Boulez on Conducting, Conversations with Cécile Gilly, translated by Richard Stokes, Faber and Faber (2002) price £14.99. ISBN 0-571-21967-5
The above is perhaps the most interesting book I have read on music.
Boulez has had a paradoxical musical career from the outset. As a composer and enfant terrible of the fifties and sixties, he suggested that all opera houses ought to be burnt down, only to find him conducting Wagner at Bayreuth a decade later. The very title of the book Boulez on conducting should make one pause for thought. This is not a difficult discourse on the tenets of his composition style but a clear practical series of dialogues on the art of conducting and other aspects of his career.
Critics have often complained that Boulez does not compose new works these days, more that he constantly revises old ones including the very early ones. On reflection I think that what Boulez is really doing is using his ability as a conductor not to interpret already composed works of his own but to rewrite and then improvise them anew as he conducts. With an ensemble or orchestra highly trained in his technique of conducting they respond instantly to his variety of gestures. It is no longer a question of counting bars but of response to the composer and the cues he signals. Boulez is in fact improvising with an orchestra in a controlled way, an extension of his early idea of writing scores with well-defined sections to be played in any order and also at a time of the interpreter's choosing. With an ensemble or orchestra he can now perhaps split each section into its component parts right down to individual ones.
Boulez, when he first set out to conduct, was self taught and slowly acquired and evolved these new techniques, including the famous one of beating five in a bar with one hand and seven in the other! Is this true by the way? Reading this book one realises that his progress as a conductor was not that fast in the case of music of the last part of the 20th Century. He is not as radical as one thinks but eminently practical. There is one passage where he talks of the impossibility of playing 17 quavers in the time of 15 correctly. What he suggests rather is to make sure one plays those 17 quavers between two downbeats, the only practical way. He also mentions his abandonment of the use of quartertones in the early Visage Nuptial when he revised it many years later. He writes "In their place I substituted a dense polyphony of small intervals, thanks to the multiplicity of voices overlapping each other, but in semitones. With this type of writing, which was much more detailed, I achieved something that made up for the quarter tones of 1946." (page 117)
He also talks about the problems of electro-acoustic music and the solutions he has found, the use of loudspeakers in large and small halls and miking instruments: "Traditional halls are simply inadequate... 'Répons' has always been played in 'empty' places, without any structure in the way, in order to place those players who have not been electronically transformed in the centre of the playing area, with the audience seated around the group and the players who have been electronically transformed placed behind and around the audience - with the loudspeakers increasing this sensation of space around the audience." (page 118)
The last part of the book is devoted to composition in spite of the title. He believes composition cannot be taught, only analysis, no doubt in reference to his years with Messiaen as a student. Messiaen did not really teach composition, nor conducting or orchestration according to Boulez. He was only nominally a teacher of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire but rather of analysis. To prove his point Boulez says that Schoenberg however high his reputation as a composition teacher only had two successful pupils, Berg and Webern. Boulez would be a reluctant composition teacher but a willing one for conducting. On orchestration Boulez recommends Rimsky-Korsakov's treaty on orchestration on topics such as balance and the instrumentation of chords that he calls extremely practical. It's time I reread that book!
One last quotation on composition teaching is intriguing: "Teaching is only a beginning; it is teaching yourself that is important. I have often said it and I still think it: I much prefer those who chose to teach themselves to those who ended up teaching themselves by chance." (page 135).
There is also in the book an account of the early days at IRCAM, founded by Boulez. Altogether this is a stimulating and, as always, provocative book, the fruit of a lifetime's career and which I highly recommend.
Boulez today at the age of 76 now conducts mainly the 20th Century repertoire, one of its few champions. I see that he recently conducted a Janacek programme in the Theatre Mogador in Paris. A hall much too small for the critic, who complained that the twelve trumpet fanfare that opens the Sinfonietta practically blew the roof off.
(A copy of this book is available for loan from the Hove Public Library music section)
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