187 years total, Photo by Jon Simon

Did Elliot Carter ever babysit Pierre Boulez? It’s pos­si­ble, con­sid­er­ing that Boulez is only 85 years old this year, while Carter fin­ished his 102nd year on earth Decem­ber 11. Carter was in the audi­ence this past Mon­day at Miller The­ater for a Por­trait of the younger man. It was another one of the events at Miller that drew a packed and excited audi­ence that included, along with Carter, other com­posers and musi­cians. John Zorn and Chet Bis­cardi sat in front of me, Olga Neuwirth at the other end of my row, Sean Shep­erd milled in the crowd afterward.

Boulez is deeply impor­tant, of course, and also truly fas­ci­nat­ing. He may deny this, but he has gone through sev­eral impor­tant trans­for­ma­tions in his musi­cal career that have par­al­leled large-scale move­ments in art music in the 20th cen­tury, from extreme dog­ma­tism and musi­cal utopi­anism through the return of Roman­ti­cism. He has been on the inside of all this both as an impor­tant com­poser and con­duc­tor, and has pro­duced great music on paper and on the podium.

Boulez took Schoenberg’s ser­ial atonal­ity to the extreme, apply­ing strict, her­met­i­cally log­i­cal rules to other aspects of music, like rhythm and dynam­ics. And although he is, his­tor­i­cally, the antithe­sis of Cage, he did cre­ate a very Cageian piece, Le Marteau sans Maître , where will­ful expres­sion on the part of the com­poser and musi­cians is sub­dued almost entirely. That work was a piv­otal moment for him and for con­tem­po­rary music. It has been praised for decades, but I feel it is a bad piece of music, but a nec­es­sary one. It is com­pletely unen­joy­able, in the guise of musi­cal expres­sion it expres­sive noth­ing other than a set of rules. Yet it also shows that Schoenberg’s sys­tem and its devel­op­ments were a tech­ni­cal and aes­thetic cul-de-sac, and after it music had to back it’s way out and find new directions.

Boulez did the same, and with orches­tras, by going back­wards in time from Alban Berg, he dis­cov­ered the great works of Mahler, Bruck­ner and Wag­ner. While his results in lead­ing this music are mixed, he can pro­duce aston­ish­ing per­for­mances, espe­cially live, and has also made some of the finest record­ings of Stravin­sky and Debussy. I recall his lead­ing the Chicago Sym­phony in Petrushka a few years ago as the great­est I have ever heard that music. The Miller Por­trait was ded­i­cated to his work as a com­poser and gave exam­ples that spanned seven decades.

The ear­li­est work was 12 Nota­tions, from 1945. Anthony Che­ung played this with impec­ca­ble skill and musi­cal­ity. The pieces are sharply etched, mostly atonal but not strictly so. Atonal music is, for most peo­ple, includ­ing musi­cians, impos­si­ble to fol­low along the lines and their rep­e­ti­tion, it goes against how the ear and the mind work. The fun­da­men­tal fea­tures of melody and har­mony can­not be defined in the moment of hear­ing, so we are left with a series of events placed in time. The best of this music places them with exac­ti­tude, and this is one of Boulez’s great virtues as a com­poser; he cre­ates ten­sion and release by pro­duc­ing a feel­ing of sus­pense around when the next event will take place, and what it will be like. The Nota­tions have this virtue, and even have moments of tonal­ity. They also have a great deal of charm and wit, and as Boulez said on stage, they are strictly orga­nized but “hope­fully the audi­ence can’t hear that,” which is an impor­tant point about music that he would have denied when he first wrote the work! It should just sound good.

His intel­lec­tual charm and what is a typ­i­cal French love of trans­par­ent sound and col­ors is just under the sur­face of his music, mak­ing even the most dif­fi­cult works appeal­ing in some ways. He also writes very well for the voice, one of the few com­posers who can make atonal and dis­so­nant vocal lines plea­sur­able. The exam­ple in con­cert was two Impro­vi­sa­tions sur Mal­larmé from the 1950s, vocal music that formed the basis of one of his large scale mas­ter­pieces, Pli Selon Pli. Mary Eliz­a­beth Macken­zie sang these beau­ti­fully, with a full voice, real expres­sion and fab­u­lous pitch. She was accom­pa­nied by the cen­ter­piece group of the con­cert, the excel­lent Talea Ensem­ble with pre­cise, impres­sive lead­er­ship from con­duc­tor James Baker. The ensem­ble began and ended the evening with Boulez’s two Dérives, the first from the mid-1980s, the sec­ond orig­i­nally from that same decade but greatly revised and expanded just four years ago.

The first is light, brisk, almost Baroque in the way it builds itself from flour­ish and trills. The col­ors are crys­talline, chim­ing. It’s a tone poem, a land­scape piece, some­thing out of the Artic, with wind blow­ing across the frozen sur­face while, under­neath, geo­log­i­cal processes move slowly and pow­er­fully. The sec­ond work is enor­mous, the dura­tion of a late Roman­tic sym­phony, and a work of com­plete bril­liance. It is ultra-complex but not dense, the clar­ity and trans­parency of the score reveals how full of com­mit­ted think­ing the music is. There is some­thing going on all the time, so much polyphony that it is truly too much to digest in one hear­ing, and it is abstract, reveal­ing noth­ing about what Boulez was think­ing other than the notes and the sound. But Boulez was think­ing a great deal, and the music is the demon­stra­tion of a mind work­ing at an extremely pow­er­ful level, hold­ing and devel­op­ing mul­ti­ple ideas simul­ta­ne­ously. The flow of ideas is so fast that it approaches the level of a Cecil Tay­lor impro­vi­sa­tion, just with great orches­tra­tion. The effect, as one tries to keep track of the lines, is the cre­ation of a pleas­ant fugue state. Although there are repeated ges­tures and sec­tional ideas, it approaches Carter’s ideal of end­less, repet­i­tive music.

Every time I think of, or write that line, I do have to stop and con­tem­plate the idea of a music that does not repeat. Music is rep­e­ti­tion and change, that is how musi­cal struc­tures can be made and, usu­ally, how essen­tial ideas of ten­sion and release are con­veyed. Music is arti­fi­cial, it’s some­thing we cre­ate out of our minds and in our ears. Carter has ded­i­cated him­self for decades now to cre­at­ing music that doesn’t repeat, music that fol­lows the exter­nal flow of time rather than cre­at­ing it’s own, arti­fi­cial sense of time. I find this in con­cept, as a human being, unnerv­ing. Time is what I exist in, and I pre­fer my art to be arti­fi­cial, to be at its core an Exis­ten­tial blow against the entropy that is an inevitable fea­ture of the uni­verse. And yet here is Carter, doing the thing that every neu­ron tells me can’t be done, and doing it brilliantly.

His cur­rent out­put, a sub­stan­tial sam­ple of which is avail­able on this great set released this year, is the most sheerly enjoy­able of his career. Carter has always gone his own way, only coin­ci­den­tally with or against musi­cal fash­ion, and his indi­vid­u­al­ity has never been greater. His voice is so con­sis­tent and so clear, yet he never sounds like he is repeat­ing him­self and rework­ing his own mate­r­ial. His pieces have become shorter and, as they become ever more con­cen­trated on his idea, with it’s unfath­omable impli­ca­tions, have become sur­pris­ingly lighter. They are imp­ish, daz­zling, full of humor, but with­out wasted notes or fil­li­gree. One is left smil­ing as if he’s played a good natured prac­ti­cal joke, one where the punch line went by so quickly it may have been missed. This video gives a good exam­ple of this style:

It is per­haps impos­si­ble to deter­mine exactly what Carter is say­ing here, but it is so clear that he is say­ing some­thing worth­while, and that because it can’t be under­stood, it draws the lis­tener in. It’s as mys­te­ri­ous, abstract and absolute as music gets, and still it’s ami­able, approach­able, win­ning. Carter is really explor­ing aes­thetic pos­si­bil­i­ties that are as yet unknown in cul­tural his­tory, and the clar­ity and con­cen­tra­tion of his style, the sense that you are hear­ing exactly what he wants you to hear, comes from his aston­ish­ing cre­ative expe­ri­ence. At 102 years young, his voice is assured and mod­estly exper­i­men­tal beyond any in the his­tory of West­ern art music.

