极品人生
标题: 庆祝布列兹90大寿！ [打印本页]
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 11:13
标题: 庆祝布列兹90大寿！
布列兹90大寿 | 他的音乐太艰深，我们应该怎么听？（转自外滩画报）
文：Dan Ruccia，译：冯坤
3 月 26 日是皮埃尔·布列兹的 90 岁生日。他被公认为 20 世纪最伟大的作曲家和指挥家，但与此同时，他的音乐往往令人生畏。对大多数人来说，布列兹就像一个高高在上的“神”，你只能仰视他，却无法接近他。那么，我们为什么还需要布列兹的音乐？我们又该如何理解他的音乐？最近，indyweek网站的一篇文章谈论了这一点。作者表示，只要你坚持聆听，还是可以从一团“乱麻”中理出头绪，并受益匪浅。
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 11:14
在演奏他的第二钢琴奏鸣曲时，法国作曲家皮埃尔·布列兹指导演奏者要“绝对避免……那些通常被称为‘饱含情感的细微处理’（expressive nuances）”。他告诉他们，恰恰相反，演奏听起来要极具冲击力、狂暴、支离破碎、刺耳、愤怒并“愈发野蛮和肢解化”。
“把声音粉碎。”他补充说。
布列兹的节拍经常在一个小节里多次变化，他的节奏粗糙并且参差不齐。他把美妙的旋律化为倾泻于黑白琴键间一场毫无规律的音符骤雨，在边缘音之间大跨度地飞跃。他的和声语言是一项关于不和谐的研究。这些作品演奏起来是如此困难，传闻钢琴家伊冯·罗里奥一想到要演奏它就哭了起来。
听起来很诱人，不是吗？
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作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 11:16
近期，钢琴家皮埃尔-洛朗·埃玛尔和塔玛拉·斯蒂芬诺维奇（Tamara Stefanovich）正在北美举行“庆祝布列兹 90 大寿”的钢琴巡演，演奏布列兹那些创作跨度长达六十余年的作品。
埃玛尔 19 岁时就加入了布列兹的“Ensemble InterContemporain”室内乐团，他以 20 和 21 世纪音乐的权威演奏者闻名于世；斯蒂芬诺维奇是埃玛尔以前的学生，也极具当代音乐天赋，两人有着相同的偏好。此次，他们轮流演奏音乐会的曲目，并将以钢琴二重奏《结构Ⅱ》（Structures book 2）收尾。
要剖析布列兹的复杂性，需要持续的引导。而他们两人是最好的人选。
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作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 11:17
我希望能说出一个简单的办法，把布列兹的音乐变得像西方古典音乐中的其他伟大的“B 字头的作曲家”一样温和而熟悉。但是我不能——布列兹更接近巴比特（Babbit）、贝里奥（Berio）和伯特威斯尔（Birtwistle），而不是巴赫和勃拉姆斯。
他的音乐艰涩难懂，20 世纪中期涌现的很多作曲家都是如此。尽管我自己也是作曲家，我也不能每次都轻松地洞察布列兹乐曲中那迷宫一般的结构。有时候我认为他的音乐有不必要的复杂性和对抗性。
不过，还是有一个方法能帮助我们理解布列兹的音乐：他的音乐是有意义的。它要表达某种东西，不管其语言多么难懂。但是在我们深入钻研之前——或者说在毫无准备的情况下去听艾玛尔和斯蒂芬诺维奇的音乐会之前——最好先了解一点 20 世纪的和声发展史。
我们身边听到的大多数音乐一般都在某个调性中，它们是华丽旋律篇章的基准。它能提示我们听到的是什么和弦，和弦的走向，以及旋律的构成。在古典音乐里，这叫作“common practice”。但在 19 世纪下半叶，作曲家们彻底地扩大了“调性”的含义。他们不走寻常路，弱化了调性，促成了不和谐音的勃兴。
20 世纪初，作曲家们就开始完全放弃上文提到的这个“common practice”，寻找能包容更多复杂不和谐音的新方式来组织音调。在 1907 年经历音乐危机后，阿诺尔德·勋伯格发明了一个完全抛开和声的系统。1920 年代初，勋伯格开始系统化他的实践，构建这个被他称为“十二音体系”或“序列主义”的体系。
在这个体系中，作曲家创造了一个序列，把键盘上的 12 个音符任意排序，每个序列里的音符不能重复。这个系统饱受争议，但勋伯格的确吸引了一圈志同道合的拥护者，包括安东·韦伯恩和阿尔班·贝尔格，他们都认为序列主义会成为音乐合乎逻辑的未来。
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作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 11:18
让我们快进到二战结束的时候：20 岁的皮埃尔·布列兹刚移居到巴黎，在巴黎音乐学院跟着音乐家奥利维埃·梅西安学习作曲。布列兹采用了勋伯格的系统作为他音乐的基础，但想在这一基础上创造更激进的音乐。他认为前人都缺乏了智慧上的勇气，没能认识到他们作品广阔的再创作空间。他提笔写下无数论战抨击勋伯格和巴托克，斯特拉文斯基和贝尔格等人，甚至连他自己的老师也不能幸免于此。
他开始精心创作一种音乐语言来实现他的蓝图——改变音符与节奏之间的关系。以往节奏总是作为铺在旋律下面的背景，而他却把节奏作为作曲的主要参数，设计了能与十二音体系的精确相匹配的复杂的节奏结构。
音乐理论家保罗格雷弗斯（Paul Griffiths）称他“用毁灭去创造”，有这种不迷信权威的气魄助推，他的创作进展如火如荼，最初的两部钢琴奏鸣曲也是在那个时期完成的。凭借着这种“毁灭的力量”，他成为战后音乐界的核心人物之一。
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作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 11:21
本帖最后由 甲米 于 2015-3-27 11:32 编辑
这又把我们带回那个最初的问题：为什么聆听这些总想着要破坏前人音乐的作品是令人愉快的？所有这些虚无主义的价值是什么呢，在于这种音乐给你带来类似于“站在一个流沙深渊里却没有救命稻草”的无助感吗？
答案很简单：布列兹的音乐——就像他的朋友、偶然音乐的鼻祖约翰·凯奇一样，要求我们重新思考该如何倾听。没有了常规的旋律、和声和节奏，我们不得不改变原来的关注习惯，体验一种新的音乐层次。你会开启直觉模式，就像布列兹细心构建钢琴的物理空间那样。他用急速的升降音型在键盘的不同边缘音之间跳跃。
接下来，你也许就会意识到，你不需要担心错过任何单独的音符。因为这些素材根植于序列主义，每个音符、每种节奏都是系统化的。这个十二音实践中的奇想（vagary）只在于暗示某种特定的细节——在你几乎要听到它们的时候一闪而过。
相反，你会开始感受这循环的形状、形态和织体。每一个反复都有微妙的不同，但你渐渐能理解布列兹是如何变换它们的，它们怎样发展，怎样彼此对话……“这些曲子变成了活体或星群”，布列兹会用这种比喻来描述他的第三钢琴奏鸣曲和《结构Ⅱ》。
也有一些片段——当不断变化的节奏短暂凝固在一个固定形态（pattern）时、或者形成了一些漂亮音响（sonority）时，他的音乐听起来就像在跳舞。这些时刻常常稍纵即逝，因为布列兹又会迅速把它们打乱，作为它下一波“声波大厦”（sonic edifice）的素材。但当我聆听布列兹的时候，这些往往我想去抓住的瞬间。
我发现，他善于创造一些具有鼓动性的声响，虽然他又很快远离了它们。没有任何一个同时代作曲家的作品能够与他的音乐架构相提并论。他的复杂修辞体系指向了一种“不可能”——就像《芬尼根守灵夜》（Finnegans Wake），杰克逊·波拉克的画作或是塞缪尔·贝克特的戏剧一样，布列兹的音乐也需要耐心，和一点能抵抗“不适感”的意志。
但我想，如果你坚持聆听，一定会得到丰厚的回报。
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作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 11:22
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作者: scfan 时间: 2015-3-27 12:31
比起他的作品，俺更能接受的还是他的指挥。老爷子90高寿了，不容易。
作者: robinwood 时间: 2015-3-27 12:59
喜欢他的法国作品和斯特拉文斯基的作品
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 13:30
本帖最后由 甲米 于 2015-3-27 13:40 编辑
好几年前的一篇采访：
皮埃尔•布列兹：你不得不和社会对抗
作为当今古典音乐界最伟大和最具争议性的人物之一，皮埃尔·布列兹在接受采访时依旧好斗而固执。
皮埃尔·布列兹是一个恶棍吗？就在今年早些时候，美国作家亚历克斯·罗斯（Alex Ross）在获奖图书《剩下是噪声—20世纪音乐研究》里，对这位杰出的古典音乐界家，毫不客气地发出指责。
“没错，我就是一个恶棍，”布列兹这样回答，带着慵懒的法式腔调。“不过，我却一点也不引以为耻。在20世纪四五十年代建立起来的那种敌对状态是根深蒂固的。有时候，你不得不和你所处的社会对抗。”
微笑着，手上却拿着刀
罗斯在书中指责布列兹对斯特拉文斯基进行恐吓，20世纪50年代曾在他音乐会上进行捣乱。
