The French composer, conductor and musical polemicist Pierre Boulez was born 100 years ago this week. His long life – he died in 2016 – was devoted to promoting new music: his own, a relatively small but challenging oeuvre, but also 20th-century composers he felt an affinity with, notably Béla Bartók, Anton Webern and György Ligeti. Boulez’s career is being celebrated on Sunday with an entire day devoted to him on BBC Radio 3. Boulez Day will culminate in a live concert from the Barbican that includes one of his most ambitious works, Pli selon Pli. It is an unashamedly anti-populist piece of programming: only Radio 3, which is used to having a niche audience, could devote a whole day to so “difficult” a composer as Boulez.
Radio 3 is treating Boulez Day as a taster for a new 40-part series, starting on 6 April, called 20th Century Radicals, which showcases a range of composers from the relatively well known – Berio, Birtwistle, Kurtág, Messiaen, Stockhausen – to more obscure musical pioneers such as Mauricio Kagel, Alvin Lucier and Éliane Radigue. It is a bold attempt to make sense of serialism, atonality and the postwar musical experimentation that alienated many listeners.
It may be that “total immersion” – the phrase Radio 3 applies to its Boulez offerings on Sunday – is the only valid way to approach new music. The way not to do it is the one chosen by many concert promoters: sandwich a 20-minute new work in between Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. Audiences generally won’t listen to it and might even resent its presence in a concert of familiar classics. There has to be context, explanation, self-belief. All music was new once.
After the second world war, “classical” music – an outmoded term; art music might be better – bifurcated into works accepted by the public (the canon, headed by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert) and those which at best existed on the margins. First Viennese School and tonality good; Second Viennese School and atonality bad. Who do you really want to listen to – Schubert or Schoenberg? While Boulez did important work in bringing composers such as Bartók into the canon, his contribution to that bifurcation was unhelpful. As the New Yorker’s music critic, Alex Ross, noted when Boulez died, he had been at times – especially in his fiery youth – a divisive figure, so eager to celebrate the music of the present that he condemned everything that had gone before. Musicians had to be either for or against the cult of the new; if they couldn’t grasp atonality, Boulez argued, they weren’t true musicians.
Such attitudes damaged new art music and indeed jazz, and both were marginalised in the pop explosion of the 1960s. Only in the past couple of decades, with the fragmentation of pop and the acceptance that a multiplicity of musical styles can fruitfully coexist, has the dogmatism subsided. We are now encouraged to appreciate Schubert and Schoenberg; Beethoven’s late string quartets are eternally new music; Max Richter can “recompose” Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to brilliant effect.
Music is a continuum, one age building upon or reacting against what went before. There are turning points – nothing is quite the same after 1914 or 1945 – but there is no year zero. New music deserves an attentive hearing, or “classical” music will live up to its offputting name and exist only as a beautiful museum.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
