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Boulez's Two Cultures: The Post-War
European Synthesis and Tradition*
BY DAVID GABLE
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 427
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.
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428 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
,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.
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 429
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).
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430 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 43 I
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
'3 Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 529.
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432 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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.
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 433
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
-sempre piu 7
Piano
Cymb.
grave
2/8 pour
80o4/8
les _
A r31
kr--3-n
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.
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434 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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.
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 435
'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
University Press, 1977), 271.
'9 Boulez, Relevis, 74 (Boulez, Notes, 71).
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436 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Example 2
fsub. ------ - h --
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TIlE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 437
Example 3
Rapide ( J. = 152)
0 staccato
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438 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 439
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:
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.
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440 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 441
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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
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Htb. 1
Perc. 1
Clch. jap.
I mI I
.- C.. enWood
sib
Perc.2
bl. --
> > cm
iff
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
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444 JOURNAL OF THIE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 445
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
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446 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
29 Boulez, Points, 327-28 and passim (Boulez, Orientations, 350-51 and passim).
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 447
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
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448 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 449
***
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450 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 451
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.
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452 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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
University Press, 1978), 78.
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 453
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
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.
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454 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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.
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THE POST-WAR EUROPEAN SYNTHESIS AND TRADITION 455
Recording
ABSTRACT
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456 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
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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