“我可能确实在他（斯特拉文斯基）的音乐会上发出过了一点嘘声，但是他（罗斯）所说的那次冲突是我的一些同学引起的，那时我们都觉得斯特拉文斯基的新古典主义时代已经走到尽头了，纯粹是在浪费时间。”
而和布列兹见面以后，斯特拉文斯基在创作上表现得更多的是无调性和全序列性的技巧。布列兹评价说，“事实上，他是一位非常独立的人，视野很开阔，他已经决定：不要被时代遗弃。”
布列兹已经83岁，他不再像以前那样，认为歌剧院应该被烧掉，但他固执依旧，并且不减当年热情。现在，他的那些评论中开始带有一种高度的趣味性—不过他虽然微笑，但手中依然拿着刀。
上周，布列兹和他的“现代乐集”乐团在伦敦南岸演奏的自己的作品《Sur Incises》被放到YouTube网站上，观众们的反应极端地分成了两派。一派认为演奏“荒谬而糊涂”，纯粹是在骗取国家艺术赞助基金；而另一边的观众则认为这是“美妙的音乐”，有人甚至将其容为“如钻石般晶莹”。布列兹得知后非常高兴。
相当一部分，甚至可以说大部分的著名现代作曲家都不被布列兹认可。在他看来，极简派音乐家，比如格拉斯（Glass）和莱希（Reich），“单调而乏味”。至于约翰·亚当斯（John Adams）？“我不会朝他音乐吐口水的，但我也同样无法忍受。他的歌剧《克林格霍芬之死（The Death of Klinghoffer）》，听起来就像糟糕的电影音乐。”而布列兹在上世纪40年代就知道的约翰·凯奇（John Cage），实在是“没有价值”。艾瑞克·萨第（Erik Satie）“也许可能有趣，但是视野太狭隘了。”
“不做自大却无聊的人”
12月10、11日在伦敦，布列兹联手巴黎现代音集乐团，在英国伦敦的皇家节日音乐厅和伊丽莎白女王大厅，分别演绎奥利弗·梅西安（Oliver Messiaen）和埃利奥特·卡特（Elliott Carter）作品，以庆祝这两位大师的百年诞辰。
对这两位音乐家，他都有独特而有所保留的评价。埃利奥特至今仍然坚持创作。“他一直在努力寻求自己的风格。最开始他深受查尔斯·艾夫斯（Charles Ives）的影响，随后他去了巴黎，师从纳迪娅·布朗热 （Nadia Boulanger），开始追求新古典主义风格。最后他终于找到了属于自己的繁复风格。他最近的作品可能更加简单，并且易于理解，但仍然非常有趣。”
当谈到自己曾经的老师梅西安时，他说：“他很快就找到了属于自己的声音。他是一名非常优秀的老师，我喜欢他那些大胆的作品。可是另一方面，他的一些作品也过于传统，甚至曲调陈旧，有的还用C大调来结束，这让我很困惑。”“也许这和他宗教上的神秘主义有关吧？”
当谈到20世纪50年代二战后的音乐时，有人曾评价，布列兹的作品能建立如此巨大的影响力，也是因为对战后的音乐而言，“丑陋是必须的”。布列兹赞同，自己那一代的人都痛恨德国和苏联战时集权主义下推崇的那些容易让人兴奋的音乐。布列兹也因此讨厌大部分的流行音乐，“虽然有些很活泼生动，但是那些“1-2-3-4的旋律总让我想起了行军进行曲。”
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-27 17:16
回复 robinwood 的帖子
作为指挥，从瓦格纳之后一直到他自己，找出他不好的录音还真不容易
作者: Jwang 时间: 2015-3-29 09:40
比起他的作品，俺更能接受的还是他的指挥。老爷子90高寿了，不容易。
scfan 发表于 2015-3-27 12:31 
呵，我刚好相反，更喜欢他的音乐。
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-29 23:14
本帖最后由 甲米 于 2015-3-29 23:15 编辑
巴伦博伊姆说，布列兹的音乐最吸引人的地方就是“它是今天的音乐，而且在很多方面还是明天的音乐。”作为二战后先锋派最重要的作曲家之一，布列兹在创作中结合了严密的数学构思与自由、主观甚至狂乱的感情表达，在呈现韦伯恩式的高度组织化的明晰织体的同时，又充分表现出德彪西式的敏锐而强烈的色彩感，被人们形容为“抽象的印象主义”。除了成名作——1948年的序列主义作品《第二钢琴奏鸣曲》外，1954年创作的整体序列音乐作品《无主之锤》、采用偶然原则创作的《第三钢琴奏鸣曲》、结合了序列主义和偶然音乐手法的后期代表作《层层褶皱》以及《记谱法》等作品都是20世纪新音乐的重要文献。
作者: rockme 时间: 2015-3-30 12:19
回复 甲米 的帖子
第一次听布列兹的作品是Sur Incises和Messagesquisse，当时就被吸引住了，印象十分深刻。
最近赶着大师90大寿买了一套大师钦点的“作品全集”。通过这套唱片基本可以对大师作品有一个比较全面的了解。
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-30 13:22
