Boulez's Two Cultures

Boulez's Two Cultures: The Post-War European Synthesis and Tradition
Author(s): David Gable

Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp.
426-456
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological
Society
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Boulez's Two Cultures: The Post-War
European Synthesis and Tradition*
BY DAVID GABLE
In German music, there is a continuity and development, such as i

Beethoven and Wagner, that the French have rarely had. . . . I tried t
know more about this tradition; I had something to acquire. Th
Frenchness-this instinct for harmony-is one I have in myself and
didn't have to fight for.
-Pierre Boulez'
IERRE BOULEZ WELL REPRESENTS A GROUP of European compo

who came to maturity at the close of the Second World War. Th
outstanding figures within this group, including Boulez (b. 19
Luciano Berio (b. 1925), and Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928), sha
a genuine community of values. While envisioning a powerful n
musical language that would possess the scope and universality of th
Viennese Classical style, they were alike in rejecting their heritage,
attempting to escape tradition. "II faut etre absolument moderne,"
Rimbaud had said." Berio, Boulez, and Stockhausen staked a claim
their new aesthetic with a remarkable series of works that larg
realized their ambitions: Stockhausen's Zeitmasse (1956), Grupp
('955-1957), and Punkte (1962); Berio's Allelujab H (1957-19
Diffrences (1959), Tempi Concertati (1958-1959), and Epifa
(1959-1961); and Boulez's own Le marteau sans maitre (1954-1957)
selon pli (i958-1962), and Figures, Doubles, Prismes (1959-1963; i9
With the new synthesis embodied in these works, the hierarchy of
musical elements was overturned and every aspect of the mus
discourse rethought.3
*I would like to thank Kenneth Carlborg (The University of Illinois Librar

Urbana), Robert P. Morgan, and Charles Rosen both for commenting on drafts of
study and for many illuminating discussions of Boulez's music.
' David Patrick Stearns, "Pierre Boulez: The Evolution of a Revolutionar
Ovation (July 1986): 2 1-22.
2 Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, bilingual edition tr
Louise Varese (New York: New Directions, i961), 88.
3 Of the three composers mentioned here, Boulez has remained closest to the
embodied in these works. Where appropriate, I have ranged freely among w
written throughout Boulez's career. References to Berio and Stockhausen gene
THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 427
Nevertheless, without denying the radical renewal accomplished

by these composers, it is possible to see that Boulez's generation did
not so much transcend tradition as transform it. The post-war
European synthesis represented an alternative to Schoenberg's and
Stravinsky's opposed neoclassicisms, but if the willed and self-
conscious recourses to tradition so characteristic of Schoenberg and
Stravinsky between the wars repelled Boulez, their disparate and
highly individual discoveries of i908-i92o have variously engaged
him throughout his career.4 Tendencies characteristic of both Austro-
German and Franco-Russian traditions merged in the formation of
Boulez's style.5s Boulez has successfully integrated his temperamental
and aesthetic affinities for the Debussy/Stravinsky line with technical
and "morphological" imperatives inherited from the three Viennese.
His characteristic treatment of motive, texture, and dynamics can
refer to the style embodied in the works mentioned here. The two works of Boulez
that I most regret slighting in this study are Le soleil des eaux (195o; rev. 1958;
re-orchestrated 1965) and Le visage nuptial (195 1-1952; re-orchestrated 1989). Entirely
lacking the doctrinaire features present to varying degrees in all of Boulez's
instrumental works of the period, they are the richest and most aesthetically
satisfying of his early works. With these works Boulez had alreadly developed a
mature and fully viable "expressionist" style quite distinct from either Schoenberg's
expressionism or the synthesis of the later 1950os that is the focus of this study.
4With the passage of time, certain parallels between Stravinsky's neoclassicism
and Schoenberg's have become increasingly clear. To compare the final E minor
chord of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto to the opening E minor chord of Symphony of
Psalms, for example, is to be struck by parallels in sonority, function, structure,
context, and style.
s There is a considerable tradition of interactions between French and Russian
composers. Moussorgsky once claimed that "In music there are two giants, the
thinker Beethoven and the super-thinker Berlioz." (Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and His
Century, 3rd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 408.) It is tempting to
view Berlioz as the inventor of one strain of Russian music, so extensive is
Moussorgsky's debt to him: compare, for example, the opening of Boris Godunov to its
source, the Overture to "La Fuite en Egypte" from Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christe. The
Franco-Russian cross-pollination worked both ways, however: the characteristic
opening chord progression from Debussy's Nuages (later transformed both in the
opening of Stravinsky's Le Rossignol and in the Introduction to Part 2 of The Rite of
Spring) is similarly beholden to the third song from Moussorgsky's proto-"Impres-
sionist" song cycle, "Sunless." Stravinsky's relationship to Debussy has often been
remarked, but the influence flowed in both directions: as late in his career as the
Atudes, Debussy absorbed the direct influence of The Rite ofSpring, notably with "Pour
les agrdments." Ravel, whom Stravinsky recognized as "the only musician who
immediately understood Le Sacre du printemps" (Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft,
Conversations with Igor Stravinsky [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1980], 62), orchestrated Pictures at an Exhibition. The styles of Varese and
Messiaen can both be viewed as distinct amalgams of influences from Debussy and
Stravinsky. I have touched upon Boulez's relationship to most of these composers
within this study.
428 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
profitably be considered against the background of these tonal tradi-

tions. The achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky provide an
illuminating context for exploring both Boulez's treatment of time and
his transformations of tonal space. Aspects of his harmonic language
and the forms it implies are best understood within the context of the
French tradition from which they ultimately stem: with the post-war
synthesis, the influence of French tradition became unprecedentedly
central to European music.
Boulez's relationship to the central Austro-German tradition is an
ambiguous one. Debussy's ambivalent attitude toward Wagner is
recapitulated in Boulez's equivocal relationship to the three Viennese.
Virgil Thomson's witty characterization of Boulez as "a German
agent"' notwithstanding, Boulez's fundamental allegiance to aspects
of Debussy and Stravinsky is part of a complex of cultural predilec-
tions already exhibited in his early preference for Boris Godunov over
Tristan und Isolde. Writing in 1976, the more perfect Wagnerite of
Boulez's Bayreuth years still had this to say on the subject of the Ring:
We need only consider the visual conception of the Ring as produced at

Bayreuth in 1876 to be convinced [that Wagner was already outmoded in
realms other than music]. By that point the Impressionists had painted
some of their most beautiful pictures. As for poetry, a "frisson nouveau"
had contributed sensations more daring than these settings from Nordic
mythology, which really belonged to the intellectual landscape of the
early nineteenth century: when Bayreuth opened [Rimbaud's] Une Saison
en Enfer and [Lautreamont's] Les Chants de Maldoror had already been
written. 7
The "frisson nouveau" in Boulez's music has little to do with a

rhetoric either "Romantic" or "expressionist" originating east of the
Rhine.
From the very beginning, Boulez's heritage stemmed from two

distinct traditions. His first models were respectively a student of
Schoenberg and a French heir to Stravinsky: Anton Webern and
6 Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981),

529-
7 Pierre Boulez, Points de repure, rev. ed. (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1985), 267
(Boulez, Orientations, trans. Martin Cooper [Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1986], 276). This is one of two anthologies of Boulez's essays available in variously
flawed English translations. The other is Pierre Boulez, Relevis d'apprenti (Paris:
,ditions
[New deAlfred
York: Seuil, A.
1966) (Boulez,
Knopf, 1968]).Notes
Whileof an Apprenticeship,
I have trans. Herbert
made my own translations of Weinstock
passages from either of these collections, I have also indicated in parentheses their
locations in the English-language editions for ease of access to the relevant essays.
Olivier Messiaen. If the neoclassicisms of Stravinsky and Schoenberg

