Bid for Blab: Pierre "Ugly Comb-over" Boulez

although i did think of a possible negtative article title:

boo-lez.

hahahahahah. oh mercy.

supremely divinely classic. unlike stockhausen, i've never heard anything really bad by him. piano sonatas 1-3 are among the most, possibly the most emotionally resonant cathartic compositional works i've ever heard. from such delicacy and gentleness to such violence to such energy. repons is also incredible, so expansive and fantastical. i remember the moans and howls and spaces on le marteau sans maitre also being powerful but i don't own it. i wish i did though - it's an absolute classic.

i actually don't feel well-versed enough to really judge anyone's conducting.

search: he uses ELECTRIC GUITAR on "Rituel" — it sounds just like Eugene Chadbourne!! (No, of course it doesn't: it's very mildmannered and a teensy bit pointless...)

The IRCAM synth-work on Répons sounds v.weedy to me (in fact I've never heard ANYTHING from IRCAM I was blown away by), but maybe "in concert" it's more sensurround and impressive.

Speaking of which, at a Westbrook gig in the early '80s I accused Boulez-groupie Georgie Born of being the product of a discourse, the response to which was having Paul Rutherford snigger at my Human League t-shirt. He can bloody talk.

Like O'Rourke, my listening sympathies are with the INA GRM crowd - Ferarri, Chion, Bayle, Parmegiani etc. - who collectively seem to me to be far more playful and hip than the academic and humourless Boulez.

Boulez-as-conductor/Ensemble Intercontemporain head honcho - bit more interesting. There's a review in the new Wire of a 1996 Boulez/Chicago SO reading of some choice Varese (Ameriques, Arcana et al); basic gist - PB's not really that keen on this sort of thing anymore, hence its lack of lustre compared to his 1977 NYPhil version, the dumping of the electronic component of Deserts and the five years its taken to be issued at all.

Dammit. I finally join the ignoble ranks of those-who-fail-to-close-their-tags.

The more I consider him a wicked calculating genius the more I like him. As a put upon idealist he sucks.

got a LP of ''marteau'' with stockhausen's 'zeitmasse' on the other side.

so i enjoyed the arrangements i guess (like all the percussion lots here, I know he was listening to gamelan so that might be coming through?). i had not much of a prob with the singing, really.

''search: he uses ELECTRIC GUITAR on "Rituel" — it sounds just like Eugene Chadbourne!! (No, of course it doesn't: it's very mildmannered and a teensy bit pointless...)''

haven't heard it but I don't quite see what the point is in comparing this to chadbourne or anything.

I gave a listen to my copy of 'repons' yesterday - despite the fact I hadn't realised there were synths in it I enjoyed many bits. I also found it quite easy on the ear and wz kind of surprised by this. I guess its the tinkly bits; overall, he doesn't work the ensemble as hard as someone like rihm on 'jadgen...'.

You mean a vinyl LP? Robert Craft? I've got this too. I like a lot of Boulez but he's kind of a difficult person to warm to.

yes and yes - I prefer the stockhausen piece.

"Boulez 2005": http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/webseries/?ID=boulez2005

...including a 50th anniversary recording of Le Marteau Sans Maitre (which sounds very good on first listen), new recordings of the piano sonatas by a young and relatively unknown Finnish pianist, another Mahler disc, and the Bartok piano concertos with three different performers. The 1995 recording ...Explosante-Fixe... has also been reissued.

the comparison w.chadbourne wz a joke julio: i have always been intrigued by the timidity of the use of elec g. by vanguard composers not otherwise known for their timidity

since then I have also heard 'opening of the mouth' by barrett, he does like to amplify things (like harps): there's a section for gtr which is acoustic but it sounds like D*r*k you know who...

Dutilleux - anyone round here a fan? I'm giving a listen to a str quartet. Boulez didn't like his stuff much but there you go..

Jean Barraque - Pick yer fave?

began the day with the topical threnody, the alg suggested boulez next and that's where i've been, seems to suit the mood (currently piano sonata 2)

ordinarily i'm all "this being piano texture is what held him back tbr" but today it feels elegiac for whatever (inc.him) so

lol here comes the singing (pli selon pli): trying to hypnotise myself into hearing this as elegiac also (of a time when ppl sang like this and no one was puzzled)

it's basically *all* 1910s beardsley-cult japanoiserie run-off anyway (as igor once cattily put it iirc, accurately spearing schoenberg's deal imo)

It being a Mallarmé setting severely undercuts that view.

lol here comes the singing

Followed swiftly by lol here comes the off button.

PB conducting the ensemble contemporain, singing actually not that grisly (= christine schafer, the unexpected kevin bacon between fischer-diskau and michael haneke lol)

all fin de siecle to me pom

a smaller world than once was imagined

Fair and unfair in equal measure. Of all 19th century French poets, Mallarmé was the least bound to his era, mainly because of the explicit sense of écart and espacement that he derived from his encounters with the meaningless, fragmentary void that lies at the heart of all poetry (quoth the modernist). Quite beyond the so-called 'Symbolist' paradigm into which he is usually folded (heh heh heh). Boulez's aural reading captures much of that, more so than the Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune, even.

