Boulez at 80

Tempo 59 (233) 3–15 © 2005 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0040298205000197 Printed in the United Kingdom

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Arnold Whittall In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern’s main purpose was to convince his audience that the twelve-note method was the natural outcome of an evolutionary process; that since ‘we compose as before’, the new was a reinterpretation of the old, not its rejection. Nothing could have been more soberly practical than the aspiration expressed in Webern’s claim that ‘we want to say “in a quite new way” what has been said before’.1 By contrast, it has long been argued that the agenda of the post-1945 avant-garde, with Pierre Boulez a leading member, might be summarized thus: ‘we want to say, in as new a way as possible, what has not been said before’. Adorno based his 1955 critique of the new music around that ‘levelling and neutralization’ which, he believed, were the direct result of the technical obsessions of ‘total’ serialism: ‘the effort to rationalize music completely has something useless and frantic about it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic’. Adorno claimed that ‘what is needed is for expression to win back the density of experience, as was already tried during the expressionist period’.2 Composers should abandon this false form of the new music and begin to remember its earlier, more authentic manifestation. As Richard Leppert has usefully glossed Adorno’s text, the philosopher’s desire was ‘for music to refer to its own past, to evoke that past in order to transcend it’. Yet, while Adorno ‘hears this engagement in Schoenberg, Berg and Webern […] in the new music of the 1950s radical serialists Adorno “hears” history’s absence, the past disappeared’.3 Leppert may well be right. But such an absolute distinction between two radical extremes naturally invites dissent, along the lines that, if history is less ‘present’ in some compositions from around the years 1909–13 than it suited Adorno to acknowledge, then it is also less ‘absent’ from post-war serial works than he believed to be the case in 1955. And even if, with Boulez at least, what we might term the reappearance of the past is a good deal less prominent in his compositions of the 1950s and 1960s than is the case later on, as a writer, performer and entrepreneur, he found it no easier before 1960 to live a life from which memory and the past were totally excluded than he has done since.

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Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music (Bryn Mawr, PA and London: Presser/Universal, 1963), p.55. This is Leo Black’s translation of the German original, published 1960, which was based on Rudolf Ploderer’s shorthand notes of lectures which Webern gave in 1932–3. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor & Frederic Will, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2002), p.191. Richard Leppert, ‘Commentary’ in Adorno, Essays on Music, p.108.

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    In 1996, Boulez ended a short contribution to a discussion about possible types of relationship between classicism and modernism with the epigrammatic flourish that if modernity was forgetfulness (‘l’amnésie’), classicism was – perhaps – remembering (‘la mémoire peutêtre’).4 From the context, it’s clear that he regards the prospect of forcing some kind of synthesis between these two dialecticallyopposed concepts with considerable scepticism: and the much wider context of his later writings, especially the complete Collège de France lectures, Leçons de musique,5 reinforces the image of a thinker who delights in a whole range of binary oppositions and stand-offs precisely because they resist synthesis, rather than (classically) seeking it out. Whether the conjunction in question is between ‘law’ and ‘accident’, ‘signal’ and ‘envelope’, or even ‘safety’ and ‘doubt’, it is the formal, thematic play between similarity and difference which attracts, not the potential for burying difference in similarity, contrast in unity. Whatever the value of such aids to perception as the conspicious repetition of ostinato-like patterns in Boulez’s later music, the effect is less a matter of sinking grateful listeners into an unambiguously organic, classical experience than of that ‘intense and far from comfortable dialogue with the past’ that Martha Hyde has claimed for Schoenberg’s recourse to ‘dialectical imitation’ in his Third String Quartet.6 Throughout his multifarious writings, Boulez has continued to resist the blandishments of the more explicitly history-conscious kinds of neoclassicism, whether in Stravinsky or Schoenberg, and his horror of Messiaen-like collage helps to determine his scepticism about Berg’s willingness to allow the subtle textural and formal ambiguities of his violin concerto to be infiltrated by such found objects as a Bach chorale and a Carinthian folksong. The overwhelming musical attractions of opposition and interplay between the convergent and the divergent, as a manifestation of dialogue between relatively fixed and relatively free compositional features, was something which even the newest New Music had difficulty in ruling out altogether. But in Structures Ia (1951–2), Boulez was able to suppress aural evidence of fixity (the row forms), and what comes across as a kind of spontaneous athematicism remains an important aspect of the works which followed Structures over the next two decades, including Pli selon pli. Structures Ia is, arguably, Boulez’s most determined attempt to practice a modernism devoted unambiguously to forgetting rather than to any dialogue between forgetting and remembering; and even if we endorse current thinking about the political dimension of avant-garde music in Paris around 1950,7 it is difficult to claim that the Utopian agenda which Structures Ia can be felt to set before its listeners required them to respond to anything other than the autonomous play of abstract textures. The possible paradoxes inherent in the composer/listener relationship in such a work have been well sketched by M.J. Grant: and her eminently plausible conclusion that ‘the operation with and integration of extremes emphasises that the aim of serial 4 5 6 7