seemed false solutions in 1945, the heady achievements of thirty years
earlier were already remote in time; direct access no longer seemed
possible. Webern's serialism and Messiaen's ideas about rhythm
provided Boulez with ready techniques that could be turned to new
ends. Young Europe naturally gravitated to Webern's "cool Roman-
ticism," to borrow Paul Klee's apt expression.8 Essentially free of any
surface reference to the rhetoric of the tonal tradition, Webern's serial
works (1924-1945) exhibit an identity of surface and structure that
accounts for the spare purity of his style. Messiaen's importance lay
not only in his speculations in the area of rhythm but in the new
worlds of medieval, Renaissance, modern, and oriental music he
opened to Boulez.
Boulez's ambitions at the level of form soon outstripped both
Webern's and Messiaen's. Despite the traces that Messiaen's influence
has left on Boulez's oeuvre, Boulez has always harbored reservations
about his former teacher's music. "Messiaen doesn't compose: he
juxtaposes," as Boulez alleged in a famous mot.9 Messiaen's forms
generally consist of juxtapositions of blocks of static material. If
Boulez sought to escape from this simple formal frame, neither
Messiaen nor Webern held the key. The distillations of Webern's style
precluded many of the possibilities for development present in the
denser compositional universes of Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, or
Berg. There is no latent instability in Webern's unfolding patterns of
equilibrium to motivate any larger forms. "Pursu[ing] his dream of
vitrified improvisation,"'0 it was ultimately Debussy who inspired
Boulez's generation to take the Webernian fragments up into a more
sweeping, more flexible, continuum.
Debussy and Boulez share more than one paradox. At the heart of
their aesthetic is the conception of a music at once static and
developmental. From this standpoint, it is revealing to compare
Debussy's developmental procedures to those of the Austro-German
tradition. From Bach to Schoenberg, motive has been indissolubly
linked to harmonic data. This enabled Wagner and Mahler to create
waves of development in a single "long line." For Debussy, as later for
Boulez, motives could be harmonically neutral. Elusive fragments of
melody, often no more than repeating rhythmic shapes, Debussy's
S Otto Karl Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career: 1914-I920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 41.
9 Peter Heyworth, "The First Fifty Years," in Pierre Boulez: A Symposium, ed.
William Glock (London: Eulenburg, 1986), io.
,o Boulez, Relev-s, 346 (Boulez, Notes, 355).
motives do not necessarily imply harmonic motion. At one extreme,

a motive could simply function as a repeating surface motif, as a
manner of decorative pattern designed to organize the musical surface
over a shifting and ambiguous background. "Des pas sur la neige"
from the First Book of Preludes furnishes an example pure and simple
of this technique. In this prelude, the French motivic system is
revealed as a total inversion of the German system. Evolving inde-
pendently of harmony within Debussy's style, melody and rhythm
developed a more purely coloristic function. Within this context, they
largely seem to be phenomena of texture. Development is displaced to
what had formerly been ancillary features, to a play of opposed
textures and contrasting sonorities. Debussy, "contra Wagner," was
still capable of the long line, of "the rhetoric of the culminating
point,"" but these were no longer achieved by harmonic means:
Debussy realized them in exploiting the dynamic "envelope" of the
total texture.
"Envelope" may be defined as the unfolding gestalt of the total
texture as shaped by dynamics and articulation.'" Already a decisive
compositional element for Beethoven, this dynamic envelope has
evolved with the other elements of music. It was used to articulate the
giant waves of Wagner and Mahler as well as the periodic phrases of
Haydn and Mozart. Within a neutral tonal space, Boulez's generation
abandoned traditional phrase structure, which entailed a rethinking of
the relationship among all the parameters. With Boulez or Stock-
hausen, the relationship of dynamic elements of articulation-quite
literally, dynamics-to temporal unfolding was transformed. As we
shall see, there is a new manner of nervous system animating the
music of their synthesis.
In tonal music, dynamics were strictly subordinate to phrase
structures rooted in harmony. To a great extent, the composer in the
eighteenth century could rely on the performer's "intuitive" applica-
tion of dynamics, of articulating inflections. Nevertheless, a simple
system of dynamics is implicit within the Viennese Classical style.
Dynamics are conceived as existing on a series of discrete planes.
Forte and piano are relative absolutes. Motion from one dynamic
plane to another is regularly accomplished at appropriate junctures
without any graded transition in levels; forte can replace piano
" Pierre Boulez, "Debussy's Orchestral Music," liner notes to recordings of

Debussy's orchestral music (New York: CBS Records, 1974).
"2I have borrowed the usage "envelope" from Boulez. See David Gable,
"Ramifying Connections: An Interview with Pierre Boulez," Journal of Musicology 4
(1985-86): 111-12.
THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 43 I
without any intervening crescendo. In performance, there is a subtle

gradation of dynamics both in the articulation of beats and in shaping
phrases, but these gradations are generally conceived as inflections on
a single dynamic plane. Gradations may also occur within transitions
from one stationary dynamic level to another, but the new softer or
louder level is itself attained, maintained, and subject to purely local
dynamic inflections of beat and phrase.
As early as Beethoven and Rossini (those two greatest masters of
the "Rossini crescendo"), these transitions assumed increased impor-
tance in the larger scale articulation of traditional formal units. The
clarity of this system of dynamics, reinforcing the other more
elaborate hierarchies of tonal music, was never entirely obscured,
even in the course of a century of subsequent refinements. Continu-
ously graded spans of dynamic change can be found in Wagner's
operas or Mahler's symphonies, but always reinforcing a palpably
goal-oriented harmonic language. Within the final crescendo from the
Liebestod, for example, "loudest" is perceptibly a goal. With Mahler
and Schoenberg, there were continuous dynamic adjustments that
required correspondingly detailed notation.
Characteristically rejecting this development, Stravinsky wrote in
1924 of his new Octet:
I have excluded from this work all sorts of nuances, which I have replaced
by the play of these [natural instrumental] volumes. I have excluded all
nuances between the forte and the piano; I have left only the forte and the
piano. Therefore the forte and the piano are in my work only the dynamic
limit which determines the function of the volumes in play.'3
Stravinsky must have felt that this represented a revival of the

"objective" dynamic system of eighteenth-century music, although
the dynamics employed in the Octet are by no means restricted to forte
and piano, despite the force of Stravinsky's rhetoric. By the 1920s,
however, there was a clear parting of the ways. Where Wagner,
Mahler, and Schoenberg had developed a more or less continuous
dynamic inflection, Stravinsky enforced a system of discrete dynamic
planes within his neoclassical works. (This conception was already
implicit in the works of Stravinsky's "Russian" period, beginning with
Petrushka.)
The mature works of Berio, Boulez, and Stockhausen represent a
reintegration of these tendencies. Before the great works of the later
'3 Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 529.
fifties, Boulez and Stockhausen had attempted a serialization of

