好几年前的一篇采访：

皮埃尔•布列兹：你不得不和社会对抗

作为当今古典音乐界最伟大和最具争议性的人物之一，皮埃尔·布列兹在接受采访时依旧好斗而固执。

皮埃尔·布列兹是一个恶棍吗？就在今年早些时候，美国作家亚历克斯·罗斯（Alex Ross）在获奖图书《剩下是噪声—20世纪音乐研究》里，对这位杰出的古典音乐界家，毫不客气地发出指责。

“没错，我就是一个恶棍，”布列兹这样回答，带着慵懒的法式腔调。“不过，我却一点也不引以为耻。在20世纪四五十年代建立起来的那种敌对状态是根深蒂固的。有时候，你不得不和你所处的社会对抗。”

微笑着，手上却拿着刀

罗斯在书中指责布列兹对斯特拉文斯基进行恐吓，20世纪50年代曾在他音乐会上进行捣乱。

“我可能确实在他（斯特拉文斯基）的音乐会上发出过了一点嘘声，但是他（罗斯）所说的那次冲突是我的一些同学引起的，那时我们都觉得斯特拉文斯基的新古典主义时代已经走到尽头了，纯粹是在浪费时间。”

而和布列兹见面以后，斯特拉文斯基在创作上表现得更多的是无调性和全序列性的技巧。布列兹评价说，“事实上，他是一位非常独立的人，视野很开阔，他已经决定：不要被时代遗弃。”

布列兹已经83岁，他不再像以前那样，认为歌剧院应该被烧掉，但他固执依旧，并且不减当年热情。现在，他的那些评论中开始带有一种高度的趣味性—不过他虽然微笑，但手中依然拿着刀。

上周，布列兹和他的“现代乐集”乐团在伦敦南岸演奏的自己的作品《Sur Incises》被放到YouTube网站上，观众们的反应极端地分成了两派。一派认为演奏“荒谬而糊涂”，纯粹是在骗取国家艺术赞助基金；而另一边的观众则认为这是“美妙的音乐”，有人甚至将其容为“如钻石般晶莹”。布列兹得知后非常高兴。

相当一部分，甚至可以说大部分的著名现代作曲家都不被布列兹认可。在他看来，极简派音乐家，比如格拉斯（Glass）和莱希（Reich），“单调而乏味”。至于约翰·亚当斯（John Adams）？“我不会朝他音乐吐口水的，但我也同样无法忍受。他的歌剧《克林格霍芬之死（The Death of Klinghoffer）》，听起来就像糟糕的电影音乐。”而布列兹在上世纪40年代就知道的约翰·凯奇（John Cage），实在是“没有价值”。艾瑞克·萨第（Erik Satie）“也许可能有趣，但是视野太狭隘了。”

“不做自大却无聊的人”

12月10、11日在伦敦，布列兹联手巴黎现代音集乐团，在英国伦敦的皇家节日音乐厅和伊丽莎白女王大厅，分别演绎奥利弗·梅西安（Oliver Messiaen）和埃利奥特·卡特（Elliott Carter）作品，以庆祝这两位大师的百年诞辰。

对这两位音乐家，他都有独特而有所保留的评价。埃利奥特至今仍然坚持创作。“他一直在努力寻求自己的风格。最开始他深受查尔斯·艾夫斯（Charles Ives）的影响，随后他去了巴黎，师从纳迪娅·布朗热 （Nadia Boulanger），开始追求新古典主义风格。最后他终于找到了属于自己的繁复风格。他最近的作品可能更加简单，并且易于理解，但仍然非常有趣。”

当谈到自己曾经的老师梅西安时，他说：“他很快就找到了属于自己的声音。他是一名非常优秀的老师，我喜欢他那些大胆的作品。可是另一方面，他的一些作品也过于传统，甚至曲调陈旧，有的还用C大调来结束，这让我很困惑。”“也许这和他宗教上的神秘主义有关吧？”