Le Marteau Sans maitre《无主的锤子》，布列兹为女中音与室内乐队而作于1955年，乐队要求长笛、中提琴、吉它、木琴与打击乐器组成，共9个乐章，以勒内•夏尔的3首短诗为基础作成。这首作品中选用勒内•夏尔的3首诗为《疯狂的工匠》、《孤独的刽子手》和《美的组合及预感》，夏尔的诗完全是超现实主义的，布列兹在这首作品中，每一乐章都展现乐队中不同的乐器组合，声乐中显现出与12音体系有关联的大跳。布列兹并不要求歌词能听得清楚，他认为，音乐的目的是加强歌词的意义，而不是按歌词谱曲。实际上，在这首作品中，布列兹把人声也当作了一种乐器来运用，这样，声乐部分就成了纯粹的音响材料。其中，人声和乐器互为补充，一会儿是回声，一会儿互相应答。这首作品是布列兹最出名的作品，在紧密的结构中充分显示了他的风格的主要特征。
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-3-30 13:26
勒内•夏尔——居住在闪电里的诗人
勒内•夏尔（RENÉ CHAR 1907—1988），二次世界大战后法国诗坛最重要、影响最大的诗人之一。这位难理解的、被认为是复杂的诗人，在研究者们作了数十年认真评论后的今天，仍有很大一部分作品是陌生的或没被读懂的。
夏尔的诗歌生命是从赤裸、神秘、圣洁的晨曦开始的。超现实主义像一道强悍的闪电，照亮了他的２３岁。布勒东和艾吕雅从一开始就对他表示器重和关注。尽管夏尔后来脱离了超现实主义团体，超现实主义的精神却贯穿了他一生。
夏尔曾以极大的勇气，亲身投入抵抗运动的战斗。从超现实主义的狂热梦幻到世界大战的残酷现实，夏尔痛苦地走进事物及存在的深处。他内在地领悟了应该怎样生存在光照和黑暗的岩缝里，以狂暴的激情的铁锤，撞击内心的爱和外部的残酷现实，最终在迸溅的碎片中窥见一己的真实和透彻。
确实，夏尔自始至终是一个反抗者，他的诗总是让人触及他内心的大矛盾和在精神上为统一大矛盾所进行的殊死搏斗。大概是黑暗在黑暗中照亮了他的道路，他确信，诗是“对仍为欲望的欲望之爱的实现”。现实的丰富材料帮助夏尔建构起一个超现实的深远空间。在《图书馆着火》中，他写道：“作品是怎么来的?就像冬天，一根羽毛落在我的窗玻璃上。马上，壁炉里升起了劈柴之战，至今尚未结束。”
尽管这样，夏尔却既非哲学家更非通灵术士。诗是夏尔真实而倔强的口舌。他始终以反抗者的形象和声音耸立着，不断地通过他的诗向我们展现暴力和抵抗的状况：闪电或炸雷。他决不说使人安心的话，他必须对各种形式的不公正和不幸表明他的抵抗。他曾愤怒地写下：“你们服从你们存在的猪猡，我听命于我身上不存在的神；我们仍是无情的人。”
冲突，进而超越，统一；凝聚，终于炸裂，透彻。
夏尔的诗是陡坡。但另有一些阳光明媚的山坡，以其爱情的、几乎是田园诗的意趣令我们陶醉。普罗旺斯的阳光和大自然，对夏尔来说意味着童年和土地。为表现一块乡土，这块乡土上的动物及植物，夏尔写下了松缓、轻松、淡淡不安的怀乡歌。夏尔成年后的激烈冲突，也许正是对童年时代与世界永远失去了的统一性的强烈向往。哪怕在幻想的狂热的意象丛中，哪怕所处的精神状态如此迷醉昏乱，夏尔始终渴望一种清醒，一种哲学意义上的穿透，对整个事物的昭然。殊不知，由于对获取清醒的过于执着，他被迫再次，三次，无数次地跌入无解的混沌——失去的赤裸。而他的渴望仍在一边：让本质的痛苦，最终沉入河底，跃为活生生的生命本身。
一个伟大诗人已经死了，但他的精神，却在文学中化为曾经激烈如今宁静的智慧。
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-4-3 16:40
本帖最后由 甲米 于 2015-4-3 17:01 编辑
2015年，布列兹接受了全球第三大乐谱出版集团奥地利环球出版集团UE的采访，谈论自己的作曲心得。这一采访由潮人谈的老朋友，UE的沃尔夫冈·肖富勒策划，由萨尔茨堡音乐节提供，以贺布列兹90大寿。
PIERRE BOULEZ – FROM REBEL TO MODERN CLASSIC
Daniel Barenboim
"Pierre Boulez will always be a man of the future to me: a true man of the future. After all, a false man of the future is either ignorant of the past or not interested in it."
Pierre-Laurent Aimard
"What is extraordinary with Boulez is his kind of morality with the music. There is a passion, a man burning for music, irresistibly, that you can feel at any second of his music-making."