dynamics, but this was one of those mechanical interventions in a
natural evolutionary process that have plagued the history of atonal-
ity. If the serialization of dynamics represented a compromise be-
tween the continuous dynamic system of the Austrian tradition and
Stravinsky's system of discrete dynamic planes, it could not be fully
realized at the level of perception. ' With the more supple language of
their later works, Berio, Boulez, and Stockhausen reclaimed the
continuous dynamic articulation of Austro-German Romanticism. No
longer expressive inflection, the smooth planing of these dynamics
exhibits the clean "objective" character of Stravinsky's discrete dy-
namic levels.
Implicit within the post-war generation's later works is an absolute
continuum of dynamics that might seem to have precluded any
possibility for articulation at any level. Paradoxically, the dynamics
effect a continuous articulation. Carefully graded and smoothly
regulated, articulating dynamics are controlled as if by rheostat. As
the often fragmented melodic line shifts from instrument to instru-
ment, linear connections require the carefully controlled swells of its
constituent notes. With a continuous dynamic, linear connections can
be made independent of timbral, registral, or pitch connections, as
when a sustained flute crescendo in Pli selon pli is released with a sharp
bongo attack (see Example i, the 3/8 measure). This can lend
extraordinary interest to a single crescendo on a sustained note. The
tensile scansion so characteristic of these works is one of their most
strikingly novel features. It was fundamental in creating the new
continuous architecture of Pli selon pli and Gruppen.
Like the asymmetry inherent in the unidirectional passing of time
or the prominence of the octave within the overtone series, the natural
privilege of the attack point has been a permanent condition of music.
With the post-war synthesis, this privilege was challenged. In tonal
music, the attack point was always at least minimally privileged
relative to the durations between attacks, if only in the articulation of
subdivisions of the beat. With Berio, Boulez, and Stockhausen,
rhythm is focused as much on the smooth shifting of the dynamic
continuum as on a system of articulated attack points. The clean
attacks represent points of renewal within the continuum while the
4 In bypassing the integral serialism of the early 950os, Berio arrived at the same
point as Boulez and Stockhausen by the later 1950s. The attempt to exploit a series
of discrete graded dynamic levels contributes to the special sound world of Stock-
hausen's Kontrapunkte (195 3), the one real masterpiece of early-fifties "pointillism,"
but Stockhausen moved on to a more promising musical field soon after.
Example I
Excerpt from Boulez: Pli selonpli: Don. ? 1967 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., Lon-
don. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distribu-
tors Corporation, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Universal Edition London
L X
A ten. ten. ten.
-sempre piu 7
Piano
Cymb.
grave
2/8 pour
80o4/8
les _
A r31
kr--3-n
glissdc avec l'embouchure
F 4. sol
v..II
Alt.div. en 4 piz.
NIB. toutes les nuances non pas precises, mais de tres loin, (f4
comme avec un effet de "fading'
W Bongos
la peau a so
de tension
la baguette
la peau.
la peau.
continuum helps to counter any tendency for the attack points to call
a new rhythmic hierarchy into existence.'5
Something of this transformed system of dynamics can be gleaned
from an excerpt from Don, the first movement of Pli selon pli (see
Example I). Boulez's adaptation of "hairpin" notation tells the whole
story. The initial glissando avec l'embouchure is performed with a
crescendo: crescendo and glissando are perceived as one. Once the
notated pitches have been attained, the sustained chord suddenly
drops in volume. This is followed by a longer, slower crescendo. Near
the end of this crescendo, a sudden more rapid crescendo perceptibly
effects an increase, not only in volume, but in tempo: an increase in
the rate of change of volume. Motion is conveyed along this sustained
chord by dynamics alone. ' (The new sforzando attack releasing the
crescendo within a crescendo is part of this same continuous dynamic
process.)
At higher levels of form, the dynamic curve need not be far
removed from the wave-like forms to be found in many works of
Wagner, Mahler, and Debussy. Tombeau (1959-I962), the last move-
ment of Pli selon pli, is conceived as a single vast crescendo with coda.
In its externals, it traces a curve strongly reminiscent of the three
successive waves that constitute the first movement of Mahler's Ninth
Symphony: both movements rely on a gradual statistical accumula-
tion of detail, but where Mahler's tonal processes build to ultimate
cathartic resolutions, Boulez's music floats. There is an extraordinary
monolithic accumulation of activity in Tombeau that parallels the
smooth dynamic of its local processes, processes far removed from
Mahler's tonal respiration. With the static timelessness of its language
and the serene implacability of its form, Tombeau gives vent to an
ethos reflecting Boulez's experience of oriental musics.
'5 These clean attack points within Boulez's dynamic continuum are a Stravin-
skyan heritage. Stravinsky once wrote: "The stylistic performance problem in my
music is one of articulation and rhythmic diction. ... For fifty years I have
endeavored to teach musicians to play sfF.7Y instead of in certain cases, depending
on the style. I have also labored to teach them to accent syncopated notes and to
phrase before them in order to do so. (German orchestras are as unable to do this, so
far, as the Japanese are unable to pronounce 'L.')" Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations
with Stravinsky, I20.
16 It should be emphasized that this technique was not an inevitable consequence
of atonality but specific to the post-war European synthesis. In exploring new
possibilities in the realm of meter, Elliott Carter, for example, developed a post-tonal
language that is not without parallels to Boulez's or Stockhausen's. Nevertheless, for
Carter's explorations of time it was crucial that the attack point maintain essentially
the same privilege it enjoyed with Beethoven.
Given the traditional intimacy of dynamics and rhythm, this

transformation of articulating dynamics naturally brings us to
Boulez's elusive handling of time. Wagner and Mahler had employed
increasingly subtle and continuous local adjustments of tempo that
were reinforced by their increasingly continuous adjustments of
dynamics. Both attained ultimate refinement in the flexible and
irregular scansion of Schoenberg's "prose rhythms." Again, this was
a development that Stravinsky deplored. Stravinsky's discussion of
musical time in The Poetics of Music parallels his remarks on the
dynamics in the Octet. Borrowing terms from the conseiller des arts
Pierre Souvtchinsky, Stravinsky rejected the subtle adjustments of
tempo or "psychological" time of the later Romantic tradition in favor
of the precision of the "ontological" time of Bach, Haydn, and
Mozart.'7 Boulez would exploit something very like this opposition
from his earliest works.'"
As a young man, Boulez demanded a "rhythmic element of perfect
atonality"'9 that would correspond to the implicitly relative and
non-hierarchical harmonic world that Schoenberg had called into
existence. The young Boulez was obsessed with the notion that the
original architects of modernism had obtained only partial solutions.
Advances along a given trajectory necessarily effected a change in the
relationship among all of the musical elements, but particular audac-
ities were linked to specific bodies of work: the new forms in certain
of Debussy's works, Stravinsky's explorations of rhythm, the evolu-
tion of the tonal language within Schoenberg's oeuvre. The issue of
rhythm seemed especially sensitive. Boulez has offered a range of
responses to the disparity of levels that he perceived between rhythm
and tonal language.
Boulez seems to have glimpsed one solution in Schoenberg's
expressionist works. In an original conception extrapolated from
Schoenberg's prose rhythms, Boulez for a time attempted to abolish
any sense of rhythmic regularity either in the large or in the smallest
'7 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1970), 41.
18 Embarking on a parallel adventure during the same period, Elliott Carter
exploited this same opposition. The opening Moderato of Carter's Cello Sonata (1948)
"presents the cello in its warm expressive character, playing a long melody in rather
free style, while the piano percussively marks a regular clock-like ticking." Elliott
Carter, The Writings of Elliott Carter, ed. Elsa and Kurt Stone (Bloomington: Indiana
'9 Boulez, Relevis, 74 (Boulez, Notes, 71).
details. This is already evident in the First Piano Sonata (1946),

completed on the eve of Boulez's twenty-first birthday:
Example 2
Boulez: Premidre sonatepourpiano, second movement, mm. 71-73. Used by Permission of

the Publisher. Sole Representative U.S.A., Theodore Presser Company
Nettement plus vif et plus violent
fsub. ------ - h --
This excerpt represents a continuous written-out rubato, except that

there is no implied metric at any level including that of the pulse
against which it can be measured.
Although Boulez was ultimately interested in a more mobile form
than he was capable of at twenty, in the First Sonata he was content
to juxtapose extreme states and to oscillate between them a' la
Messiaen. In the Sonata's second movement, a completely irregular
texture is opposed to a texture made up of absolutely regular, rapid,
repeated pulses derived from Stravinsky's "motor rhythms." In
Stravinsky's music, these rapidly ticking pulses would have been
grouped into variable measures through the use of dynamic accent or
by varying the size of repeating motives, as Boulez would soon show
in an analysis of The Rite of Spring."2 In Boulez's Sonata, the
irregularly overlapping entries of the motives thwart any possibility
for grouping at a level higher than that of the pulse (see Example 3).
By the late 1950's, Boulez had generalized his rhythmic ideas
under the rubrics of "temps strie" and "temps amorphe," the twin
poles of a shifting continuum through which the absoltite measure-
ment of time was to be abolished. This was clearly a grand extrapo-
lation from the sort of rhythmic opposition already put into play in
the First Sonata. For Boulez, the notion of "striated time" embraces
not only any regular, pulsed rhythmic organization, whether metrical
or not, but any conception of fixed time points, regardless of how
20 Boulez, "Stravinsky demeure," Relevis, 75-145 (Boulez, "Stravinsky Remains,"

Notes, 72-145).
TIlE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 437
Example 3
Boulez: Premiere sonatepourpiano, second movement, mm. I --1 2. Used by Permission of

the Publisher. Sole Representative U.S.A., Theodore Presser Company
Rapide ( J. = 152)
0 staccato
irregular in organization. By this definition, all of the music in the

First Sonata may be said to exist in striated time. "Amorphous time"
indicates a temporal conception in which some relationship remains
partially undetermined. Beginning with Le marteau sans maitre
(1954-1957), in most of Boulez's works there is a characteristically
Boulezian use of rubato or heterophony, both of which are subsumed
under the category of amorphous time, and even the fermata comes
into its own.
Rubato in Chopin allows both a measure of freedom to the

melody, which "robs" from the relatively strict time values marked by
the bass, and a degree of flexibility in the projection of meter. In
Boulez's music, the notion of rubato is considerably extended. Rubato
no longer serves only to inflect the tonal materials; this flexibility is
fundamental to Boulez's conception. In a characteristically Boulezian
inversion of tradition, there is often a continuous rubato in which the
integrity of the rhythmic figures at the most immediate level must be
relatively strictly respected while, paradoxically, the tempo remains
in constant flux. Where Chopin's flexible surface still implied an
essentially stable underlying meter, Boulez's rhythms often float on an
unstable flux.
There are effects of rubato throughout almost every movement of