Pierre Boulez, ‘Classique – Moderne’, in Die Klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20.Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Danuser (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1997), p.308. Published by Christian Bourgois Éditeur, Paris, in February 2005. This is a revised and extended version of Jalons (pour une décennie), (Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1989). Martha M. Hyde, ‘Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music’, Music Theory Spectrum 18/2 (Fall 1996), pp.220–35. See Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also, Ben Parsons, ‘Arresting Boulez: Post-War Modernism in Context’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129/1 (2004), pp. 161–76.

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music is the creation of equilibrium’8 brings back the possibility of comparison for listeners and critics who apply this aesthetic principle more widely across the spectrum of music composed since 1900, and even, perhaps, a significant amount of the music composed since the 1820s. As early as 1958, Boulez wrote: it is my belief that our generation will be concerned quite as much with synthesis as with discovery properly so called – and perhaps even more so. It will be devoted to the expanding of techniques, the generalizing of methods and the rationalizing of procedures of composing or, in other words, to synthesizing the great creative currents that have made their appearance since the end of the last century.9

Those investing heavily in the ‘Boulez as modern classicist’ doctrine will eagerly highlight the word ‘rationalizing’ in those comments, and note the oft-quoted statement about making ‘an attempt to organize delirium’ that appears at the end of the same essay ‘Sound, Word, Synthesis’, almost two decades before the launching of IRCAM. Boulez’s own words are these: ‘I am increasingly inclined to think that in order to make it really effective we must not only take such “frenzy” into account but even organize it’ (Orientations, 182). We might guess that Boulez was instinctively drawn to ways of creating an equilibrium that complemented the stylistic and formal procedures of those ‘great creative currents’ from the past which were nevertheless culpable of succumbing in varying degrees to neoclassicism, and to admitting the kind of dialogues that have often been discussed since the mid-1980s in terms of the critical principle known as the ‘anxiety of influence’.10 The guilt-free, anxiety-free response to precedent is more Boulez’s style: and I wonder whether the crucial motivating factor here was his decision to compose a portrait of Mallarmé – a poet whose radical ideas about the sound- and senseaspects of language were not inevitably transmitted through the kind of formal modernism shown in the fractured page layouts of Un Coup de dès, but which could equally well be accommodated by the historysanctified constraints of the sonnet.11 Nevertheless, even if Mallarmé played a vital part in setting Boulez on the ideological path from Utopian avant-gardism to more pragmatic modern-classicism, it was only when it became possible, at IRCAM, to conceive of a viable conjunction between new technology and old aesthetics that the composer could begin his move back to perceptible thematicism. Whereas Boulez’s response to the death of Schoenberg in 1951 had been a polemical essay, ‘Schoenberg is Dead’,12 the death of Stravinsky in 1971 inspired …explosante/fixe… , a musical memorial in which the potential for the legitimate use of musical memory lay primarily in elements of hierarchic organization, around an ‘original’ E flat. Two years later, when Bruno Maderna died, and three years on from that, in 1976, with the 70th birthday of Paul Sacher, Boulez pursued the possibility of composing more extended ceremonials centering around E flat, while managing to eliminate any 8 9 10 11 12

M.J.Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics. Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.160. Pierre Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p.177. Further page references in text. See in particular Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990). See Whittall, ‘ “Unbounded Visions”: Boulez, Mallarmé and Modern Classicism’, TwentiethCentury Music 1/1 (March 2004), pp.65–80. First published in English in The Score 6 (February 1952). See also Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.209–14.

