Boulez & Cage: Giants of the Avant-Garde
PROGRAMME NOTES
written by AURÉLIE WALSCHAERT
Pierre Boulez Initiale (1987)
Pierre Boulez Mémoriale (1985)
John Cage Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951)
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John Cage Six (1991)
John Cage The Seasons (1947)
John Cage Seventy-Four (1992)
[all programme notes]
[read also: Ilan Volkov on Boulez & Cage]
[read also: Jean-Luc Plouvier on the prepared piano]
[read also: fun facts about Boulez & Cage]
[discover also: Avant-garde film picks]
[discover also: Curated by... Jean-Luc Plouvier]
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14.11.2024 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
15.11.2024 DE BIJLOKE GENT
Giants of the Avant-Garde
John Cage (1912-1992) and Pierre Boulez (1925-2016). Two avant-garde figures who after the Second World War radically did away with the existing musical traditions. Two highly idiosyncratic inventors who made their own rules. Although Cage’s aleatoric or chance music seems diametrically opposed to Boulez’s precisely organized serialism, both composers looked in the same direction and both explored the limits of what music could be.
The Atlantic Ocean that lay between them did not stop them from maintaining a short but intense friendship. After their first meeting in 1949, Boulez and Cage wrote each other hundreds of letters, In which they shared their musical opinions, described the musical culture of their country, or made small talk. Then after five years, they each went their own way.
Brussels Philharmonic reconciles some compact compositions by Boulez with works that typify Cage’s philosophy, including his iconic Concerto for prepared piano. Music that is now half a century old, but still sounds progressive.
Pierre Boulez
"Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal."
– Pierre Boulez
It is almost impossible to sketch Boulez’s career in a few sentences. The Frenchman not only left his mark on post-war music history as a composer, but also made a name for himself as a conductor, music theorist and educator. In addition, his influence on music culture in France cannot be underestimated: Boulez co-founded IRCAM (the largest research centre for electroacoustic music in the world), founded Ensemble Intercontemporain, the first music ensemble for contemporary music, and also participated in the political debate for the establishment of cultural institutions such as the Cité de la Musique in Paris.
Boulez first studied mathematics before he enrolled in 1942 at the Conservatory in Paris to study as a pianist, conductor and composer. Initially, he took lessons with Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), who made a huge impression on him with his Mode de valeurs et d 'intensités (mode of durations and intensities). In this work, Messiaen formalized the relationship between pitch, rhythm and attack by assigning a fixed duration and articulation to each pitch. René Leibovitz (1913-1972) brought Boulez into contact with the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951). What Schönberg applied to pitch, Boulez rolled out to all aspects of sound production. And thus ‘total serialism’ was born.
Not only the audience but also Boulez himself soon clashed with the limits of this extremely calculated way of composing. Throughout his career, he continued to look for opportunities to apply serialism with more freedom and spontaneity. In poetry and electronics, among other things, he found ways to add layers of colour to his music. The idea of an open work of art is also a typical aspect of Boulez’ way of working. ‘The material is not yet exhausted,’ he regularly said. And so he reopened his existing works to incorporate new insights. In doing so he referred to the shape of the spiral: ‘At every stage, the spiral is complete and there can always be another twist; that form is both finite and infinite.’
Down to the last detail
Boulez left little to chance. The arrangement of the musicians in the room was also an essential part of a composition. For example, in 'Initiale' Boulez created spatial effects by positioning the two trombones, the two horns and the two trumpets symmetrically around the tuba player. This short work saw the light of day in 1987 and was intended for the inauguration of the Menil Collection, a museum in Houston that houses the rich art collection of the French couple John and Dominique De Menil. The title of the work refers to the decorated initial letters from medieval manuscripts and has been interpreted as the ‘initial’ part of a work in progress. It is an invitation for the listener to imagine the future text preceded by the colourful initial.
John Cage
"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear."
– John Cage
While Boulez took a rational and mathematical approach to composing, Cage was mainly guided by philosophical and spiritual principles. He saw himself as a designer of an event in which the experience of a sound was central, not the personal taste or intentions of the composer. The source of that sound could be diverse, ranging from conventional instruments and electronics, to the environment or everyday objects such as a buzzer or an iron trash can.
For Cage, too, the study of music was a secondary step after initially studying theology. In the early 1930s, he travelled to Europe, where he came into contact with the music of European modernists such as Stravinsky and Hindemith. Upon his return to the United States, he enrolled in composition classes with Henry Cowell (1897-1965) and Schönberg. The latter said of him: ‘I only had one good American student; he is of course not a composer, but a genius inventor.’ A statement that sums up Cage’s approach: although at the beginning of his career he still ventured to write a few compositions based on twelve-tone sequences, he soon began to experiment.
The (right) choice
One of those experiments resulted in the prepared piano in the early 1940s: by placing all kinds of objects such as screws, pieces of felt, wood or paper between the piano strings, Cage manipulated the sound of the piano so that it sounded more like a percussion ensemble. In 1950, Cage composed a real concerto for the prepared piano, which he conceived as a ‘drama between the piano, which remains romantic and expressive, and the orchestra, which itself follows the principles of Eastern philosophy.’ Despite the rather traditional title, there is little conventional about this work. Within a carefully defined frame, Cage deliberately leaves a number of things open for the performers. So, for example, he provides material for all the parts, but he gives the musicians enormous freedom in the way they can combine these building blocks.
Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra is a sophisticated example of the technique he developed in the late 1940s under the influence of Eastern philosophies. In doing so, he arranged pre-determined sounds – from a few notes to chords or tone groups – in a tabular ‘range’, as a collection of possibilities that served as the basis for a composition. Cage described the technique in a letter to Boulez: ‘All this brings me closer to a “chance”, or if you like to an un-aesthetic choice.’ Cage applied the technique for the first time in the music for the ballet The Seasons, and then further refined it in his String Quartet in Four Parts and Concerto for Prepared Piano.
Over the course of his career, silence would become an increasingly important part of that pre-programmed ‘range’. As in Seventy-Four from 1992, one of the so-called ‘Number Pieces’ that Cage composed at the end of his life and in which the title refers to the number of performers. Seventy-Four has only two parts: one for the high and one for the low instruments. The musicians play their part – a single note or short phrase – within a predetermined time frame, at a pace of their choice. In addition, Cage prescribes a slightly imperfect tuning that may be exaggerated here and there, in order to give the work a microtonal flavour. This time, the coordinator in charge is not the conductor, but a video clock. Cage himself did not witness the premiere of Seventy-Four; he died a few weeks before the planned performance.