So the Boulez Day has come and gone at Conservatoire; not only was it around the time of hand-ins for me (yes, we’ve all had them haven’t we?) I thought it best to get some distance from the event before writing this.
The day was a celebration of Pierre Boulez, one of the leading legends of contemporary classical music of the 20th Century. Powering on at 83 years of age, he visited the Conservatoire to receive an honorary doctorate from the faculty, after an invitation from lecturing composer Edwin Roxburgh, who has known him throughout his career.
Included in the programme of the day’s concerts and workshops was a special performance of Boulez’s 1997 work Anthemes 2 for violin and electronics, with the incredibly talent Angela Balint on violin and BCU’s favourite technological composer Jonathan Green on live electronics.
I was lucky enough to have witnessed rehearsals of the work in its preparation stages, and was concerned as to how this would go; the live electronics had been prepared as a ‘patch’ (a set of preset functions) to be used in the programme Max/MSP, and would require 2 computers to run. This patch had been provided byIRCAM, the institution set up by Boulez in 1977 (at the request of then French president Georges Pompidou) to establish a facility for technology and music to be researched together.
The piece and the software it was running on (now established world wide as a leading tool) were both conceived and created at IRCAM, which is one of the world’s leading centres for electronic music research…and yet the whole thing was a nightmare. The complexity of the patch meant it required two computers to run it, but even then would routinely crash; during the years the piece had taken to realise, the software’s core itself had been modified and upgraded, whereas the existing patch had merely been modified to ‘cope’, as opposed to re-engineered more suitably. Because of this it was teetering and unstable.
The performance took place and Jonathan Green got to within a minute of the ending…before both computers crashed at once. The performance, although programmed as a concert, then became a workshop, with Boulez giving a, not harsh, but fairly firm critique to the duo. He had much to say about the electronics, and it was an incredibly tense atmosphere that prevailed, with myself and my friends who had known of the difficulties in the weeks prior to the concert looking at each other with concern and collected sympathy for Jonathan, who had managed to wrestle a frankly monstrous and lumbering software environment into a 98% working tool…no mean feat, I assure you. He was then left in the position of having to be diplomatic and try to solve the problems Boulez wanted sorting.
Now, this causes problems for me, and largely because of the nature of the piece. It is written making use of certain live sound treatments such as ‘infinite’ reverb and harmonisation, and the triggering of pre-recorded samples. It occurred to me that, what with these being pretty basic effects, and his main issue being with the timing of cues and smoothness of ‘perceived transformations’ between live violin and pre-recorded samples…why the hell didn’t he just pre-record everything?
And here lies the beginnings of a long argument concerning conceptual aesthetics (that is, the process and the achievement) versus practicality. Boulez, and many of the IRCAM tradition and its many followers, have an overwhelming, romantic desire for all sounds to have some link to those being created by the musician, especially if working with harmonic spectra (the treatment of specific audio frequencies). But it appears only to create multitudes of problems. The same goes with sample playback; if the performer is playing a part and adding expression, they are far less likely to be able to synchronise perfectly with a rhythmic sample that drops in at a point, compared to if they are playing to a strict tempo timeline.
Anthemes 2 may indeed be a good piece of music, but it does not make for easy performance. This is not just because of the technical ability necessary on the part of the performers, but because the composer has chosen to utilise an almost foolish choice of techniques in order to represent an artistic opinion that the music should be as ‘physically existing’ as possible. However, I would argue that the music would be far more flexible if everything had been pre-recorded and set to a backing track for the soloist to play along to (called a ‘tape’ part in classical music). Then they would be able to perform around a strict tempo grid with far more elasticity, than having two musicians essentially playing catch-up with a dodgy computer system, praying it will hold out until the end of the performance.
To simplify further; composer’s make performer’s lives hell enough writing the music they do. They shouldn’t complicate things further with unnecessary use of technology when more user-friendly, effective alternatives are readily available. I would have thought Boulez, with the reputation he has for promoting technology in music, would have considered this. It appeared he had not, which I found disappointing.
