The Insider

His lofty forehead reminds one female worshiper of Beethoven. To most people, however, Conductor Pierre Boulez looks more like a career librarian.

Glamour, image and sex appeal are not his bag. At a rehearsal, he is one plain musician talking to others. He may interrupt the music to say, "Take some of that color out of the A flat," or "Make this more crescendo." But he never indulges in exhibitionism or talkfests, which often earn other conductors only the scorn of their players. At a concert, he makes few flourishes in the direction of the audience. "I have no patience," he says, "with those conductors who, though their backs are physically turned to the spectators, spiritually face the ticketholders in an expressionist dance which has nothing to do with how the music ultimately will sound in their eardrums."

Boulez, who lives in Baden-Baden, knows better than most conductors how the music of his own time should sound, since he himself has composed some of the best of it (Eclat, Le Marteau sans Maitre). When he takes to the podium, he brings along insight, evangelism, an insider's care, and the ability to get what he wants from an orchestra. This is why he has become one of the most sought-after guest conductors in Europe and the U.S. It helps explain why, in the space of only a few years, his recordings of Schoenberg, Berg, Debussy and Stravinsky have been such successes. Says the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Zubin Mehta: "When he does Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, it's so clear and expert, it's like George Szell's Eroica. It gets on your nerves a bit, because you know you can't do it as correctly."

Too Aggressive. In his early critical writings, just published in Notes of an Apprenticeship (Knopf; $8.95), Boulez criticized almost every leading composer except his idols, Debussy and Webern. While praising Stravinsky's rhythmic innovations in Le Sacre du Printemps, Boulez rapped him for his unwillingness to surrender diatonic melody--and reliance on the tonic and dominant--in favor of serialism. As for the father of serialism, Arnold Schoenberg, Boulez took him to task for failing to apply the serialistic principle of melodic organization to other aspects of music like timbres and intervals between notes.

As it turned out, this was the kind of carping that a student aims at the teachers who mean the most to him. In 1948, for example, Boulez castigated Berg for having introduced a polka into the atonal fabric of Wozzeck. Today, admitting that he "may have been a little too aggressive," he praises the way in which Berg joined music to dramatic expression in the same opera. "In Wozzeck, the contradiction between pure and theatrical music has completely disappeared." Boulez's recent recording of the opera (CBS Masterworks) signals this change of attitude with its unfailing projection of just the right emotion, mood and orchestral detail.

Physics and Psychology. Boulez at 43 has not mellowed altogether. He deplores "the dinosaurlike" orchestras that ignore exotic instruments and electronic sounds and lack the technical proficiency to play much of today's avant-garde music. "In the future," he says, "I'm certain that important changes will have to be made within the composition of the orchestra to permit this flexibility."

Boulez cannot stay away from the podium. "Conducting, for me, remains a stimulating contact with the mainstream of music, and it reflects favorably upon my own creative efforts," he says. He also insists that new music will be writ ten and understood only with the broadest understanding both of the other arts and of nonartistic fields--physics and psychology, for example. Already, he notes, creative art is bristling with an unprecedented intermingling of disciplines. "My advice to the average listener is just listen with the vastness of the world in mind," he says. "You can't fail to get the message."

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