当谈到20世纪50年代二战后的音乐时，有人曾评价，布列兹的作品能建立如此巨大的影响力，也是因为对战后的音乐而言，“丑陋是必须的”。布列兹赞同，自己那一代的人都痛恨德国和苏联战时集权主义下推崇的那些容易让人兴奋的音乐。布列兹也因此讨厌大部分的流行音乐，“虽然有些很活泼生动，但是那些“1-2-3-4的旋律总让我想起了行军进行曲。”

回复 robinwood 的帖子

作为指挥，从瓦格纳之后一直到他自己，找出他不好的录音还真不容易
   

　　巴伦博伊姆说，布列兹的音乐最吸引人的地方就是“它是今天的音乐，而且在很多方面还是明天的音乐。”作为二战后先锋派最重要的作曲家之一，布列兹在创作中结合了严密的数学构思与自由、主观甚至狂乱的感情表达，在呈现韦伯恩式的高度组织化的明晰织体的同时，又充分表现出德彪西式的敏锐而强烈的色彩感，被人们形容为“抽象的印象主义”。除了成名作——1948年的序列主义作品《第二钢琴奏鸣曲》外，1954年创作的整体序列音乐作品《无主之锤》、采用偶然原则创作的《第三钢琴奏鸣曲》、结合了序列主义和偶然音乐手法的后期代表作《层层褶皱》以及《记谱法》等作品都是20世纪新音乐的重要文献。

回复 甲米 的帖子

第一次听布列兹的作品是Sur Incises和Messagesquisse，当时就被吸引住了，印象十分深刻。
最近赶着大师90大寿买了一套大师钦点的“作品全集”。通过这套唱片基本可以对大师作品有一个比较全面的了解。  

2015年，布列兹接受了全球第三大乐谱出版集团奥地利环球出版集团UE的采访，谈论自己的作曲心得。这一采访由潮人谈的老朋友，UE的沃尔夫冈·肖富勒策划，由萨尔茨堡音乐节提供，以贺布列兹90大寿。

PIERRE BOULEZ – FROM REBEL TO MODERN CLASSIC

Daniel Barenboim
"Pierre Boulez will always be a man of the future to me: a true man of the future. After all, a false man of the future is either ignorant of the past or not interested in it."

Pierre-Laurent Aimard
"What is extraordinary with Boulez is his kind of morality with the music. There is a passion, a man burning for music, irresistibly, that you can feel at any second of his music-making."

Simon Rattle
"He changed music, he changed the way we think, he changed the waywe structure the music business."


Pierre Boulez © Monika Rittershaus

Pierre Boulez
on
Composing

Mr. Boulez, Le Marteau sans maître was premièred exactly 60 years ago. You were composing this piece in 1953/55, shortly after a brief discussion at the beginning of the 1950s, when it seemed that serial methods were asking to be extended across every element of composition. This represented the thrilling possibility that a new musical system might be found, but there was also the anxiety that music’s creation would become as automated as heavy industry – allowing masterpieces to be made without a master, merely by the hammer of technology. But this sort of total organisation proved to be impossible – luckily so, one might say. Did you want to use Le Marteau to demonstrate that spontaneity and system can indeed coexist?

Boulez: The fact is that when I composed the structures beforehand, I was totally responsible for that – because I wanted the composer to be anonymous. The composer was just a transmitter and nothing else. But very early on, I became aware of the fact that this was entirely impossible. But I did not want to go back to the twelve-tone system, because I found it impossible as a way of constraining the available possibilities. Therefore, I began to develop a system in which freedom was possible, and I conquered my own freedom not only regarding the twelve-tone system, but also with regard to the general possibility of composing purely with a system. And therefore, Le marteau  – even from the vantage point of today – was for me a beginning of a conquest, of freedom.

Le Marteau appeared to be a link between two seemingly incompatible experiences: the strictly constructivist musical thinking of the German and Viennese school as mediated by Webern, and what one might call the more ornamental elements of French music, especially of Debussy and Messiaen.

Boulez: Yes, I attempted to unite two parts of the musical world which had previously been incompatible – and had even regarded each other with a sort of distance. The constructivism of the Viennese was occasionally a bit of a burden, and I thought that the inventiveness and ingenuity, the spontaneity of a Debussy were very necessary sometimes. You really cannot just be constructive all the time; you have to be descriptive, as well. I suppose that’s the sort of combination between constructivism and spontaneity which I found to be very important.

