussing some of Boulez’s earliest works, Notations for piano (1944-45), the author states, “Boulez shapes music through the creation of oppositions: he defines concepts by opposing one type of material against another, and thereafter having them interact with each other. The result appears flexible but relies on a fairly deterministic mechanism in order to achieve this effect. Pierre Boulez (who once penned an essay with the telling title ‘Constructing and improvisation’) repudiates the alleged antinomies between freedom and determinism, between idea and system, between spontaneity and calculation, between automatism and individual will. In short, Boulez’s music presents a world of contrasts that propels it into life.”
“The early words, such as the First Piano Sonata (1946) and the Sonata for flute and piano (1946) testify to his assimilation of the serial language inherited from Webern and Schoenberg, to which he as initiated…as well as an approach to rhythm which owes much to his teacher at the Paris Conservatoire starting in 1944, Olivier Messiaen (1908-92)…Boulez explored the serialization of parameters other than pitch, and the ensuing proliferation to which it can give rise…He was particularly interested in so-called ‘real-time electronics’, that is, technology for transforming sound electronically and projecting it through speakers, which would allow for direct interactions between performer and machine on stage, freeing the musician from slavishly following the implacable rhythm of pre-recorded sound.”
Boulez, “also shows, in later years, a greater concern for the capacity of the listener (whether experienced or musically untrained) to grasp his music. He fits musical objects with perceptible ‘envelopes’ (as he calls them) and sends out musical ‘signals’, various kinds of breaks in the musical texture which articulate the form and guide the listener…From serialism, open forms, the interface between instrument and machine, the concern with perceptibility, Boulez’s catalogue forms a rich and varied corpus. Although Boulez dispenses with total serialism after a brief but decisive period, his concern with the formal unity of a work of art remains a central concern…In essence, Boulez’s conception of music demands that there be a necessary connection between the parts and the whole, even when the smallest units are the result of chance of accident. As he writes near the end of his 1963 essay ‘Necessity of an aesthetic orientation’, ‘Each work must absolutely and necessarily create its form out of the virtual possibilities of its morphology, in order for there to be unity at every level of language.’”
Boulez was interested in how language of any kind was structured. “Structural linguistics emerged from the thought of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), godfather of the science of semiotics…greatly contributed to the development of the type of scientific reasoning applied to the social sciences and the humanities that came to be known, in the late 1950s, as structuralism.”
Boulez was searching for a new approach to musical organization, he “was dreaming of a musico-philosophical ‘discourse on method’. Boulez became highly critical of what was known as musique concrete. “’Musique concrete may be intoxicated with the illusion that it is saying something; in fact, it is floundering in non-signification.’ Similarly, serial music can only ‘ideologically’ be compared to a language, since ‘unlike articulate speech, which is inseparable from its physiological or even physical foundation, it is a system adrift, after cutting the cables by which it was attached’. By freeing itself from the rules which link tones to each other, it gives up the possibility as in any other, and which consists precisely of general structures whose universality allow the encoding and decoding of individual message’.
Boulez was strongly influenced by Debussy, Stravinsky and Webern, “Boulez’s affinity with structuralist thought owes more to his close acquaintance with works such as Debussy’s Etudes, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring of Webern’s Cantata, op. 31, which had already put him in contact with ‘those aspects of music which are fundamentally structural in their modes of operation.’ We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to seek artistic expressions that include both structure and emotional expression or, metaphorically, articulation and breath.
“The play of oppositions in Boulez’s music could also be seen as a manifestation of another structuralist conception of language: the theory of the double articulation of language expounded by the linguist André Martinet in the first chapter of his Eléments de linguistique générale… ‘macro-form’ is created from the combined effect of microstructures. For Boulez, this would imply that new microstructures cannot be housed within older, pre-existing frameworks, since those older forms are themselves the result of the combined effect of smaller units which no longer belong to the vocabulary of music. The creation of new forms that result from oppositions laid down at the micro-level would become a fundamental axis of Boulez’s musical research in the 1960s and beyond.”
