Day Twenty-Three: Pierre Boulez and the avant-garde
For today’s recommended listening, I have chosen Boulez’s 12 Notations. Originally conceived as 12 short pieces for piano (each piece 12 bars long, Boulez making a mockery of the dodecaphonic system of Schoenberg!) whilst the composer was a twenty year old student in Paris, the works were later orchestrated and developed. Boulez created entirely new works that are much more than just orchestrations, these works now giving us a rare insight into the composer's particularly long developmental process. Below are two recordings, the first being the orchestral version, the latter the piano original. For those with the time and curiosity, it is a worthwhile excursion to compare the two!
For those with little time or those who would like a cold water shock into this sound world, then I highly recommend listening to Notation II, only two minutes long and the most mesmerising sound world.
The early Twentieth Century saw classical music undergo a huge transformation as it morphed from the late nineteenth century; Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Bruckner to Bartok, Schoenberg and Ives, the music becoming more dissonant and discombobulated as the world around it descended into chaos with two World Wars. Fast forward to the second half of the twentieth century and civilisation is different. No more could people write music with harmony and melody in the same way that Bruckner and Wagner had been doing just before the turn of the century and yet still have it accurately represent society.
The term “newness” can be applied to music in the sense that it applies to something that breaks from the mould with which its predecessor came from. Primo Levi accurately summarised the desire to do something new when he said, “I’m writing poetry, because I cannot find the poetry I’d like to read”. The question is still why? Every new work is a moment of creation, a moment whereby the creator is searching for novelty and creating a new experience with rules, grammar and the world in which it is created. Newness is also a temporary phenomenon, with something new eventually becoming part of a much larger tradition. If one were to look at the premiere of Stravinsky’s masterpiece, “ Le sacre du printemps”, one can appreciate that this was a moment of something new. The audience behaved infamously badly but in truth, it was the combination of Nijinsky’s choreography that was truly shocking, not so much the music. Stravinsky faced a career-ending situation and still said, “I simply cannot write what they want from me-that is, repeat myself-repeat anyone else you like, only not yourself”. Stravinsky’s statement shows the innate desire for composers to break new ground, discover new things within their art and also, develop themselves as artists. By the time that Wagner had pushed tonality to its limit with Tristan und Isolde, it was only inevitable that composers would start to find a new way of communicating with the tools of musical language. The result was the Second Viennese School, another significant moment of “newness”.
The term avant-garde was applied to music that lies on the limit of experimentation and innovation. Essentially, it suggests a critique of previous conventions and a rejection of the mainstream in favour of newness. In some cases, it was even a deliberate action to confuse and challenge the audience, a fact which has contributed to the general public not truly accepting the music of their time. Here there is the contrast between the audience accepting the work because it is what they know and the artists responsibility to further their artistic field.
This ties in to the basis of knowledge and creativity. The Western meaning of knowledge is the capacity to answer questions. Applied to classical music, this would be the composer learning his music theory, studying and composing a work which continues in the tradition of his teacher. However, questions are landscapes that are constantly moving, whose logic is difficult to understand and temporary and whose consistency is hard to grasp and forever changing. Applied to music, this is the idea that music represents society and is always changing in relation to what is going on around it. Perhaps a better definition of knowledge would be the ability to inhabit the landscape of such questions. Therefore, if an artist can inhabit the musical language so that it becomes like the spoken word, so that expression is not something that is studious but something that is spontaneous and uses the widest possible array of language, then this is doing something new with music. The challenge for music in the last seventy years has been to educate the audience enough that they can experience the music this way.
In practise, most artists search for meaning in their work and it is at crossroads, at thresholds and passing through resistance where meaning is found. In other words, the avant-garde was a desire to find new meaning in music. One of the most common problems that avant-garde music faces is that it does not adhere to the age of positivity in which we live. It does not adhere to tradition and does not lie within a comfortable historical and social context. The digital media that we have today adheres to exactly this false sense of positivity. As a result, the moral correctness of being negative, of “no”, is discredited and this gives rise to populism, both in ideas and in art. A contemporary artwork, therefore, must reflect these anthropological events. According to Hegel, negativity must be inhabited for the development and life of the spirit; it acts as a buffer that creates distance to think and be constructive.
Because of this, art can become a place to challenge the very paradigm of our existence. We live in a digital age of excitement, whereby populism grabs the eyes and ears of the masses because it provides instant expression, an embodiment of “non-distance”. The results are a superficial society where true meaning is not searched for and depth of the soul, not to speak of depth in art, thought or love, is discarded in preference to short term, comfortable concepts and thoughts. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries dealt primarily with human tragedies, both mythological and real and as a result, they might not truly be able to embrace and reflect today’s issues. The role, therefore, of new music and the avant-garde, is to embody in art the current zeitgeist, to embrace, understand and reflect today’s issues and to continue the development of a timeless art.
