The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-11-05)

November 5, 2020 19

apart and put back together... like an
appliance demonstrated by a traveling
salesperson.” Many of Debussy’s works
conclude by fading “into the uncer-
tainty from which they were born.” In
passages like this, Boulez’s defense of
the salient features of Debussy’s mu-
sic—a sense of constant transition, a
“mobile” hierarchy in which secondary
material can become primary and vice
versa—sounds distinctly like a defense
of his own later work.
Boulez is equally illuminating about
Wagner and Mahler, two composers
whose heart- on- sleeve expressionism
might seem at odds with the feline
aloofness of the Boulezian demeanor.
Boulez’s essential insight about Mahler
is structural: Mahler’s themes, by their
basic nature (their “source in folklore,”
their “triviality”), are inherently un-
suitable to conventional symphonic de-
velopment, and as a result such themes
“ wou ld slowly go on to ba n k r upt t he for-
mal economy of the symphony.” They
are subversive by their very banality.
Boulez also highlights the way that
Wagner’s patient, luminous treatment of
individual chords influenced twentieth-
century thinking about acoustics: the
shining A major chord that opens the
Lohengrin prelude, and to a still greater
extent the E- flat major arpeggios that
open Das Rheingold, are revolution-
ary defamiliarizations of basic har-
monic objects. The absence of melody
or harmonic development allows us to
hear these chords not as prefabricated
elements in a vocabulary, but as singu-
lar acoustical entities; as Rheingold’s
arpeggios accumulate, “one cannot de-
cide whether to focus on the horizontal
dimension that generates them or the

vertical dimension which is the result

of these multiple superimpositions.”

Boulez’s take on Stravinsky, on the

other hand, strikes me as a weak mis-

reading. In his eyes, Stravinsky was

“highly original” in his earlier pieces,

which did not have obvious models—or

at least not models that Boulez was fa-

miliar with—but his later experiments

with extant European idioms, and es-

pecially his overtly neoclassical pieces,

constitute an unforgivable regression.

To my ears, the miracle of Stravinsky is

precisely that he is equally inventive in

every “style” he tries; he is capable, like

Picasso, of liberating and setting alight

any material he touches.

But Boulez cannot hear past his

knee- jerk aversion to anything resem-

bling functional tonality in the work of

a twentieth- century composer. In the

spirit of experimentation, Stravinsky

was willing to run the risk of sound-

ing innocent or even sentimental—a

risk Boulez would never have admit-

ted to his oeuvre’s steel fortress. This

reductive attitude, this refusal to listen

past Stravinsky’s surfaces and meet the

music on its own terms, is a harbinger

of the bullying narrow- mindedness

that Boulez brings to his analyses of

more recent music.

Over the course of Music Lessons,

Boulez trains the automatic weapon

of his disdain on practically every

school of twentieth- century musical

thought. He does not reserve his ire,

as I expected he might, for composers

whom he considers backward- looking;

he is equally intolerant of artists who

dare to make music using new sound

sources (often electronic ones), who

experiment with improvisatory prac-

tices, or who use unconventional no-

tation. Given the ferocity of these

broadsides, it is perhaps merciful that

Boulez almost never specifies who or

what he’s attacking, but this also makes

it impossible to take his criticisms se-

riously. There is nothing more boring

than the spittle- spewing invective of a

demagogue railing against ill- defined,

possibly illusory enemies, and unfor-

tunately this book seethes with such

denunciations. Demoralizing as it is to

read Boulez’s bursts of vitriol, it feels

important to enumerate them so as to

define their scope, which is so vast as

to amount to an aesthetic boxing- in.

By dismissing past and future alike,

Boulez backs himself into a suffocat-

ingly tight corner.

Here he is on the first wave of com-

posers to explore electronic means of

sound production:

Rather than asking the fundamen-

tal questions... they yielded to

the dangerous temptation of the

superficial and simple one: is this

material capable of meeting my

immediate needs? Such spur- of-

the- moment and frankly servile

choices could not, of course, take

us very far.

More recent electronic music, in

Boulez’s opinion, seems “amateurish

or even incompetent when evaluated

as a composition”; such music arises

from “a simplistic reflex that precludes

the creation of masterpieces,” a “banal

and facile exoticism.” As for “recent

incarnations of improvisation” (which

are not specified), “it is difficult to see

any value in them except as individual

psychological case studies, or indeed a

collective r itual participated in by prac-

titioners of a particular cult.” If impro-

visation is a dead end, how about music

that draws on Classical models? “In

this case, procedures are adopted not

for their deeper meaning, but as a kind

of prosthesis”; the work of neoclas-

sicists amounts to mere “pleasurable

dabbling.” And don’t get him started

on neo- Romanticism, which “doggedly

settled for isolated, bulimic medleys,

without any kind of critical distancing.”

What about new methods that seem,

on the surface, respectably avant-

garde? Pieces that use microtones

“clearly do not indicate exceptional

imagination” and display a “lack of

originality... this new material failed

to stimulate genuine reflection on the

very compositional practice it pos-

ited.” The creation of graphic scores

“involved some fetishes of which we

can say only that they represented ei-

ther great naivety or useless cunning.”

American Minimalism? Don’t even

ask! “One quickly wearies” of their

phasing techniques “as soon as one

senses how they function.” The use of

sonic objets trouvés is a manifestation

of “narcissistic cultural play.” If music

is inspired by a “chart, graphic, set of

instructions or poetic or para- musical

text,” then “vanity is its main feature.”

Stockhausen- inspired “intuitive music”

is of no worth either: “It was soon clear

that the musical ideas suggested in this

way were clichés.”

Elsewhere, Boulez decries the irre-

sponsibility of certain unspecified re-

forms to musical notation: “Wanting

Making The Met,

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Visitors to The Met in 1910 and 2019. Photo (right): Roderick Aichinger.

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