Boulez’s works have, “two fundamental types of musical textures. On the one hand there is a type of writing which is strict, in which the structure is determined in a rigid manner. On the other hand, there is another type of writing, which is much more freely conceived, to the point of being at times ‘open’ or ‘aleatoric’. To these two types of writing there correspond two types of listening: ‘structural listening’ for the first kind, and what we might call ‘resonance listening’ for the second.”
“By setting up a correspondence between life and form, Boulez emphasizes the organic fact of dynamic form…he introduces another quoted, this time form Jean Cocteau: ‘I prefer the forms of life to the life of forms’. He obtains…what amounts to his own artistic credo: “I prefer to defend the forms of life than defend the life of forms.’ Boulez writes, ‘For, whether you speak of relative form free form, aleatoric form in the instant in which I hear it, a form is always fixed. Therefore, whether I speak of forms that are fixed once and for all, or of form [fixed] in the instant, I can by no means distinguish between the two as an aesthetic category.”
Boulez’s study of Anton Webern’s work, particularly his Second Cantata, he derives much inspiration for his own work. Boulez writes, ‘The Second Cantata opens up infinite perspectives and must without doubt be considered one of the key works of the contemporary movement by reason of its potentialities for the future. A whole generation will acknowledge this word as one of its essential starting points: both poetically and technically it stands at the origin of a new conception of music itself.’
The author discusses the work, “By blurring line between the horizontal and the vertical dimensions in music, thereby revealing the vertical dimension (that is harmony) to be nothing more than the simplest case of polyphony, Webern becomes the creator of the ’diagonal’ dimension, which Boulez himself, as a composer, would go on to exploit. As Boulez writes, Webern ‘introduced a new dimension, which one might label diagonal, a kind of distribution of points, blocks, or figures, not so much in the sound-plane as in sound-space…In the same way, a heterophonic texture is a kind of aura of the melodic line. One does not need a strict rule in order to create it. On the contrary, the curls that fan out from the principal line are derived in a free and unpredictable manner, enriching its presentation, without modifying the structure.’” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to pursue a greater understanding of this ‘diagonal’ dimension of music creation.
“Boulez metaphorically situates Webern at the border between the ‘absolute’ universe of tonality, and the ‘relative’ universe of the serial.” He writes, ‘In this respect, he occupies a unique position in the history of modern music, since he borrows a number of elements form the music or the past, even a quite distant past, and projects them on to a future which their authors could certainly not have foreseen. As I said before, this is where the main ambiguity of his work resides: and this ambiguity is the pivot on which the language of music was able to make a ‘historical’ turn, and bring in a period of its development which was fundamentally irreducible to the previous one…it uses elements of classical language and, through a distortion of their use, it makes them into the elements of a new language. That is to say that all the elements have a double meaning…It is Debussy alone who can be compared with Webern, in his similar tendency to reject any formal organization that pre-exists the work in hand, in his similar recourse to beauty of sound per se, in his similarly elliptical pulverization of the language.”
Boulez praises Webern, in how he “uses fixed registration to create a sense of immobility which is paradoxically constructed out of polyphonic motion. These types of tension between fixity and motion” are what fascinated Boulez. Another thing that was striking to Boulez, was Webern’s use of structures: “his preference for series which are reducible to a small number of symmetrical subgroups (generally three groups of four notes of four groups of three).” Boulez writes, ‘he strips the thematic material down to a single motive of three sounds, which is the minimal requirement for a feature that can be recognized separately. He does indeed use the transformed versions of this figure to make up the full chromatic complement; but these manipulations are carried out with an object so easy to perceive in its totality that its varied settings of nothing to obliterate the make-up of the original object.’
“Just as Webern reinterprets the laws of strict counterpoint in order to transform them into the laws of serial generation, Boulez reinterprets serial generation in order to create ‘sound blocks of variable density’, which, with the weakening they imply of the horizontal/vertical distinction, are at the heart of his sound world.”
“In phase with his activities at IRCAM, Boulez displays a growing interest in the experimental results of the sciences of acoustics and psychoacoustics.” Instead of actually delving into electronically generated sound and music, which was at its infant stages, he uses the ideas and terminologies of electronic music, reinterpreting them for his own compositional uses. Terms like ‘envelope’ and ‘filtering’ are found, metaphorically, in written passages of notation in his musical scores. We teach students in our music school how to understand and use musical envelopes, particularly in electronic sound design.