Simon Rattle
"He changed music, he changed the way we think, he changed the waywe structure the music business."
Pierre Boulez © Monika Rittershaus
Pierre Boulez
on
Composing
Mr. Boulez, Le Marteau sans maître was premièred exactly 60 years ago. You were composing this piece in 1953/55, shortly after a brief discussion at the beginning of the 1950s, when it seemed that serial methods were asking to be extended across every element of composition. This represented the thrilling possibility that a new musical system might be found, but there was also the anxiety that music’s creation would become as automated as heavy industry – allowing masterpieces to be made without a master, merely by the hammer of technology. But this sort of total organisation proved to be impossible – luckily so, one might say. Did you want to use Le Marteau to demonstrate that spontaneity and system can indeed coexist?
Boulez: The fact is that when I composed the structures beforehand, I was totally responsible for that – because I wanted the composer to be anonymous. The composer was just a transmitter and nothing else. But very early on, I became aware of the fact that this was entirely impossible. But I did not want to go back to the twelve-tone system, because I found it impossible as a way of constraining the available possibilities. Therefore, I began to develop a system in which freedom was possible, and I conquered my own freedom not only regarding the twelve-tone system, but also with regard to the general possibility of composing purely with a system. And therefore, Le marteau – even from the vantage point of today – was for me a beginning of a conquest, of freedom.
Le Marteau appeared to be a link between two seemingly incompatible experiences: the strictly constructivist musical thinking of the German and Viennese school as mediated by Webern, and what one might call the more ornamental elements of French music, especially of Debussy and Messiaen.
