Boocoorechliaff the Bulgar, also dead, forgot the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell and the profit and loss. I suspect, however, that his music was more atonal than pantonal [...]
We knew there was something familiar about M. Boocoorechliaff. His name does not appear in our catalogue of recordings, but to-day we noticed his worthwhile
book about Strawinsci - still on our shelves after having been purchased at a remainder sale many years ago. It is translated from the French by Martin Cooper. Here is a taste of Boocoorechliaff for interested Members:
"The generation that came to maturity after the Second World War have made musical history a conscience, a mission, a warranty and a weapon. They had been presented with a picture of 'history being written' by the just men and the martyrs - Schoenberg, Webern, Varese - whose path they must 'ineluctably' follow without equivocation or deviation of any kind, and without looking back, under pain of being considered (or indeed considering themselves) 'useless'. How could it have been otherwise? The forging of a genuinely contemporary language with the world in ruins and an exhausted musical language finished off by Schoenberg and gifted by Webern first with the grace of silence and then with a new breath of life - this demanded nothing less than total commitment. The generation that submitted itself to this revolutionary discipline was to give birth to something more, and better, than a new grammar - a whole new conception of music and a sharing of intellectual concepts - a common idea that was to spread all over the world and then gradually to recede, after enriching the liberty and independence of the individual with a radical experience that all had shared.
"To the obsessive idea of history as a progression and musical evolution as determined by necessity, Stravinsky opposed his own conception of history as
permanence. This was the origin of the serious misunderstandings - now resolved, we believe - that had arisen between Stravinsky and this younger generation. Stravinsky regarded history neither as conscience nor master, but as his property and his
instrument. He saw the whole course of history as available to him, and he criss-crossed it with abandon and delight, sometimes at the risk of losing his power of conviction. Why did he do this? In order to put the clock back? To support an imagination suddenly paralysed after the
Sacre? No: rather to rediscover beyond but also at the very heart of the complex constellations of musical history, perpetually recurring down the ages, certain active
constants. To reach down through this whole subsoil to the roots of his own musical invention and to a tradition conceived as living and experienced as necessary. And finally to look for complex and repeated answers to his own constant and unwavering demands in the worlds of the sacred, of the archetype and of
style."
Here we see Boocoorechliaff playing an Oriental finger game with Georges Pludermacher:
