Boulez Trips Up Downtown
Schonberg 1981, 206-210
When Pierre Boulez came to New York it soon became apparent that he knew only one thing supremely well, and that was the new music. For that he was a fervent proselytizer, a believer, and he did his best to educate an audience that refused to be educated. Others had failed before him. Leonard Bernstein had tried an avant-garde series with the Philharmonic and it was a disaster, part of which was due to the resistance of the orchestra itself. (And Lenny, the orchestra said, did not like the stuff either.) Boulez could do no better; and, as suggested below, there was little he could do with the second-rate music he was trying to sell.
THE MARTINSON HALL in the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater is on the third floor of the old building on Lafayette Street. It is a rather small, close room, seating about three hundred, though about three hundred fifty tickets were sold for the first of the Prospective Encounters the other Friday. The overflow was accommodated on pillows strewn all over the floor.
There was Pierre Boulez, a lavaliere microphone around his neck, exhorting the troops. Never did a commander have a more faithful or worshiping army. The four-concert series was Boulez’s idea. Disturbed by the lag between composer and audience, committed to the avant-garde, realizing that the New York Philharmonic is not the arena for experimentation, Boulez conceived the idea of four downtown concerts aimed at bridging the gap.
This was a long evening, seven to midnight. At least, the official starting time was listed as seven, but not until twenty minutes after that did Joseph Papp, the “owner” of the theater, get up to introduce Boulez. Papp made approving noises about the “decentralization” of the New York Philharmonic and of the arts in general. Then Boulez eagerly took over. He was wearing a gray striped suit, a blue turtleneck sweater and brown suede shoes (the jacket was shortly discarded; it was hot in Martinson Hall, and soon most of the men in the audience also doffed jackets and loosened neckties).
Boulez, speaking staccato English with a ripe French accent, was a happy man. This was close to his heart. He spoke for about a half hour on the purpose of the series. New York, he said, needed a new musical service in a different place in a different way. Contemporary music needed to be placed into proper perspective. He decided to forgo the use of the word "concert" in this series. There was too much “tradition” in concerts, and tradition was something that all of us had to fight. These “encounters” would institute a dialogue among composers, performers and the public. They were to be held in a free and informal manner. It is very important, insisted Boulez, that composers talk to the audience. Otherwise there could never be a direct relationship.
Why Martinson Hall? Because it was outside the normal limits of concert halls. Composers want to go beyond the feeling of pure music and establish a unity. More and more, composers hate precise borders. They want to dissolve the gap between pure music and theater. As for the actual music on these pro-grams, Boulez said, he had selected pieces that were short. That way it would be easy to repeat any work that aroused attention, and such music also is easier to analyze. Any questions?
There were no questions. Boulez looked chagrined and disap-pointed. He looked this way and that, and there was an awkward pause. Finally somebody took pity on him and asked a question. The ice broken, questions then came one after the other. Boulez fielded them deftly. He is a voluble speaker, and more: he is a believer. There is a startling lack of pomposity in his approach. He is not out to impress anybody, or to build himself up, or satisfy his own ego. Rather, when he talks about modern music (and modernism in general) he is something like Cicero addressing the Athenians: learned, reasoned, reasonable. And underneath is a burning fanaticism coupled to a powerful intellect.
Boulez completed the question period, even making a few mild funnies as he went along. Then came the music. There were two works, Mario Davidovsky"‘s Synchronisms No. 6 for piano and synthesized tape, and Charles Wuorinen’s The Politics of Harmony, a theater piece for mime, actors, three singers (within the orchestra) and small ensemble.
While Boulez was making out his case, one listened admiringly. It would be so nice to go along with everything he said. There is a gap between composer and audience, a bigger gap than there ever has been in history. This gap should be bridged, if the state of music is to remain healthy. The repertory has to be replenished. Symphony orchestras and opera houses need the stimulus of new sounds, new forms, new philosophies. No argument anywhere. Boulez is right.
Then one listened to the music. The Davidovsky was an academic-sounding collection of predictable synthesized effects with a post-serial piano part. To anybody who has had any experience with tape music, this work was tired-sounding and unoriginal. Paul Jacobs, who played it, told the audience what it was all about (the composer, who was supposed to be present, was in bed with a slipped disc). Jacobs’s analysis was technical; he said very little about the expressive qualities of the music until somebody in the audience gave him the question direct, whereupon he said that he liked it. There was a repeat of the seven-minute work. It sounded no better the second time around. Again Jacobs was asked about the emotional qualities of the music. “I don't think of music in those terms,” he said. “I enjoy the piece. It has low levels of tension, uncomplex materials ... it is not severe music."
There was a twenty-minute break, and then Wuorinen ap-peared. He had a few words to say about his score. It could, he said, be regarded as a purely musical experience. Or a theatrical experience. Or a combination of the two. Basically it was an attempt at cultural intercommunication-ancient Chinese in source, Western in treatment. The work was played; it ran some forty dismal minutes, with the singers maltreating the English language in extended twelve-tone syllabic extensions, with the usual academic kind of organization, with a 1960's kind of athe-maticism, with virtually no personality, with not a trace of charm.
Boulez analyzed it. He showed various relationships, various compositional techniques, and all one could think of was George Bernard Shaw's analysis of the Hamlet soliloquy:
"Shakespear [Shaw's spelling], dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repeti-ton depends. Here we reach a colon ...
〃
And that is Boulez's error, as it is the error of so many propagandists for the new music. The form of the work seems to be the end in itself, and not the quality of idea or expressive mean-ing. Wuorinen's score, whatever its compositional niceties, is a pompous bore, and most in the audience seemed to agree.
By the time it was over, many in the audience had drifted away, and there were about one hundred left to attend the final question and answer panel. With Boulez as master of ceremo-nies, there were Wuorinen, Richard Howard and James Sea-wright. There was much talk about the dead weight of "tradition." There was much bemoaning of the fifty-year cultural lag. It did not seem to occur to anybody that if a work of art has not established itself in fifty years, it conceivably, just conceivably, might be the fault of the work of art and not the public.
It was a very dull conversation. There was no basic disagreement among the panel members. All were on the side of Boulez's angels. In the meantime Boulez himself was employing his bright intellect to keep the subject moving along. But when it was all over he sounded like the barker at a carnival trying hard to entice an audience to enter. He would have had a more convincing case had he selected a better grade of merchandise. If these unattractive Columbia-Princeton hunks of academia are going to be characteristic of the Encounter evenings, it is hard to see many customers being enticed into the Boulez sideshow.
Ост. 17, 1971