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association with Beethovenian heroics (as well as any echoes of that much-disliked Beethoven-quoting work by Schoenberg, the Ode to Napoleon). It was working with the convergence/divergence polarity, and its perspectives on centricity, that seems to have promoted the embrace of generative thematicism. In analyses of the …explosante/fixe … offshoot Anthèmes (1991) – whose privileged pitch is D – both Jonathan Goldman and Edward Campbell talk of a return to ‘recognizable objects’ which are ‘clearly related to one another’: and by 1991 this ‘return’ had been going on for some time.13 When Goldman writes of Anthèmes that it is ‘constructed of a relatively restrained number of identifiable motivic cells, and these cells vary with each of their appearances, by being shortened or lengthened, by the alteration of the number of attacks or the durations of the notes, through changes in dynamic markings and so forth’ (51), he seems to be identifying the kind of traditional thematic processes that could be labelled ‘classical’, and therefore represent Boulez’s wholesale retreat from the ideals of both modernism and the new music – especially if it proved possible to trace the source of such variational procedures to a single thematic entity or Grundgestalt. Yet just as the thematic process in Anthèmes seems to circle around a collection of comparable elements, without treating one particular motive as allgenerative, so Boulez’s harmony, in works from the mid-1970s onwards, moves flexibly along a continuum between the centripetal and the centrifugal, avoiding – or ‘forgetting’ – ‘classical’ resolution and aiming to preserve a degree of balance between the polarized elements.14 From this perspective, Boulez has evolved from a relatively brief phase of ‘pure’ modernism to a more dialectical involvement with modernism and classicism, forgetfulness and memory, Utopianism and realism. It might even be possible to view this later phase in terms of response to what is arguably the most profound of all the diverse polarities affecting his musical experience and enterprise: not only acoustic/electroacoustic, but also Webern/Wagner.

    His genius was both hot-headed – even irrational – and extremely analytical. His correspondence and his writings show a quite exceptional awareness of his own evolution, his importance and his impact on others and also of the workings of his own creative faculty. This self-awareness furnishes us with extraordinarily shrewd insights into the chief characteristics of his artistic invention and the main objectives of his artistic quest. (Orientations, 226–7)

These sentences come from an extended introductory essay on Wagner which Boulez wrote for publication in 1975, just before his conducting of the ‘centenary’ Ring at Bayreuth. It is natural enough to regard comments about ‘self-awareness’ and the ‘extremely analytical’ nature of Wagner’s genius as evidence of Boulez’s identification of qualities which he himself embodies: for example, the ‘hot-headed – even irrational’ aspect might be linked to that Artaud-inspired ‘delirium’ which bursts out from time to time. In these terms, even that ‘anxiety of an artist creating a new world that proliferates beyond his rational control, a dizzy sense of uniting agreement and contradiction in equal parts, a dissatisfaction with the dimensions recognized by musical experience and the search for an order less obviously established and less 13

Edward Campbell, Boulez and Expression. A Deleuzoguattarian Approach, PhD Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2000. Jonathan Goldman, Understanding Pierre Boulez’s Anthèmes [1991]: ‘Creating a Labyrinth out of Another Labyrinth’, MA Dissertation, Université de Montréal, 2001. Page references to Goldman in text.

