Music Book Review: Music Lessons: The College de France Lectures by Pierre Boulez

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

 

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