Marteau. The exception is Commentaire I de "Bourreaux de solitude," in
which a steady pulse is maintained. The syncopated tapping figures of
its side drum as nearly approach metric regularity as anything in the
work. The tapping figures are maintained in Commentaire II de
"Bourreaux de solitude," but the tempo is now elastic. Commentaire II
opens assez rapidement, but a gradual trend toward slower tempi
unfolds across the movement. Within Commentaire II, a prevailing
tempo governs any given span of time, but there are continual
excursions from this tempo: ductile patterns of acceleration and return
inscribe temporal arcs. This continuous oscillation of tempo interacts
with the movement's overall pattern of deceleration in constituting the
form of the movement, but Boulez's use of the fermata is crucial for
the manner in which the form is projected.
Like rubato, the fermata is a familiar unfixed element. Unlike
measured silence, it seldom played a crucial role before Boulez,
despite such spectacular exceptions as the opening of Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony. Beethoven's use of fermatas in this passage is
rhetorical and dramatic: in performance these fermatas are held for the
duration of several measures. They help to articulate not only
Beethoven's famous motive but the form of the movement as well.
Near the end of the coda (mm. 475-82), the motive returns for the last
time in its original form, that is, with fermatas, but the upbeat figure
of three eighth notes has been extended by three additional measures
of repeated octave G's (see Example 4).
Example 4
Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, first movement, mm. 475-482
" ' " " I . . . ' ' ' " " " I I F F ' 9P
Although there is no indication for this in th

eighths are generally played with a gradual
ritardando, the final three upbeat eighths leadi
generally played with a further ritenuto that ar
this articulation within an articulation serves t
already malleable around the edges with Beetho
exploited in the articulation of form.
With Boulez, what was once marginal has m
center. Within Commentaire II de "Bourreaux d
and deceleration are interrupted every few
fermatas, "brusques coupures dans le tempo."
Boulez's aesthetic is close to that of the Rom
fragments created by the coupures resemble
being at once fragmentary and whole and also s
2" Pierre Boulez, Le marteau sans mattre, final version

1957), 19.
the edges." At the same time that each fragment projects the
characteristic rubato of the whole, it is equally a miniature in its own
right with its own defining envelope. The undampened sonorities of
xylorimba and vibraphone continue vibrating through the ruptures in
the continuity, so that each burst of motion is defined by the dying
curve of its own sonority. The large-scale temporal design of the
movement is not projected whole but is only implicit within its
fragments.
A compendium of the varieties of heterophonic experience could
be culled from Boulez's oeuvre. Boulez would insist on the rarity of
heterophony in the traditions of Western art music, but he can cite
examples both French and German to counter this generality:
Beethoven used it for ornamental purposes-the Adagio of the Ninth

Symphony-and in a certain number of slow movements from his other
late works. Debussy used heterophonic figures with an acoustic aim
-above all to "construct" his orchestra.23
22 According to Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The
Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 25-26, for a
definition of the Romantic fragment: "[Friedrich] Schlegel's definition in the Athe-
naeum is ... the best place to start: 'A fragment should be like a little work of art,
complete and perfect in itself, and separate from the rest of the universe, like a
hedgehog.' . . . The hedgehog . . . rolls itself up into a sphere, a form that is at once
perfectly geometric and yet organic, and satisfies the main Romantic desires; the
edges of this sphere are a little irregular, blurred, and point outside the sphere in a
way that is provocative, piquant. . . . The Romantic fragment . .. is both metaphor
and metonymy. .... The most common metonymy is synecdoche, where the part
signifies the whole . .. but the Romantic fragment is paradoxically intended, by its
apparent completion and in many other ways, to resemble the larger unity that it
implies."
Boulez's interest in Antonin Artaud and Rend Char (whose poems are set in Le
marteau sans mattre) suggests one path from such considerations of form to Marteau: the
myriad subterranean connections linking surrealism and other parallel movements in
France to the unstable element in German Romanticism. Another link is Berg. (Think
of Schumann.) According to Boulez, with Berg's Pieces for Clarinet and Piano op. 5,
"it is not . . a question, as with Webern, of the perfect microcosm; but of a gesture
that is open, that one feels could be continued, diffused, multiplied. Rather like the
sketches for novels in Kafka's journals, these pieces allow us to suspect developments
unexpressed, developments beyond the actual writing with its apparent closure.
They represent some sort of open form, although at the same time they are finished
works." Boulez, Points, 377 (Boulez, Orientations, 373).
23 Pierre Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard
Rodney Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 121. If Boulez's
interest in heterophony stems primarily from his experience of Indian, Balinese, and
Javanese music, his music also continues two Western traditions of heterophony. The
first of these stems from Boulez's Beethoven examples, to which Wagner, Mahler, and
Berg were all heir. The other begins with the heterophonic textures in the piano
music of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt that so influenced Debussy.
As this image of Debussy's orchestra suggests, Boulez often realizes a

heterophony not so much of line as of texture. Given their simulta-
neously unfolding layers of texture, an Ivesian or Debussyan milie can
erupt in Pli selon pli or Figures, Doubles, Prismes. Less concerned with
any correspondence between the parts than in decentralizing the
temporal organization, Boulez has expanded the temporal conception
implicit in heterophony by introducing various measures of improvi-
satory indeterminacy. While the parallel lines or textures in
Beethoven or Debussy may be out of phase, their relationship in
notation and performance is fixed, definitive. At certain points within
Don from Pli selon pli, strands of texture unfold not only indepen-
dently, but with some latitude in their coordination.
With the elegant oriental ceremony of Rituel (1975), the temporal
relationships among the textural strands are never precisely fixed in all
respects. Rituel is entirely made up of alternating quasi-heterophonic
sections. Within the even-numbered sections of Rituel, up to eight
instrumental groups simultaneously play homorhythmic patterns. To
quote from the score, "Each instrumental group is to play in strict
synchronization within itself," but:
The instrumental groups should not attempt to synchronize with each

other. The conductor gives each group the cue to start and thereafter each
continues to play, unconducted, independently of the other groups. ...
Depending on the form the conductor wishes to give the section, the
groups can begin one after another and end together or they can begin
together and end one after another; any intermediate solution is also
possible.24
Section IV of Rituel, in which only three of the eight groups play, is

given as Example 5. Each group includes a percussion player, which
is the key to the effect that this passage will have in performance.
While other instrumentalists within each of the groups hold sustained
notes, the percussionists play even quarters, but a clear metric never
arises: not only are there 1/32 and 3/32 rests within the parts for each
percussionist, but this ceremonial beating is completely uncoordi-
nated in performance. No single centralized temporal order governs
all of the simultaneously unfolding continuities.
Sonority often plays a direct role in Boulez's amorphous temporal
effects. Composers within the French tradition have traditionally been
sensitive to both timbre and sonority, which already assumed an
24 Pierre Boulez, Rituel, rev. version, preliminary notes (London: Universal

Edition, 1975)-
independent role with Debussy. In Boulez's works, sound is linked to

time with unprecedented intimacy. In Le marteau sans maitre, [clat,
and Ripons, works spanning three decades of Boulez's career, Boulez
exploits an opposition of sons tenus (the sustained sounds of woodwind,
brass, and bowed string instruments) and sons percutis (the struck or
plucked sounds of piano, celeste, harp, glockenspiel, xylophone, and
so forth), and these opposed sound characteristics influence the
character of the writing. In Ripons (Part i, 198 1-1984), this opposition
is made explicit in space. In the antiphony of Ripons, six soloists
surround the audience at the perimeter of the hall producing the sons
percutis of two pianos, cimbalom, harp, xylophone, and vibraphone.
They engage in dialogue with a large traditional chamber orchestra
made up of winds, brass, and strings seated at the center of the hall.'5
The chamber orchestra plays in the strict time marked by the
conductor's beat while the soloists are allowed considerable flexibility
in pursuing their own tempi. Although receiving periodic cues from
the conductor, the soloists are only loosely coordinated with the group
at the center.
In Iclat (1965), the temporal characters of the work's three clearly
defined sections determine the form, but instrumentation and sonor-
ity largely determine the temporal characters. [clat's ensemble con-
sists of a solo piano and two instrumental groups: six sustaining
instruments (pairs of winds, brass, and strings) and a group of plucked
or struck instruments (celeste, harp, glockenspiel, vibraphone, man-
dolin, guitar, cimbalom, and tubular bells). The first section of [clat
is essentially scored for solo piano. The plucked and struck instru-
ments join for the central section. In the final section, where a regular
pulse is asserted for the first time, the entire ensemble plays. In this
third and most propulsive section, the irregular quasi-Stravinskyan
metrical groupings are measured by a steady underlying pulse.'6
Within the opening section of [clat, the sense of pulse is com-
pletely elastic. [clat opens brusquely with a precipitous salvo from the
25 No one has remarked the characteristically Boulezian use to which the