Boulez: Yes, I attempted to unite two parts of the musical world which had previously been incompatible – and had even regarded each other with a sort of distance. The constructivism of the Viennese was occasionally a bit of a burden, and I thought that the inventiveness and ingenuity, the spontaneity of a Debussy were very necessary sometimes. You really cannot just be constructive all the time; you have to be descriptive, as well. I suppose that’s the sort of combination between constructivism and spontaneity which I found to be very important.
Le Marteau was praised highly for a new sound appearing in new music. What sound did you have in mind when you started?
Boulez: At the time I was very interested in other cultures and I listened to quite a lot of non-European music: Balinese music, African music, Japanese traditional music, Chinese opera and so on. I was similarly interested in the sounds contained in such music. Bali, for instance, has a kind of metallic sonority. And if you go to Africa, wood is one of the main sound-producing materials. For me, remaining in the tradition of the Viennese School and the European school was too much, and I wanted to have another world. And I am generally very sensitive to sound. Let’s take Stravinsky’s Les noces, for instance: this is a forefather of the sound of sur Incises , but when I add the percussion, which is very important, and the harps, then the sound is totally different. And this sound harkens back to Bali and to the African sphere.
At what time your composition is finished? And when do you keep on working on a piece?
Boulez: There are some works which are unfinished, because the structure of the work was not very clear to me. Therefore I do return to works, but there are also some works which I don’t touch again – Derive II , for instance, I will not touch again. It’s finished because I worked on it for quite a few years, and then I discovered of way of structuring, of composing the work which was totally different than what I had done up to that point; a sort of narrative aspect of the work. I saw that this narration was finished, and that I could not add anything – the addition would have been totally artificial. There are works which I want to finish, and some other works which I don’t want to finish. You know, I have a relationship with my work which is very sentimental …
There is a quotation of Gustav Mahler according to which he said that "the material composed him." Would you agree with that?
Boulez: Yes, definitely. If you have an interesting and productive relationship with the material, the material certainly will compose for you. It’s an exchange. I find it wonderful to think of it such that the material in fact composes with you, and you compose with the material. But if you have material: what do you do with it? It’s not just spontaneity that is important, but the question of what you do with this spontaneity! You invent in a sort of hyper-spontaneity – that’s the real difficulty of composing. In my composing, process is an important aspect. So I look and have some quite spontaneous reactions. After that, I look at what I’ve done, and I say: but with this material, I could do far more. I write them down immediately, or as immediately as I can. That’s spontaneity I would like to say. And that remains – hence the name Derive, because it remains there, unused, and it’s derived from things I have already written. And so Derive I is derived from the material I used for Répons, and I still have a lot of material I wrote for Répons which is unused. It’s like you’re an archaeologist – by discovering you go down, down and down. And then you discover yourself.
Please, explain to us what is the creativity of composing?
Boulez: Sometimes you are confronted with material, and you discover the solution very quickly. Sometimes you findabsolutely no solutions that are interesting or worth it. And sometimes you’re not thinking about it, but rather about something else – and suddenly you say "ah!" now that’s the direction in which you have to go. Every moment in your life, if you are creative or in the creative process, can be fruitful. But you have to take the opportunity. And composing is also a matter of seeing the opportunity where other people see nothing. It’s exactly that.
Universal Edition/Wolfgang Schaufler
Companions
Daniel Barenboim on Pierre Boulez:
"The way his brain works is about two hundred times faster than a normal person's."
"Although the content of Boulez' music is very complex, its colour is very French. To me, there is no doubt that it is French music."
"Pierre Boulez will always be a man of the future to me: a true man of the future. After all, a false man of the future is either ignorant of the past or not interested in it."
Daniel Barenboim conducts the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra on August 12, 2015 and the chamber music concert of WEDO on August 13, 2015.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard on Pierre Boulez:
"He plays the piano in an extraordinary manner: very original and at the same time extremely controlled."
"Pianists are very grateful that the piano is his instrument, just as everyone is very grateful that conducting became his domain later on."
"I met him when he was 50 or 51. To me, he was Mount Everest even then, the greatest musician of his time who could look back on the highest achievements in every field."
The former Boulez student Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich perform the complete piano works by Pierre Boulez on August 8, 2015.
