Le problenrie Boulez

Noel Malcolm

ORIENTATIONS: COLLECTED WRITINGS by Pierre Boulez, edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, translated by Martin Cooper

Faber & Faber, £25

In 1954 two distinguished French musi- cians, Gavoty and Daniel-Lesur, con- ducted a survey of contemporary compos- ers under the heading 'Modern music — for or against?' Poulenc, Copland, Mes- siaen, Britten and nearly a hundred others sent replies or gave interviews, and the resulting book makes fascinating reading. One of the briefest replies was that submit- ted by the young Pierre Boulez. 'For or against modern music?', he wrote, 'why the fuck should I care?', to which he added a few lines of personal insults. I offer this nugget of information free to the world of Boulez scholarship; by now it is probably the only writing on music by Boulez which has not been gathered up and reprinted by his assiduous editors and commentators. Orientations, which is 540 pages long, is the third such collection to appear in print. The enfant terrible has become a sage.

Some of this material goes back to the Fifties and Sixties, the heady days when Boulez was lecturing to his disciples at Paris and Darmstadt on the principles of avant-garde composition. Anyone who has read his first collection, Notes of an Apprenticeship, will know the main con- cerns already: above all, the systematic application of 'serialist' permutations to every aspect of the music, and the intro- duction of chance and choice, allowing the sections of a piece to be shuffled into different sequences. Where the two books overlap the earlier one has usually said it all more succinctly.

Orientations echoes at times to the sound of barrel-scraping, and a humane editor might have dispensed with some of the most dated specimens of Sixties sensibility, the straggling, self-conscious poems about Adorn°, the problem of form, or Beeth- oven.

Beethoven, magic lantern for a host of monkeys.

Can this 'man' have ever been born? and 200 years ago?

and in a town — and in a modest house? Where do we stand, after 200 years? is it really 200 years?

There are six pages of that one.

The most valuable new material in this book is the set of notes and commentaries on Wagner, Debussy and Berg which Boulez wrote when he was conducting and recording their works. The long essays on Parszfal and Pelleas are indispensable: powerfully persuasive, for example, on Wagner's manipulation of time and Debus- sy's shifts between symbolism and realism. Reading this sort of piece, one can see that Boulez's greatness as a conductor doesn't just lie in his gift for conjuring clarity, energy and brilliance out of his orchestras. The gift is there, but there is a lot of hard thinking about the score to go with it.

So why is it that Boulez's thinking about music in general, as displayed in the rest of this volume, is so flabby, question-begging, arrogant, repetitious and self-indulgent? This is le probleme Boulez, and I am not sure that I can solve it. Part of the explanation must be that Boulez has not really evolved from enfant terrible to maitre — he has always tried to be both at once. Hence the insulting arrogance of some of his writing, which combines truculent pole- mics with lordly superiority. The first essay in the book, for example, is ostensibly a reply to some of the common criticisms of avant-garde music (its loss of contact with the public, its rejection of the past, etc). But Boulez is really not interested in understanding these criticisms: his techni- que is to parody his opponents' arguments and then sneer at them. Defenders of tonality are 'musical theologians' who want to 'put the cosmos in their pockets'; they are also fetishists, congenitally blind men, sergeant-majors, Pharisees and whirling dervishes. This is rather a laborious way of learning that Boulez doesn't like them.

The polemical truculence needs no further explanation, but the lordliness has a special character of its own. Boulez talks down to his reader from a position of special knowledge: music is a science and Boulez is at the frontiers of research. 'Research' is in fact a talismanic word, enshrined in the 'research institute' which he now runs in Paris. In an early letter to John Cage we find him excitedly announc- ing his latest 'discoveries': a new 'graphic formula' to describe intervals down to one 24th of a tone, and various new ways of juggling 'functions' and 'variables'. None of this, of course, explains how a composer can use these technical discoveries to musical effect, nor indeed why he should use them at all.

Sometimes it's as if M. Jourdain had started giving lectures on Chomsky. Here is a typically scientific piece of prose, with my translation:

A the composer originates a structure which he ciphers B he ciphers it in a coded grid C the interpreter deciphers this coded grid

D according to his decoding he reconstitutes the structure that has been transmitted to him

(Translation: A the composer writes a piece of music B he writes it C the player reads it D he plays it.)

Defenders and disciples will hasten to point out that Boulez is aware of the dangers of pseudo-science in music. Early on in the book he observes: 'One can only smile at the diagrams and treatises that consist of a mad collection of permutations totally devoid of interest.' But note that he is criticising only the ones 'totally devoid of interest'; so this presumably excludes the huge tables of permutations on pp. 138-9 and all the other diagrams which look like electrical circuitry, oscilloscope readings and computerised seating-plans. Like Cal- vin Coolidge's preacher, he disapproves of sin. Unlike most preachers, however, he makes little or no attempt to explain what sin is or how it can be avoided. Boulez disapproves of sin: ergo, sin is what Boulez disapproves of.

The book is in fact full of advice with which it would be hard to disagree. The composer 'must not be content with any easy, accommodating scale of values', and so on. For almost every criticism one might make of Boulez, there is a passage where we can find him sagely nodding in approv- al. He is against pseudo-science, but he is also against false cults of spontaneity. Throughout the book there is a rigid historicism at work, in which music has necessarily and logically progressed through the 'discoveries' of Schoenberg and Webern; but when Boulez wants to attack the view that modern music has lost touch with the past, he denounces historic- ism and declares that history proceeds by leaps and spontaneous mutations. 'In the last resort', he remarks in chapter three, 'it is presumptuous to develop ideas about music. . . As we have already said, we do not consider musicians to be in the best position for undertaking this enquiry.' At this point there are 460 pages still to come. The reader cannot say that he hasn't been warned.