technology employed in performing Ripons has been put. The digital processors that
modify the sounds produced by the soloists function as a giant "heterophonizer,"
multiplying lines in space to create a floating heterophonic blur. The work's two
opposed sound worlds are not entirely polarized: one of the pianists doubles on
electric organ and the basses occasionally make a percussive use of their bows.
26 In 198 I, Boulez recorded Eclat/Multiples (1970), an expanded version of Aclat
(Pierre Boulez, tclat/Multiples [New York(?): CBS Records, 1983]). This recorded
performance of Aclat, which opens the expanded work, is 9 minutes, 18 seconds long.
The respective durations of Aclat's three sections are 58 seconds; 7 minutes, 15
seconds; and i minute, 5 seconds.
Mod6r = 66 (72 / 76
III Fl.
l 4 - Htb.
S Si possible, sans respirer jusqu'a la fin de 1
i l a phrase. Si n&cessaire, respirer avant b ]
Htb. 1
Cloche
Perc. 1 . .... . > > > >
.. . . . ..,,,.,
Boo-#roc7TTr r F" 't.tr
A ..............k .i ?, ', /
Per 3l. en
*) cette triple-croche initiale sera toujours rapide ainsi que dans toutes les *) dieses anfiingliche Zwe
sequences impaires. always be very q
**) chaque groupe est men6 par un instrumen
Htb. 1
Perc. 1
Clch. jap.
I mI I
.- C.. enWood
sib
Perc.2
bl. --
> > cm
iff
III Fl. 2 An"t-.
Bongo
Perc. 3 1 .,
Example 5
Boulez: Rituel: In Memoriam Bruno Maderna, Section IV. ? 975 by Universal Edition
(London) Ltd., London. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European Ameri-
can Music Distributors Corporation, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Universal Edition
London
444 JOURNAL OF THIE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
piano, molto crescendo, molto accelerando, and then excessivement rapide.

This gesture comes to rest on a chord that is extended, pianissimo, by
the sustaining instruments. The pianist then launches a cadenza,
under which cover, one by one, the trilling sounds of the sustaining
instruments imperceptibly fade. Within the cadenza, the tempo
remains in constant flux, in a state of continuous accelerando or
rallentando, until a rapid, regular tempo is attained at the very end.
Like the slow introduction to a Haydn symphony, this opening
section functions as a large-scale "upbeat" to the work's central
section, but the dynamic of Boulez's form could not be more remote
from Haydn's.
The floating center of Aclat marks an extreme point within
Boulez's oeuvre. Within its special timbral world, the sense of pulse is
suspended and amorphous temporal effects are given free rein. The
scintillating core of Aclat consists of a succession of brief, brilliant, and
variegated heterophonic passages punctuated by long unmeasured
silences. Temporal structure seems to be determined by the rates of
decay of the various sons percutes. "The tempo floats in response to the
changing sonorities," as Charles Rosen has remarked of the Third
Piano Sonata. 27
With the still center of Aclat, we arrive at what might be called the
metaphysics of the fermata. Where the fermatas in Commentaire II de
"Bourreaux de solitude" made brusques coupures within the continuity's
fabric, Aclat's fermatas are absorbed within a continuous process. At
each fermata, music reverts to a state of pure sound as to its origin.
During each fermata, the unmeasured vibration of undampened
sonorities gradually subsides, leaving unmeasured silence. (Laissez
vibrer is an ubiquitous indication in Boulez's scores.) Within this
unique realization of the smooth continuum that Boulez's generation
sought, rhythm is often no more than the vibration of sound, form a
respiration of sound and silence, and silence is revealed as music's
ground.
Boulez's harmonic language, too, is expressed against a vast and

uninflected background. Beginning with Le marteau sans maitre, each of
Boulez's works is conceived as the projection of a single static
controlling harmony, but there is a more fundamental background
27 Charles Rosen, liner notes to recordings of Boulez's Piano Sonatas I and 3

(New York: Columbia Records, 1973).
against which the specific tonalities of each of his mature works must
be understood. Boulez's harmony unfolds against the background of a
neutral tonal space fundamental for the floating stasis projected in his
mature works. In the period from 1908-1920, a functionally neutral
tonal space had been the by-product of Schoenberg's and Stravinsky's
unique and particular compositional strategies. For Boulez's genera-
tion, a neutral tonal space would be an ineluctable starting point.
Schoenberg's expressionist works succeeded a significant realign-
ment of the musical elements. Emphasis had gradually shifted from
the tonal framework to the elaboration of the musical surface. The
forms of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven had essentially been har-
monic forms. With Wagner, the development of themes or motives
commanded as much importance as the underlying, increasingly
ambiguous, tonal relations. Within a chromatic context, interest was
increasingly focused on the local surface elaboration of highly expres-
sive motives, motives whose dissonances were often resolved only as
others arose within the flux. Music began to approach "invention in a
perpetual state of becoming," as Boulez would describe Erwartung.'8
Although now fragmentary, the individual motives in Erwartung are
recognizably those of a post-Wagnerian framework, if a radically
transformed one. In Wagner's music, motivic working-out had always
implied harmonic resolution, if often resolution delayed or unat-
tained. With Erwartung, maximum instability is reached. While its
motives are unstable, their tensions can only be discharged within an
unstable system. The framework is in dissolution.
Of the five composers who have remained talismans for Boulez
throughout his career, Debussy, Stravinsky, and the three Viennese,
only Stravinsky remained entirely aloof from Richard Wagner. In
rejecting the faded aesthetics of self-expression that he perceived in
the twilight Romanticism of the Austro-German tradition, Stravinsky
necessarily rejected the rich harmonic resources of formal develop-
ment that were available to him in all their complexity, particularly as
developed by Wagner and Mahler. Without denying an immediate
Russian tradition upon which Stravinsky could draw-that source is
variously reflected in all the works of his "Russian" period-we can
see that Stravinsky turned his back on three hundred years of musical
"expression" as embodied in the development of tonality. Moreover,
he gradually abandoned the continuous developments of The Firebird.
Stravinsky's Russian-period works stand in marked contrast to
that final paroxysm of Viennese Romanticism, the expressionism of
2s Boulez, Relev"s, 355 (Boulez, Notes, 365).
Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Stravinsky reduced the linear ele-

ments of music to simple melodic units, Russian folk melodies. These
materials are often not even tonal, but modal, pentatonic, or based in
"artificial" symmetrical scales. In short, relative to the materials of the
tonal tradition they are neutral and "inexpressive" enough to begin
with, and this is reinforced by their harmonization. However much
Stravinsky's vertical structures may resemble those of traditional
harmony, there is a prevailing relative dissonance serving to neutralize
harmony in his works. Properly speaking, these chords are not
dissonant, requiring resolution, but static.
If only at a certain level of abstraction, the harmonic languages of
Schoenberg and Stravinsky converged from opposite points. Where
Schoenberg's absolute harmonic instability admitted no resolution,
Stravinsky's neutralized motives and static harmonies did not require
any. Schoenberg's "overbidding," no less than Stravinsky's "simpli-
fication," as Boulez once put it,29 resulted in a neutral tonal space,
although with an important qualification that seems to have escaped
Boulez and Stockhausen for a time. In Stravinsky's neo-modal world
no less than in Schoenberg's chromatically charged one, motivic
materials reserved palpable if largely frustrated tonal tendencies.
There is a lingering tension between the motivic materials with their
persistent tonal tendencies on the one hand and the framework with
its implicit neutrality on the other. "Foreground" and "background"
were essentially polarized and the neutrality was never absolute.
The conception of tonal space implicit within the music of the
post-war European synthesis is inextricably bound up with a charac-
teristic treatment of register. Boulez's generation unconditionally
accepted a neutral tonal space; the surfaces of the works of this group
unambiguously reflect this. To effect this neutrality within a space
that remains functional, Berio, Boulez, and Stockhausen have all
made use of various techniques of harmonic diffusion, one of the very
most important of which was directly inspired by Debussy's spacious
registral effects. The last two centuries have witnessed a gradual
expansion of the registral space consistently exploited in composition,
but, following Debussy, Berio, Boulez, and Stockhausen were the
first composers to accept broad tracts of registral space as given and,
in diffusing harmonic tension, to exploit them in a thorough-going
fashion. A breath-taking sense of space is apparent on virtually any
page of their mature works.
29 Boulez, Points, 327-28 and passim (Boulez, Orientations, 350-51 and passim).
Boulez employed a spacious registral canvas from his earliest

essays, making use of literally the entire range of the keyboard as early
as the original Notations for piano of 1944. Boulez's early works
embody a fascinating conception. As Charles Rosen has indicated, in
the Second Piano Sonata (1948) Boulez used space to effect a
"diffusion of the several directional forces."30 Motivic writing is
pressed into service to disperse the chromatic elements throughout the
registral space:
Example 6
Boulez: Deuxikme sonate pour piano, final measure. Used by Permission of the Publisher,
Heugel et Cie.
Tres lent(J=60)
P8 sub.
Jr , .... 3
? i " ' J ' , *
This quasi-cadential example represents only the extreme case.3'

For a brief period, Boulez experimented with an absolutely neutral
tonal field. By I95 1, he had moved from the works of his first period
to the tabula rasa of "total serialism." With the integral serialism of
Structures ia (1952), the locus classicus for this compositional experi-
ment, a registral system ensured the systematic distribution of pitch
throughout the entire registral field. Total serialism guaranteed in
advance a neutral tonal space, but the neutrality was a purely
statistical phenomenon. The neutrality of Boulez's language was not
to remain a function of automatism for long, although this absolute
neutrality is largely preserved in Le marteau sans maitre, the first work
that Boulez completed after the first book of Structures.
30 Charles Rosen, "The Piano Music," in Pierre Boulez: A Symposium, 87.

