pierre boulez & l'ensemble intercontemporain
Pierre
Boulez is name-checked on the cover of "Freak Out!" (1966) under the
heading "These People Have Contributed Materially In Many Ways To Make Our
Music What It Is. Please Do Not Hold It Against Them", long before he
collaborated with FZ on the album "Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect
Stranger" (1984). He is also name-checked in "The Real Frank Zappa
Book" (1989).
He is
also mentioned in "My Favorite Records", an FZ penned article in Hit
Parader (1967): "Also, Pierre Boulez conducts his own composition: 'Le
Marteau Sans Maître'. I don't know what label that's on, but it's the one with
Boulez conducting. The one by Robert Craft has too many mistakes."
Boulez
(1925, Montbrison, France), became one of the most distinguished composers and
conductors in the world. Through his own compositions and his activities as
author, teacher, and advocate of contemporary music, he has made a decisive
contribution to the development of music in the twentieth century. Boulez's
positions with three major symphony orchestras gained him an international
reputation as a foremost interpreter of music by Alan Berg, Anton Friedrich
Ernst von Webern, and Arnold Schoenberg as well as Claude Debussy, Maurice
Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and Richard Wagner. Weber, Schoenberg and Stravinsky are
also name-checked on the cover of "Freak Out!".
After an
initial training in mathematics, he studied piano, composition, and choral
conducting at the Paris Conservatoire (1943-5), where his teachers included
Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. He became musical director of Barrault's
Théâtre Marigny (1948), where he established his reputation as an interpreter
of contemporary music. In 1953-54, he founded the Concerts du Petit Marigny, one
of the first concert series entirely dedicated to the performance of modern
music, which later became the Domaine Musical series.
Throughout
the next decade, he was much involved with musical analysis and he taught
composition at the Music Academy in Basel (1960-62). Boulez began his conducting
career in 1958 with the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Baden-Baden, Germany. From
1962-63, he was visiting professor at Harvard University.
Pierre
Boulez first appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on subscription
concerts in February 1969 conducting Claude Debussy's "Jeux", Béla
Bartók's "First Piano Concerto" with Daniel Barenboim, Anton
Friedrich Ernst von Webern's "Passacaglia" and "Six Pieces for
Orchestra", and Olivier Messiaen's "Et exspecto resurrectionem
mortuorum". His reputation as a leading musician brought him to the
attention of George Szell, who invited him to conduct in the United States for
the first time with the Cleveland Orchestra. From 1969 until 1972, Boulez was
principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1971, he became chief
conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971-5) and, that same year, he
succeeded Leonard Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic, a
position he held until 1977.
His
difference of opinion about state intervention in the arts as espoused by André
Malraux led Boulez into voluntary exile for several years. He returned to France
in triumph in 1974 when the French government under President Georges Pompidou
decided to build a music research center at the Pompidou Centre and invited
Boulez to be its creator and director. In 1976 he became a professor at the Collège
de France, and in 1977 he became director of the Institut de Recherche et de
Co-ordination Acoustique Musique (IRCAM) at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (he is
also co-founder of Cité de la Musique, another music center in Paris). From
IRCAM sprang the creation of a major and permanent instrumental group, the
Ensemble InterContemporain, one of the world's finest contemporary music
ensembles which Boulez conducted regularly, in France as well as on extended
tours abroad.
In 1991
Boulez resigned as conductor of the Ensemble InterContemporain, while continuing
as its president; that same year he was guest artistic director of the Scotia
Festival. In 1992 he conducted Peter Stein's new production of Claude Debussy's
"Pelléas et Mélisande" with the Welsh National Opera on a European
tour that began in Cardiff. In January 1993, this production (released as a
video by Deutsche Grammophon) was named "1992 Opera Production of the
Year" at the International Classical Music Awards in London. At the 1992
Salzburg Festival, Boulez appeared with the Ensemble InterContemporain, the Los
Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1993,
he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for the first time in almost 30 years. In
1994 he led the orchestra at a Webern festival during the 1994 Berliner
Festwochen.
To
celebrate his 70th birthday in 1995, Pierre Boulez undertook a world tour with
the London Symphony and a host of international stars including Maurizio
Pollini, Jessye Norman, Gidon Kremer, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Mstislav
Rostropovich. In 1995, Boulez conducted Peter Stein's production of Arnold
Schoenberg's opera "Moses and Aaron" at the Nederlandse Opera in
Amsterdam and led the opera's premiere at the 1996 Salzburg Festival.
