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

20 The New York Review

to change notation without refl ecting
on the why and wherefore easily turned
into a leap in the dark, and attempts
at reform were soon forgotten because
they were impracticable.” At times,
the object of his fury is so vague that
it can’t be named; the practitioners of
some form of rhythmic experimenta-
tion—the use of motor rhythms?—are
dismissed as follows:

Even a strong, coherent language,

such as that of the best Stravinsky,

quickly degenerated into a cata-

logue of mannerisms.... These

rhythmic processes were not in-

tegrated into the language in any

way, but tacked on as very superfi -

cial decoration.

Nowhere in these scorched- earth
rhetorical campaigns does Boulez
name specifi c pieces or practitioners,
and nowhere does he acknowledge the
possibility that he might be traffi ck-
ing in unhelpful generalizations—or,
worse, stomping on a nascent mode of
experimentation before it has time to
bloom. Like Groucho Marx in Duck
Soup, he works himself into a lather
over perceived offenses, the origins
of which are usually invisible to the
reader. Picture all the young compos-
ers who attended these lectures over
the decades at the Collège de France:
How else could they react but by clam-
ming up, doubting their basic impulses,
inwardly closing off access to new
modes of perception?
An unintentionally comical aspect
of the book is that, after pages of rabid
assaults on enemies real and imagined,
Boulez’s essays tend to conclude anti-
climactically, with a kind of shrug. In
the last paragraph of “Language, Mate-
rial and Structure,” he declares that, in
the end, “we can but trust our instincts”
to perceive the difference between the
“musical and the non- musical.” Else-
where, he says that “between order and
chaos”—quite a wide region—“there
is room for the most unstable, volatile
and rich zones of both imagination and
perception.”
Such conclusions, taken in isola-
tion, might strike the reader as broad-
minded. In context, however, they
are hilariously incongruous: Boulez
sounds like a victorious general, stand-
ing on a battlefi eld strewn with the
bodies of his enemies, proclaiming the
need for peace and reconciliation. In-
deed, this pattern—shoot fi rst, shrug
later—resembles the larger trajectory
of Boulez’s career. In his early years,
he was prone to claiming that “all the
art of the past must be destroyed”; a
couple of decades later, he had blithely
cashed in, and spent much of his time
conducting cycles of Wagner operas
and Mahler symphonies.

This brings us to Boulez’s understand-
ing of “memory”; in his universe, there
is no concept more fraught. His writ-
ings on memory encompass both “dy-
namic, creative memory,” employed by
individual artists in the acts of compo-
sition and performance; and collective,
cultural memory, which in his view per-
petually risks becoming “static.” One
might locate the central struggle of
Boulez’s career in the tense negotiation
between these two modes of memory.
He fi nds himself continuously drawn,
seemingly against his will, to engage
with the past (“I do not see how history

can be avoided unless by blind fate”),

but he exhorts us to stay vigilant, to be

sure that if we must engage with our

cultural heritage, we do so actively and

critically.

Boulez’s examination of the faculty

of active memory—the antennae that

we all possess but that, for musicians,

must be hypersensitive—is among the

book’s strongest passages. He defi nes

active memory as a faculty not only of

recall, but of presence and prediction:

a performer must achieve a “global

memory,” which consists of “recall-

memory,” “monitoring- memory” (en-

gagement with the present moment),

and “prediction- memory.” Boulez

compares this multidirectional mem-

ory to peripheral vision, without which

we could not gain an accurate sense of

an object’s position in space. The per-

former is like an Olympic skier, entirely

alive to the present instant, yet also re-

liant on the momentum of past actions,

and constantly scanning for obstacles

ahead. Once a musician has fully ab-

sorbed a score, “a whole emerges in

which memory can roam at will.” The

score’s unidirectional temporal canvas

becomes, in the hands of a master in-

terpreter, a landscape within which the

performer is free to rove, to discover.

If Boulez is at his most penetrating

in his analysis of individual memory, he

is at his most dishearteningly myopic in

his dire warnings against the perils of

complacent collective memory. What

good does it do, exactly, to shame the

nonprofessional music lover for buying

multiple recordings of the same piece?

Does the act of record collecting really

“show in fact a disturbing loss of men-

tal acuity,” and do music afi cionados

really benefi t from being told that their

“totemic worship” of recordings “hides

an overly superfi cial grasp of the mean-

ing of a musical text”? To my mind,

listeners who are not professional musi-

cians, but whose dedication and inquis-

itiveness lead them to seek out multiple

recordings of a single piece, are an es-

sential part of the musical ecosystem.

But Boulez has nothing but scorn for

such listeners, and here, as through-

out his career, he is notably effective in

driving them away.

The book’s baldest self- contradiction

lies in Boulez’s contemptuous dis-

missal of the contemporary phenom-

enon of “historicism”—a broad term

that, in his hands, refers to a sterile

or servile fi xation on musical history,

on precedent and tradition—which is

immediately followed by a detailed

historical account of past composers’

attitudes toward the past. “Going back

a generation,” he says earnestly, “I can

already see very different attitudes.”