3' Rosen, "The Piano Music," 87, is definitive on the relationship of motive to
space in Boulez's early style. According to Rosen, "A I7th is not, for [Boulez],
primarily a transposed 3rd, but a projection in musical space." This conception was
adumbrated in certain of Webern's works, including the first movement of the
Symphony op. 2!, and the Variations for Orchestra op. 30.
A remarkable insaisissabilit characterizes Le marteau sans maitre. Its

polyphony for equal voices-Marteau floats literally bass-less in the
alto register-is characterized by a continuous kaleidoscopic shifting
remote from anything resembling traditional motivic development.
Given the static harmonic world of Marteau, this change within stasis
produces "a kind of furious calm," as Charles Ives once characterized
some of his own music.3' The tonal materials are neutral virtually to
the point of indifference to tempo. It was relatively easy for Boulez to
put such materials through their paces with varieties of amorphous
time.
After Marteau, Boulez decisively broke with this absolute neutral-

ity. Boulez's technique had become sufficiently supple that he could
exploit a harmonic language richer than Marteau's. Without returning
to the language of Schoenberg and Berg, Boulez and Stockhausen
recuperated the rich potential for development in Viennese chromat-
icism.33 In Boulez's early works, no controlling sonority intervened
between the absolutely neutral background and the motivic writing
that expressed it on the surface, although intervallic consistency was
ensured by the motivic writing. The development of the continuum
within his mature works enabled Boulez to express a single, central,
controlling harmony. 34 Boulez's continuum thus represented as much
32 Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings, selected
and ed. Howard Boatwright (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 36.
33 This coincided with a "rehabilitation" of Berg chez Boulez and Stockhausen that
was accomplished by the mid-195os. With probable reference to Boulez, Stravinsky
complained of a reaction against Webern's music "in favor of Berg's; I hear
everywhere now that Webern's series are too symmetrical, that his music makes one
too conscious of twelves, that la structure serielle chez Berg est plus cacbhe." Igor
Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (Garden City: Doubleday,
I960), 98.
34 If only passively, Le marteau sans mattre was Boulez's first work to express such
a sonority. Boulez's use of a single static controlling harmony represents the
culmination of a long development. Robert P. Morgan, "Dissonant Prolongation:
Theoretical and Compositional Precedents," Journal of Music Theory 20 (1976): 49-9 ,
has shown how composers in the later nineteenth century began to "prolong"
dissonant sonorities over increasingly longer spans of time. I hope to pursue this
aspect of Boulez's harmony at a future date. When a score becomes available, an ideal
locus for a study of the relationship of controlling sonority to the unfolding continuity
in Boulez's mature works will be Ripons. The septachord with which the soloists make
their entrance remains near the surface throughout much of the work. For a glimpse
of Boulez's harmonic techniques in Ripons, see Andrew Gerzso, "Reflections on
Repons," Contemporary Music Review i, no. I (October, 1984): 23-34. A first important
approach to Boulez's harmony is Robert Piencikowski, "Nature morte avec guitare,"
in Pierre Boulez: Eine Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag am 26. Mrz r985, ed. Josef Hiusler
(Vienna: Universal Edition, 1985): 66-81. Boulez's development of the continuum
a transformation of harmonic motion as of rhythmic motion.

It was crucial in Boulez's transformation of registral space. In Pli
selon pli, extraordinary effects of space are achieved by layering strata
of unfolding activity, but the constant shifts in register characteristic
of the Second Sonata or Structures are no longer required.3s The wide
spacing still contributes to a diffusion of harmonic tension, but the
listener is more readily able to pursue the linear argument, because
the burden of harmonic diffusion now rests on a technique more
fundamental than registral diffusion. Now harmonic diffusion is
effected by the continuum itself. In expressing the controlling har-
mony, the continuum serves as a continuous outlet for the linear urges
of chromaticism. In Pli selon pli, as in Gruppen or Epifanie, the tendency
toward motion inherent in the chromatic materials is unchecked, but
harmonic tension is diffused throughout the texture, continuously
channeled through all of the lines on the surface. This is accomplished
in a context where pitch has lost some degree of its priority, where
motion is conveyed as much by the smoothly shifting dynamics as by
any pattern of attack points. Focus is constantly shifted from the
attack points, precisely the points where pitch changes, to the planing
dynamics, as in Example I above from Pli selon pli. The harmonic
tension conveyed along the chromatic lines is now diffused in large
part by these dynamics. In the expressionist works of Schoenberg,
Berg, and Webern, the very most local gestures of motive or phrase
had maintained a vestige of tonal meaning, a semblance of harmonic
motion. No longer are there any such gestures within the unarticu-
lated-or continuously articulated-continuum of the post-war Euro-
pean synthesis. The "directional forces" are uniformly discharged at
every point. Diffusion is now total. Berio, Boulez, and Stockhausen
had succeeded in divorcing linear chromaticism from tonality.
***
The young Boulez once stated axio

tonal idea was based in a universe de
within works subsequent to Le marteau sans m

his penchant for characteristically long-limbe
and Visage nuptial.
15 Within Boulez's mature works, pitch is
points. Thus Boulez is able to maintain som
linear-registral connection while exploiting a
tral leaps. For an example of Boulez's use o
phrase of the first Improvisation sur Mal
aujourd'hui" (1957).
the serial idea in a universe in perpetual expansion."36 In the realm of

rhythm as of pitch, music had arrived at a relative conception. Within
works written in the classical tonal system, the listener is always
oriented in time. Boulez's mature works deliver the listener into a
perpetual present. Tonal harmonic motion implied a dramatic con-
ception of form; it is no accident that the tonal language of Haydn and
Mozart was rooted in opera buffa or that Wagner could still invoke
quasi-Aristotelian categories of peripeteia or catharsis in describing his
musical/dramatic forms. Boulez "and the Zen generation as a whole,"
as Stravinsky once put it, are not concerned with "movement from
and toward. . . . Nor ... are these composers concerned about
'dynamic passage through,' which betrays an essentially dramatic
concept."'37 Boulez's processes result in forms that are decorative
rather than dramatic. The Wildean paradox of decorative art-that
the most profound aspect of anything is its surface-is as pertinent to
Boulez as to Matisse or Vuilliard. We are more immediately aware of
the liquid colors and heterophonic aureoles of sound in Ripons than of
its gradual underlying processes. Despite the clear sectional outlines
revealed by its unfolding panels, Ripons is reticent in the articulation
of form.
With its "luxe, calme, et volupt6," Ripons is located squarely within
a certain French tradition. Boulez tends to dismiss the idea of a French
tradition, or at least of a continuous one: "Cela ne fait pas une suite."38
Nevertheless, Ripons' colors and textures alternately recall Symphonie
fantastique, The Firebird, and Le martyre de Saint Sibastien, while its
chinoiserie echoes Le Rossignol and Messiaen.39 In crucial respects, the
development of the post-war European synthesis seems as much the
culmination of certain trends within the French tradition as a natural
36 Boulez, Relevis, 297 (Boulez, Notes, 304).

