18 The New York Review
Sound and Fury
Matthew Aucoin
Music Lessons:
The Collège de France Lectures
by Pierre Boulez,
edited and translated from the French
by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan
Goldman, and Arnold Whittall.
University of Chicago Press,
662 pp., $40.
In 2014, when I was an apprentice con-
ductor with the Chicago Symphony, I
first conducted that ensemble in public
with an enormous projection of Pierre
Boulez looming over me. Boulez, the
revered and widely influential French
composer and conductor, was nearly
ninety at the time. He had originally
been slated to lead two weeks of pro-
grams in Chicago, but his declining
health prevented him from traveling;
as a result, his conducting duties were
apportioned among three young con-
ductors, myself included.
The orchestra’s administration com-
pensated for the disappointment of
Boulez’s physical absence through video
interviews with the maestro about the
music on the program (a colorful med-
ley of works for orchestra and chamber
ensemble by Igor Stravinsky and Mau-
rice Ravel), which were projected onto
a screen behind the musicians. In be-
tween each piece we performed, there
was Boulez, fittingly larger than life,
reminiscing about the political obsta-
cles to performing German composers’
work in France during World War II
or loftily expressing his reservations
about the music that the audience was
about to hear. This, I remember think-
ing as his magnified Cheshire- cat smirk
hovered above me in the hall’s semi-
darkness, is exactly how many compos-
ers have felt for the past sixty years.
When conductors manage to con-
tinue performing into their eighties,
their colleagues tend to soften their
views, even of maestros who were once
feared and despised. A shock of white
hair and a newly tremulous tone of
voice in rehearsals has helped many
former tyrants come to be seen as be-
nevolent fountains of wisdom. I can
think of no other artist for whom this
transformation was as complete, or
improbable, as Pierre Boulez. When
he was a young composer and polemi-
cist in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s (he
did not seriously take up conducting
until later), he seemed intent on burn-
ing down the entire music world, rag-
ing even against his former idols and
teachers—Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier
Messiaen—for their pitiful failure to be
absolument moderne. The sheer force
of his fury, the bloodthirstiness of his
crusades, convinced many of his col-
leagues that he must surely have been
obeying a deep inner logic.
Later in life, Boulez spoke more
softly, if not necessarily more kindly.
And as he became an ever more re-
spected conductor, a narrative took
hold: he had mellowed; he was actually
very nice. Given his lingering reputa-
tion for Rimbaudian savagery, he was
capable of creating a favorable impres-
sion simply by walking into a room
without biting anyone’s head off.
Music Lessons, the translation of
the lectures he gave at the Collège de
France between 1976 and 1995, pro-
vides English- language readers with
the fullest document yet of the mature
Boulez’s musical thought: his approach
to composition, his analysis of his pre-
decessors’ work, and his attitudes to-
ward many sectors of twentieth- century
musical activity. It is an important pub-
lication, especially because I believe it
casts doubt on the notion that Boulez
grew wiser or more generous with age.
This book embodies his every para-
dox: he is both discerning and myopic,
clever and needlessly cruel, capable of
moments of thrilling clarity as well as
long stretches full of bland, arid tau-
tologies. His contradictions are the
contradictions of the late- twentieth-
century European avant- garde; his
narrowness became the narrowness of
a generation. As his era recedes, it feels
newly possible to take stock of both his
strengths and his limitations.
When it comes to Boulez’s music,
rather than his rhetoric, I prefer him
at his most brutal. His early piece Le
Marteau sans maître (1955), a set-
ting of the poetry of René Char, is a
scorching, cathartic embodiment of
the predicament in which midcentury
European modernism found itself tan-
gled. Like the “masterless hammer” of
the piece’s title, serial music—that is,
music whose harmonic content consists
of permutations of a fixed sequence of
notes, such as the twelve tones of the
chromatic scale—had developed into
a practically autonomous mechanism
that was capable of leading compos-
ers around by the nose. In the piece’s
instrumental second movement, thealto flute wanders like a weary nomad
above a bone- dry texture consisting of
xylorimba, drums, and pizzicato viola,
which play a lazily hypnotic groove. It
is a sparse, desert- like landscape, with
no bass- register cushion for the ear to
rest on.
