Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise

At that moment (and the bits where he talked about Marteau Sans Maitre) I had visions of Birtwistle presenting performances just calling it 'great' and 'frightening' with a smile and leaving it at that.

Would watch.

I've spent a lot of time with Xenakis, less so Messiaen, still hasn't really clicked for me. I love his ideas and his concepts but I haven't really 'felt' it yet.

I know pieces by and have heard of everybody in these programmes obv, but often I don't know a lot about them whereas with Cage, for example, I could tell you his life story, quote bits from 'Silence' and 'A Year From Monday', used to take mushrooms and listen to him for a weekend, I know his stuff pretty well.

My gaps are more like:

Non-canonical Shoenberg/Webern/Stravinksy, altho I've spent a LOT of time with Shoenberg's books (where he's actually rather funny, also, the best place to go for musical analysis of Beethoven imo).

Gah I dunno, the more I think about it, the more I realise it wasn't really filling any gaps in for me, it was just fun to watch and yes, Noodle Vague otm, MORE of this kind of thing.

Birtwistle was asked about people who don't or won't get mdoern classical. He said that's 'their problem'.

Nice one HB :)

yeah, otm

Somehow I can't imagine a writer being asked a similar question... unless it was by Kirsty Wark

I know pieces by and have heard of everybody in these programmes obv, but often I don't know a lot about them whereas with Cage, for example, I could tell you his life story, quote bits from 'Silence' and 'A Year From Monday', used to take mushrooms and listen to him for a weekend, I know his stuff pretty well.

Its not so much about life stories, more about how the chance procedures he was employing clashed with what Boulez was doing, and Cage was one of the first that stoood his ground, and with the help of David Tudor made quite a mark in those years in the early 50s. You can't overlook that and then talk about America's contribution to European music as money via the CIA.

Apparently Boulez and Cage were in v frequent and friendly postal correspondence during the early darmstadt time.

It has been published

Scurrilous rumours abound about the closeness of their friendship

He Hammers the Master

iirc, Boulez biography claims that there's no evidence of Pierre ever having been on a date let alone in a relationship with anybody

I want to read that correspondence, though, even though Boulez-in-print makes me uncomfortable

This won't make me popular on this thread but I prefer his conducting to both his composing and his commentifying. I like some of his music a lot (mainly Marteau, Pli Selon Pli and Rituel) but could live without it; whereas as a conductor he's fucking irreplaceable to me.

I've read some of the Boulez-Cage correspondence, Boulez is generally amiable unlike the usual persona (a nice quote I came across recently had André Souris describe the youthful Boulez as a 'little savage', 'full of a sort of anonymous rage') but I don't recall finding much of huge interest. Lots of "hey your new piece is quite good, I hope you like my new piece" and the like. But also v precise technical discussions that I don't have the knowledge to understand.

Also Cage was probably too nice to make for a good interlocutor in the gossipy shit stirring dickhead hilarity that I get the impression was rife in those scenes. Souvtchinsky one day writing a letter to Stravinsky saying how much of an arrogant jerk Boulez is then the next day writing to Boulez saying how important he is to him, Boulez saying that he barely spoke to Souvtchinksy for years when they were still writing weekly letters, &c &c.

xp i don't know about prefer but he is a major major conductor true, he's done my favourite version of Mahler's 8th for a start

that's my favorite mahler 8 too.

no Jon you're pretty otm. Several compositions of his rule my school tho

I think there was about 10 mins in my listening life where I cared about conducting as a thing at all...I think the 2nd Piano Sonata and Marteau are all time. The 3rd Sonata is also brill, really underrated. Saw a great perf by Ian Pace who is on this disc I've been meaning to hunt down, and as we're talking about the both Cage and Boulez...

Howard Goddall is touching on similar ground but I think I'll seek punishment elsewhere tonight.

I read the Boulez-Cage correspondence years back. Morton Feldman made it sound really juicy in his writings but yeah it's very polite and courteous.

