What does the world sound like? What does a brushstroke sound like? What do dreams of a better world sound like?

When art and music meet, a very special creative chemistry is created. We think, for example, of

Piet Mondrian and Earle Brown. A large white sheet of paper is dotted with several dozen black lines or bars – some horizontal, some vertical, some thick, some thin. In its geometric asymmetry, it could be confused with a sketch by Piet Mondrian. In reality, it is a musical score: Earle Brown’s ‘December 1952’.

or Schönberg and Kandinsky. One detaches himself from the basic tone, the other from the subject. One founded free tonality and the twelve-tone technique, the other abstract painting.

or John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. Robert Rauschenberg created the famous ‘White Paintings’ in 1951 and thus gave John Cage the courage, as he himself once said, to compose his silent piece. The audience at Woodstock on 29 August 1952 were astonished: they wanted to hear a piano piece. And they heard: Nothing. Because the piece ‘4’33’’ consists of silence. The idea behind it certainly had something to do with the flood of information at the time, as a certain political stance hit a nerve. # Hashtag Zeitgeist!

or Paul Klee and Pierre Boulez, a synaesthetic phenomenon in 20th century music and painting! (more on this below)

Super exciting and yet relaxing. Timbre and colour. Music to the thinking ear – honouring Pierre Boulez on his 100th birthday

Hand on heart: we all have difficulties understanding this or that new art in one way or another. Is it the art or is it us? It is clear that neither art nor music can be regarded as historical constants or as socially independent in their works and events. Just as history is made up of contradictions and ruptures, so too is the development of music and art.

Photo © Gerd Eichmann

At the beginning of the modern era, two essential functions and missions of music and art were juxtaposed: On the one hand, both served to praise God and accompanied church services and church festivals – on the other hand, they had the task of organising and entertaining festivals. On the one hand, music and art were part of the representation of the church and the clergy – on the other hand, music and art represented and supported the splendour of a principality. Sacred works were commissioned by the church, while festive music, courtly suites, singspiels and operas were requested by the princely court, which employed painters, sculptors, musicians and composers.

In contrast to the orders of the church and court were the independent musicians who played in the streets and squares, accompanied singers or blasted from the tower. After the French Revolution and the subsequent secularisation, art and music began to develop as representatives of the people – the citizen rose up!

But even at the beginning of the 20th century, everything that was new, different and foreign in art and music was threatened with open disapproval. Representation a buzzword?

Due to the loss of their previous function, art and music began to withdraw. Fine art was hoarded in special museums and galleries, new music was relegated to private circles. This rejection of a bourgeois concert business backfired: it was shunned by society – new music became a real message in a bottle for insiders. The destruction of the ‘Entartete Kunst (forbidden art)’ declared by the Nazis and, in connection with this, the deportation of Jewish artists became the climax of the rejection of new music and new art, which had been pushed to the sidelines.

The break-up of the middle classes into the working and the bourgeoisie after two world wars ultimately led to the separation of music and art as a whole from society. There were well-known riots at performances of concerts, ballets and operas by Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Erik Satie, Arnold Schönberg, Kurt Weill, Ernst Krenek and others. A profound change was on the horizon, a new understanding of perspective. The spearheads of ‘civilisation’ were breaking down boundaries and at the same time drawing new lines in the emerging art. It no longer wanted to be dependent on any cultural organisation. Instead, it wanted to be autonomous and independent. In line with this attitude, no traditional ties were tolerated in the compositions. Signs of subjective feelings or hints of any kind of meaning were also frowned upon.

Followers of the generation of Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and others intensified the 12-tone system into a serial one. Here, not only each of the 12 tones, but every sounding parameter is integrated into a serial construction. For most listeners, the real difficulty with the new music – this new music – begins with these serial compositions. The difficulty with this early serial music in particular is also the need to engage with a completely new and different listening perspective.

When the young Pierre Boulez first encountered some of Paul Klee’s paintings in an exhibition, he was fascinated by them for the rest of his life. He even planned to give the first volume of his ‘Structures’ for two pianos the title ‘On the Border of the Fruit Land’, borrowed from one of Klee’s picture titles. ‘Structures Ia’ for two pianos by Pierre Boulez from the early 1950s is not a melody with accompaniment, not a thematic-harmonic development with a climax and finale – instead, we hear pure structures, i.e. a network in which every note is related to every other.