Pierre
Boulez's discography includes prize-winning recordings of "Parsifal"
from Bayreuth and Berg's "Lulu" (world premiere recording). In 1989,
he signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon to record a broad range
of twentieth-century masterworks with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the
Cleveland Orchestra, and the Berlin Philharmonic as well as contemporary
repertoire, including his own works, with the Ensemble InterContemporain. Boulez
has won 23 Grammy Awards since 1967, five of those were with the Chicago
Symphony. His recording of Béla Bartók's "The Wooden Prince" and
"Cantata profana" with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
received four 1993 Grammy Awards for "Best Classical Album",
"Best Orchestral Performance", "Best Performance of a Choral
Work", and "Best Engineered Recording-Classical". He won two 1994
Grammy Awards ("Best Classical Album" and "Best Orchestral
Performance") for his recording of Béla Bartók's "Concerto for
Orchestra and Four Orchestral Pieces, Op. 12" with the CSO. Boulez's 1994
awards were presented to him in a special ceremony at Orchestra Hall in
December, 1995. In 1995, Pierre Boulez was awarded the German Record Critics
Award for his contribution to 20th-century music, named "Artist of the
Year" by the magazine Gramophone, and honored at the Victoires De La
Musique in France. In 1996 Boulez received the Berlin Arts Prize, and the Royal
Swedish Academy of Music awarded him the Polar Music Prize. He won the 1997
Grammy Award for "Best Orchestral Performance" for a recording of
Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique" and "Tristia" with the
Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus. Boulez most recently received a 1999 Grammy
Award for "Best Classical Contemporary Composition" for the recording
of his work, "Répons", with the Ensemble InterContemporain. His many
awards and honors include honorary doctorates from Leeds, Cambridge, Basel, and
Oxford universities, among others; Commander of the British Empire; and Knight
of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
His
numerous compositions are widely performed. His early work as a composer
rebelled against what he saw as the conservatism of such composers as Stravinsky
and Schoenberg. Of his later works, "Le Marteau sans maître" (1955) -
"The Hammer Without a Master" - gained him a worldwide reputation,
confirmed by "Pli selon pli" - "Fold according to Fold" -
and his third piano sonata.
Boulez
also has published five books about music.
Boulez
worked with soprano soloist Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani, who is also name-checked
as Sylvia Brigham on the cover of "Freak Out!" (1966) under the
heading "These People Have Contributed Materially In Many Ways To Make Our
Music What It Is. Please Do Not Hold It Against Them".
39 |
frank zappa: boulez conducts zappa,
the perfect stranger (1984, lp, usa, angel) |
concerts
The Holland Festival
both ircam and the ensemble are active. here are links to both;
ensemble intercontemporain
http://www.ircam.fr/activites/creation/collaborations/eic-e.html
ircam home page
http://www.ircam.fr/index-e.html
their sole project with zappa was of course "the perfect stranger", conducted by pierre boulez. for this project, the ensemble intercontemporain was recorded january 10 & 11 1984, at ircam, paris.
members of the ensemble intercontemporain at that time were:
producer: frank zappa
recording engineer: didier arditi
umrk 1992 re-mix & eq: spencer
chrislu
engineer: bob
stone
fz approved master, 1993
computer programmer: david ocker
special software: steve difuria
cover: (detail) american artist: donald
roller wilson
from:
ben watson
zappa made contact with ircam, the center for sonic exploration built beneath
the pompidou center in paris and run by pierre boulez, when he visited to
experiment with giuseppe di giugno's 4x digital signal processor.
that zappa's music should be conducted by pierre boulez was generally
greeted with incredulity.
he puzzled the press with his reticence in praising zappa's scores. "i
reserve judgement about all the qualities of zappa's music", he told
liberation (1987). out of press
conferences, though, he replied to a question asking if he liked zappa's music
by saying, "certainly. i found
a kind of vitality and it was very good for our musicians to do that: they were
not accustomed at all to it, and that's good to work on it." (nov 18th,
1990).
the perfect stranger appeared on emi's classical subsidiary angel.
from:
the real frank zappa book
pierre boulez
i met boulez after sending him some orchestral scores, hoping that he would be
interested in conducting them. he
wrote back saying he couldn't because, although he did have a chamber orchestra
of twenty-eight pieces, he did not have a full-size symphony orchestra at his
disposal in france (and even if he did, he probably wouldn't have used it, as he
later stated that he didn't care for 'the french orchestral tone',
preferring the bbc symphony).
i bought my first boulez album when i was in the twelfth grade:
a columbia recording of "le marteau sans maitre" (the hammer
without a master) conducted by robert craft, with "zetmasse"
(time-mass) by stockhausen on the other side.
within a year or so of that, i managed to get hold of a score.
i listened to the record while following the score, and i noticed that
the performance was not very accurate. i
later acquired a recording of "le marteau" on the turnabout label,
with boulez conducting, and was surprised to find that he took the first
movement much more slowly than the tempo marked in score.
