teleplasm
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Posts: 49
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« on: 16:36:22, 02-06-2007 » |
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This Saturday on "Music Matters", Tom Service descended into the IRCAM Führerbunker to meet Pierre Boulez and members of his entourage. Boulez sounded genial and philosophical, as he usually does these days, even when speaking of the time in the 1980's when he had to stop "being Robespierre" and become someone else, maybe Barras or even Napoleon --- he didn't specify. Service didn't enquire what Boulez had said to President Pompidou back in 1970 in order to persuade him that French taxpayers should provide funds to promote the music of Boulez and his disciples, but one can bet that la gloire came prominently into it. It was probably a lot more politically persuasive than the lame arguments Boulez brings forward for the continuation of those funds today. At any rate, a "broadening of the aesthetic" there had to be if IRCAM was to survive --- though the music that now emanates from IRCAM still has that saminess that results from superabundance of musical resources, a phenomenon paralleled in literature that one could call the 'Finnegans Wake Effect'. It seems more likely that posterity will regard IRCAM as a monument to the delusion that music can be fabricated in studios than as a model of how to map the music of the future.
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« Last Edit: 00:19:25, 04-06-2007 by teleplasm »
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pim_derks
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« Reply #1 on: 16:40:56, 02-06-2007 » |
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Many thanks for posting this, teleplasm. Now I would like to hear a piece by Marcel Landowski.  |
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"People hate anything well made. It gives them a guilty conscience." John Betjeman
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perfect wagnerite
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« Reply #2 on: 17:06:19, 02-06-2007 » |
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Service didn't enquire what Boulez had said to President Pompidou back in 1974 in order to persuade him that French taxpayers should provide funds to promote the music of Boulez and his disciples, but one can bet that la gloire came prominently into it.
After hearing this I was trying to picture, say, Harrison Birtwistle or Max trying to persuade Tony Blair or Gordon Brown to sink large quantities of public funding into a centre for new music in Britain. Irksome though the French can sometimes be about la gloire, it does have advantages over some of the alternatives .... |
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At every one of these [classical] concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. (Shaw, Don Juan in Hell)
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richard barrett
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« Reply #3 on: 17:15:33, 02-06-2007 » |
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I was trying to picture, say, Harrison Birtwistle or Max trying to persuade Tony Blair or Gordon Brown to sink large quantities of public funding into a centre for new music in Britain. Irksome though the French can sometimes be about la gloire, it does have advantages over some of the alternatives ....
Blair: Actually, I'm more of a rock and roll sort of bloke. Birtwistle: Well then just give us the money and **** off. |
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Reiner Torheit
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« Reply #4 on: 20:31:40, 02-06-2007 » |
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trying to persuade Tony Blair or Gordon Brown to sink large quantities of public funding into a centre for new music Several other countries have such centres. Although it's nothing to rival IRCAM, Sweden has a similar centre in Goteborg, and even allows "outsiders" to use it by prior arrangement. The conditions (it's on a rather beautiful island) were described to me as "utterly idyllic" by composers who've had the chance to spend any time there. The studio is also pretty darn good too.  |
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"I was, for several months, mutely in love with a coloratura soprano, who seemed to me to have wafted straight from Paradise to the stage of the Odessa Opera-House"
- Leon Trotsky, "My Life"
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pim_derks
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« Reply #5 on: 20:40:47, 02-06-2007 » |
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Wasn't Pierre Boulez complaining last year on Front Row about the fact that the city of Paris doesn't have a decent concert hall?  |
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"People hate anything well made. It gives them a guilty conscience." John Betjeman
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marbleflugel
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« Reply #6 on: 21:01:24, 02-06-2007 » |
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They should have given him Golders Green Hippodrome (rebuilt in the location of choice)
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'...A celebrity is someone who didn't get the attention they needed as an adult'
Arnold Brown
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Biroc
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« Reply #7 on: 14:45:30, 03-06-2007 » |
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I was trying to picture, say, Harrison Birtwistle or Max trying to persuade Tony Blair or Gordon Brown to sink large quantities of public funding into a centre for new music in Britain. Irksome though the French can sometimes be about la gloire, it does have advantages over some of the alternatives ....
Blair: Actually, I'm more of a rock and roll sort of bloke. Birtwistle: Well then just give us the money and **** off.  |
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"Believe nothing they say, they're not Biroc's kind."
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richard barrett
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« Reply #10 on: 18:03:11, 06-06-2007 » |
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What exactly is the problem there, Pim? Do you think folk music has no trivial aspects? Everything has trivial aspects, doesn't it?
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #11 on: 18:15:35, 06-06-2007 » |
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That Youtube video breaks up into 2-3 second segments when I try to play it (is there a reason for this? And anything that can be done about it?), so it isn't so easy to catch all of what Boulez says, as words are often chopped in two! Boulez talks more about about folk music in the essay on Bartók in Stocktakings: From an Apprenticeship, saying the following:
From time to time throughout his life he will go in search of authentic folk documents, either as a respite from composition, or perhaps to refresh his inspiration. These expeditions will yield an impressive number of melodies collected and written down from recordings, with a fineness of ear and precision of rhythm which can arouse nothing but admiration. At last folksongs were transcribed without in any way forcing them into the scales or rhythms of academic music. He left us fundamental work on the folklore of Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. His last journey, in 1935, was devoted to the Arabs of Biskra and the Turks of Anatolia.
Bartók the composer profited greatly from Bartók the folklorist. Starting from a conventional anti-Habsburg nationalism (in his symphonic poem Kossuth of 1903 he parodies the Austrian National Anthem, i.e. Haydn!), he was led by the desire for authenticity to the discovery of new materials and undocumented techniques which turned his aesthetics upside-down and forced him to resolve the problem of Hungarian music in a way that went beyond simple provincial exoticism. But, while noting the persistent influence of Central European folklore, one must also observe that Bartók's work is marked by a basic instability, even a certain inequality, in its various components. Bartók felt the influence of all his contemporaries and, in spite of his powerful personality, sometimes absorbed it rather superficially.
All of that suggests to me that Boulez by no means dismisses folk music out of hand. I imagine he might be alluding to a point of view that is mentioned by Dahlhaus and others, about how folk music no longer has the same meaning after industrialisation, and becomes merely a commodity (Dahlhaus frames his distinction between entertainment music of the eighteenth century and Trivialsmusik of the later nineteenth in a similar manner).
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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pim_derks
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« Reply #12 on: 23:29:38, 06-06-2007 » |
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What exactly is the problem there, Pim? Do you think folk music has no trivial aspects? Everything has trivial aspects, doesn't it?
That's absolutely true, Richard. For instance, the music of Boulez also has trivial aspects. I wish to thank Ian Pace for sharing the fragment from the Boulez essay. The phrase "provincial exoticism" is interesting. I wonder what Boulez wants to say with this phrase. To me, it's a bit of a contradictio in terminis.  |
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"People hate anything well made. It gives them a guilty conscience." John Betjeman
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Daniel
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« Reply #13 on: 23:45:37, 06-06-2007 » |
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That Youtube video breaks up into 2-3 second segments when I try to play it (is there a reason for this? And anything that can be done about it? Some evenings you need to click on pause and allow it a little more time to load up, then it'll run without breaks. |
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Swan_Knight
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« Reply #14 on: 12:33:24, 07-06-2007 » |
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I didn't hear the interview, but presumably Boulez is unhappy, to put it mildly, about the election of the mongrel Sarkozy to the Presidency of his country - and with good reason. Sarkozy's stated aim seems to be to try to make France more like his beloved America; I don't think he will succeed, but I would imagine Boulez and other people in the arts in France can no longer expect the kind of sympathy from central government that they have taken for granted for decades.
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...so flatterten lachend die Locken....
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