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easily accepted’ (Orientations, 300), attributed by Boulez to Mahler, would not be entirely foreign to his own experience and character. Today’s critical musicology welcomes attempts to connect a composer’s life with his works, especially if that ‘connexion’ is shown to be complex, problematic, the very reverse of a simplistic assertion that the work is ‘like this’ because the life was ‘like that’. With Boulez, perhaps the simplest point to be made about his life in music concerns his versatility. Many composers conduct, many conductors compose, musicians of all kinds try their hand at ruling over research establishments, conservatoires or even university music departments. But no other musician active since 1945 has achieved quite the same spectacular success as Boulez in all three spheres of activity. Boulez’s supreme versatility renders questions about possible connexions between life and work especially attractive in a scholarly climate where the claim that culture is politics by other means seems to have opened up to admit the parallel claim that musicology is anthropology by other means. One way in which Boulez is like today’s leading politicians is that he has had greater opportunities to reveal strengths and weaknesses of personality than most other serious musicians active on the contemporary scene. This encourages books as different as Joan Peyser’s Boulez. Composer, Conductor, Enigma, and Georgina Born’s Rationalizing Culture. IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde.15 Fastidious musicologists tend to deride these documentary efforts, whose feet are all-toofirmly planted in the mud and mayhem of the real world – or, at least, of the world as the author in question constructs it. Nevertheless, those who don’t want to rule out exploring what it means to consider possible alignments between Boulez’s life and work shouldn’t ignore the materials which authors like Peyser and Born provide. Over the years Boulez has given so many interviews that his strategy for concealing himself from the public by seeming to embrace that public has become transparent. The outstanding example of an encounter striving for familiarity and ending in alienation remains Peyser’s riveting narrative, in which her love-hate relationship with her subject gives immediacy, if not authority, to her would-be Freudian observations: in Baden-Baden, we’re told, ‘Boulez sleeps in an exceptionally narrow Bauhaus bed’ (178). Such Napoleonic austerity can easily be taken as a strategy to facilitate the exercise of power. In later conversations with Jean Vermeil, Boulez denies this: ‘I don’t think there is any pleasure in power. … I’m not interested in power. … Power leaves me cold. … Power no, authority, yes’.16 Yet it’s difficult to accept such denials at face value, coming from a musician who would surely identify with the Schoenbergian claim that ‘I feel the necessity to act as a fighter, as a battering ram for the interest of the development of the art’.17 The younger Boulez certainly had the necessary aggressiveness, and with the Second Piano Sonata (1948), Peyser is in no doubt that ‘Boulez knows exactly what he wants – the impression of more violence and more delirium. He also knows how to get what 14

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The best overview of the changing technical factors involved in Boulez’s music up to the mid-1980s is still Susan Bradshaw, ‘The instrumental and vocal music’, in Pierre Boulez. A Symposium, ed. William Glock (London: Eulenberg, 1986), pp.127–229. Peyser’s book was published by Cassell (London) in 1976, Born’s by the University of California Press in 1995. All page references in text. Jean Vermeil, Conversations with Boulez. Thoughts on Conducting, trans. Camille Naish (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1996), pp.87, 88. Further page references in text. Schoenberg, notes for a speech on education, c. 1936. See Joseph Auner, A Schoenberg Reader. Documents from a Life (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003), p.276.

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he wants’, in keeping with his comment about his sister and himself in relation to their parents: ‘they were strong, but we were stronger’(47). Peyser’s tale hinges on what she portrays as a tragic situation. As someone dedicated to protecting his personal privacy, Boulez embodied ‘the ultimate condition of modern man’ (262), and although ‘a person so alienated, so divided, must attempt to restore wholeness with what he has to hand’, we have to confront the fact that, in Peyser’s stark phrase, ‘his revolution did not work’ (249). The revolution in question was getting subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to like contemporary music of the kind Boulez admired. In his role of postBernstein Pied Piper, Boulez had failed: and, we infer, it remained to be seen whether that ‘other kind of music’ (265) to which the thennascent IRCAM was dedicated would succeed, and whether IRCAM itself would succeed, as the model of an institution allegedly very different from anything that had existed before. Georgina Born’s Boulez could hardly be more different. Unlike Peyser, Born decided at the outset of her study ‘not to speak directly to Boulez’, since it seemed to her ‘far more to the point to report the representation of Boulez, and the sense of his impact, through informants’ testimony and my own observations rather than to invite being overwhelmed by his own authoritative, and better-known, account of things’ (9). By the time Born’s study of IRCAM in 1984 was published, eleven years later, it had acquired an interpretative slant clear from the very first sentence of the epigraph, from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power – ‘Modern art is an art of tyrannizing’: and there’s an ironic counterpoint between Born’s initial quote from Boulez, declaring the need for harmonious collaboration between technician and creator, and the record of argument, dissent and frustration to which she devotes so much space. From an early stage the uninterviewed Boulez is characterized as a charismatic but dictatorial force ‘who has controlled every aspect of musical discourse: its production, but also the conditions of its production – its reproduction (performance, theorization, diffusion through education) and so its legitimation’ (80). In producing her vivid scenario of Boulez’s acquisition and exploitation of power, Born makes much of what she calls the ‘profound parallels’ with Wagner (94): and she details how Boulez’s ability to dispense patronage connects with the appearance of ‘hagiographic texts of different kinds that promote his authority’ (93) – texts whose ‘mythic’ exaggerations encouraged subordinates to refer to him, however sardonically, as ‘the king’ or even as ‘God’ (146–7). Born is deeply sceptical about the assumptions concerning social legitimacy and aesthetic value that go with the kind of composition Boulez favours. Even so, she acknowledges Boulez’s own ambivalence about the nature of IRCAM, as an institution committed to research yet expected to produce artistically valuable results: and she appreciates that this ambivalence can be related to a fundamental aesthetic stance in which Boulez sees music not purely as ‘architecture’, but as the ‘architecture of emotion’ (147). Ambivalence also plays an essential part in Born’s highly pertinent judgements about the extent to which IRCAM, at least in the mid-1980s, perpetuated working practices which were ‘largely a leftover from earlier forms of music making’, fuelling ‘a reification of individual authorship replete with the romantic conception of the heroic and individualist artist – a striking romantic survival within a present modernism, and evidence of the continuity between romanticism and modernism’. Yet, since at the same time IRCAM promoted practices ‘in which authorship becomes multiple and in which it may be difficult to reconstruct the lines of