37 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (Garden City:
Doubleday, i963), 27-28. It should be emphasized that Stravinsky is referring
specifically to Boulez, Stockhausen, and the new music in Europe rather than to John
Cage.
a Pierre Boulez, Par volonti et par hasard: Entretiens avec CUlestin Delihge (Paris:
lditions du Seuil, 1975), 19.
39 The inclusion on this list of two works by Stravinsky only serves to confirm
that to be a French composer in the twentieth century is to be influenced by
Stravinsky. Boulez has specifically compared the manner in which Stravinsky burst
on the scene with Firebird to Berlioz's debut with Symphoniefantastique: "[The Firebird]
confirms Stravinsky's orchestral mastery with a fresh vigor that I can only compare
to Berlioz's Symphoniefantastique (although I know that Stravinsky was not especially
fond of Berlioz . . . ). Without reservation, I would say that the modernity of the
orchestration of our own time was revealed in Firebird just as the modernity of
nineteenth-century orchestration was revealed in the Symphonie fantastique." Boulez,
Points, 367 (Boulez, Orientations, 360).
development within the history of atonality. Nor is this unique to

Boulez's works. The music of Berio, Stockhausen, and Boulez alike
relies on a motionless harmonic core, spacious effects of register, a
characteristic "directionlessness."
Before Stockhausen, effects of stasis within works from the
German tradition were purely local effects, as with the mysterious
dominant ninth chords that occur before the final fugue in the last
movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (mm. 647-54). Reflecting
Schiller's text ("Uber Sternen muss er wohnen"), this Ivesian sonority
suggests the timeless music of the spheres. In function, this dominant
may prepare the subsequent D major fugue. In effect, with its
repetition through eight slow measures, it seems neither consonant
nor dissonant but static.
A French composer writing not so very long after Beethoven could
strive for large-scale effects of stasis. Edward Cone has emphasized
both Berlioz's coloristic use of non-functional chords and his deceptive
reverse resolutions.40 At measure Io8 of the Adagio from Romeo et
Juliette, E resolves to At within the context of the tonic A major.
This resolution of a true dominant by a coloristic "false" one not only
serves to negate motion: it occurs at a climactic cadence where a strong
tonic might have been expected. The movement as a whole is
characterized by long tonic pedals. There are excursions to third-
related keys, but with one exception, these are never stabilized. C#
minor (mm. I44ff) and F# minor (mm. 244ff) are maintained only as
long as the harmony is motionless. Motion from the tonic chord of the
local key immediately brings with it a return to A major. Within this
evocation of a humid summer night in Verona, the listener is adrift on
a sea of A.
Tonality is not a static but a dynamic system. It was not effects of

stasis but instabilities within tonality that precipitated Schoenberg's
atonality. Schoenberg preferred the term "pantonality" to "atonality,"
and this reflects a historical development. There was a proliferation
within tonality itself in the late works of Liszt, Wagner, Verdi,
Brahms, and Wolf. Not mincing words, Stravinsky preferred "anti-
tonal" to describe certain harmonic features of his neoclassical and
serial works.4' Adopting these terms, we can distinguish the panto-
4o Edward T. Cone, "Inside the Saint's Head: The Music of Berlioz," in Music: A
View from Delft, Selected Essays, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 217-48.
4' "Now it well may be that I remain for a considerable time within the bounds
of the strict order of tonality, even though I may quite consciously break up this order
for the purposes of establishing a new one. In that case I am not atonal but antitonal.
nality of Schoenberg (expressionist or neoclassicist), Luigi Dallapic-

cola, Roger Sessions, or Elliott Carter from the antitonality of Boulez,
Stockhausen, and Berio; Carter's dynamic conception of form is
infinitely closer to Beethoven's than to Stockhausen's, despite any
superficial resemblances between the tonal languages of the two
post-war composers. Debussy had already drawn a parallel distinction
between French and German traditions when he claimed that "Berlioz
is much further removed from Bach and Mozart than is Wagner. He
is less tonal than Wagner."4' Far from leveling all distinctions, the
history of atonality has preserved them intact.
This opposition naturally extends all the way to the level of form.
Boulez admires certain forms of Berlioz for being "cachees."43 In the
Adagio from Romeo et Juliette, the key of the dominant appears only
briefly in the final moments of the work (mm. 367 ff), serving not as an
architectural fulcrum but to amplify the movement's climax. This
special effect is unforeseen in what has gone before, "hidden" as the
recapitulations of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are not, as the
staggering climaxes of Wagner and Mahler are not. Similarly nurtured
by divergent harmonic traditions, the formal ambitions of Schoenberg
and Boulez are fundamentally incomparable, as Sessions implicitly
suggested in defending Schoenberg's neoclassical forms:
When people call Schoenberg a neoclassicist, the point is, he was

grappling with large musical design. ... With some of the music
[Boulez's, Stockhausen's] that would be called non-neoclassic ... you
don't really have a large design .... With all admission that [Boulez] is
a very gifted man, I don't ever feel a sense of large design. .... I enjoy
listening to it, but after I've heard it, I don't have a feeling of the piece as
a whole.44
Boulez's language does not imply harmonic form, traditionally

conceived, but the unfolding of a perpetual present. Form may be said
to radiate from a static core. This temporal orientation is inherent in
the very nature of the continuum through which Boulez's language
and forms are expressed. With the smooth planing of the dynamics
I am not trying to argue pointlessly over words: it is essential to know what we deny
and what we affirm." (Stravinsky, Poetics, 53.) "Perhaps the most significant devel-
opment in the Movements . . . is their tendency toward anti-tonality." (Stravinsky
and Craft, Memories, i o i.)
42 Edward Lockspeiser: Debussy: His Life and Mind (London: Cassell Books, 1962),
204.
3 Conversation of i8 October i987 with the author.
44 Andrea Olmstead, Conversations with Roger Sessions (Boston: Northeastern
throughout much of Pli selon pli or the amorphous timbral effects of

Eclat, we pursue a process of continuous change. Attention is focused
less on patterns revealed from attack point to attack point, on
successions of parsed spans, than on continuous and instantaneous
changes occurring in the present.45
Paralleling developments within the other arts, the language
expressed through Boulez's continuum has inevitably had a corrosive
effect on central formal tenets of the work of art as traditionally
conceived in the West. In some of Jackson Pollock's last paintings, the
edge of the canvas fortuitously ends processes that could be indefi-
nitely extended. Where Boulez dispenses with the frame of tonality,
Pollock's pictures are hung without frames. John Ashbery has rejected
the epiphanies of Joyce and Proust rather than privilege these
moments artificially. Without such rhetorical privileges, how is form
to be articulated? In the realm of music, these privileges had
essentially been the prerogative of tonality, in which sense Schoen-
berg's or Carter's music must still be considered tonal. With Boulez's
"antitonality" the old concept of form as a closed, self-contained
dramatic whole gives way to a series of open static works. Dramatic
relations within a work are displaced to a higher level; to a series of
juxtapositions between works based on the same material or between
versions of a single work. The very relation of the composer to his
material is changed:
I would say that on the creative plane I live in a kind of plasma that
permits me to shift my location by moving to and fro. I remain in the
same material and project my thoughts in several directions at once. I
now have a supple material that allows me this drifting in time, these
diversions [recreations]. That is why I have made several versions of Pli
selon pli and am considering an expansion of Iclat.46
As he acknowledged in the citation at the head of this essay,

Boulez may have learned from German music about "a continuity and
development . . . that the French have rarely had," but it is the
French "instinct for harmony" expressed through his continuities and
forms that has enabled him to pursue his recreations. More astonishing
45 It seems likely that most music will require both kinds of attention; it is a
question of emphasis. In so far as a "Rossini crescendo" is a crescendo, we pursue it
as continuously as Boulez's smooth surfaces. At the same time, other more funda-
mental aspects of the same passage would still require the parsing of spans demarcated
by attack points and so forth.
46 Pierre Boulez: "Musique traditionelle-un paradis perdu?," The World of Music
9, no. 2 (I967): 8, author's translation.
is the extent to which so many of Boulez's European contemporaries,