He writes, ‘The envelope is what individualizes a development and allows you to give it a particular profile in the unfolding of the work.’ The author goes on, “An envelope is what gives a collection of notes a legible contour, organizing the smaller musical units which constitute it…could be considered any sequence of chords in parallel motion.”
A ‘Signal’, one of the most basic semantic vocations of sound is to function as a message bearer. A sound, whether a bullhorn or a fire alarm, becomes an acoustic sign which can mark a break or any other important event…It can take the form of an isolated note with a fermata, acting as ‘a brief but effective alert’. ‘Signals are of a punctual order, envelopes are of a global character.’ Boulez emphasizes the immobility of the signal: it is non-directional…it breaks out of the musical discourse in order to mark an important point of formal articulation.
Boulez writes, ‘A signal can above all be considered as a mnemonic device.’ Boulez’s signals jog the listener’s memory by leaping out of the sound continuum in the manner of road signage. Signals as well as envelopes, we learn, prove to be particularly useful in large-scale works, that is, musical forms which, on account of their sheer length, challenge the listener’s capacity to remember musical events, a precondition of being able to make mental connections between them.”
Boulez remains concerned for the listener’s ability to discern musical patterns. “When composing a melodic cell, for example, ‘there must be a sufficient number of elements of repetition in order for memory and perception to act in consequence and recognize the initial object across its different representation.’. The theme is so fundamental to Boulez’s thinking on form that he devotes over a hundred pages to what he call the ‘thematics’ of various composers… ‘The play of recognition, the prospects of listening, this is what makes a work successful, what creates in us the feeling of immediate truth of a text and the truth hidden so deep that we are not sure of having grasped it in its totality.’”
Boulez writes, “In my very young years, I thought that music had to be athematic, without themes, but now I am convinced that music must be based on recognizable things which are not themes in the classical sense, but rater themes in which there is an entity which takes different forms by which has characteristics so visible that you cannot confuse it with another entity.”
In creating a new musical language, Boulez discussed, ‘I think that the most ineluctable necessity of language is its unity. It is only this profound unity which generates diversity in coherence.’ In regards to larger-scale works, the author goes on, “Large-scale form is born of alternation and contrast, and no purely deductive method of construction can yield the kinds of comprehensible structures that Boulez desires…Rather than theory, Boulez offers a direction, an orientation, and many workable, if personal, proposals…Boulez does not offer unequivocal answers…but rather a clear enunciation of the problem at hand.”
Above is an except from Boulez’s analysis of Webern’s Cantata, op. 31, revealing how various series were linked by overlapping common tones. Boulez makes use of this kind of technique in his own works.
“Boulez is a composer who distances himself form strict serial techniques, but remains nevertheless deeply informed by serial thought.” Boulez, instead of working strictly with all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, enjoyed working with smaller sets, such as six note rows in Dérive 1, or seven notes as in Rituel .
Another technique Boulez used to ‘blur the lines’ of strict serialism was the use of ‘Anticipations and Suspensions’ in the use of the series by “either by prolonging a voice from a previous chord into the harmony of its successor, or by anticipating an upcoming harmony before its arrival. These two types of procedures allow Boulez to attenuate the rigidity of his harmonic framework.”
Many times Boulez used a kind of ‘puzzle’ form. “This term was coined by Boulez to describe works that consist of contrasting passages placed end to end without transitions, in a musical equivalent of the cinematic jump-cut.”
As stated earlier, Boulez made use of electro-acoustic ideas in his creativity. “Boulez’s increasing interest in the science of acoustic and its application to music…began to leave a mark on his instrumental writing, albeit sometimes in a rather metaphorical form, in the presence of adapted electroacoustic techniques such as frequency shifting, phaser effects, filters, delays, harmonizers, resonators, and so on.”