These days I never bother with nor think about B's own compositions,but I listen to his Debussy one hell of a lot.

I'm with Julio, conducting means nothing to me tbh, OK so I'm disgusting savage, tell me about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y17-pJZ9nEg

i couldn't even pinpoint what it is about conducting per se but a good conductor shapes the performance and is a handy tag to identify a work that's still obviously collaborative. i've seen professional musicians talk about conductors as if they make a huge difference and i'm happy to accept that.

Oh nooo this discussion again? 90% of a conductor's job is "talking to the musicians" and the other 10% is "setting the tempo". I think xyzzzz_'s attitude is healthy as a listener, as there is that tendency toward creating false synapses between "what the performance sounds like" and "the backstory and the politics of the conductor". But conductors are like heads of state, they won't actually directly change the appearance of the country or what goes on there, but they will affect the way people talk about things

"Talking to the musicians" of course includes "suggesting points of articulation/accenting" and "balancing the sections against one another" and "setting the tempo" includes "controlling the rubato", so.

Boulez is one of those very few conductors because of whom the whole myth-making ~conductor~ thing even exists; I can't even think of half a dozen like him whose style is so identifiable by ear alone. Conducting should not be mythologized but there have been conductors who basically had some kind of fucking voodoo and B was one.

this roughly equates to the difference between being a romanticism/early modernism devotee and a post-war specialist, where for the latter it is quite rare to find more than a single recording of many orchestral pieces

boulez is pretty singular, even on these shitty laptop speakers i could easily identify the difference between say maaze's and boulez' 'nocturnes' within about five seconds

i suspect a lot of that probably owes to assiduous work by sound engineers who can ably record boulez' differentiation/spaciation of sound

i don't think anybody's backing an extreme auteur theory of the conductor here. just acknowledging that Boulez's done good work.

Xxpost

To some extent. Though if you include recorded/captured radio broadcasts you often end up with alternates aplenty. And the more popular postwar figures... I have at least 4 diff Lutoslawski 3rds and there are at least that many more in the catalog.

it's not a question of 'good work' it's that boulez is in aggregate terms more distinctive as a conductor than as a composer, since early stockhausen/barraqué/maderna/pousseur etc approach some fairly similar territory whereas there is no analogue for him as a conductor

I should mention that a few of Hans Zender's Mahler recordings display a Boulez-like 'hallucinatory clarity'

I think of Boulez's orch recordings the same way I think of Michelangeli, Zimerman, or Moravec's piano playing -- the balancing and pinpoint clarity is so fine it gets almost uncanny valley

boulez is deified in the conductor trade, i know someone who studied with him and has a level of infatuation that would be considered strange in another context

I think I misused 'uncanny valley'. Sorry. Should have just said 'surreal' instead.

if you have to use a proper noun as a musical adjective, it's better than 'silent hill'

If Boulez had embraced his resemblance to Marlon Brando and taken the Apolalypse Now razor blade route, this conversation wouldn't be taking place.

just heard a radio trail for tonight's ep..."post-war...blah blah...rediscovered melody and beauty...blah blah...all lived happily ever after" ugggh

so far this third episode is dumb and dull but then i suppose i know cage fairly well. is john adams really quite as much the fusty conservative in general as he is in the role he's fulfilling in this show?

suck it modernism, you lost, john adams and george benjamin won.

as i understand it.

these sorts of programmes are always terrible and there is no reason to watch them beyond dull curiosity

I am almost gonna miss the car crash. Almost.

He's v careful to say whether anybody lost or won, classical goes on making its sensuous and sumptuos noise. Dreadful.

Revived this thread bcz I get the impression this is the kind of thing Alex Ross likes to think he is doing in his writing when listening to this analysis of Beefheart's 'Frownland' (it might be worth its own thread)

I kinda like it once it gets past 10 mins when he actually starts talking about the music, he nicely explains the vocab to someone who isn't familiar, then breaks it down the piece into 7 blocks (still going on as I press the submit button on this post).