Thursday, October 22, 2020

Aucoin Writes About “Lessons” from Boulez

Before we had to deal with the constraints of pandemic conditions, my wife and I would make regular visits to the City Lights Bookstore when we were in the North Beach area. Inevitably there would be something that attracted my attention strongly enough that I ended up purchasing it. On our most recent visit (hopefully not the last), my acquisition was Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures, transcriptions of lectures given by Pierre Boulez between 1976 and 1995 translated into English by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, and Arnold Whittal.

Like other purchases this book found its way to a pile where it has had to compete with other offerings vying for my attention. Because I have not touched the book since then, I was particularly interested in reading Matthew Aucoin’s review of it, which has just appeared in the latest (November 5) issue of The New York Review of Books. While I recognized Aucoin’s name as a composer, to the best of my knowledge, I have never had an opportunity to listen to his music; and I have been unable to find evidence of anything I have written about him. Given the clarity of his writing about the Boulez book and the acuity of his challenges to the contents of the book, I feel that I ought to learn more about his music.

I suppose my interest in Aucoin’s review derives from one of his strongest criticisms of the Boulez lectures. This has to do with the apparent conviction by Boulez that listening does not figure in the act of composition. To be fair, the index of the book has an entry for “listener/listening;” but it is just a reference to the entry for “perception,” which is broken down into a myriad of subcategories among which “listening” never appears. By now readers are probably aware that my own interests have involved arriving at a better understanding of the nature of listening as it is practiced by not only those making the music (both composers and performers) but also those on “audience side.”

If the nature of listening is not called out explicitly in Boulez’ lectures, he does seem to appreciate the significance of the concept of memory. Here is how Aucoin characterizes Boulez’ approach to writing about memory:

He defines active memory as a faculty not only of recall, but of presence and prediction: a performer must achieve a “global memory,” which consists of “recall-memory,” “monitoring-memory” (engagement with the present moment), and “prediction-memory.” Boulez compares this multidirectional memory to peripheral vision, without which we could not gain an accurate sense of an object’s position in space. The performer is like an Olympic skier, entirely alive to the present instant, yet also reliant on the momentum of past actions, and constantly scanning for obstacles ahead. Once a musician has fully absorbed a score, “a whole emerges in which memory can roam at will.” The score’s unidirectional temporal canvas becomes, in the hands of a master interpreter, a landscape within which the performer is free to rove, to discover.

What may be most interesting is that there is nothing particularly new here. Igor Stravinsky offered similar perspectives, acknowledging Henri Bergson as one of his inspiring sources. However, as Aucoin’s summary identifies, any understanding of memory must entail the nature of our awareness of the passing of time. Edmund Husserl gave a pioneering series of lectures on the subject of “time-consciousness;” and many of his insights were subsequently picked up by Martin Heidegger for his monumental Being and Time. What is more interesting, however, is that the “tripartite” nature of memory cited by Aucoin can be traced all the way back to the Confessions of Augustine. Sadly, the index to Music Lessons lacks entries for Augustine, Husserl, and Heidegger; and my guess is that, for Boulez, Bergson was just one of many names that Stravinsky dropped in his own reflections about music.

Stravinsky appears often in Aucoin’s review. I was particularly taken by his account of a “weak misreading” of Stravinsky by Boulez. Aucoin elaborates this point as follows:

In his eyes, Stravinsky was “highly original” in his earlier pieces, which did not have obvious models—or at least not models that Boulez was familiar with—but his later experiments with extant European idioms, and especially his overtly neoclassical pieces, constitute an unforgivable regression.

The kicker here is the aside about Boulez’ familiarity. By now just about anyone interested in details about Stravinsky’s approach to composition knows that Russian folk music played a significant role in those “earlier pieces.” Here, again, we discover that the index to Music Lessons has no entry beginning with the word “Russian.” Trying to overlook Stravinsky’s Russian origins is a bit like trying to overlook the French influences on Erik Satie.

For the most part Aucoin tries to restrain himself from going on an invective rant. Nevertheless, I have to say that I was taken by one particularly observation:

There is nothing more boring than the spittle-spewing invective of a demagogue railing against ill-defined, possibly illusory enemies, and unfortunately this book seethes with such denunciations.

I suppose the value in this is that it allows for generalization. We all know that those attributes were aimed at Boulez, but I suspect that each of us has other targets in mind! More important is how, for better or worse, Aucoin guided my feelings about having this book. The “bottom line” is that I am not about to discard it; but I shall do my best to be judicious in how I allocate any attention to it!

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