Schoenberg saw himself as part of a

continuous tradition; he wouldn’t have

given in to mere adoration of the past.

Neither would Wagner or Berlioz. Back

in the good old days, people lived in the

present!

This section’s striking lack of self-

awareness made me notice a broader

pattern: for all Boulez’s horror of nos-

talgia, he expends most of his analyt-

ical energy on three composers from

one historical moment. “Shall I once

again sing the praises of amnesia?”

he asks grandly at the beginning of his

chapter on memory and creativity. Not

in this book, he won’t: here he’ll mostly

sing the praises of Schoenberg, Berg,

and Webern, whom he refers to—jok-

ingly, but revealingly—as the Father,

the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Apart

from passing nods to Elliott Carter,

Luciano Berio, and György Ligeti, the

only contemporary composer he regu-

larly references is himself. Where are

the celebrations, or interrogations, of

his contemporaries—György Kurtág,

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harrison

Birtwistle, Sofi a Gubaidulina, Luigi

Nono, Galina Ustvolskaya, Iannis Xe-

nakis, to say nothing of artists outside

the circle of the European avant- garde?

Poor Boulez: he contradicts himself,

but does not contain multitudes.

The oases that are Boulez’s fl ashes

of insight hardly suffi ce to combat the

pervasive badness of his writing; this

collection contains a deadening, stul-

tifying crush of unreadable sentences.

There is Boulez as Silicon Valley CEO:

“What matters above all is the absolute

necessity of global, generally applica-

ble solutions.” There are the sentences

that stubbornly resist every effort to

follow them:

With respect to material itself, we

have seen that the non- musical

can either become musical or not,

that the salience of the work to

this material plays a signifi cant

role but is nevertheless not a suf-

fi cient condition, and that despite

their striking, if passing, qualities,

some kinds of material will never

be foundational for their musical

language, and we are never sure

why natural selection yields such-

and- such an outcome.

And then there are entire passages that

manifest a bottomless, immaculate

emptiness:

We can now say that musical forms

should be determined according

to precise references to an idea

exactly determined in all its com-

ponents, in comparison to much

vaguer references to general sche-

mas relating to a common and

less individualised background.

While certain aspects correspond

to relatively anonymous formulas,

others very precisely refl ect highly

individualised characteristics. This

depends on the chosen form, and

at its heart, those moments that it

implies.

I read such passages breathlessly, won-

dering if Boulez might, God forbid, let

some speck of meaning in, but no: their

lubricity is total. It’s just like listening

to his music.

In a book as long as this one, it is

worth considering what is absent. The

word “beauty” barely features at all.

Boulez typically renders judgment

according to the spectra of interest/

boredom and order/chaos—two valid

but painfully limited frameworks that

ignore many of the reasons human be-

ings make music in the fi rst place. No-

where in the book does he seriously

consider other, more organic modes

of composition: modes based, for in-

stance, on listening, or on the possibil-

ity that the musical materials one works

with are not merely dead matter to be

manipulated. When I read Thomas

Adès’s writings on music, or Morton

Feldman’s, I am moved and humbled

by the sense that these composers, in

their basic practice, are engaging with

an otherness that they do not pretend

to understand. The goal of Boulez’s

engagement with music, by contrast,

seems to be pure domination.

Boulez’s universe is also an exclu-

sively male one: each of the more

than 110 musicians, scholars, poets,

and painters cited in this volume is a

man. Only three women’s names ap-

pear in the book’s six hundred–plus

pages: Cosima Wagner, whose diary is

a source for quotations of her husband;

the seventeenth- century actress Marie

Champmeslé, who makes a cameo

when Boulez wonders how Racine

might have been declaimed in his own

time; and the abstract painter Maria

Helena Vieira da Silva. For an artist

writing in the last decades of the twen-

tieth century, this is an impressive feat

of chauvinism.

As I read, I found myself frequently

wondering how Boulez managed to

compose at all, given that his basic,

unchecked impulse is for impatient

dismissal. I can hardly imagine a less

receptive, less creative frame of mind.

In the end, having blocked access to

so many pathways of musical thought,

including many that had barely begun

to be explored, what does Boulez leave

himself with? He traps himself in the

historical moment of the Second Vien-

nese School. He works only with the

twelve tones of the chromatic scale but

refuses to acknowledge the possibility

of stability or messy, “unequal” rela-

tions among those twelve tones. He

builds himself an exquisitely empty

glass box and insists on living there.

These lectures sometimes feel, as his

music sometimes does, like ever more

elaborate arabesques around the same

arid source: in the Boulezian hall of

mirrors, everything sounds like every-

thing else.

In spite of his brilliance and the

breadth of his expertise, I cannot help

but feel that Boulez was, in the end,

more a repressive force than a pro-

gressive one. I won’t repeat the crude

opening fanfare of Boulez’s famous

non- obituary of Schoenberg (“Schoen-

berg est mort”), but I will say that there

is, in this book, precious little that feels

really alive. Q

Anton Webern