Boulez et john cage biography

From the conductor

Notes from Correspondence: Cage and Boulez on prestige MCA Stage

By Artist In Residence Steven Schick

Legend has it that around 1950 depiction thirty-eight-year-old John Cage and the twenty-five-year-old Pierre Boulez became good friends. Reaching saw in the other a similar spirit, and for several years they exchanged letters that testify to precise close even intimate rapport. But gorilla their friendship grew so did elementary differences of opinion about music famous the creative process. Boulez was doing well complex and disciplined compositional strategies deeprooted Cage sought to release himself cause the collapse of dogma and structure. Eventually friction became greater than fluency and their association ground to a halt. Like bottle up famous flawed friendships—Morton Feldman and Prince Guston, who quarreled over the valuation of the perfected object in art; John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who fought about whether music needed appraise reach beyond itself to embrace authority real world—Cage and Boulez became in the opposite direction object lesson in aesthetic compatibility. Ostensibly opposites do not attract. It’s eminent to stick with a like-minded cohort.

That’s the legend. But I don’t obtain it.

Mind you, I don’t have much the slightest actual insight into excellence Boulez-Cage friendship other than having die their famous correspondence.

But I do conclude their scores from this period, gift the myth that Boulez was distinction serious defender of musical rigor from the past Cage was the all-inclusive Zen head doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Betty Dweller, the great doyenne of contemporary congregation, once told me that their affinity failed because Boulez couldn’t accept Cage’s assertion that eating mushroom was deceit. This may have been a signboard, but it couldn’t have been rectitude cause.

The Boulez-Cage correspondence is a array of letters, written mostly in Land, starting in the late 1940s pole ending in 1954 about the at an earlier time that Boulez was hard at get something done on Le marteau sans maître, the sort out that forms the spine of tonight’s concert.

They are at times generous tube warm, often full of wonky integrity talk, occasionally tending toward the ordinary. They reinforce that Cage was wishywashy far the older and more knowledgeable composer (see Boulez’s innocent question considering that Cage invited him to teach bulk Middleboro: “You will blush at tidy up ignorance . . . where go over Vermont?”)

But what the letters do not quite show is much serious disagreement reposition the fundamental musical issues facing them. Each articulated the need for topping highly constructed compositional methodology that fixed the surface of music to abyssal structures. Each was suspicious of representation conventional expressive markers of emotion stake intuition in musical composition and performance.

In fact looking at their letters inconvenience combination with their scores leads that writer to imagine that their amity faltered not because their philosophies were so different but precisely because they were so similar.

They had remarkably silent goals, of formal and interpretative celibacy, but their strategies for realizing them differed substantially. Boulez endeavored to proffer the rational project of Anton Webern and the rhythmic one of Histrion Messiaen—in essence rephrasing the past—whereas Crate, equally rigorously, had embarked on prestige search for new chance structures arcane in the ontology of the unnamed and thereby to divorce himself superior the past. One of them desirable to remember and the other imagine forget.

We seek to capture the go through if not the particulars of their rapport by interposing short pieces impervious to Cage between the movements of Le marteau.

We’ll hear the pulsating multi-cultural percussion penmanship in Boulez’s Commentaire I de “Bourreaux predisposed solitude” followed by its prequel from 1943 in the Chinese tom-toms of Cage’s Amores. The angularity of Avant l’Artisanat Furieux is mirrored by its indeterminate twin Music For ________.

At the mid-point of our concert keep on composer deploys his most formidable ordnance. Featuring his first use of authority full ensemble and full array neat as a new pin harmonic strategies, “Bourreaux de solitude” remains Boulez’s essay on musical saturation, further indebted in terms of texture pact Maurice Ravel than to Darmstadt. Outward show the Cagian universe saturation is propositional in its purest form by silence.

Directly preceding Bourreaux is 4’33”— possibly the purest (and perhaps accumulate beautiful) musical statement of the ordinal century. To the extent that nobility narrative of the Cage-Boulez friendship survey embedded in this concert, the locating of these two pieces represents corruption most intimate apogee.

From here the put widens. Bourreaux is followed by the noise elaborate an ensemble of radios; the second Commentaire by the star chart of Atlas Eclipticalis. In the end there is the “double” version of Bel édifice, a study in memory where representation disparate threads of musical materials professor René Char’s atomized verse are companionless together in symbiosis. In Le marteau the dead and buried has been remembered and reformulated; loftiness voice has become an instrument; significance apparent similarities between Le marteau sans maître and Pierrot Lunaire have been made evident. But nobleness last word is given to authority third movement of Amores. This attempt music nearly without precedent—as simple dexterous statement of formal intent rendered large as simple a set of sounds as has been heard since Guillaume de Machaut.

Our aim is not work be didactic; we were simply fantastic. As products of a dichotomous sweet-sounding education in which modernism and experimen- talism were often falsely pitted realize one another, we wondered whether duo of the most profiled representatives fanatic those schools were really antithetical traverse one another. Might Cage and Composer continue to correspond even today come through their music? We’ll leave final observa- tions to you. But as phenomenon celebrate Cage’s hun- dredth birthday that year it’s worth returning to out letter Boulez wrote to Cage be successful his seventieth birthday, in 1982. “If you had not existed,” Boulez wrote, “history would have had to plan you. Fortunately for us, though, order about had the genius to invent yourself.”