Thanks for another fascinating post, which provides further proof that the Boulez of the 1980s was much less averse to moments of implied tonality, however fleeting, than the Boulez of the 1950s – there are loads of ’em littered throughout this piece, it seems to me…
i know what you mean, Chris, but i wonder whether this idea of “implied tonality” is actually a corollary of what i referred to as the ‘intangibility’ of the music. When Boulez breaks up the surface so much with trills, fluttertongue, tremolandi — and Dérive I makes the point even more strongly — this has a way of damping down dissonance to the extent that, to my ear at least, there’s more than a passing semblance of consonance. Either way, you’re right that this is entirely typical of later Boulez; who would have thought, in the mid-1950s, that there was a sensual impressionist lurking within him…?!
In order to gain access to said sensual impressionist, I guess he first had to shrug off the straitjacket that (by his own admission on at least one occasion) his earlier insistence on dodecaphony-at-all-costs had forced him into. Whatever one calls it, the result, as you say, is a kind of “dance of ambiguity” around various euphonious possibilities; there’s one particular recurring refrain whose real-or-listener-generated “chord progression” (commas both inverted and non-inverted, like parentheses and dashes, are nigh-on impossible to avoid in a discussion like this!) sounds, to these ears, not a million miles removed from something that Holst, say, might have dreamt up. Whether the latter-day Boulez is, accordingly, more of a follower than a leader (a list of composers who have exploited this ambiguity in similar ways over the decades – or centuries?! – would be very long indeed!) is a moot point, but, either way, I’m very much looking forward to hearing the other Boulez pieces in your series-within-a-series.
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Thanks for another fascinating post, which provides further proof that the Boulez of the 1980s was much less averse to moments of implied tonality, however fleeting, than the Boulez of the 1950s – there are loads of ’em littered throughout this piece, it seems to me…
i know what you mean, Chris, but i wonder whether this idea of “implied tonality” is actually a corollary of what i referred to as the ‘intangibility’ of the music. When Boulez breaks up the surface so much with trills, fluttertongue, tremolandi — and Dérive I makes the point even more strongly — this has a way of damping down dissonance to the extent that, to my ear at least, there’s more than a passing semblance of consonance. Either way, you’re right that this is entirely typical of later Boulez; who would have thought, in the mid-1950s, that there was a sensual impressionist lurking within him…?!
In order to gain access to said sensual impressionist, I guess he first had to shrug off the straitjacket that (by his own admission on at least one occasion) his earlier insistence on dodecaphony-at-all-costs had forced him into. Whatever one calls it, the result, as you say, is a kind of “dance of ambiguity” around various euphonious possibilities; there’s one particular recurring refrain whose real-or-listener-generated “chord progression” (commas both inverted and non-inverted, like parentheses and dashes, are nigh-on impossible to avoid in a discussion like this!) sounds, to these ears, not a million miles removed from something that Holst, say, might have dreamt up. Whether the latter-day Boulez is, accordingly, more of a follower than a leader (a list of composers who have exploited this ambiguity in similar ways over the decades – or centuries?! – would be very long indeed!) is a moot point, but, either way, I’m very much looking forward to hearing the other Boulez pieces in your series-within-a-series.