CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Making Music: Pierre Boulez

Zankel Hall
Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble
Pierre Boulez, Artistic Director and Conductor
Hilary Summers, Contralto
Ara Guzelimian, Series Moderator

PIERRE BOULEZ Le Marteau sans maître
PIERRE BOULEZ sur Incises

Program Notes:

By Paul Griffiths
PIERRE BOULEZ Le Marteau sans maître
Composed between 1953 and 1955, Le Marteau sans maître was first performed in Baden Baden on June 18, 1955, by Sybilla Plate and members of the Südwestfunk Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by Hans Rosbaud. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on May 8, 1969, with mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani and the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble conducted by Arthur Weisberg.

Scoring: contralto, alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylophone, and percussion.

Just for a moment, in 1951–52, it had seemed to Boulez that serial methods were asking to be extended over every element in a composition. It was a thrilling possibility: that a new coherent musical system might be found. It was also a terrifying anxiety: that creation would become as automated as heavy industry—that masterpieces could be made with no master, only the rude hammer of technology. The moment passed. Total organization proved impossible, since decisions would always have to made—not least the decision to compose a piece at all. But the residue remained, in that Boulez was left to contemplate the limits of choice, the coexistence of spontaneity and system, the troubling uncertainty of any boundary between the human and the mechanical. Are we the pawns of historical and psychological processes we cannot see or alter? Or is there always the possibility of the inexplicable, the unprecedented?

The experience of 1951–52 had taught Boulez that “composition and organization cannot be confused for fear of a mad inanity,” and yet in Le Marteau sans maître (“The hammer with no master”) they are very deliberately (or automatically) confused, so that we can never be sure whether “mad inanity” is not the intention, whether the music’s impenetrability is the veil of an automatic process or the composer’s design. What Boulez had learned was not that will and mechanism must not be confused, but rather that they cannot but be confused, just as so many other ostensible opposites are shown in Le Marteau sans maître as confused: voice and instrument (in that the voice becomes a wordless instrument in the finale, while the instruments begin to sing, playing music that had earlier been sung), sound and silence (in that the loudest sounds can silence sense, and the longest silences be filled with reverberation, real or imagined, and expectation), melody and accompaniment, pulse and pulselessness, essence and ornament.

There is also, increasingly as the work proceeds, a doubt about the integrity of the three miniature cycles, each based on a concise, enigmatic poem by René Char, whose work Boulez valued for qualities it shared with his music—an oblique passion and a passionate obliqueness, a mix of fury and tenderness—as well as, in the case of these poems, for a brevity that allowed the music to create its own scale, with the poems as inscriptions across it. Not only are the cycles shuffled, but they start to lose their identifying marks. For example, the four “Bourreaux de solitude” pieces are generally marked by strong pulsation, but the last of them has a richly embellished flute part that might belong more to the music for “L’artisanat furieux.” The work seems to become clogged with memories of itself, and it is in an exhaustion of reminiscence that it comes to an end. The whole principle of the finale is the tedium of repetition: it is a “double” not just of the centerpiece but of everything that has gone before, incorporating quotations from all three cycles. Not only does the singer lose power over speech, but the music loses the power to go on. It does not come to an end: an end comes to it.

That can only come about when the work has run out of possibilities of self-renewal. Right up to the final page, it goes on finding ways to spin along as if in a perpetual improvisation, for Boulez’s logic was a logic in how the music was made, not in how it may be perceived: there his ideal was an opacity of scintillation and speed, an encounter with something too fluid and fast to be grasped. The vocal sections (which can hardly be called songs: in matters of genre, too, the work cuts across categories, between song cycle and chamber piece, chamber piece and orchestral composition) are lazier in movement, but still volatile, while the prelude and postlude to “L’artisanat furieux” race at double speed, as if they were harmonics of the setting, and the commentaries on “Bourreaux de solitude” have a rattling patter, broken unpredictably in the second by moments of suspended animation. Through velocity and abruptness, and through sheer allure of sound, the work frustrates our efforts to explain it or understand it. It just is.

