The decade of the 1950s was an exciting time for music coming out of
a classical tradition as well as for other disciplines. It was just
at the end of an epoch where the atom had been split and its power
used for many purposes. Freudian psychology was still very much in
vogue. Theoretical and practical science were deeply respected, to
the point where they had invaded philosophy, with Husserl striving to
develop the doctrine of phenomenology into a pure, non-empirical
science, soon to be followed by Heidegger and Sartre.
A scientific approach to music was also very much in vogue during the
50s and 60s, when the form of a composition of music tended to become
more important than its content, to the point where by the early 70s,
a composer of this school such as Charles Wuorinen would be moved to
say, in a lecture-demonstration at Cummunity Church in NYC, that the
sounds themselves in a composition were a "necessary evil", and that
while he had nothing against sounds per se, that their essential
purpose was to represent relationships.
In the 1950s, this music (which was called "serialism") was actually
very exciting and continued to seem so right up until the late '60s.
The idea that it might be possible to order all the parameters of
music in much the same way one would order a 12-tone row was a new
one and led to much interesting music during this period.
Most of the composers who originated this style of writing are now
either dead or in the twilight years of their life. While a few of
them have gone on to invent or work in other styles of music within a
classical tradition, many of them opted to continuously elaborate
upon the musical style to which they gave birth to in the 1950s.
Since having a new idea is much more difficult than simply refining
or commenting upon an old one, this seemed the more prudent course,
which is why even today we hear the students (or students of
students) of these composers, after ALL these years, mindlessly aping
their style (or "daringly" embellishing upon it, as we are prone to
describe this practice here in France).
Music in a serial style (as well as its later post-serial derivatives
and various descendents) is easy to identify. It is almost always
atonal, usually arhtyhmic and unerringly brings to mind a vision of
the depressing, frozen-wasteland of Europe immediately after World
War II. It's a music about angst, a music about the "triumph" of the
mind over the emotions.
The end of the fifties saw a hybrid musical landscape, with composers
on one side of the fence advocating complete control of all the
parameters of music, attempting to reduce music to a science, and on
the other side the composers who continued to push the definitions of
music through the use of indeterminacy, chance operations, stochastic
principles and rule-oriented pieces. The composition of music and the
sound of the resulting performances had reached the outer limits of
the performers technical capacities, doing its intrepid best to be as
arcane as possible. At times it seemed comprehension was limited only
to a select core of hardened new music fans. By the early sixties, a
critic of the New York Times had gone so far as to write a shocking
article on the composer Milton Babbitt, a composer who was a leader
of this school, entitled: "Who cares if you understand?"
There was a consensus among composers of the time that it was
considered a compromise to write music with even a veneer of
accessibility, for accessibility was not a part of the theoretical
platform. It seemed one needed to be a specialist in modern music, or
perhaps in love with someone who was, in order to fully appreciate
the music which was being written around that time. In other words,
for an ambitious young composer at the end of the fifties or the
beginning of the sixties, tonality was out and dissonance was in. Or
at least some kind of noise! I was writing in this style of music
myself when I was studying composition in the sixties. It certainly
seemed like a good idea at the time. I loved it!
However: we are now (after all) in 1997...
We are in an epoch where many composers coming out of classical music
are also comfortable working within a jazz or rock (or even techno)
context as they are working within an academic or "art" environment;
we have many composers whose work is coming out of the minimalist
movement of the sixties; another entire movement is based on the
ideas of the post-moderist school of the eighties. A lot of water has
passed under the bridge since Pierre Boulez as a young man wrote
Sonate I-III and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote Klavierstücke I-IV,
which brings us, at last, to the subject of this essay!
Sonate I-III and Klavierstücke I-IV were written for the piano.
The piano, more than any other instrument, lets us know where a
composer's head is at, one's compositional technique being laid bare,
as it were, when one composes for this instrument. Both of these
pieces were written in the 1950s and were enormously influential.
What are we to think of them today?
I listened to both pieces recently and came to certain
conclusions.
I hadn't listened to Sonate I-III since I was a student, so I was
really hearing it with fresh ears. I will also say right up front
that I have a weak spot in my heart for some of the music of Pierre
Boulez. When I was a classical flutist I had played his SONATINE for
flute and piano, which the American pianist Paul Jacobs had kindly
offered to read through with me at the time.
After a fresh listening, I decided that I prefered Klavierstücke
I-IV to Sonate I-III. Both pieces are atonal, arhythmic and cerebral
as well as being extremely difficult to play. However, Stockhausen's
effort seems so much more MUSICAL than the effort of Boulez.
Particularly, when listening to Klavierstücke III...it's so,
well, exquisite. One almost imagines one is listening to something as
refined as a sophisticated blues line articulated by a singer on the
level of Billie Holiday. In Stockhausen's piece, everything is in its
place. The melody, the rhythm and the structure, while being complex
(EXTREMELY complex) is also elegant and beautiful. Everything works
MUSICALLY. It's about perfection. I wasn't surprised when I read that
Stockhausen played piano in a bar during his late teens and early
twenties, this earthy connection that he had with music certainly
shows up in his written work.
On the other hand, with the Boulez piece, it almost seemed as if the
composer was viewing the final aural product with disdain: that the
actual sound, which was, after all, a mere byproduct of the structure
of the composition, was a "necessary evil"; that the actual music was
less important than the intellectual effort that went into creating
it. In listening to Sonate I-III we hear a mushy, dark, depressing
sound with much overuse of the sustain pedal and many overlayered
rhythms, which may work on an intellectual level and look wonderful
in notated form, but do not work or hold together very well
musically, even when one takes into consideration its given genre
where complexity is championed.
No matter how complex music is, , it has to WORK within a rhythmic
and melodic framework no matter how dense the rhythm and structure
might be. I don't care how much Mr. Boulez might say his music is
coming out of his reading of Mallarmé, all I can do is quote
the current motto of IRCAM's Ensemble Intercontemporaine: "It don't
mean a thing unless it's got that swing!".
While I do not mean to say anything here against complexity in music,
I think one thing we can all agree upon is that too much contemporary
music coming out of a classical context hides behind complexity,
which it uses as a disguise to cover bad or mediocre music. It's been
painfully obvious to most of us for a long time that the emperor has
no clothes. I am finding it fascinating to take a fresh look at music
coming out of a classical tradition which was made in the fifties
with a view to deciding which music from this period we still find
useful and which music would perhaps be better off relegated to the
dustbin of history.
Rhys Chatham
Paris, France - March 1997
This page was last updated on 26 April 1997
Bibliography:
1. For the Charles Wuorinen quote: Village Voice, 15 August 1974:
"Confronting the Ears Head On" by Tom Johnson
2. For the Milton Babbit quote: Originally appeared in High Fidelity
VIII, 2 February 1958, reprinted in E. Schwartz and B. Childs,
Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, pg 243-50.
Rebuttal from Timothy Ouellette:
From: "timothy ouellette" <sparkwater@hotmail.com>
To: Rhys.Chatham@wanadoo.fr
Subject: Boulez vs. Stockhausen
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 12:54:24 PDT
Hello there!
I 'm an undergraduate mathematics & music composition double major (at an extremely mediocre American college) who has read your online article about Boulez and Stockhausen's major piano works, and, after mulling it over for several days, I decided to send along some thoughts I've been having about your thoughts.
Having just had the revelatory experience of hearing Maurizio Pollini perform both Boulez's Deuxieme Sonate and Stockhausen's Klavierstucke X during this season at Carnegie Hall, I must relate that both composers have, in my opinion, produced profoundly musical works for the instrument. You are right, I think, to notice that there exists an essential opposition between these two (that Boulez's chilly Cartesian sparkle has little traffic with the loopy inclusiveness of Stockhausen is very hard to miss!), yet your dismissal of the musicality of Boulez (in the sonatas) I found somewhat cavalier.
I understand, of course, that the temptation to bash Boulez a little is almost too good to pass up - in addition to penning much critical invective (most of it hysterically funny), he has, at times, presented himself as little more than a Napoleon complex with a comb-over. And I can't help but wonder if some critic hasn't already written his obit under the title 'Boulez est mort' in retaliation for his drubbing of Schoenberg. But we must attempt, as we have attempted with every other great composer, to consider the works separately from the man.
