20th Century SIX

pierre boulez schoenberg

schoenberg is dead

boulez 12 tone

anyone who has not felt the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is of no use - each work is a potentially ceaseless torrent of music that demands continual interrogation and a near permanent state of revision

le marteau sans maitre ensemble

a new way of vocal music, combining alto flute, guitar, vibraphone and percussion - features shared form a continuous passage from voice to vibraphone, allowing a graduated deconstruction of the voice into percussive noise

boulez vision

i am trying to have an ever more complex vision - less visible and more worked out in depth. i am trying to expand the series and expand the serial principle to the maximum of its possibilities

le marteau sans maitre second movement

associated individual pitches with duration - C semiquaver, C# quaver, D dotted quaver

second piano sonata boulez

warms, destroys, reforms and rebuilds conventions like sonata form and fugue - used inspiration of mahler and bruckner and rebuilt

initial response of serialism as only viable technique

musical groups branded his music as non-music, ugly and rebarbative noise

boulez inspiration

dialogue with great modernists, taking sustenance from languages as different as webern, debussy, ravel and bartok

1970s boulez

got the french government to open an institute for the study and exploration of new forms of musical composition, and experimented with chance, improvisation and electronics. he worked with the spatialisation and manipulation of sound in real time

boulez form view

maze or labyrinth - compositional process has open ended

structures 12 tone

all parameters were governed by serialism, not just pitch. he devised scales of twelve dynamic levels, twelve durations, and ten modes of attack - not to be repeated until all had sounded

boulez structures language

i wanted to eradicate from my vocabulary absolutely every trace of the conventional. i wanted gradually, element after element, to win back the various stages of the compositional process, in such a manner that a perfectly new synthesis might arise, not corrupted from the outset by foreign bodies

boulez john cage

friendship over a six year correspondence about the future of music. broke as he could not accept cage’s commitment to chance procedures. he broke off contact

alex ross on boulez at darmstadt

at times he seemed absolutely sure of what he was doing. amid the confusion of postwar life, with so many truths discredited, his certitude was reassuring

robert piencikowski boulez

an obsessional concern for perfection

pli selon pli

70 minutes long, individual sonnets framed by two orchestral movements. the word setting is syllabic at first but becomes melismatic until the words can’t be distinguished. he wanted to make the sonnets become the music

controlled chance

a permanent discovering - performers chose between possibilities that had been written out prior. he believed in strict control tempered with ‘local indiscipline’ - freedom to choose small, individual elements while still sticking to a serialist structure

boulez 3rd piano sonata chance

the pianist chooses different routes through the score, and in one movement can omit certain passages

boulez eclat chance

the conductor triggers the order in which each player joins the ensemble

boulez domaines chance

the soloist dictates the order in which the sections are played

figures-doubles-prismes fixed work

a great cycle of variations whose components interpenetrate each other instead of remaining isolated in the traditional manner - families of instruments scattered rather than grouped

boulez mid 70s move

return to vertical harmony and clarity and legibility of form

rituel in memoriam bruno maderna

15 sections, orchestra in 8 groups. the odd numbered sections are conducted, the even regulated by a percussionist beating time - a ritual of disappearance and survival

sur incises

most important work ‘because it is the freest’ - three pianos, harps and percussionists allowed him to create effects of harmonic, timbral and spatial echo - a study in qualities of attack and decay. hammered, plucked instruments and overtones created by crotales and bells, or the duller attack of the drums

boulez western musical forms

exhausted and built up from scratch - one must embrace delirium and organise it … i like to give myself rules for the pleasure of breaking them

boulez difficult music

that elite must be as large as possible - difficult music as most rewarding

boulez elitism criticism

it serves as a smoke screen for people who are lazy … elitism camouflages their lack of responsibility

boulez memorable music

during this century we have seen the disasters of hitler and stalin bring culture to the lowest possible level, pressuring composers to write music that can be immediately understood, which, of course, means that it can also be immediately forgotten

john cage prepared piano

a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its hammers

schoenberg cage

of course he’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor - of genius. cage later adopted this

cage inspired by oskar fischinger

everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound - inspiring him to explore sounds of household items

christian woolf cage 1951

gave him the I Ching - a chinese text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events.

cage 60s shift

to music not composition

variations iii cage

abounds in instructions to the performances, but makes no references to music, instruments or sounds

hpschd

a large scale multimedia work which combined seven harpsichords performing chance determined excerpts from works by cage and the western canon as well as 52 tapes of computer generated sound

cage european operas

1987 - many standard pieces of operatic repertoire were used, but not in a preset order. no two performances were allike. days before I and II were to be premiered, frankfurt’s opera house was damaged by fire

european operas delay

one performance was so bad that he penned a letter to the musicians criticising their interpretation of his composition - cannot fully remove composer intent

music of changes system

material selected from charts by using the I Ching

music for piano basis

paper imperfections which provided pitches, and coin tosses were used to determine accidentals and clefs

john cage difficult reason

a performance would show that the impossible is not possible

john cage improvisation criticism

inevitably linked to the performer’s preferences. he tried to eliminate these but incorporated improv in other ways

cage child of tree

performers are asked to use a certain species of plants as instruments. the performers have no knowledge of the instruments - the structure of the piece is determined through the chance of their choices

iannis xenakis chance music

an abuse of language and an abrogation of the composer’s function

why composers intentions are still there

individual elements like notes and chords are still freely composed without regard to chance. chance operations are used to rearrange them