The sound, yet again, is unplaceable. In his ensemble Boulez combines features of European chamber music (viola), Balinese gamelan (vibraphone), African percussion (xylophone), and Japanese koto (guitar) with the universal flute. But the evocations of different cultures (even of European culture) are very fine. There are no Balinese or Japanese scales, no tangibly African rhythms, and so far from offering a collection of musical postcards from abroad, the instrumentation seems vital to its duties here: the xylorimba and percussion necessary to the pulsed rhythms of the “Bourreaux de solitude” cycle, the vibraphone, guitar, and pizzicato viola necessary to the resonant soundscape, the flute necessary as a substitute voice, the whole variegated sextet necessary to the splintered polyphony.

Unique and inevitable, Le Marteau sans maître has the qualities by which we recognize a great work.


PIERRE BOULEZ sur Incises
Composed between 1996 and 1998, sur Incises was first performed (in its preliminary version) in Basel on April 27, 1996, by the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez. The present version was first performed in Edinburgh on August 30, 1998 by the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by David Robertson. The Carnegie Hall premiere of sur Incises took place in Weill Recital Hall on November 20, 1999, with the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez.

Scoring: 3 pianos, 3 harps, and 3 percussionists (marimbas/vibraphones).

Boulez’s habit of expanding works is well established: among many other examples, his Notations, the early set of piano aphorisms, is still, more than half a century later, in the process of being transformed into a massive sequence of orchestral studies. In sur Incises the new destination was found more quickly. Again the origin was a short piano piece, Incises (“Incisions”). Out of this came sur Incises (“on Incisions”), a composition that lasts around 40 minutes and multiplies the piano threefold thrice, so that the music ripples through an ensemble of three pianos and three each of instruments that are, coloristically, next door (harps, and marimbas or vibraphones).

Boulez has drawn attention to the difference between tonal music and serial music by a cosmological analogy: in tonal music there is a principle of gravitation, the home key being the center of the universe, whereas in serial music there is no center but rather perpetual expansion. It rather follows that any expansion of a musical idea (not to speak of a whole piece, as here) could, notionally, continue forever—that the composer could go on elaborating the basic material indefinitely and never bring a composition to an end. Indeed, this is how Boulez’s musical life has turned out. With rare exceptions, his works exist in conditional states, always subject to revision or extension. And in recent years he has been reluctant to bring any project to a decisive close.

So it may be with sur Incises, which began its growth in April 1996, when it was performed as a 10-minute piece at concerts Boulez conducted in Basel and Paris to celebrate the 90th birthday of Paul Sacher—the same Sacher who, nearly 60 years before, had commissioned the Bartók work heard before intermission. Over the next two years, Boulez added to the score, and the present ending sounds pretty conclusive, but part of the point of the piece is that new beginnings are always possible—that even when the material seems exhausted and the instruments burnt out, the music can still spin on.

In Incises Boulez had put forward two kinds of music: a rapid toccata-style mobility marked by stutterings of immediate note repetition, and strummings at the bottom of the keyboard. These latter form the basis for the start of sur Incises—sunken bell music suggesting perhaps entrapment, lethargy, or just a circling round the territory, exploring what is at hand before any decisive project is undertaken. Then, after a few minutes, the instruments move quite suddenly into the other kind of Incises music: quick, energetic, rushing from one repeated note to the next. In an earlier work featuring nine performers on tuned percussive instruments, Éclat (1965), Boulez had used the greatest possible variety of timbres. Here, by contrast, piano tone is omnipresent at the center, and the effect is of a piano hurtling through a hall of mirrors, which copy or distort its sound. Or perhaps it is a maze of mirrors, since every so often the tumult comes to an end, the tempo slows, and the fast figurations fall apart, only for the music, after a while, to speed off again in another direction.

—Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Paul Griffiths is the author of numerous books on music, including The New Penguin Dictionary of Music and, most recently, A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge University Press).

Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble
Pierre Boulez, Artistic Director and Conductor
Each year, young musicians from all corners of the world are invited to spend three weeks in Lucerne to study and perform pioneering works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with Pierre Boulez, his assistant Jean Deroyer, and members of the Ensemble InterContemporain. The two ensembles, assembled during the Lucerne Festival Academy 2007 in Lucerne, also
performed tonight’s works in the adjacent concert tour in Essen, Germany and Mito, Japan. The academy forum’s numerous atelier sessions, workshops, and concerts give interested members of the public a unique chance to look behind the scenes and gain valuable insight into both the compositions and the creative process.

Hilary Summers, Contralto
Hilary Summers was born in South Wales and studied music at Reading University before continuing her vocal studies at the Royal Academy of Music and the National Opera Studio in London. She works extensively in the Baroque repertoire and sings regularly with many of Europe’s finest authentic instrument ensembles including The Academy of Ancient Music with Christopher Hogwood, Les Arts Florissants with William Christie, The King’s Consort with Robert King, and The English Concert with Andrew Manze. As a contemporary music enthusiast she has explored much of the modern repertoire. Under Boulez’s direction, she has performed his Le Marteau sans maître throughout Europe with the Ensemble InterContemporain and has recorded it with the same forces to much critical acclaim. Also with Boulez, she has sung his Le visage nuptial in Chicago with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She created the role of Stella in Elliott Carter’s opera What Next? at the Berlin Staatsoper conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Other recordings include Handel’s Messiah with King’s College Cambridge; Handel’s Orlando (Medoro) with Les Arts Florrisants; Handel’s Lotario (Idelberto) with Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco; Vivaldi’s La Senna Festeggiante and two discs of Vivaldi’s sacred music with Robert King and The King’s Consort. Her most recent release is Handel’s Semele (Juno & Ino) with Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company for Chandos.

Recent projects have included the acclaimed Wiener Festwochen production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Sorceress) with William Christie, a recording of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle with The King’s Consort, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hippolyta) for the Teatro Real, Madrid, performances of Le Marteau sans maître with Boulez at the Lucerne Festival, and performances of George Benjamin’s new opera, Into the Little Hill, in the US and Europe.

Future projects include further European performances of Into the Little Hill, a revival of the Dido and Aeneas production at the Vienna Festival, her début with the Opera de Paris (Mother Goose), and concerts with the Orchestre de Paris, Ensemble InterContemporain, and The King’s Consort.

Ara Guzelimian, Series Moderator
Ara Guzelimian was appointed Provost and Dean of The Juilliard School in New York City in August 2006. In that capacity, he oversees the faculty, curriculum, and artistic planning of the distinguished performing arts conservatory in all three of its divisions—dance, drama, and music.

Prior to his Juilliard appointment, Ara Guzelimian was Senior Director and Artistic Advisor of Carnegie Hall from 1998 to 2006. He continues his association with Carnegie Hall as host and producer of the acclaimed Making Music composer series at Carnegie Hall, which has included concerts devoted to such composers as John Adams, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Lieberson, Leon Kirchner, Osvaldo Golijov, as well as Oliver Knussen, Meredith Monk, George Perle, and Chen Yi. This season, Pierre Boulez, Thomas Adès, and Frederic Rzewski will be the featured composers.

Previously, Ara Guzelimian was the Artistic Administrator of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado from 1993 to 1998. In addition, he was Artistic Director of the Ojai Festival in California from 1992 to 1997. He was associated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1978 to 1993, first as producer for the Orchestra’s national radio broadcasts and, more recently, as Artistic Administrator.

Mr. Guzelimian is also an active lecturer, writer, and music critic. In the recent seasons, he has been heard both on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and as a guest host on public radio’s Saint Paul Sunday. He is the editor of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Pantheon Books, 2002), a collection of dialogues between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. In September 2003, Mr. Guzelimian was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for his contributions to French music and culture.