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individuality’, the institute was ‘a site of absolute if repressed confrontation between the continuing power of the romantic ideology of authorship and its practical and material transcendence’ (268). The extent to which Boulez’s own sense of himself as composer might have been affected by these issues will be considered a little later. First, some discussion of texts in which his own authorial voice is more directly audible. In various volumes of conversations, Boulez adopts the polished manner of the supremely accomplished chef d’orchestre who tells us exactly what he thinks we need to know. Boulez has often been given to comments like this, from 1968, about other composers’ music: ‘what really interests me … is a work that contains a strong element of ambiguity and therefore permits a number of different meanings and solutions’ (Orientations, 462). Later, in the Collège de France lectures, the supremely classicistic observation that only the ‘profound unity’ of a viable language makes meaningful diversities within an overall coherence possible, is complemented by the following hymn to liberty: ‘I believe that the fundamental freedom of composing can only be found in the rupture, in the accident constantly absorbed by the law, at the same time as the constantly repeated destruction of the law by the accident’.18 In his conversations with Jean Vermeil, Boulez talks of wanting to hear, and to realize, a ‘hierarchy of values’ in the works he conducts (80): ‘even in music where the sound is not continuous I still try to obtain a certain continuity through discontinuity. By that I mean that there may be interruptions, or ruptures, but there is still an underground rumbling one does not hear, and it links up with something one then hears anew’. These comments come just after Boulez has told Vermeil that ‘if I hear something that has remarkable moments but no general design, it leaves me unsatisfied. I hear those moments and appreciate them, but if I can’t really link them with something continuous that joins one moment to the next, then I’m unsatisfied. In rather disconnected music, such as that of Webern, those moments have to be joined in an extremely evident manner’ (83). Later, he says that ‘even in disconnected works, such as Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6, where the segments are separated, I look for continuity’: and he ends by declaring: ‘I believe the sense of continuity is the most important element in performance’ (91). In his later conversations with Cécile Gilly, Boulez claims that the ‘shifting connections within a group, between the collective and the individual, enormously enrich the various dimensions of the music’.19 Just as the dialogue between order and disorder remains a powerful motivation, so the ‘dialectic of safety and doubt is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting elements in our perception of music’ (112). If, as Boulez says at the end of his comments to Gilly on …explosantefixe…, ‘the barrier dissolves between categories which initially, seemed totally incompatible’ (114), he is suggesting that – at least for the performers – nothing should inhibit a final sense of resolution, of synthesis. Yet it is always difficult to use Boulez’s words to close off the open-ended and the ambiguous. Take the topic of organicism, linked to the images of spirals and mosaics which he associates with the IRCAM works. As he tells Rocco di Pietro, I want to get rid of the idea of compartments in a work … similar to Proust, where you find that the narration is continuous. You have, of course, chapters in 18 19

Boulez, Jalons, p.290 [see note 5]. Boulez on Conducting. Conversations with Cécile Gilly, trans. Richard Stokes (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), pp.106–7. Further page references in text.