too, have exploited a tonal language on the French model in pursuing
their floating stasis. Even a composer so clearly within the mainstream
of German developmental traditions as Stockhausen understands wie
die Zeit vergeht only from the perspective of the still center of the
universe. This unprecedented pan-European influence of the French
harmonic tradition played a preponderant role in determining the
essential character of the post-war European synthesis.
University of Chicago
LIsT OF WORKS CITED
Texts
Barzun, Jacques. Berlioz and His Century. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982.
Boulez, Pierre. Boulez on Music Today. Translated by Susan Bradshaw and
Richard Rodney Bennett. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 197i.
"Debussy's Orchestral Music." Liner notes to recordings of De-
bussy's orchestral music. New York: Columbia Records (D3M 32988),
1974.
"Musique traditionelle-un paradis perdu?" The World of Music 9,
no. 2 (1967): 3-10.
,. Par volonti et par hasard: Entretiens avec Cilestin Deliege. Paris: iditions
du Seuil, 1975.
. Points de repere. Rev. ed. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1985 (English-
language edition: Orientations. Translated by Martin Cooper. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1986).
. Relevis d'apprenti. Paris: iditions de Seuil, 1966 (English-language
edition: Notes of an Apprenticeship. Translated by Herbert Weinstock.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).
Carter, Elliott. The Writings of Elliott Carter. Edited by Elsa and Kurt Stone.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977-
Cone, Edward. "Inside the Saint's Head: The Music of Berlioz." In Music: A
View from Delft, Selected Essays, edited by Robert P. Morgan, 217-48.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Gable, David. "Ramifying Connections: An Interview with Pierre Boulez."
Journal of Musicology 4 (1985-86): 105-1 3.
Gerzso, Andrew. "Reflections on Repons." Contemporary Music Review i, no.
I (October 1984): 23-34.
Heyworth, Peter. "The First Fifty Years." In Pierre Boulez: A Symposium,
edited by William Glock, 3-39. London: Eulenburg Books, 1986.
Ives, Charles. Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. Selected
and edited by Howard Boatwright. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.
Lockspeiser, Edward. Debussy: his Life and Mind. 2 vols. London: Cassell
Books, 1962.
Morgan, Robert P. "Dissonant Prolongation: Theoretical and Compositional
Precedents." Journal of Music Theory 20 (1976): 4-9 I.
Olmstead, Andrea. Conversations with Roger Sessions. Boston: Northeastern

University Press, 1987.
Piencikowski, Robert. "Nature morte avec guitare." In Pierre Boulez: Eine
Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag am 26. Marz 1985, edited by Josef Hiusler,
66-8 . Vienna: Universal Edition, 1985.
Rimbaud, Arthur. A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat. Bilingual edition
translated by Louise Varese. New York: New Directions, i96i.
Rosen, Charles. Liner notes to recordings of Boulez's First and Third Piano
Sonatas. New York: Columbia Records (M 3216i), 1973.
. "The Piano Music." In Pierre Boulez: A Symposium, edited by William
Glock, 85-97. London: Eulenburg Books, 1986.
Rosen, Charles, and Henri Zerner. Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of
Nineteenth-Century Art. New York: Viking Press, 1984.
Stearns, David Patrick. "Pierre Boulez: The Evolution of a Revolutionary."
Ovation (July 1986): 20-22, 24, 29.
Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1970.
Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. Conversations with Stravinsky. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, i980.
. Dialogues and a Diary. Garden City: Doubleday, 1963.
. Memories and Commentaries. Garden City: Doubleday, i960.
Thomson, Virgil. A Virgil Thomson Reader. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Werckmeister, Otto Karl. The Making of Paul Klee's Career: 1914-1920o.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
White, Eric Walter. Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1966.
Editions of Boulez's Music
Boulez, Pierre. Deuxidme Sonate pour Piano. Paris: Heugel, 1950.

. Le marteau sans maitre, final version. London: Universal Edition,
'957.
. Pli selon pli, i. Don. London: Universal Edition, 1967.
. Premiere Sonate pour Piano. Paris: Iditions Amphion, 195 1.
. Rituel: In memoriam Bruno Maderna, revised version. London: Uni-
versal Edition, 1975-
Recording
Boulez, Pierre. dclat/Multiples. Boulez conducting members of the Ensemble

InterContemporain. New York [?]: CBS Records (74Io9), 1983.
ABSTRACT
Pierre Boulez is typical of a post-war generation of European composers

known for its apparent repudiation of tradition, although the synthesis of
such composers as Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen can be shown to be firmly
rooted in tradition. Tendencies within both Franco-Russian and Austro-
German traditions merged in the formation of Boulez's style. This is
reflected both in Boulez's first models, Messiaen and Webern, and by his
life-long engagement with both Schoenberg's expressionism and the works of
Stravinsky's Russian period. Wagner, Mahler, and Schoenberg had devel-
oped a continuous dynamic inflection that Stravinsky, by the 192os, rejected
in his neoclassical works. Boulez's generation reintegrated these tendencies
within the absolutely smooth continuums to be found in many of their
works. In Boulez's mature works, there is a continuous system of smoothly
planing dynamics. No longer expressive inflection, these dynamics exhibit
the clean objective character of Stravinsky's discrete dynamic planes. This
dynamic continuum was crucial in creating the continuous through-com-
posed forms of Boulez and Stockhausen. Boulez's rhythmic structures are
ultimately rooted in Stravinsky's motor rhythms and Schoenberg's prose
rhythms, an opposition he has exploited in many works. Schoenberg's and
Stravinsky's essentially neutral tonal space furnished the background for the
post-war European harmonic language in which harmonic tensions are
diffused both by spacious effects of register and by the continuously graded
dynamics. The floating stasis projected in Boulez's mature works is as much
a culmination of certain trends within the French harmonic tradition as a
natural development within the history of atonality. With the post-war
generation in Europe, the French harmonic tradition enjoyed unprecedented
influence.

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Boulez's Two Cultures: The Post-War European Synthesis and Tradition

Author(s): David Gable

American Musicological Society, University of California Press are collaborating with

In German music, there is a continuity and development, such as i

IERRE BOULEZ WELL REPRESENTS A GROUP of European compo

*I would like to thank Kenneth Carlborg (The University of Illinois Librar

Nevertheless, without denying the radical renewal accomplished

profitably be considered against the background of these tonal tradi-

We need only consider the visual conception of the Ring as produced at

The "frisson nouveau" in Boulez's music has little to do with a

From the very beginning, Boulez's heritage stemmed from two

6 Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981),

Olivier Messiaen. If the neoclassicisms of Stravinsky and Schoenberg

motives do not necessarily imply harmonic motion. At one extreme,

" Pierre Boulez, "Debussy's Orchestral Music," liner notes to recordings of

without any intervening crescendo. In performance, there is a subtle

Stravinsky must have felt that this represented a revival of the

fifties, Boulez and Stockhausen had attempted a serialization of

A ten. ten. ten.

glissdc avec l'embouchure

Given the traditional intimacy of dynamics and rhythm, this

details. This is already evident in the First Piano Sonata (1946),

Boulez: Premidre sonatepourpiano, second movement, mm. 71-73. Used by Permission of

This excerpt represents a continuous written-out rubato, except that

20 Boulez, "Stravinsky demeure," Relevis, 75-145 (Boulez, "Stravinsky Remains,"

Boulez: Premiere sonatepourpiano, second movement, mm. I --1 2. Used by Permission of

irregular in organization. By this definition, all of the music in the

Rubato in Chopin allows both a measure of freedom to the

There are effects of rubato throughout almost every movement of

Although there is no indication for this in th

2" Pierre Boulez, Le marteau sans mattre, final version

Beethoven used it for ornamental purposes-the Adagio of the Ninth

As this image of Debussy's orchestra suggests, Boulez often realizes a

The instrumental groups should not attempt to synchronize with each

Section IV of Rituel, in which only three of the eight groups play, is

24 Pierre Boulez, Rituel, rev. version, preliminary notes (London: Universal

independent role with Debussy. In Boulez's works, sound is linked to

25 No one has remarked the characteristically Boulezian use to which the

III Fl. 2 An"t-.

piano, molto crescendo, molto accelerando, and then excessivement rapide.

Boulez's harmonic language, too, is expressed against a vast and

27 Charles Rosen, liner notes to recordings of Boulez's Piano Sonatas I and 3

2s Boulez, Relev"s, 355 (Boulez, Notes, 365).

Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Stravinsky reduced the linear ele-

Boulez employed a spacious registral canvas from his earliest

? i " ' J ' , *

This quasi-cadential example represents only the extreme case.3'

30 Charles Rosen, "The Piano Music," in Pierre Boulez: A Symposium, 87.

A remarkable insaisissabilit characterizes Le marteau sans maitre. Its

After Marteau, Boulez decisively broke with this absolute neutral-

a transformation of harmonic motion as of rhythmic motion.

The young Boulez once stated axio

within works subsequent to Le marteau sans m

the serial idea in a universe in perpetual expansion."36 In the realm of

36 Boulez, Relevis, 297 (Boulez, Notes, 304).

development within the history of atonality. Nor is this unique to

Tonality is not a static but a dynamic system. It was not effects of

nality of Schoenberg (expressionist or neoclassicist), Luigi Dallapic-

When people call Schoenberg a neoclassicist, the point is, he was

Boulez's language does not imply harmonic form, traditionally

throughout much of Pli selon pli or the amorphous timbral effects of

As he acknowledged in the citation at the head of this essay,

is the extent to which so many of Boulez's European contemporaries,

Olmstead, Andrea. Conversations with Roger Sessions. Boston: Northeastern

Boulez's Two Cultures

Boulez's Two Cultures