Midway through the movement, the
pulse peters out, and the alto flute, with
a long exhale of a trill, gives up alto-
gether. In response, the percussion and
viola snap to life with a vicious, violent
dance that seems to mock the alto flute
for its feebleness. This is viscerally
thrilling stuff, music that hisses and
stings like a cornered scorpion, which
is surely how it felt to be a composer in
Boulez’s position at the time. I wish I
could write a piece as blunt, as pitiless
as this one.
Compared to the concentrated fury
of Le Marteau, much of Boulez’s later
music seems to have softened without
sweetening. His forms grew ever more
diffuse and his sonic palette more so-
phisticated, but his harmonic language
did not evolve accordingly: though
he would not admit it, the “hammer”
of the twelve- tone system remained
his master to the end. Though there
is much to admire in his later pieces,
especially their scintillating textural
juxtapositions, the music’s apparent
complexity often amounts to a super-
saturated sameness. Every explosion,
every would- be violent gesture, con-
firms only the inherent lack of dyna-
mism in Boulez’s harmonic materials,
their inability to organically grow or
change. The result is a paradoxical
smoothness: nothing Boulez does canbreak this music’s abstractedly so-
phisticated veneer. I enjoy these later
pieces, but for a reason that I doubt
Boulez would appreciate: I find them
relaxing, because I know that nothing
will happen in them. Within so blandly
undifferentiated a harmonic language,
nothing can happen.
One doesn’t have to be a master
psychologist to suggest that Boulez’s
seething rage against so many of his
fellow artists might have been a redi-
rected creative frustration, an inadmis-
sible fear of creative infertility. This
frustration, and the many defensive
maneuvers it engendered, are on full
display in Music Lessons.In his introduction, the scholar Jean-
Jacques Nattiez notes that Boulez, in
editing the book’s manuscript, “de-
liberately excluded... as too specific
a whole series of references to partic-
ular works and composers.” This may
have been a mistake: the book’s stron-
gest sections are those with the most
specific subjects, especially those in
which Boulez interrogates and cele-
brates the work of his musical influ-
ences. The composers who emerge as
his touchstones, the select few whose
influence he fundamentally embraces,
are the three leading exponents of the
so- called Second Viennese School—
Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton
Webern—as well as one composer who
refused enrollment in any “school”:
Claude Debussy. Boulez also offers
enlightening meditations on Richard
Wagner and Gustav Mahler. His writ-
ing about these six artists, much like
his performances of their music as a
conductor, shows him at his best: lucid,
incisive, full of a deep- burning intellec-
tual passion.
The two composers with whom
Boulez most deeply identifies, for
widely divergent reasons, are Webern
and Debussy. He admires the asceti-
cally rigorous Webern because he pre-
cipitated a necessary crisis. Webern’s
music manifests an extreme expressive
compression; he felt for a while that
“when all twelve notes”—the twelve
notes of the chromatic scale—“have
gone by, the piece is over.” Each note
seems to be an unwriting of the previ-
ous one: Webern writes not with a pen
but with an eraser. This “absolute de-
sire for non- repetition,” Boulez notes,
“leads to a complete impasse.” Yet
Webern’s compositional zero hour was
also productive: the fundamental con-
flict between his desire to employ tra-
ditional forms (sonata, rondo, etc.) and
the nontraditional nature of his har-
monic materials led him, in Boulez’s
terms, to a “thematic virtuality.” We-
bern’s music is based not on percep-
tible themes but on virtual ones, on a
Mallarméan “Idea,” such as symmetry,
which “can be perceived only through
its metamorphoses,” the ghostly elabo-
rations of an absent center.
If there is a tinge of envy to Boulez’s
admiration for Webern—as a com-
poser, Boulez lacked Webern’s pith-
iness—his appreciation of Debussy
shows a profound methodological
sympathy. He admires Debussy’s re-
jection of preexisting forms, of pieces
whose constituent elements are “takenPierre Boulez; illustration by Tom Bachtell