Le Marteau was praised highly for a new sound appearing in new music. What sound did you have in mind when you started?

Boulez: At the time I was very interested in other cultures and I listened to quite a lot of non-European music: Balinese music, African music, Japanese traditional music, Chinese opera and so on. I was similarly interested in the sounds contained in such music. Bali, for instance, has a kind of metallic sonority. And if you go to Africa, wood is one of the main sound-producing materials. For me, remaining in the tradition of the Viennese School and the European school was too much, and I wanted to have another world. And I am generally very sensitive to sound. Let’s take Stravinsky’s Les noces, for instance: this is a forefather of the sound of sur Incises , but when I add the percussion, which is very important, and the harps, then the sound is totally different. And this sound harkens back to Bali and to the African sphere.

At what time your composition is finished? And when do you keep on working on a piece?

Boulez: There are some works which are unfinished, because the structure of the work was not very clear to me. Therefore I do return to works, but there are also some works which I don’t touch again – Derive II , for instance, I will not touch again. It’s finished because I worked on it for quite a few years, and then I discovered of way of structuring, of composing the work which was totally different than what I had done up to that point; a sort of narrative aspect of the work. I saw that this narration was finished, and that I could not add anything – the addition would have been totally artificial. There are works which I want to finish, and some other works which I don’t want to finish. You know, I have a relationship with my work which is very sentimental …

There is a quotation of Gustav Mahler according to which he said that "the material composed him." Would you agree with that?

Boulez: Yes, definitely. If you have an interesting and productive relationship with the material, the material certainly will compose for you. It’s an exchange. I find it wonderful to think of it such that the material in fact composes with you, and you compose with the material. But if you have material: what do you do with it? It’s not just spontaneity that is important, but the question of what you do with this spontaneity! You invent in a sort of hyper-spontaneity – that’s the real difficulty of composing. In my composing, process is an important aspect. So I look and have some quite spontaneous reactions. After that, I look at what I’ve done, and I say: but with this material, I could do far more. I write them down immediately, or as immediately as I can. That’s spontaneity I would like to say. And that remains – hence the name Derive, because it remains there, unused, and it’s derived from things I have already written. And so Derive I is derived from the material I used for Répons, and I still have a lot of material I wrote for Répons which is unused. It’s like you’re an archaeologist – by discovering you go down, down and down. And then you discover yourself.

Please, explain to us what is the creativity of composing?

Boulez: Sometimes you are confronted with material, and you discover the solution very quickly. Sometimes you findabsolutely no solutions that are interesting or worth it. And sometimes you’re not thinking about it, but rather about something else – and suddenly you say "ah!" now that’s the direction in which you have to go. Every moment in your life, if you are creative or in the creative process, can be fruitful. But you have to take the opportunity. And composing is also a matter of seeing the opportunity where other people see nothing. It’s exactly that.
Universal Edition/Wolfgang Schaufler

Companions

Daniel Barenboim on Pierre Boulez:
"The way his brain works is about two hundred times faster than a normal person's."
"Although the content of Boulez' music is very complex, its colour is very French. To me, there is no doubt that it is French music."
"Pierre Boulez will always be a man of the future to me: a true man of the future. After all, a false man of the future is either ignorant of the past or not interested in it."
Daniel Barenboim conducts the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra on August 12, 2015 and the chamber music concert of WEDO on August 13, 2015.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard on Pierre Boulez:
"He plays the piano in an extraordinary manner: very original and at the same time extremely controlled."
"Pianists are very grateful that the piano is his instrument, just as everyone is very grateful that conducting became his domain later on."
"I met him when he was 50 or 51. To me, he was Mount Everest even then, the greatest musician of his time who could look back on the highest achievements in every field."
The former Boulez student Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich perform the complete piano works by Pierre Boulez on August 8, 2015.

