The history of music is not only written with scores, but also with ideas capable of shaking its foundations. Over time, there have been composers whose influence has transcended beyond his works, leaving his mark both with his art and his statements. Pierre Boulez (Montbrison, 1925 – Baden -Baden, 2016) belongs to that reduced number of people who, with a genius that continues to be noticed today, has written some of the most important themes of the twentieth century while burning the music industry with its beliefs, opinions and claims. The French artist, who came to affirm that we had to “explode opera theaters”, challenged the structures of the past to transform the way we understand and live contemporary music.
One hundred years after his birth and almost a decade after his death, Pierre Boulez continues to be a fundamental figure to understand the evolution of art and travel throughout a century full of changes and renovations. “To explain the history of the music of the second half of the twentieth century, you have to talk about names and trends,” says Eva Lainsa, a professor at the University of Seville, Eldiario.es. “Boulez is one of those names. He not only created music, but also directed, reinterpreted and announced the work of his contemporaries, such as Varèse, and previous generations, such as Stravinsky or the Second School of Vienna,” he adds on the artist, who has become one of the most acclaimed of his time with up to 26 Grammy Awards and 67 nominations.
But Boulez is not only recognized for writing works, because his “more pedagogical work” was to become a “defender” of the music of his time. “He did it with incredible naturalness,” says Lainsa, who claims that, “for him, being a musician meant interpreting, composing, teaching and managing music.” The expert in artistic education, who had the opportunity to interview Boulez in 1996 and has translated his work into Spanish Think about music todaywhich collects essays that the French wrote from conferences to which he attended, qualifies it as a “musical space” open to everyone, where, in addition to his own repertoire, there is also the possibility of meeting other proposals. “The spirit of Boulez is described as the possibility of doing the necessary mediations to get the music forward,” says Lainsa.
This defense of theirs caused Boulez to win the fame of “radical” soon, an attribute that accompanied him throughout his career despite the fact that he never gave him any importance. For posterity there is already one of his statements to the German magazine Der Spiegel, in 1967, for the “extremely outdated” that the opera theaters: “In a theater that is mainly dedicated to recitals, modern operas are represented with great difficulties, which is unlikely. The most expensive solution would be to explode opera theaters, but would not be the most elegant?”
“It is very easy to stay with phrases like that,” says Eva Lainsa, “but you have to understand them in context.” The musicologist emphasizes that, in the 60s, the opera continued to see himself as a bourgeois product, “something where people were going to see more than to listen.” As Boulez loved opera and, in fact, he directed some as Lulu and WOZZECKin addition to Wagner’s works, the artist defended that “the repertoire had to be renewed and the theater opened to the public.” For Lainsa, statements like that intended to encourage “having a more natural relationship with music, make part of people’s lives, eliminate all that rhetoric in opera theaters and invite people to stay with it.”
Towards the same place the music professor Jesús Martínez Vargas points out, who interviewed him in 1990 for the elaboration of his research work Pierre Boulez: Aesthetics, Poetics, Politics (1998): “His desire was to tear down the walls that existed between the public and the musical creator.” Boulez, who settled in Paris at age 18, in 1943 meets a bleak panorama at the end of World War II, a France in economic and cultural decline marked by its past collaborationist and by a musical world dominated by neoclassicism. “In that context, Boulez decides to become a modernizer,” says Martínez Vargas, since “he realizes that he does not want to be a marginal composer or adopt utopian positions.”
Boulez understands that, to transform the musical world he has inherited, he needs more than rebel from the periphery. “As he said, instead of ‘barking at night’, his goal was to consolidate a professional reputation that would allow him to go to action,” says Jesús Martínez Vargas to this newspaper. “And that desire for modernization and reorganization inevitably involves decisions of a political nature. It implies redefining the social function of art, transforming teaching and changing how music is composed and interpreted,” he adds. Pierre Boulez discovers that it is not possible to follow the traditional model: new instrumental formations are needed, musicians prepared in a different repertoire and with a new way of playing.
Thus, almost by obligation, as it becomes an orchestra director. In 1953, he founded with the artist Suzanne Tézenas Leaine musicala concert cycle dedicated to the dissemination of contemporary music, combining premieres of young composers with key works of the twentieth century. Eva Lainsa reflects that “radicality” that has probably alluded to have more to do with a “matter of responsibility.” “When someone enters musical life, listening, being hired, assuming programming or directing orchestras, understands that all this implies a great responsibility, and Boulez was aware from the beginning,” he says, arguing that “who manages music inevitably wins enemies” and that “most criticisms have gone out there.”
In this way, Boulez always sought to look to the future even trying to keep the referents that led him to his position. According to Jesús Martínez Vargas, he said that “the past was a reference”, but never something to “succumb.” In fact, the professor reveals that the composer “liked to use a phrase from the poet René Char who claimed that the past was like a library that had to set fire so that something new could arise.” His eagerness for “polemicist” was to look, very radically, what should be done with the institutions to take them forward. “His goal was to open them to contemporary creation, instead of just continuing to interpret Verdi or Donizetti. He did not reject them, but their controversial attitude was a way of pointing out what he should change and attract attention to it,” says Martínez Vargas.
While we have made the effort to appreciate contemporary painters and writers, in the hearing we have stayed at the beginning of the 20th century. Music is a temporary art in which memory plays a very important role.
Jesús Martínez Vargas
– Professor and musicologist
Among the greatest achievements of Pierre Boulez is the creation of the Institute for Coordination and Research of Acoustics and Music in France in 1970. “How can we gradually transform the institutions so that it is clear what is important for the future?”, He had been one of his maximum concernswhich motivated him to continue working from within. “While we have made the effort to appreciate contemporary painters and writers, in the audition we have stayed at the beginning of the 20 listening to what we have already heard. ”
This memory exercise involves recalling the compositions of Boulez, which are a reflection of what we were and also what we will be. Some of the most relevant are Le Marteau Sans Maître (The Hammer Without Owner)that catapults it as a reference composer in 1955, and Rituel in memoriam Bruno Madernawhich dedicates to his late friend and director of orchestra Bruno Maderna. “This is open music that invites you to get up and walk, almost to play the instruments with your hands,” says Eva Lainsa. “Invite you to recreate with the sound, open to it and let it penetrate you,” he adds on the compositions, that Martínez Vargas describes as “very refined, with pleasure for the sound color.”
The centenary of Boulez is being held in France with numerous activities around the figure of the artist. In Spain, it will be next March 31 when the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard will play the Piano Sonata No. 1 (1946) in a concert Free entrance to the Reina Sofía Museum. The activity will serve to imagine again, as Lainsa recounts, “to that mozart as a child sitting to the piano that played and created things that the elders did”, a scene in which it is not difficult to imagine Boulez as the protagonist. The teacher indicates that the composer has synthesized “very well” what is “being a musician” and that, when he is remembered from now on, he will do so being part of “the history of music” that he himself was in charge of writing.
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