Music Lessons: The College de France Lectures
by Pierre Boulez (Music 780 Bou)
Composer and conductor Pierre
Boulez was one of the most significant figures in post-WWII 20th century
classical music. In the 1950s, he was at the forefront of contemporary
composition, both as a composer himself and as a proponent of the work of peers
like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Luigi Nono. In the 1960s, he
continued to compose while taking on responsibilities as a conductor. By the
1970s, he was one of the most renowned conductors in the world, conducting the
BBC Symphony and directing the New York Philharmonic, as well as important
chamber groups like the Ensemble Intercontemporain (which he also founded). He
was conductor on so many notable recordings of 20th century pieces that it’s
hard to find important works he hasn’t worked with.
Boulez worked as a music educator
throughout his career as well. In the 1950s, he taught and performed at
Darmstadt, which was an important incubator for avant-garde composers in Europe
that came to be known as the “Darmstadt School” for its contributions in that
era. In the 1970s, he founded IRCAM in Paris, an important facility for
research and development of electroacoustic music throughout Europe. He was
also the Chair of Invention, Technique and Language in Music at the College de
France from 1976 to 1995. And his tenure there is where we pick up the story
today: Boulez prepared lots of writings that he used for lectures at the
College de France, which are the most comprehensive window into his thoughts
about a wide range of musical subjects. The lectures have finally been
translated into English, and published in a volume called Music Lessons, edited and translated by Jonathan
Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, and Arnold Whittall. It’s been a very long time since
the English-speaking portions of the world got to read some of Boulez’s
thoughts in his own words — his last book in English, “Orientations,” was
published in 1986.
So this is a big deal. If you’re
interested in 20th Century classical music, Boulez was a participant and
authority on just about every element of modern music. If you’re a composer or
aspiring composer, you’ll additionally find lectures here that are as close as
you’re going to get to having a class with Boulez on composition. That’s one
heck of a deal with your library card, if you ask me.
In the introduction by Jonathan
Goldman (himself the author of the 2011 book “The Musical Language of Pierre
Boulez”), we learn that the contents of this book aren’t precisely all of the
lectures Boulez gave at the College de France. Instead, he generally wrote one
substantial essay at the beginning of each academic year, and gave lectures
using these essays as reference points. This book is already a fairly large
work, and one can imagine that there may come a time in the future where audio
transcriptions of the full lectures might expand a book like this to several
volumes of material. Nonetheless, what we find here is carefully written and edited
by Boulez, and hopefully translated with as much care, giving us a window into
the more theoretical side of his thinking.
Contrary to the title, these aren’t
literally music lessons in the sense that you’re going to learn the basics of
music from Boulez. Instead, each essay reflects on what he’s working on in his
own compositional life at the time, and he connects his own thoughts and
directions to more universally applicable concepts that would benefit
collegiate music students. Along the way, we get a view of about 20 years in
the middle of an astonishing career as composer and conductor, during which his
own natural curiosity takes us through a huge amount of musical territory.
The first essay, from 1976, updates
us on Boulez’s state of mind and musical thinking in the time immediately after
his tenure at Darmstadt (many of his lectures there have seen publication,
too). Here we find a restless voice, dissatisfied with both the old and the new
trends in music at the time. Music was either getting chaotic (perhaps a subtle
jab at the aleatoric methods of John Cage, with whom Boulez had a falling out
back in the Darmstadt years), or it was getting too complex, too riddled with
esoteric symbols particular to every score. But with frustration also comes some
optimism, as he notes that “the future of music is richer than it has ever
been.” He devotes his second essay from the same year to the consideration of
invention and research as part of the future of music. Around this time, he was
helping to found IRCAM, so it makes sense that these ideas were fresh in his
mind.
I don’t want to get into a full
play-by-play of each essay, as most of them are quite long and nuanced, and
your best bet is to read them yourself and follow along on this iconoclastic
journey. But a few of the broader themes that come and go over the years
include addressing the various techniques, tools and systems at musicians’
disposal to see if they’re enhancing or diminishing creativity and expression,
concerns about themes and forms and now they affect listening audiences’
perception of music, thoughts about chance and aleatoric operations versus
compositional control, modern interpretive considerations in the performance of
early music, and of course the occasional discussion of other composers as
reference points when comparing and contrasting all of the above.
If I had to boil this rich, complex
text down to two primary themes, I’d say that Boulez was above all concerned
about order versus chaos in composition, and within “order,” he was quite
concerned about how various formal considerations affected the identity and
perceptions of the work. The first of those seems to me a fixation particular
to composers, who generally consider the act of composition to be a discipline
of control and specificity, but during the years of these essays, we were all
still coming to terms with a century that gave us opposite extremes of control,
from total serialism to chance operations. And the latter seems to me a concern
that naturally arises for conductors, who have to bridge that space between the
intent of composers and the perception of listeners. These are indeed
fundamental issues to consider for many musicians, and there is a lot to learn
from Boulez within the pages of Music Lessons.
[If
you enjoy this, you may also wish to try New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez
by Martin Iddon or Boulez on Music Today by Pierre Boulez.]
[
publisher’s official Music Lessons web page] | [ Encyclopedia
Brittanica entry on Pierre
Boulez ]
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff
Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that
page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog
individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the
reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other
great music resources, at the
Polley
Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public
Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find
biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet
music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out
Polley
Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and
follow
them on Facebook!
Posts