"fair and unfair in equal measure": lol this is p much what i was aiming for

"I go down to IRCAM and this engineer shows me a big room with a giant computer. He goes "Listen, we put the sound in... and it comes out a few seconds later at a different pitch!" It slowly dawned on that they've spent a million dollars on a 200 dollar Yamaha SPX-90." - Jim O'Rourke in an old Wire.

― Andrew L, Monday, August 27, 2001 2:00 AM (eighteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Nice.

I never thought Pli Selon Pli was a good idea tbf. If it is, objectively, a good idea, then it's objectively executed poorly. It might just be me but Mallarmé's writing isn't done any favors here at all!

This is good internet content, regardless if it's overblown, dixit Donal Henahan: "The excerpts from "Pli Selon Pli" that Mr. Boulez conducted at Carnegie Hall confronted the listener in no such embarrassing manner: they dealt with the Mallarme texts antiseptically, like a rubber-gloved dental technician. This sort of expressively uncontaminated art is a thing of its time and therefore in a sense legitimate. It may be described as the 'great' music of a century in its death throes.

"fair and unfair in equal measure"

Though yeah, this is probably otm.

As an aside, Ravel dedicated 'Soupir', the first of his Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, to young Igor. I wonder if he also deemed 'pretty monotonous and monotonously pretty' (his assessment of Pli selon pli, which tbf applies to a great deal of notated music from the 1960s onwards).

xp that Henahan quote is great.

*deemed it

i just feel PSP is still too much stuck in the shadow* of schoenberg's evil-clown song-suite, which is what strav was dissing as "dated beardsley cult" (which i think is mean but funny when describing a fairly overripe piece of german expressionism, the words are worse than early siouxsie, and does spear the narrowness)

*(stuck largely as an effect of the singing, and as noted, christine schäfer here achieves a degree of lift-off out of this) (which reminds me i shd take the locked-down opportunity write up the notes i took on sprechgesang after a discussion on one of pom's threads, i have OPINIONS)

The Schäfer recording – post-drawn out 80s rewrite of the piece – does attenuate the work's flaws: it's less self-consciously terroristic, almost comfortable with its placidly neutral neo-impressionism, plumbing tinkly sounds for sound's sake. It has nothing to prove save its own folding and unfolding. I'm tempted to describe it as Feldman-esque, although I do agree that the singing remains a hurdle, despite Schäfer's admirable – and very Mallarmean – self-effacement.

i think (listening in the context of right now as i am) (couldn't work out how not to tbf) i am realising i have moved from "less self-consciously terroristic" (= that's bad, PS is a sell-out and shouldn't have spent his youth being rude to fogeys) to "less self-consciously terroristic" (= yeah fair, times change, he stayed where he was and thoughtfully consolidated, who doesn't, and now we get to mourn something for what it actually was and not for what it loudly said it was going to be)

I approve of the Terror, of course, but as you said, much of it turned out to be rhetorical bluster, the resulting music being… not much of an effective result, really, unless you extrapolate an unsaid starting point that would later become increasingly more insistent and explicit, before being spelled out at long last, superseding the 'BLOW UP THE OPERA HOUSE' incarnation of Boulez in the process (I've always wondered whether this wasn't also an etymological play on opera in the sense of 'works', i.e. screw l'œuvre, embrace désœuvrement). Then again, Mallarmé also announced an all-encompassing Livre, which was to be an 'explosion'…

The best Pli selon pli recording is the 1981 one with Phyllis Bryn-Julson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, originally issued on Erato and then reissued at budget price in Warner Classics’ Apex series after Warner bought Erato. Among the three Boulez-conducted recordings, it sits comfortably in the middle where the performers are now more comfortable than the music and the sound quality is better than the first recording, but Boulez’s conducting hadn't become so weak and effete as on the DG recording with Schäfer.

Now that the maestro has passed on, I hope we will see a new recording of the piece, by someone like Matthias Pintscher who can put some of the mid-period Boulez fire back into it.

how's the singing

i'm not going to do a comparison right now, someone in another place mentioned sparks and i'm moving on to the,

m

Funny you should mention Pintscher, as his music has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as late, revisionist Boulez. I don't think of him as a particularly fiery conductor tbh.

xps

Nor can I resist copy/pasting Richard Barrett's brief obituary, 'Boulez is dead':

He created around himself a mythology of radical avant-gardism without ever really putting it into practice in his own work, at least after his early years. His prescriptive view of what was acceptable in new music, and what wasn't, was in my opinion a dead hand on French musical culture for many years. His dismissal of so many things from free improvisation to Xenakis wasn't just a matter of personal opinion but a statement with systematically accrued political clout behind it. This isn't to detract from the many impressive and memorable things he did as a composer and conductor, even if I don't feel personally very involved in most of his compositional work when I hear it. Let's celebrate his passing and that of his generation by looking forward not backward.