Boulez is Dead
Persona aside, this is also the man who later claimed, 'The use of computers finally brought electronics down to the level of understanding for composers. I feel very responsible for that change.' This statement is either deceitful or the egotistical rambling of a megalomaniac. Sadly Boulez is so uninformed about the sonic/technical arena that he probably believes it. There have been legions of people working at this issue. Fine programmers, very sensitive musicians, and academic and commercial venues have contributed. It has been a very long, mostly unstructured group effort. To be sure there are great heroes: Max Matthews, John Pierce and Bell Labs, James Tenney, Jean-Claude Risset, John Chowning, Charles Dodge, Barry Vercoe, Digidesign, Yamaha Corp., Xerox Corp., Steve Jobs and Apple Computers and many, many others. Boulez, the former director of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), was never a computer heavyweight and is a minor player at best, an arts administrator not an inspired digital visionary.
Technology in music is far more than electronic and computer-driven work. The serial and atonal composers vehemently brought this issue forward in mid-century. Music itself became a form of amateur technology. In the Century of Science, not surprisingly, 'serious' music became relegated to set theory, to the rigors of mathematical manipulation. If music wasn't about this, it simply was not considered serious. The academy approved of this; science fed music a part of its syntax and that became the focus. It was something you could teach, something you could quantify, something you could publish articles about in scholastic journals, something by which to gain academic tenure. But increasingly no one, except composers, theorists, eccentrics, a few die-hard critics and a handful of dedicated musicians who eagerly awaited the next Elliott Carter musical cross-word puzzle, was interested. The pseudo-connections between music and math had hit a high point of abstraction. People simply stopped caring, and Pop music became all music to most of a generation.
Copyright © 26 March 2000 Jeff Talman, New York City, USA
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Boulez also cut a swath of confusion and misdirection in the field of music and technology. Early contact was in Pierre Schaeffer's electronic music studio in the heyday of musique concrète. Typically, Boulez disavowed that studio more than fifteen years later in 1966 -- the charges: the work was no more than an aesthetic pose, there was no investigative method. But the use of the equipment was part of that method, and Boulez did not have the patience to master it and grow with it. Schaeffer, as did many others, devoted productive years to exactly that which Boulez berated: 'An infinite collection of confusing wires, long and unreliable - I cannot explain the frustration I had...' and 'If you have to work in hertz and not in notes, and then wait half an hour to process the sounds, you get completely discouraged.' Substitute the phrase 'tone rows' for 'wires' and 'pitch class' for 'hertz' and it could easily be a musician discussing serial music. Boulez didn't have the will, or engineering skills to work in the electronic medium fluidly... this is not a fault, it is just his own particular persona.
Boulez's shallow intimacy with technology became quite apparent in the directions his own work took at IRCAM. His method was to graft older musical concepts to computer-based realization. It was not a search for what music might become, but instead the predictable use of the computer to continue that which music already was. The method was to link computers to live performance. This could be viable and laudable, but it was, in typical Boulezian fashion at the expense of the other: computers as tools for developing three dimensional and environmental work, as tools for integrating different forms of art, as tools for re-thinking, both physiologically and psychologically the ways that humans interact with sound. Boulez could not see this, his myopia forces him to see music as a series of limitations rather than as a wealth of possibilities. Fortunately, he was outside of the loop and IRCAM moved forward -- experimentation went ahead without his meddling too deeply. His own computer work, despite the aid of some of the finest digital audio assistants, is negligible and dated. His recent preference was to perform a work once scored with electronics in a revised version without the electronics. His use of the computer apparently added nothing that couldn't be accomplished in traditional ways.