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-4-4 09:04
A guide to Pierre Boulez's music
If you want one piece to convince you that the highest achievements of contemporary music are the opposite of desiccated, solipsistic experimentalism, listen to Boulez's Notations
It's impossible to imagine contemporary music, and in fact the entire musical world, without Pierre Boulez. As a composer he defined the image of the iconoclastic avant-garde in his music of the 1940s and 1950s; as a polemicist he gave post-war music some of its best aphorisms - "anyone who has not felt… the necessity of the dodecaphonic [12-tone] language is OF NO USE", that the best solution to the problem of opera would be to blow up the opera houses, that some contemporary composition amounted to frenetic arithmetical masturbation", and dozens of others. He showed his brilliance as a political and cultural operator wgeb in the 1970s in Paris he established the underground laboratoire of IRCAM, that labyrinth of computer-music possibility that you tread on top of if you've ever been to the Pompidou Centre; and as a conductor and teacher he has done more than anyone alive to create a performance practice for 20th century music, from Mahler to Mantovani, from Stravinsky to Schoenberg, from Berg to Birtwistle - and his own music.
The first thing to do when thinking about Boulez's music is to prise it apart from the phenomenon of Boulez the man's power, influence, and personality. One misconception of his output is that there really isn't that much of it. admittedly, after two decades of non-stop composing up to when he was in his early 40s, Boulez's actual rate of musical production does seem to have slowed down dramatically. There are precious few new pieces from the 1970s and 80s, and still fewer in more recent decades. That's exactly when his conducting career took off (in the 1970s, he was simultaneously in charge of the BBC Symphony and the New York Phil), and setting up IRCAM and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Was he then, and is he now, simply conducting too much to have any time to compose? He has been saying for the last 10 years that he wants to find more time to write, to complete the series of exponential orchestral explosions of a set of piano miniatures he composed in 1945, the 12 Notations, which he started in the late 1970s. Yet even now in late 80s, he continues as busy as ever on the podium, teaching - as he puts it - the world's great orchestras and assemblages of young players how to play the music he knows and loves the best: Stravinsky, Bartók, Webern, Mahler, Schoenberg.
All is not as it seems with Boulez's compositions. For him, each work is a potentially ceaseless torrent of musical energy that demands continual exploration, interrogation, and a near-permanent state of revision. But when you hear the latest state of being of his relatively recent music, like Sur Incises or Dérive 2, there's nothing provisional about their power and impact, and they teem with a kaleidoscopic sensuousness of sound and colour. If you want one piece to convince you that the highest achievements of contemporary music are the opposite of desiccated, solipsistic experimentalism, listen to Boulez's orchestral versions of his Notations. It's music that shimmers with bejewelled brilliance, that takes Debussy and Ravel's orchestral techniques as a starting point and builds on them with voluptuous excess.
That connection with earlier music is something that's true of Boulez's seismically influential earlier music, too; it's just that it's part of the story of his work that didn't fit with the post-war necessity of creating a new world of musical expression that had nothing, or as little as possible, to do with what Boulez saw as music's tainted past. Le marteau sans maître incarnates a new way of thinking about vocal music - with the alto line's feverish unpredictability, and new combinations of instrumental colour (there are no real bass instruments in the piece's resonantly exotic lineup ensemble of alto flute, guitar, viola, xylorimba, vibraphone, and percussion), but it's also a piece that couldn't have happened without Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire four decades earlier, or Webern's chamber music, or Debussy's late sonatas. Similarly, the power and ferocity of the Second Piano Sonata comes in part from the way the piece warps, destroys, reforms and rebuilds conventions such as sonata form and fugue. More than that, Boulez's essential compositional concerns are in many ways identical to those of the composers whose conventions he was supposedly rupturing. Take Pli selon Pli, his fabulously surrealist song-cycle on poems by his beloved Stéphane Mallarmé. At a performance at the Royal Festival Hall last year which Boulez himself conducted, the piece was revealed to be a gorgeously expressive work, and, in the standing ovation that followed, it felt like a victory of the music over the polemic, that the sumptuousness of this piece had at last broken the shackles of perception that so much post-war music has suffered from.