 
The work of Paul Klee forms the centre of Pierre Boulez’s interest in the visual arts. His encounter with the artist and his work culminated in the major essay ‘Das Fruchtfeld’ (The Fertile Field), published by Paul Thévenin, in which Boulez shares his admiration for Klee’s work with the reader and also discovers the structural similarities between the works of these two artists of the century: spatial simulations, the proliferation of simple formal cells, the relationship between foreground and background, the relationship between line and space, the rhythmisation of surface. These analogies open up a double perspective from which Boulez develops a poetics of the pictorial and the compositional.

The storm has passed. The raging sky clears. The waves are calming.

Boulez’s storm, if you like, has calmed down. The young Boulez was enraged by almost everything that the music world around him was doing; you can hear this rage in his Second Piano Sonata of 1947/48, a kind of controlled demolition of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier Sonate’.

Like Paul Klee, Boulez wanted to leave Europe behind and establish a new aesthetic language with a few elements of the most sophisticated music that Europe had produced up to that point. The synthesis was achieved in 1957 with Le Marteau sans maître whose instrumentation echoes European high and folk culture (viola and guitar), other continents (percussion) and global universality (in the form of the alto flute).

But Marteau not only proclaimed the revolution, he thwarted it at the same time. The angry man had written a masterpiece. Although the work itself was directed against the norms of European musical culture, it was welcomed with open arms. A whole armada of new music ensembles emerged to present works that positioned themselves in a similar way. The instigator himself was also favourably accepted – if only because he turned out to be a remarkably distinctive conductor. Within a decade, he had conducted the most important orchestras in Europe and the USA and stood in the orchestra pit at the Bayreuth Festival.

This did not stop his creativity. While he stood at the conductor’s podium two or three times a week, he acquired a huge repertoire. The founding of IRCAM, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination acoustique/musique, which was built and equipped according to Boulez’s wishes and opened in Paris in 1977, offered a way out of this labyrinth – and led directly into the next one, that of electronic transformation. Boulez demonstrated its potential for the first time in the early 1980s with his work on Répons, which remains a work in progress to this day and forever.

In the 1990s, he reduced his commitments at IRCAM, conducted regularly again and wrote extensive works: sur Incises from 1995-98 and Dérive 2, begun in 1988 and revised again and again until 2006. Despite everything, he did not turn his back on adventure. As a conductor, he not only devoted himself to the old favourites Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartók and Ravel, he also found new paths: to a Janáček opera, to Richard Strauss. And his late work as a composer is also characterised by those typical flashes of lightning that illuminate unfamiliar territories of permanent fascination.

The storm was far from over. It still isn’t today. In the hands of conductors of the two generations that came after him, his repertoire became ours. His music continues to amaze students, academics and audiences alike. It still harbours secrets. And finally, the crucial challenge that his entire life poses to us remains: to remain curious and, where necessary, to stir up our own storms.

Photo © Gerd Eichmann

Celebrate with us from wherever you are! 100 years of Pierre Boulez in Paris, Nice, Monaco or in Baden-Baden, where Pierre Boulez settled in protest against the French Algerian policy and out of irritation at the responsible minister André Malraux’s cultural policy. Pierre Boulez lived and worked in Baden-Baden from 1959 until his death in 2016 at the age of 90.

Boulez was considered likeable, an enthusiastic concertgoer himself, someone with whom people enjoyed talking and exchanging ideas.

Earcatcher and eyecatcher under one roof. Works of art by Paul Klee emphasised the cultivated atmosphere in his house (pictured above).

His global work and his connection to the city of Baden-Baden enriched the city (world) enormously and left a lasting mark. He found his final resting place in Baden-Baden’s main cemetery.

Photo © Gerd Eichmann

Artist of the century, gentleman and visionary. He was one of those personalities who changed the world of music forever.

Lead image Pierre Boulez durante una conferencia en el Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruselas (Bélgica), el 25 de octubre de 2004 by Franganillo on Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 (edited – cropped); all other photos as credited