Musicon / Periscope / Thinking about Pierre Boulez
-Thinking about Pierre Boulez
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It’s as a result of his efforts that so much 20th-century music is now established in the concert repertory
The public perception of Boulez as the most hardline of modernists still persists, even though that austere image belies the generous-spirited and engaging character that he reveals in private. In mellower old age he might admit the scorched-earth aesthetic that he and his contemporaries invoked in the 1950s – which insisted the great western tradition was dead and that only a brand-new, rigorously organised musical language could take the art form forward – was ultimately self-defeating. The polemicist who once disrupted concerts and called for opera houses to be burnt down has matured into a benign pragmatist.
But it is because of his musical evangelism rather than his theorising or his own often beguiling music that Boulez’s place in the pantheon of 20th- and 21st-century music is assured. Posterity may remember a handful of his works for their beauty, elegance and ravishing sound worlds, but it is the new standards he has defined for the performance of the music of our time that has left the most lasting impression. Boulez’s conducting career took off internationally in the 1960s, at a time when his creativity as a composer was showing signs of running out of steam. Based upon the principle that to get to grips with the music of the present, audiences must learn to accept and understand the music of the immediate past, Boulez defined a performing tradition for the music of the early 20th-century modernists – Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartók and the Second Viennese School especially – and works that audiences previously considered “difficult” emerged in a new light.
It’s as a result of his efforts that so much 20th-century music is now established in the concert repertory. Present-day composers no longer need fear incomprehension and incompetence when their works are performed, while they may also use the hi-tech facilities of Ircam, the music research centre in Paris that opened under Boulez’s direction in 1977. The US composer John Adams’s description of Boulez as a “master with a very small hammer” reveals that his significance is not universally accepted but, on this side of the Atlantic at least, our musical life in the last 50 years would have been much less varied and adventurous without him.