Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)
Professor at the Collège de France from 1978 to 1995, Pierre Boulez passed away on January 5, 2016 in Baden-Baden. He was an immense composer, conductor and researcher, who was directly responsible for many aspects of modern music through his works and his influential role in the world music community. Of particular note were the creation in 1977 of Ircam, the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique-musique, which he directed until 1992, and the 1976 founding of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. These ecumenical names aptly characterize Boulez's approach: integrating all aspects from acoustics to musical creation to explore unknown creative spaces and produce new aesthetics.
Pierre Boulez was born in 1925 in a small town in central France. His father intended him to become an engineer, but after beginning his studies in higher mathematics, he soon opted for music, first in Lyon, then at the Paris Conservatoire, where he quickly won a first prize in harmony in Olivier Messiaen's class. However, his contact with science continued throughout his career.
His career as a conductor is certainly the best known to the public. I will therefore only touch briefly on it here. It began somewhat by chance, when he was asked to replace conductor Hans Rosbaud at short notice at the Donaueschingen Festival of Contemporary Music in 1959. His intervention was much appreciated, and Boulez was soon invited by major foreign orchestras. He conducted the Cleveland Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic and Chicago Philharmonic, leaving us memorable recordings, particularly of 20th-century music. He also made remarkable productions at Bayreuth, such as those of Parsifal, then, with Patrice Chéreau, that of the Ring during Wagner's centenary, begun in 1976 to critical acclaim and completed in 1980 with 85 minutes of applause and 101 curtain rises. His phenomenal ear and the precision of his direction are still remembered.
Like the rest of his generation, Boulez felt he had a mission to renew music - classical, or scholarly, if you prefer - after the heights reached at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Some of his compositions, such as Le Marteau sans maître, remain benchmarks. But he always put aesthetic issues first, and despite several attempts at electronic compositions, he had little regard for what could be done at the time with raw materials (Pierre Schaeffer), electronic tools (Karlheinz Stockhausen) or pure improvisation. His aim remained to write music that was constructed and precise, and that responded to clear aesthetic choices. He made this clear in his opening lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, where he was introduced by Michel Foucault.
In this impressively clear yet unpublished lecture, he insisted that his intention was not to give a traditional lecture, but rather to ask questions as a composer and researcher. He deeply believed that many problems could not be solved spontaneously by simply manipulating sound material, but had to be tackled in a well-directed effort. He saw the duality of aesthetic ideas and sound materials as forming the core of musical creation, as illustrated by the constant evolution of instruments and works from the Renaissance to the present day. He stressed the importance of the rise of instrumental and vocal virtuosity in the twentieth century, which provided composers with new sound materials. His aim was to fuse three virtuosities: those of conception, composition and execution. He didn't believe that improvisation achieved this fusion, as it doesn't allow for the back-and-forth and mixing of material that gives written composition its depth. Nor, unlike many other musicians, did he believe that creation was irrational and magical, or that the immediate use of electronic and computer technologies would go beyond the DIY stage. On the contrary, he believed that far-reaching collaboration between musicians and scientists was a necessity, not only to understand how sound is constituted and to create it at will, but also to understand how it is perceived.
His creation of Ircam was thus the result of a desire to explore new avenues in depth, by providing adequate resources to scientists and composers who wished to ask themselves the same kind of questions and take the time to come up with real answers, rather than simply accumulating experiments. He thus recruited first-rate computer scientist-musicians such as Guiseppe di Guigno, creator of the 4X signal processing machine, and Miller Pukette, inventor of the Max/MSP sound synthesis and control environment, used by Boulez in several major compositions such as Anthèmes II and Répons before becoming a worldwide standard. He encouraged and monitored a wide range of other work, from voice transformation to the mathematical-computational modeling of musical instruments to enable the synthesis of natural sounds in real time. He organized constant contact between researchers, composers and instrumentalists, giving a major role to the Ensemble Intercontemporain. The composers he brought to Ircam to work with the scientists were some of the most famous of their generation: Luciano Berio, John Cage, Gérard Grisey, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and even Frank Zappa.
The question of time in music has always been central to Boulez. One of his criticisms of electronic music was the inflexible nature of its execution, due to the way sounds are produced from analog instruments or magnetic tape. He was well aware that what makes a performance rich, on the contrary, is the freedom the performers take with tempo and articulation, according to their expressive intentions. At Ircam, developing ideas on real time that I and other researchers had introduced for quite different reasons, a young researcher named Arshia Cont solved this problem in his Antescofo software, which precisely reverses the way time is processed: instead of following the fixed tempo of fixed electronics, Antescofo detects and predicts the tempo of the musicians in real time, aligning the electronics with them. I only met Pierre Boulez once, in 2010, at the time of the creation of Tensio by Philippe Manoury, who has worked a lot with him and is a great Antescofo user. Boulez's comment to me was clear: "This is exactly what I've always wanted". Antescofo is now used everywhere, and I had the pleasure of presenting Anthèmes II by Hae-Sun Kang (violin) and Antescofo in Edinburgh as part of my College lectures. Of course, this system builds on a lot of other research carried out at Ircam - for example, changing the tempo of recorded or synthesized sounds without changing their pitch or timbre is far from simple.
It's to Pierre Boulez's great credit that he understood that research had to be all-encompassing, and that dozens of scientific problems had to be solved for the musician to achieve a new creative power. And it's only now, after decades of research, that composers and musicians can really benefit. Everyone knows what they owe to Pierre Boulez.
Gérard Berry, November 27, 2016.
References
Printed
Berry G., "Hommage à Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)", L'annuaire du Collège de France, Paris, Collège de France, n° 116, 2018, p. 705-707.
Digital
Berry G., "Hommage à Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)", L'annuaire du Collège de France, Paris, Collège de France, n° 116, 2018, online July 2, 2018, https://doi.org/10.4000/annuaire-cdf.13739.