i razzed him about it when we met.
boulez is, to use one of thomas nordegg's favorite phrases, "serious as
cancer," but he can be funny too. he
reminds me a little of the character that herbert lom plays in the pink panther
movies. he doesn't have the
'psychotic wink', but he has some of that nervous quality about him, as if he
might -given the proper excuse- start laughing uncontrollably.
i went to lunch with him in paris, prior to the perfect stranger recording.
he ordered something called brebis du [fill in the blank]-- i didn't know
what it was. it was some kind of
meatlike material on weird lettuce with a translucent dressing.
he looked like he was really enjoying it.
he offered some to me. i
asked him what it was. he said,
"the sliced nose of the cow." i
thanked him and went back to my pepper steak.
i saw him conduct the new york philharmonic with phyllis
bryn-julson as soloist at lincoln center in '86 or '87.
the audience was extremely rude. the first half of the program had pieces
by stravinksy and debussy; the second half was a piece by boulez.
after the intermission, the audience came back in and waited for him to
begin his piece -which was very quiet compared to the first two- and then about
half the audience got up -noisily- and walked out.
he kept on conducting.
i would have enjoyed the opportunity to grab a microphone and scream, "sit
down, assholes! this is one of the
'the real guys'!"
the
perfect stranger
since releasing the lso album, i have turned down at least fifteen commissions
from chamber music groups of varying sizes from all over the world who offered
me cash to write a piece of music for them.
if i were a composer just starting out, i would think that was the
greatest thing in the world - but i don't have the time anymore, and i shudder
to think what would happen to my music if they played it without my being there
during the rehearsals. complicating matters, these commissions are offered in a
way that requires my presence at the premiere performance - during which i would
be expected to sit there and pretend it was terrific.
that's what happened to me when boulez conducted the live premiere of
"dupree's paradise," "the perfect stranger" and "naval
aviation in art?". it was underrehearsed.
i hated that premiere. boulez
virtually had to drag me onto the stage to take a bow.
i was sitting on a chair off to the side of the stage during the concert,
and i could see the seat squirting out of the musicians' foreheads.
then they had to go into the ircam studio the next day and record it.
-fz
from:
daniel norris (suzy) (dnorris@haywire.csuhayward.edu)
i got in an argument with a musical snob friend of mine (oh, i'm a snob too, but
not like this), who insisted that the name was pronounced "bou-lay".
of course, this guy also pronounces shubert as "sue-bear",
which i find incredibly irritating.
from:
biffyshrew (biffyshrew@aol.com)
it's pronounced boo-lez. zappa even
asked him. you're making the mistake of applying rules of standard french
pronunciation to somebody's proper name, which doesn't necessarily follow said
rules. i assure you that boulez
pronounces his own name "boo-lez." if you think that's bad french,
then argue with him, not me.
from:
paul hinrichs (paulhinr@mindspring.com)
...and he pronounces "pierre" as "perrier" (not like the
overpriced ht-oh in bottles, rhymes with "terrier") and gets very
disgusted, to the point of spitting, when someone mispronounces it. that's why
ike willis always called him "_mr._ boo-lezzzz", he was that
unpredicable when you got it wrong. better not to risk it, he'd go off like a
hammer without a master...
from:
queensac (queensac@msn.com)
this is from the deutsche grammophon website:
varèse's influence on other composers, not just from the classical world
by p.boulez
perhaps the best example regarding this phenomenum was frank zappa. i knew
frank zappa quite well. his great interest was varèse's music. it certainly had
a great influence on his thinking and on his material. it was very interesting
to watch how someone like zappa was hypnotised by varèse. though zappa was in a
different world, varese's music was still influential in an osmosis kind of way.
it is not immediately appreciable nonetheless still very acute.
anyone can of course take from him. but you know, a generation has its own point
of view and for example for my generation varèse was practically unknown,
especially from a french point of view. he was french but exiled in the us for a
long time. through a student of his of the generation of messiaen, he was
represented still in france after the war. but it meant he was a kind a myth and
remained an unknown quantity.
his works were just not performed. in fact i gave the first performances of varèse
after the war at the domaine musicale. i remember the performance of déserts
was a big scandal. not due to the instrumental music but due to the tape music.
the tape was performed at a level of loudness that was practically unbearable to
cover the protest! so nobody heard the music properly. poor varèse was upset
and offended by the reception he received. his relationship with the french
musical community was always a tortured one. he had some projects in the 1930s
in france for which he came back from the us, but they never materialised. so he
went back disappointed. i was one of the rare frenchmen with whom he
communicated.
zappa discography / filmography:
1984 frank zappa- boulez conducts zappa: the perfect stranger
1987 the amazing mr. bickford (vhs)