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A Case for Tonality in the Twentieth Century
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11217 |
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THE ARTS
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5 / 1986 |
3,029 Words |
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David Eaton
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It has been almost eighty years since Viennese composer Arnold Schonberg composed his first atonal works and began the march towards what he called "the emancipation of dissonance." By renouncing tonality as a viable means of expression, Schonberg was challenging a system of musical thought and theory which had existed for two hundred years. Schonberg's twelve-tone technique captured the imagination of a new generation of composers, and this new system of composition (and its inherent compositional rationale) was eventually to be come the most significant force behind the evolution of musical thought in the twentieth century.
Of all those whose musical lineage can be traced to Schonbergian thought, Pierre Boulez stands as a giant among his contemporaries. He is the high priest of the avant-garde, the "greatest living exponent of twentieth-century music" as proclaimed by The New York Times. Composer, conductor, administrator, lecturer--Boulez has won high praise from even his most severe detractors as an indefatigable champion of new music.
Boulez is currently the director of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in France and conductor of the Ensemble InterComtemporain, the institute's resident orchestra.
In 1970, when Boulez was music director for both the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he was asked by French President Georges Pompidou to become director of a music research institute which was to become part of a national center for contemporary art in Paris (now known as the Center Pompidou). Boulez had already been experimenting in the realm of electronic music, and the IRCAM project no doubt seemed to be the most suitable setting in which to continue this work. The relationships between live performers and computers and the synthesis of art and technology were to be the parameters in which composers, performers, and technicians would carry out their experiments, forging a new musical syntax in the process.
In March of 1974 at a world press conference, Boulez stated the philosophy and hopes of the new research center:
Our age is one of persistent, relentless, almost unbearable inquiry. In its exaltation it cuts off all retreats and bans all sanctuaries; its passion is contagions, its thirst for the unknown projects us forcefully, violently into the future; it compels us to redefine ourselves, no longer in relation to our individual functions, but to our collective necessity. Despite the skillful ruses we have cultivated in our desperate effort to make the world of the past serve our present-day needs, we can no longer elude the essential trial: that of becoming an absolute part of the present, of forsaking all memory to forge a perception without precedent, of renouncing the legacies of the past to discover undreamed of territories. Certainly a heady statement, and one in need of some perspective.
The Ensemble InterContemporain has just completed a five-city, fourteen-concert U.S. tour. Featured on the programs were a number of new works by composers who are or have been active at IRCAM. The tour and the new music have generated a great deal of interest, along with the controversy which is almost inevitable whenever contemporary music is performed. Granted, it is difficult--if not altogether impossible--to draw conclusions about an endeavor as
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