Boulez made use of a kind of structured aleatory composition process, “in which a rule is posited which regulates the linear placement of each of the elements in time. The willed unpredictability of these passages in which Boulez plays on the simultaneous recognition (of a given cell as belonging to one of the four thematic families) and surprise (at discovering which of the elements will occur next) does not preclude the possibility of their obeying rules which the ear alone cannot identify…In what’s known as a first-order Markov chain, each new state (in this case, the appearance of either A,B, C or D) is considered to depend only on its previous state. A probability is then assigned, which describes the chance that the process will pass from any of the given states into any of the others (e.g. the probability that A will be followed by B, or D by C), and in this way can describe events which display a richer structure than mere random succession. In a situation in which there are n different states, these probabilities can be represented by an n x n matrix know as a ‘matrix of transition probabilities’, or simply ‘transition table’.”
Summarizing Boulez’s compositional techniques, the author states, “As if recognizing the limitations of ‘classical’ twelve-tone technique, in which transformations of the row yield other rows, whose novelty is undercut by their isomorphic relationship to their predecessors, Boulez’s post-serial compositional techniques – whether the partition of a series into unequal parts, pitch-class set multiplication or the application of a sieve of filter which eliminates notes falling outside a given range of pitches – all serve to produce heterogeneous, well-differentiated material with a legible contour. His later emphasis on themes, signals and envelopes has a similar intension. Boulez’s basic preoccupation is the creation of new material from old through a coherent process of deduction, while seeking clear ways of differentiating this material, a task for which the transpositions, inversions and retrogradations of the twelve-tone row prove insufficient. Differentiation of material in turn amounts to sitting up perceivable oppositions in material on every level of structure – essentially through the use of contrasts – in order to escape from the debilitating homogeneity which can arise from the serial system as it was conceived in the immediate post-war period.”
“We could tentatively conclude then that Boulez’s stance on form, which marks a return to thematic writing, tends to shape all elements of the music into ‘parametric elements’: elements which, despite their constant variation and infinitesimal degrees of gradation and nuance, can still be perceived as basically binary. This allows the listener to construct a grammar along structuralist lines: to navigate through the music. In this way, Boulez creates works with startlingly clear contours without sacrificing the extreme detail which constituted one of the most durable achievements of post-war music.”
“In his more unguarded moments, Boulez is capable of a clear statement on his conception of form, as in these extemporized words taken from his 1965 Darmstadt lecture: ‘Form can be completely viewed in a precise and complete vision form the beginning, and little by little realized over the course of its development. On the other hand, certain accidents of gestures can modify the transcription of this form, deforming it to a point in which it has very little in common with the form conceived in a vision.’ “Like a labyrinth, form is simple when viewed form above; it reveals its complexities when it is perceived within the confines of musical time.”
Pierre Boulez, did not, in my opinion ‘break away’ from serialism as much as take it to a place that the technique could be more aesthetically malleable. When the equal-tempered scale was created, and J.S. Bach became the first monumental composer to begin to exploit its possibilities, little did anyone know where musical composition would land 400 years later, in a world devoid of almost any hint of relationship to the acoustic nature of harmony via the overtone series. Serialism’s ‘blindness’ to a harmonic world outside of an equal-tempered scale became the box serious composers lived in throughout the 20th century. Although the techniques of compositional development that arose from strict Serialism, as well as Boulez’s own inventions are tools with a high degree of integrity, I believe that the majority of exploration in this historical path could be characterized as ‘Equal-temperament gone to seed.’ What is needed now is an exploration into a musical world outside of the Western equal-tempered octave. We need to look at the full frequency range and all of its possible relationships. I believe that there is a way to continue the tradition of Western art music to include elements of tempo, meter and rhythm with acoustic harmony, chromatic ‘serialism’, and even micro-tonality, all in one integrated system, but we have to be willing to look outside of the limitations of the equal-tempered scale to do it. Boulez did excellent work inside of what is possibly the far end of the equal-temperament world. I believe that now, just as J.S. Bach had the opportunity to begin a new day with equal-temperament, a new day of ‘integrated frequency’ is historically upon us.
We endeavor to teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas this new path forward, using what I have termed Integrated Frequency, in my pursuit to synthesize ideas derived from Conlon Nancarrow, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Elliot Carter, along with extended serialism techniques discussed above.