Boulez is DeadThe style of the other living composers presented in the Carnegie Hall series is no surprise: mostly atonal and squarely mid-century. A New York Times critic found that 'The repertory is such as Mr. Boulez has been promoting from the podium for nearly half a century...' One concert-goer noted that the most tonal music performed during two of the recent Boulez-led concerts was Happy Birthday to You as played by the LSO to Boulez! Predictably audiences will continue to be forced to cope with Boulez's selections of gray-bland atonal works in order to hear the repertory for which they are willing to pay. Proof: take away the Bartok, Stravinsky and Mahler, and Boulez will return to conduct under-attended new-music-only concerts, as he did in the late 80's in appetizing venues such as linoleum-lined Wollman Auditorium (now defunct) at Columbia University. With beloved early twentieth century works and the occasional performance of the transcendant work of Ligeti as bait, and with the establishment backing him, the blight is never-ending.
Beyond this: the new revisionist Boulez. In an interview last month, he spoke of 'bringing the revolution to the people.' After 55 years, he's learned that his work must somehow relate to audiences or his 'revolution' will have only leaders and no followers. This is a revolution that reeks of press statements, the hoped-for reciprocal sales and programming power. His marvelous new inspiration is to graft this music that no one wants onto the museums! It is not enough that he has spearheaded the decline of modern music. Now he wants the culturally and financially successful museums to carry the burden of his folly. The momentum from his 75 year celebration, the recent whirlwind touring and his splashes across the media (who after all crave subject matter), may actually convince the museums that he deserves space. This is until the museums learn, and not quickly enough, that a super-tanker wake of audience disinterest follows Boulez's modernist agenda. There is a lighter side to Boulez: he and his ilk helped to make Minimalism possible. Pierre, this is the sort of ironic scandal you would enjoy if you weren't one of the objects of its attention. Without your steely, resolute drabness and inspired ostriching -- your refusal to confront a larger world, Steve Reich, Philip Glass and leagues of Minimalists and Post-Minimalists would have had little to grate against... in fact you were a far better target to them than poor old Schoenberg was to you. Ironically and hilariously the more hard-nosed you became, the easier the job was for them.
Copyright © 25 March 2000 Jeff Talman, New York City, USA
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The damage
is not in the music that Boulez wrote, which has marginal interest as does that of many unadventurous composers. The grievous error he and his atonalist cohorts made was to dictate the path of new music to the exclusion of all else. By cutting off other sources, other possibilities, other minds, they made it possible for the public to increasingly cut them off as professor longhairs with confused, irrelevant content. The intellectual one-ups-man-ship was too important for them to shed. It was their thin connection to the thread of Webern's style, a style that they could only ebb past because there was not a true revolutionary among them. Promoting 'the intellectual' as the source of composition was an escape hatch from confronting emotion. Passion and expression were miniaturized, curtailed, avoided, dried-out. Today Boulez's continuing mission is still to put forward the severe intellectual at the expense of the subjective, of passion and pleasure. None-the-less, he is only too capable of pleasing audiences when it comes to leaping about on the conductor's podium, as he confides, 'Once in a while, you have to do that for the audience.'