A guide to Pierre Boulez's music

If you want one piece to convince you that the highest achievements of contemporary music are the opposite of desiccated, solipsistic experimentalism, listen to Boulez's Notations

It's impossible to imagine contemporary music, and in fact the entire musical world, without Pierre Boulez. As a composer he defined the image of the iconoclastic avant-garde in his music of the 1940s and 1950s; as a polemicist he gave post-war music some of its best aphorisms - "anyone who has not felt… the necessity of the dodecaphonic [12-tone] language is OF NO USE", that the best solution to the problem of opera would be to blow up the opera houses, that some contemporary composition amounted to frenetic arithmetical masturbation", and dozens of others. He showed his brilliance as a political and cultural operator wgeb in the 1970s in Paris he established the underground laboratoire of IRCAM, that labyrinth of computer-music possibility that you tread on top of if you've ever been to the Pompidou Centre; and as a conductor and teacher he has done more than anyone alive to create a performance practice for 20th century music, from Mahler to Mantovani, from Stravinsky to Schoenberg, from Berg to Birtwistle - and his own music.
The first thing to do when thinking about Boulez's music is to prise it apart from the phenomenon of Boulez the man's power, influence, and personality. One misconception of his output is that there really isn't that much of it. admittedly, after two decades of non-stop composing up to when he was in his early 40s, Boulez's actual rate of musical production does seem to have slowed down dramatically. There are precious few new pieces from the 1970s and 80s, and still fewer in more recent decades. That's exactly when his conducting career took off (in the 1970s, he was simultaneously in charge of the BBC Symphony and the New York Phil), and setting up IRCAM and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Was he then, and is he now, simply conducting too much to have any time to compose? He has been saying for the last 10 years that he wants to find more time to write, to complete the series of exponential orchestral explosions of a set of piano miniatures he composed in 1945, the 12 Notations, which he started in the late 1970s. Yet even now in late 80s, he continues as busy as ever on the podium, teaching - as he puts it - the world's great orchestras and assemblages of young players how to play the music he knows and loves the best: Stravinsky, Bartók, Webern, Mahler, Schoenberg.
All is not as it seems with Boulez's compositions. For him, each work is a potentially ceaseless torrent of musical energy that demands continual exploration, interrogation, and a near-permanent state of revision. But when you hear the latest state of being of his relatively recent music, like Sur Incises or Dérive 2, there's nothing provisional about their power and impact, and they teem with a kaleidoscopic sensuousness of sound and colour. If you want one piece to convince you that the highest achievements of contemporary music are the opposite of desiccated, solipsistic experimentalism, listen to Boulez's orchestral versions of his Notations. It's music that shimmers with bejewelled brilliance, that takes Debussy and Ravel's orchestral techniques as a starting point and builds on them with voluptuous excess.
That connection with earlier music is something that's true of Boulez's seismically influential earlier music, too; it's just that it's part of the story of his work that didn't fit with the post-war necessity of creating a new world of musical expression that had nothing, or as little as possible, to do with what Boulez saw as music's tainted past. Le marteau sans maître incarnates a new way of thinking about vocal music - with the alto line's feverish unpredictability, and new combinations of instrumental colour (there are no real bass instruments in the piece's resonantly exotic lineup ensemble of alto flute, guitar, viola, xylorimba, vibraphone, and percussion), but it's also a piece that couldn't have happened without Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire four decades earlier, or Webern's chamber music, or Debussy's late sonatas. Similarly, the power and ferocity of the Second Piano Sonata comes in part from the way the piece warps, destroys, reforms and rebuilds conventions such as sonata form and fugue. More than that, Boulez's essential compositional concerns are in many ways identical to those of the composers whose conventions he was supposedly rupturing. Take Pli selon Pli, his fabulously surrealist song-cycle on poems by his beloved Stéphane Mallarmé. At a performance at the Royal Festival Hall last year which Boulez himself conducted, the piece was revealed to be a gorgeously expressive work, and, in the standing ovation that followed, it felt like a victory of the music over the polemic, that the sumptuousness of this piece had at last broken the shackles of perception that so much post-war music has suffered from.
To be honest, Boulez's polemics have often been part of that perceptual problem. It comes when you take sound and fury in his writing of the 1950s at face value. Boulez today conducts the music he once reviled as utterly beyond the pale, Schoenberg's late music, say or Wagner's Ring Cycle, whose interpretation he changed forever at Bayreuth in Patrice Chéreau's centenary production in 1976. Recently, he has spoken of how Mahler and Bruckner were the real influences on Sur Incises, how he learnt to structure large-scale structures from these late-romantic symphonists, and movingly said how his music is indivisible from his personality and his expressive concerns, an artistic credo that chimes as much with any romantic composer as it does with the apparently forbidding avant-garde.
It's possible there's been a loss that has accompanied Boulez's accommodation with the sweep of music history and his transformation into pillar of the musical establishment: listen, for example, to his first recording of Le marteau, a shocking blast of febrile, scarcely contained energy, and compare it with the perfect technique but slower tempos and more limited expression of his latest version.
There's a perfect opportunity over the next couple of weeks to put his music centre-stage again, when Daniel Barenboim plays a Boulez work in each of the concerts of his complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at the Proms. Don't believe the polemics or the preconceptions: trust your ears instead, and relish some of the most ravishing music you will ever experience.