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Proust, but the work has to be read in one go. That for me is one of my main goals in music (for large works). I don’t want any breaks in the music, but you can introduce new ideas and abandon some other ideas, like the characters in a novel.20

Is it possible that Boulez in the late 1990s is simply teasing di Pietro, just as he had teased Joan Peyser 20 or more years before? Apart from the blithe suggestion that Proust must be read ‘in one go’, the apparent refusal to countenance difference, assemblage, doesn’t quite fit with the comment to di Pietro that ‘I need, or work, with a lot of accidents, but within a structure that has an overall trajectory – and that, for me, is the definition of what is organic’ (25). But it’s right and proper than an element of ambiguity should persist in connexion with Boulezian notions of organicism, and, for that matter, classicism. Like his compositions, Boulez’s writings and interviews bear consistent witness to the modernist stratum in his thinking about music.

    Boulez’s tendency to associate classicism with remembering might explain his preference for restraint, his fastidious refusal to confuse memorial recollection with ‘delirious’ lament. The brief prose poem which prefaces Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974–5) stresses formal aspects – ‘perpetual alternation … recurrent patterns changing in profile and perspective’ which dialectically promote a ‘ritual of the ephemeral and the eternal’, and create a sense of ‘the images engraved on the musical memory – present/absent, in uncertainty’. This seems to embody the composer’s sense of the work’s form as expressing the fundamental ‘uncertainty’ which its materials reflect, and which listeners inevitably confront. For the musical memory, the presence of one image requires the absence of others which, in the dialogue between the ephemeral and the eternal, are no less essential to the ceremony: and it is a short step from ceremony conceived in these terms (something present memorializing someone absent) to the kind of formal presence/absence dialogue which ‘live’ electronics makes possible. In a recent article (see Note 11) I discussed the third Mallarmé Improvisation from Pli selon pli in terms of its magical, siren-like associations, and the kind of aesthetic enslavement depending on sounds whose sources are unseen which has been much discussed of late. There seems to be a natural progression from Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of hidden sounds ‘whose invisibility forced the listener to concentrate on the morphology of sounds rather than their origin’21 to the aura of Boulez’s IRCAM works, in which the listener at a live performance registers the disparity between what is visible and audible and what is audible yet invisible: and the ‘various spatialization techniques’ which Andrew Gerzo uses in the 1996 DG recording of Dialogue de l’ombre double are designed to construct ‘an imaginary hall in which the sound sources seem to the listener to move horizontally or vertically, closer or further away’.22 The effect is evidently the result of something mechanical: and yet the aesthetic impression can transcend mere mechanics, as that trace of magic refuses to be erased. 20 21 22

Rocco di Pietro, Dialogues with Boulez (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), p.70. Further page reference in text. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p.148. Andrew Gerzo, booklet notes with DG recording 457 605-2 (1998).

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Doubling, shadowing, are multiply deployed in Dialogue, most notably in the spatial relations between the principal clarinet and its recorded or echoing Other: and doubling and shadowing are also evident in the dialogues within Boulez’s material, and between that material and allusions to Berio’s Sequenza 9a, Stockhausen’s In Freundschaft, and Boulez’s own Domaines. (The title alludes to a scene from Paul Claudel’s weightily symbolic 11-hour drama Le soulier de satin (1922–4) which contains a monologue for a character called ‘l’ombre double’ – although, according to Béatrice Ramaut,23 Boulez decided on his title only after the music was completed.) In elaborating on the ritual, theatrical qualities of the piece, with its use of movement and lighting, Ramaut suggests an association between the construction of the first section, or ‘Sigle’, and those psalmodic models lodged in Boulez’s memory since childhood, which (as Jonathan Goldman has shown) also have a role in Anthèmes (Dissertation, 40). These memories of ritual and ceremony might even help to explain a touch of almost Germanic pathos in the character of Dialogue – and not just ‘pathos’, but an heroic vulnerability, restoring the link to Wagner, and to Kundry, the siren who finds peace in death. Consideration of the character of Dialogue’s materials, and certain comparisons which arise with generic prototypes in Boulez’s earlier music, strengthen the case for using ‘modern classicism’ as an appropriate category for music which is not so much an antithesis to an earlier, avant-garde modernism as something deduced from it in the light of experience, and of the conviction that listeners should be encouraged to perceive the nature of musical materials, rather than remaining mystified by them. Among these generic prototypes, none is more seminal, nor more persistent, than the juxtaposition of reticence and incisiveness, corresponding to slower and faster, rhythmically freer and more regular elements – the prototype of the kind of ‘explosant/fixe’ polarity that can perhaps be thought of as Boulez’s version of the Nietzschean confrontation between Dionysus and Apollo. Such balancing oppositions are evident as early as the contrast between the staccato moto perpetuo (‘Rapide’) and slower, smoother, more lyrical material in the second movement of the first piano sonata (1946), shown in Ex. 1. They are no less fundamental to the formal and textural dialogues of many later works, for example the ‘Libre’ and ‘Prestissimo’ materials at the beginning of Incises for piano 1994, extended version 2001 (Ex.2). As gestures, these basic thematic elements are as complementary as the genres of fantasy and toccata which they recall. The early works tend to shun the proto-thematic recognizability of pitch-centred ostinatos, but the later pieces are more relaxed about such unifying aids to accessibility, and about their possible connexions with the signifying ‘topics’ of baroque and classical tradition. As works without an electro-acoustic component, Incises, sur Incises and Anthèmes forgo that additional, mysterious element of spatially enhanced dialogue by means of which Boulez seems to come closest to his own very personal version of a more romantic aesthetic and its admission of pathos into the expressive vocabulary. In the ‘Sigle final’ of Dialogue de l’ombre double, the brilliant, rapid flow of the writing suggests a typical Boulezian moto perpetuo or toccata. The first part (to bar 65) is written for the recorded or ‘double’ clarinet only, in dialogue with itself, the principal material divided between the repressed and 23