I cannot imagine, for instance, that the "aural product" packaged as his Second Sonata is really disdain made audible - yes, his interview with Deliege reveals his frustration with sonata form and his desire to demolish it, yet with what care the damage is done, and how beautiful the incisions! And its sound, in a great performance, is as ravishing as anything ever written for 88 keys.
It is the great performance I should like to emphasize here: Boulez's works absolutely require great performances in a way that few others do. In your article, you mention a 'mushy dark depressing sound' and an overabundance of pedal as primary characteristics of the Boulez piano sonority. After I read this, and with Pollini fresh in my ears, I went and listened to as many recordings of the three sonatas as I could find, scores in hand. After this research, I feel that your comment is more appropriately applied to Boulez as he is played, not to Boulez as he has composed. If, for instance, I knew only Idil Biret's or Claude Helffer's recordings of the three sonatas, I would have to agree with you - these are overpedaled and rhythmically flabby performances that display all the faults you mention.
But this would be to mistake the shortcomings of particular musicians for lapses of compositional insight. The Second Sonata, for instance, has few pedal markings despite its 50+ page length. Given, then, that the pedallings which are indicated are generally limited in range, one might reasonably expect the work to be played somewhat drily, as befits a piece with nearly continuous four-part linear counterpoint running through it. (Alternately, one might expect discreet pedalling of the sort used when playing Bach on the piano, meant to add presence and aid legato, but also to preserve clarity.) Why did I find, then, an all-concealing reverberant murkiness through which one strains to hear the counterpoint on the recordings just mentioned? Ms. Biret is particularly sketchy in this respect - her interpretation of the explicit instruction 'sec', or dry, on the penultimate page of the last movement involves fully raising the dampers...
The Third Sonata , conversely, has comparatively many (precisely notated) pedal indications designed to allow different combinations of overtones to crystallize during the work. Leaving aside the two recordings mentioned, Herbert Henck had the most cleanly and accurately played performance - yet the delicate overtones were thwarted by his having been recorded on a badly-tuned piano, a fact which mars the performances of all three sonatas on his disk. Surely this sort of thing has disastrous implications for the sound-image one gets of Boulez's work.
Of those recordings still in the catalogue, we have discounted three, by generally reliable performers on well-known labels, and pity 'tis that there are not many more recordings of the sonatas than these. Why so few? Because these works are so damned hard to play! I speak as a pianist when I say the following: it does no disservice to Stockhausen to note that whatever blood & sweat is required to perform his entire Klaverstucke X (and it's a monster) is more than matched by the last movement of the Boulez 2nd Sonata alone (and this movement is only one-third of the former's length). I cannot help but feel that what we are experiencing is akin to the performance history attending such works as the Hammerklavier or the Debussy Etudes, where the singularity of utterance is wedded to such physical woe for the musician that we must wait for an executant to transcend their technical requirements; then can a true evaluation of the music begin.
These performers, these performances exist, and it is with relief that I come back to Pollini (his celebrate DG recording of the 2nd). As of 1977, we find that he was (and is) prodigiously capable of playing this formidable score to the letter - Boulez's transparancy of texture is there, the rhythms snap and crackle, and even the temptations of excess virtuosity are shunned and replaced by a wealth of articulation and color. It is worth mentioning that the rhythmic/motivic structures which do not seem to hang together on any other recording of this work are suddenly, shockingly, perfect here - and their relationships become more and more apparent upon subsequent listenings. The notational niceties become, on this recording, aural reality.
But this is not the transcendant performance. He had to live with the work for 20 years, and play it at Carnegie Hall this season for that. Experience and time gave Pollini room to breathe, to allow air and light into the structure. This was a musician at play - and the overwhelming feeling of the Boulez was one of exuberant joy. A great performance, possibly this work's first. It has only now begun to be heard.
This then (I never intended a note of this length!) was my issue with your assertion that Stockhausen is somehow more subcutaneously musical than Boulez - we musicians can only play musically when we truly own the technical requirements of the work, when the clever fingerings have been found and the exercises done; sometimes we must wait until a great performer shows us what the music can be, to give a us a standard towards which to strive, to convince us that a particular mess of gropings around a resonator contains beauty. This is the "necessary evil" - not performances generally, but the wait for a great performance of a difficult new piece, its true first performance.
Tim Ouellette - Connecticut, USA