The Sensuous Radical: Pierre Boulez at 90

Once there was a young firebrand whose revolutionary ideas forever changed the shape, feel and sound of classical music. No, we're not talking about Beethoven. We're talking about Boulez. Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor, turns 90 years old today.

The young Boulez was a rebel, even a rabble-rouser right after World War II, both in his music and in his musical philosophy.

"I see music as a kind of continuity, like a big tree," Boulez told NPR in 2000. "Of course there are many branches, many different directions. I think music is in constant evolution, and there is nothing absolutely fixed and rigidly determined."

But there was one thing fixed in Boulez's mind: the need to shake music up. Early on, he and some like-minded buddies disrupted a Stravinsky concert, complaining about the composer's neoclassical style. Later, Boulez declared that one solution to opera's problems would be to blow up the opera houses.

"In Britain we had this phrase 'angry young man,'" says Paul Griffiths, author of the book Modern Music and After. "Boulez was very decisive about how things should go for himself at a very early age and rejecting anything that stood in his way or that seemed to be backpedaling on the way to the future."

The young Boulez was disillusioned after the war. How could European culture spawn such carnage? Music, like Europe, Boulez thought, would have to be rebuilt. But first he had to tear it down.

"The only way to assert himself," Griffiths says, "was to be against everything else, to push through barriers and through destruction to bring about something new."

What Boulez created was a new emphasis on sound, color and the very building blocks of music.

"This music is as seductive as any on the planet," says St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director David Robertson. The conductor spent most of the 1990s in Paris leading Boulez's Ensemble Intercontemporain. He's quick to point out the sensual side of Boulez's music, as in Notation No. 1 for orchestra, which began its life as a piano miniature in 1945.

"When Notation No. 1 enters," Robertson notes, "you have this different layering of the instruments between the harps and the violins in such a way that it's almost as though we're laying out different types of silk fabric that interweave. And they are not clearly folded. They are being draped on the musical landscape."

You may not be able to hum Notation No. 1, but Griffiths feels that's not the point.

"You have to change your idea of what melody and harmony are," Griffiths says. "The thing is, we're all brought up with this huge education in the harmonic system that governed Western music for so long. And that music has taught us how to listen to that music and it hasn't taught us how to listen to other music."

Other music from other countries, for instance, or the 12-tone style of music developed by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s, which inspired Boulez. There's a little of both, Griffiths says, in Boulez's 1955 breakthrough Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master).

"He forms a completely new kind of chamber ensemble," Griffiths says. "It now sounds standard because it has become almost the norm. But then it was completely new." Think of ensembles like eighth blackbird today.

In Marteau there's a singer and a percussionist, plus flute and viola. Then a guitar which hints at Spain, a vibraphone that evokes Indonesian music and a xylophone that conjures up African music.

"It's a kind of world music long before we were talking about world music, but re-formed in completely his own way," Griffiths says.

The piece was evocative, and even something of a hit for Boulez, but it was also complicated. Early on, the composer was the only one who understood his music well enough to conduct it. And that's how Boulez backed into a second career as a conductor, leading major orchestras in London, New York, Chicago and Cleveland, conducting a width swath of classical music from Handel to the contemporary British composer George Benjamin (who has returned the favor).