To be honest, Boulez's polemics have often been part of that perceptual problem. It comes when you take sound and fury in his writing of the 1950s at face value. Boulez today conducts the music he once reviled as utterly beyond the pale, Schoenberg's late music, say or Wagner's Ring Cycle, whose interpretation he changed forever at Bayreuth in Patrice Chéreau's centenary production in 1976. Recently, he has spoken of how Mahler and Bruckner were the real influences on Sur Incises, how he learnt to structure large-scale structures from these late-romantic symphonists, and movingly said how his music is indivisible from his personality and his expressive concerns, an artistic credo that chimes as much with any romantic composer as it does with the apparently forbidding avant-garde.
It's possible there's been a loss that has accompanied Boulez's accommodation with the sweep of music history and his transformation into pillar of the musical establishment: listen, for example, to his first recording of Le marteau, a shocking blast of febrile, scarcely contained energy, and compare it with the perfect technique but slower tempos and more limited expression of his latest version.
There's a perfect opportunity over the next couple of weeks to put his music centre-stage again, when Daniel Barenboim plays a Boulez work in each of the concerts of his complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at the Proms. Don't believe the polemics or the preconceptions: trust your ears instead, and relish some of the most ravishing music you will ever experience.
作者: 甲米 时间: 2015-4-4 09:12
The Sensuous Radical: Pierre Boulez at 90
Once there was a young firebrand whose revolutionary ideas forever changed the shape, feel and sound of classical music. No, we're not talking about Beethoven. We're talking about Boulez. Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor, turns 90 years old today.
The young Boulez was a rebel, even a rabble-rouser right after World War II, both in his music and in his musical philosophy.
"I see music as a kind of continuity, like a big tree," Boulez told NPR in 2000. "Of course there are many branches, many different directions. I think music is in constant evolution, and there is nothing absolutely fixed and rigidly determined."
But there was one thing fixed in Boulez's mind: the need to shake music up. Early on, he and some like-minded buddies disrupted a Stravinsky concert, complaining about the composer's neoclassical style. Later, Boulez declared that one solution to opera's problems would be to blow up the opera houses.
"In Britain we had this phrase 'angry young man,'" says Paul Griffiths, author of the book Modern Music and After. "Boulez was very decisive about how things should go for himself at a very early age and rejecting anything that stood in his way or that seemed to be backpedaling on the way to the future."
The young Boulez was disillusioned after the war. How could European culture spawn such carnage? Music, like Europe, Boulez thought, would have to be rebuilt. But first he had to tear it down.
"The only way to assert himself," Griffiths says, "was to be against everything else, to push through barriers and through destruction to bring about something new."
What Boulez created was a new emphasis on sound, color and the very building blocks of music.
"This music is as seductive as any on the planet," says St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director David Robertson. The conductor spent most of the 1990s in Paris leading Boulez's Ensemble Intercontemporain. He's quick to point out the sensual side of Boulez's music, as in Notation No. 1 for orchestra, which began its life as a piano miniature in 1945.
"When Notation No. 1 enters," Robertson notes, "you have this different layering of the instruments between the harps and the violins in such a way that it's almost as though we're laying out different types of silk fabric that interweave. And they are not clearly folded. They are being draped on the musical landscape."
You may not be able to hum Notation No. 1, but Griffiths feels that's not the point.
"You have to change your idea of what melody and harmony are," Griffiths says. "The thing is, we're all brought up with this huge education in the harmonic system that governed Western music for so long. And that music has taught us how to listen to that music and it hasn't taught us how to listen to other music."
Other music from other countries, for instance, or the 12-tone style of music developed by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s, which inspired Boulez. There's a little of both, Griffiths says, in Boulez's 1955 breakthrough Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master).
"He forms a completely new kind of chamber ensemble," Griffiths says. "It now sounds standard because it has become almost the norm. But then it was completely new." Think of ensembles like eighth blackbird today.
In Marteau there's a singer and a percussionist, plus flute and viola. Then a guitar which hints at Spain, a vibraphone that evokes Indonesian music and a xylophone that conjures up African music.
"It's a kind of world music long before we were talking about world music, but re-formed in completely his own way," Griffiths says.
The piece was evocative, and even something of a hit for Boulez, but it was also complicated. Early on, the composer was the only one who understood his music well enough to conduct it. And that's how Boulez backed into a second career as a conductor, leading major orchestras in London, New York, Chicago and Cleveland, conducting a width swath of classical music from Handel to the contemporary British composer George Benjamin (who has returned the favor).
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