david robertson
page two

As the director of the Ensemble InterContemporain, you have an enormous amount of this type of responsibility.

Yes, you're particularly aware of it here. Contemporary music, for the vast majority of people who say they like music, has not yet been proven to be something worthwhile. I say that with no rancor; it's just the fact. It's done for a fairly small number of people, because it requires listening which is not so prevalent nowadays. Therefore, every concert we do has the added onus of needing to justify its existence, and the existence of this music, in contemporary society.

The music director of a symphony orchestra or an opera house is performing music that has been performed for two hundred years: most people know, approximately, the philosophical and social context of a work by Schubert or Bach, even if this context has been put into question during the last thirty years. So an entire season can be performed, at least for the moment, unconsciously. There is still a fairly well ingrained sense that in bourgeois society it's the done thing, culture is good for you. What I think many of these institutions have not yet realized is that the second world war and the atomic bomb have problemetized a great deal of these assumptions, the "culture is good for you" principle, which is really a Victorian impulse, dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. I don't think this is at all addressed, and I think we're walking down a tightrope to disaster if we continue, with the New York Philharmonic, to stick with more or less interesting variants of overture, concerto, symphony. This is a model that was put in place about a hundred and thirty years ago, and it still functions for many people; but if life inside the great concert halls hasn't changed, life outside has changed dramatically—even the lives of those audience members.  

But in terms of institutions, contemporary music is not simply an outside to the nineteenth-century drawing room. It has its own limitations, its own styles, its own characters playing their roles: Lachenmann plays a part, Rihm plays another. . .

I think there's a danger in saying that. I don't look at it that way in my own personal life nor, luckily, in the programmation of the ensemble—which is why I think our ensemble is very different from the Asko, or even from the Ensemble Moderne. I think the closest it comes is to the London Sinfonietta, which, in its best days, really represented, in my opinion, how one should view contemporary culture: I don't think you can look at Sam Francis and imagine that Cezanne is not important and doesn't play a role, just as I don't think you can look at Lachenmann and not think of Hindemith. I think many people would like to be able to do that. Who knows why? Perhaps it increases their sense of self-importance, or it may give them the feeling of being singular in what they're doing.

For me, "contemporary music," music which looks at the composition of notes seriously, is something that began in earnest around the time of the sturm und drang period and then went on to German romanticism. It said that music is more than something that diverts—divertissement—more than just amusement, and that one can do things with the language of music that one cannot do in other realms. Now this has to do with the history of German philology, and it's something that a composer such as Boulez is continuing to do today. (Someone like Berio comes from a different tradition; Italian music remained more an accompaniment to a great singer, or to a special occasion or festival. The illustration of a story, also, is very important in Italian music.)

Lachenmann, Rihm, or, to stay with the Germans, Mikhail Obst: they are writing music differently than someone composing music for a film. They are writing music that must be listened to with total concentration, something not a lot of people are prepared to do. It means unplugging the telephone: there are very few people who actually think that's necessary.

One of the wonderful things about compact discs and cassettes is that you can stop the music, if you are listening with interest, have a conversation, and then go back to it. What is concentration if it can be interrupted at any moment? This is very important, and having been brought up in southern California, where so many people work in the entertainment industry, I've thought a lot about timing on television, for example, "television time," what you do in order to keep someone involved, in spite of constant interruption.

In any case, I find it impossible to limit myself to twentieth-century music. I know very few people who only read literature published after 1945, and yet there is this idea that you can just be interested in post-war music, since you like "contemporary music." I find this… baloney.  

I knew a professor of logical positivism who didn't require his students to read anything before. . .  

Well I think that's a mistake! It's the idea of saying that you can have humanity without DNA. It's not that I'm for or against Darwin, but in geological terms things take a long time; in human terms, things happen comparatively in a fraction of a second. If you look at how long it takes a child to learn to walk, you realize the complexity of the human brain; a foal is on its feet immediately. The human brain is a enormous, complicated machine, and you can't read the instruction manual, so you just have to keep pressing buttons.

I'm against the concert with five world premières. I have trouble listening to such a concert, and I'm an expert! I reach a saturation point, and I end up glossing over much of what I hear. If I go to a gallery I can't really look at more than ten pictures. When I was a student in London, I realized that what I found difficult about galleries was not that I didn't like looking at pictures, but that I reached a saturation point after three or four images.

A great painting, whether abstract or figurative, has elements so rich that it is constantly changing, because you are constantly changing; it's rich enough to accommodate your own development. If I am putting together a program of all new works, as I am for a couple of next season's concerts, I want to do so in a way that won't produce that feeling of fatigue and heaviness, but rather one of elation and stimulation, that sense of "Yes, that was difficult, but I see how this connects with that."