Re: blowing up boulez

["K. Scott Handley" <thesubtlebody@xxxxxxxxx>]

-----Guillaume G. wrote:
> Are you remotely aware of the colossal impact "that
> crusty bureaucrat", as
> you call him, has had (and is still having) on
> contemporary music and on
> music in general? Both as a composer and as a
> conductor? How many pieces of
> his have you heard/are you familiar with? 

It's been years since I've analyzed LE MARTEAU (which
has dated like milk, YMMV), but I am excruciatingly
aware of the man's effects, positive and negative, on
the culture industry and the regulation of
sound-research from the Ivory Bunker of IRCAM.  His
accomplishments are titanic, but suspending critique
due to awe is no way to progress beyond the
avant-garde garden/ghetto that he has cultivated. 
Which, sorry to say, is not remotely avant-garde
anymore, the beauties of RÉPONS are no longer
avant-garde, the context has changed, and as Jim
O'Rourke, Georgina Born, and Anthony Braxton (among so
many others) have variously observed, IRCAM is a
bloated, overfunded, and redundant agency of cultural
prestige.

>How
> familiar are you with his
> (enormous) recorded output? Are you aware of the
> level of devotion and the
> drive with which he promoted music of this century,
> even under sustained
> fire (his years at the NYPO, for example)? Etc.

Awareness really isn't the issue here; you're
presuming that intimacy with the man's oeuvre would
necessarily pre-empt critique, or for that matter
contempt.  Boulez is as subject to time as the rest of
us, he's just managed to create a black hole for
limited and precious funding, and not only in his home
country.
 
> ...but to disparage a
> man like him with blanket statements such as those
> one can read in the
> quoted message strikes me as disrespectful and
> cowardly.

The Ivory Bunker is cowardice itself.  Among Boulez's
mountains of accomplishment there are festering boils
of corruption.  The more undeniable a person's
contributions, the more likely that their shadow will
overcome any future progress, and quelch badly-needed
critique.  Darmstadt and its wake are last century's
news, and have everything to do with history that's
worth waking up from.

-----s

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