The Soul of a New Machine

By Michael Walsh

Pierre Boulez used to be the stormy petrel of contemporary music. As a youthful radical, he booed Stravinsky for what he viewed as a failure of nerve; he has called for the demolition of the world's opera houses and denounced institutions like Lincoln Center as cultural supermarkets. Later, as conductor of both the New York Philharmonic and London's BBC Symphony Orchestra, he discomfited audiences by aggressively championing difficult new music. Ten years ago he stood the staid Wagner shrine of Bayreuth on its ear with a daring production of The Ring of the Nibelung.

In 1976 he took over officially as head of an experimental music laboratory at the Pompidou Center in Paris known acronymically as IRCAM. He has kept a low profile since, shunning most conducting invitations in order to compose in his electronic studio. Has the former enfant terrible, now 60, mellowed? Or does his modernist flame burn as brightly as ever?

American listeners have a chance to judge for themselves. Last week in Los Angeles, Boulez and his crack new-music group, the Ensemble InterContemporain, began a five-city U.S. tour, bringing with them a visionary 45-minute marriage of live performers and computers called Repons (response). It is the first major work by Boulez since 1974, and Repons has propelled him back where he belongs: at the center of music's creative storm.

Once a dedicated foe of the French cultural establishment, Boulez has become his country's unofficial musical czar. Such is his clout that the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique commands a disproportionate share of the money that the French government spends on music. Boulez has influenced the design of the flexibly configured concert hall at the Cite de la Musique, La Villette, which will become the new site of the Paris Conservatory of Music in 1989. He is also vice president of the board of the new Opera Bastille, which will become the home of the Paris Opera the same year. There will be two theaters in the complex, a 2,700-seat facility for grand opera and a variable 600-to-1,300-seat theater for early operas and experimental works. Boulez's presence is likely to ensure a place for contemporary music on the Opera's roster, but he is quick to deny any further ambitions. "I am simply helping this new institution to be born," he says.

In other words, Boulez is a pragmatist. At the Philharmonic, he gradually broadened his repertoire to include a variety of musical styles; in opera the would-be dynamiter turned out to be an effective Wagnerian. At his brainchild, IRCAM, Boulez's fellow composers have great stylistic latitude. "I cannot make my personal taste the main criterion," he says. "I am more tolerant than my reputation."

It is easy to believe him, for in person Boulez is affable and charming. Of average height, balding, with a pleasant Gallic face, he could pass for a friendly greengrocer in his native Loire region. Yet throughout his career, his work has often been criticized for what some perceive as a fundamental coldness. Boulez resents the charge and defends his musicianship. Recalling the hostile reception he met from the fiercely proprietary Bayreuth musicians before his first Ring, he notes, "When you are attached to contemporary music, immediately they suppose you don't know the classic repertoire. But I think I can study a score very well, so I am not really inferior to people who have played the music 500 times."

Boulez's music, derived from the twelve-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg, is devoid of conventional melodies and harmonies. Instead it is made up of bursts of tones that are combined into seemingly cacophonous passages, which tax both the ear and the mind. It can sound dense and abstruse at first acquaintance, yet, like the notion that Boulez is unfeeling, this too is a misper- ception. Forbidding though his music undeniably can be, it amply repays careful, open-minded listening, gradually revealing its sweep and surge.

Repons is a good illustration. Musically and technologically, it is Boulez's most ambitious, unorthodox undertaking to date. In a large gymnasium (the Los Angeles performances were at the John Wooden Center on the UCLA campus), a centrally located small orchestra of 24 is surrounded by six soloists scattered around the room, performing at various times on amplified xylophone, vibraphone, cimbalom, harp, celesta, electric organ, two pianos and percussion. The sounds are fed into a bank of computer-synthesizers, which alter and transform them according to a predetermined program and project them out again through loudspeakers hung over and around the audience. The drama lies in the confrontation between the acoustic and the amplified instruments. Ghostly trills float above rumbling repeated figures, brasses punch out long discordant lines, and the shimmering whoosh of woodwinds fills the air. Repons is a journey into the soul of the 20th century, a harsh but exhilarating blend of music and machine. Its only flaw is that it does not go far enough. In 1981, when Boulez premiered the first 18 minutes of the work, the technology was still largely untried. What Repons needs now is to live up even better to its name, to offer a greater, freer and more apparent interplay among conductor, performers and computers. Characteristically, Boulez intends to keep adding to the piece, so perhaps that will happen in the next installment, scheduled for a London premiere in 1988.

Fittingly, Boulez's tour will end in New York, where he will be reunited with his old orchestra. That program is vintage Boulez: Stravinsky, Debussy (the obscure, elusive Jeux), and a work of his own, Improvisations sur Mallarme, I, II, and III. The conductor's six seasons in Manhattan were not, on the whole, happy ones. "My life would have been simplified by a more positive response," he observes dryly. But he is likely to find a more receptive climate for his ideas now. Today's audience has been exposed to a range of idioms from serialism to minimalism. Boulez's highly conceptualized ^ brand of musicmaking can now be seen as another alternative. Nobody talks about blowing up opera houses anymore; instead, peaceful coexistence reigns. If Boulez has grown, so, fortunately, has the rest of the musical world. Welcome back, Pierre.