Résumé
The topic of musical material features prominently throughout Boulez's College de France lectures, and in this paper I set out to establish some of the principal elements of its elaboration. Boulez spoke of the dissatisfaction experienced by musicians in the face of "the frequent inadequacy of the sound material… at their disposal" (2018, pp. 3-4) and suggested that the search for new material stood in need of aesthetic reflection. Unlike for John Cage and other musical experimentalists, for whom sound was of intrinsic value and no distinction was to be made between sound, noise and music, Boulez positioned himself within the tradition of Schoenberg and Webern where, to qualify as musical, sounds had first to form part of a musical language and be integrated into a compositional project.
In the lecture courses he gave in the early 1980s, Boulez embarked on a re-reading of his own compositional trajectory. He discussed the question of musical material and how he had adapted what he inherited from Schoenberg, Webern and Messiaen to produce his own idiosyncratic approach in which he developed new pre-compositional operations. In "The Concept of Writing" (1990-91) he cited examples from the work of his contemporaries, namely Berio, Ligeti and Carter, highlighting, in particular, how Carter managed to produce "pre-material" which "fixes many other features of the language" (2018, pp. 506-507). He returned to Carter's working of source or pre-compositional material in "Writing and Idea" (1992–93) where we find some of Boulez’s richest reflections on the topic.
In all, Boulez set out a coherent vision of musical material in the College de France lectures. Despite the sometimes apodictic nature of his exclusions, there is much of great value in the generic concept he elaborates. While chronicling his own idiosyncratic compositional journey, his discourse is arguably open-ended in its envisioning of what musical material might be and responsive to the imaginative needs of individual creative musicians. Consequently, the paper concludes in considering what Boulez’s reflections might continue to offer to composition and musical thought today.