Béatrice Ramaut: ‘Dialogue de l’ombre double de Pierre Boulez: analyse d’un processus citationnel’, Analyse Musicale 28 ( June 1992), pp.69–75.

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Example 1: Piano Sonata No.1, second movement © Copyright Amphion Editions Musicales, Paris

the assertive. That marked ‘agité, mais murmuré’ circles within a relatively narrow, low register: that marked ‘comme une brusque interjection’ uses quintuplet semiquavers to launch its increasingly extended, ascending flourishes (Ex.3).

  :       13

Example 2: Incises © Copyright 2001 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien

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Example 3: Dialogue de l’ombre double, beginning of ‘sigle final’ (‘double’ only). © Copyright 1985 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien

Initially distinct, these two types of material evolve into a more interactive phase (from bar 27), preserving a distinction of tempo (‘agité’ as against ‘plus modéré’) but tending increasingly towards the single ascending or descending trajectory. Then, in the second part, a degree of synthesis is reinforced by the persistence of the dialogue between the ‘live’ clarinet’s single, reiterated high Cs and the varied, florid approaches to the same pitch in the ‘double’, approaches which integrate elements from the first part’s distinct ‘agité’ and ‘brusque’ materials. In this way, Dialogue ends with a reiterated cadence that is surely intended to resolve rather than to dissolve, and which wears its classical associations very firmly on its sleeve. Yet that final sustained and repeated cadential pitch is not quite the all-pervading, all-controlling tonic of tonal tradition: most of the work is far too febrile, if not actually frenzied, to support such a judgement, and in the ‘Sigle final’ it is as if the pre-recorded, invisible ‘double’ is vainly attempting to escape the triumphantly single-minded presence of the implacable and immobile principal clarinet.

      In a rare admission of emotion, Boulez has said that ‘the amazing scene between Alberich and Hagen’ which begins Act 2 of Götterdämmerung ‘moves me for reasons that are probably not directed related to the drama. The composer seems here to be conducting a kind of dialogue with his own double and the subject to be something much more general than the Ring: it is a questioning of the future, an uneasiness about generations to come’. For Boulez ‘the whole scene reveals a deep uncertainty about communication’, an ‘anguished questioning’ which refers ‘to the whole work and its future validity’

  :       15

(Orientations, 291). Perhaps, in Boulez’s mind, this links back to the overriding element of ‘doubt’ about absences and presences revealed by the Rituel poem, and explored so memorably in the electro-acoustic works, from Répons onwards. The labyrinthine world in which the delirious forgetfulness of modernism seeks accommodation with the ritualized remembrances of classicism begins at the point where the path from the new music explodes into a daunting multiplicity of routes and counter-routes. Hardly surprising, then, that even the ferociously self-assured Boulez should remember the sacred ceremonies of his youth in working on compositions which reach out to their listeners in ways of which both Wagner and Webern might have approved. At 80, he is still remembering, still resisting the siren calls of unadulterated nostalgia.