Composed and Decomposed:  Music of our Centuries

The Works & Process at the Guggenheim series  presented Pierre Boulez at Alice Tully Hall on March 5.  (I love how New York halls have recently been cooperating, allowing appropriate spaces to performances. The concert below this was afforded the same cross-town courtesy.)  Boulez told how in his youth he listened to ethnic music, field recordings. With the humor he typically shows nowadays, he explained he does not use these influences obviously in his work:  "Like the colonies, I didn’t want to bring back teas and spices."  He became a conductor, for Domaines Musicale "late in life, before thirty," because "they had a small budget and I was the cheapest conductor."  Their first performance was in 1955, and the following year he was deep in it, "and believe me," he said, "I was sweating heavily. I had to find in myself a way to conduct to find a way to perform without disaster." 

Discussing improvisation, Boulez noted "an absence of gravity.  We are so sure of ourselves.  Sometimes one falls down, but you forget these things."  Regarding jazz, "Sometimes it’s brilliant and sometimes it’s trivial."  In most improvisation, he feels "I can tell you exactly what will happen; after two or five minutes of excitement it was enough.  For one hour, totally predictable: up and down, up and down."  I wonder what it is he’s heard.

Explaining his 1965 work Éclat, Boulez said that after composing Structures for two pianos, "which is probably, quote unquote, my most austere work, and I am being kind to myself, I wanted to write a piece that’s melodic.  Imagine Bach writing only canons."  He said, "Conducting this [Éclat] is like playing a keyboard.  There are seven cues, like a game piece.  You have to have in your head all the data."  I wonder if he’s tried to discuss this with Mr. Zorn.  He likened composing to "ping pong, but played by the same person."  Why does he keep changing and extending his works?  "If I feel the need to transform a piece, I transform." 

Ensemble Sospeso, previously lauded in this column, performed Le Marteau Sans Maître.  Boulez said that René Char’s poem "is the center and the absence.  You have, still, the form of the poem, but disseminated in the other pieces [sections of the work]."   

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