It’s an unmis­tak­able fea­ture of late style. You can hear it in a CD out this year from Noah Cre­shevsky, who has pio­neered his own unmis­tak­able style. He calls it hyper­re­al­ism, and it’s apt. Cre­shevsky works with elec­troa­coustic sources (sam­ples and instru­ments), and stitches his music together into pieces that sound like music that is just slightly inhu­man, in that it is clear, direct, has rec­og­niz­able means and struc­tures, but has a par­tic­u­lar qual­ity of the veloc­ity of events and ideas, or adapts an acoustic instru­ment in a par­tic­u­lar way, that could not actu­ally be pro­duced by a per­son phys­i­cally play­ing an instru­ment. It’s like Con­lon Nancarrow’s approach, but with an inter­est in var­ied, open-ended struc­tures. The results are as unnerv­ing as Carter’s con­cept, but exhil­a­rat­ing. The Twi­light Of The Gods is a daz­zling CD, the pieces full of rec­og­niz­able details that tickle the mind and the mem­ory, the music itself mov­ing in ways that make one dizzy. Creshevsky’s music is like rid­ing a musi­cal roller-coaster, one that has turns and drops that can’t be seen or antic­i­pated from the car. It can be exhaust­ing, but it is amaz­ing to hear, and the CD is one of the best releases of the year. It’s also a tes­ta­ment, again, to an artist whose lan­guage and craft are beyond assured.

Another com­poser who is so clear and accom­plished in his lan­guage is Ingram Mar­shall. He also has one of the year’s best release in Sep­tem­ber Canons . Here we are on, it seems, a unguided tour of the composer’s mind, with pieces that cover sev­eral of the areas he has touched on in his work; his use of elec­tron­ics to aug­ment acoustic instru­ments with great beauty, rep­re­sented by the title piece for Todd Reynolds vio­lin, his pieces that use frag­ments of his own mem­ory and expe­ri­ences via older record­ings of music, like Sibelius or vil­lage marches, as the tex­ture in which to cre­ate new per­spec­tives, music for the Gam­buh, an Indone­sian dra­matic form, and of course game­lan music, rep­re­sented here by “Wood­stone.” This last has one of the most com­pelling and beau­ti­ful com­bi­na­tions of melody and har­mony that I have ever heard, so beau­ti­ful it’s dis­turb­ing in its power. A won­der­ful collection.

Of course, the great exam­ple of late style in the arts is Beethoven, espe­cially the piano sonatas and string quar­tets. Beethoven, the great builder of musi­cal struc­tures that, with­out a wasted moment, inevitably con­veyed the lis­tener from begin­ning to end, from entrance to exit, every room and pas­sage­way with a pur­pose … this Beethoven, late in his life and deaf, with his unerr­ing knowl­edge of how sym­bols on a page trans­lated into sound and form, began to explore what strike me as deeply per­sonal thoughts and feel­ings. The musi­cal edi­fices are still unshak­ably firm, but they are more extrav­a­gant, with details, pas­sage­ways and rooms that have no other pur­pose than to add a sen­sa­tion of plea­sure, or mys­tery. There is a long debate about the mean­ing of the late string quar­tets, and to that I would add the view that much of them mean noth­ing. That for Beethoven, who had been a pub­lic com­poser, pro­duc­ing works that more and more informed the audi­ence of ideas along with music, the late music is nec­es­sar­ily inter­nal, due to his deaf­ness, but also delight­fully inter­nal. He is not only writ­ing what he hears in his inner ear but what delights his inner ear, music that makes him won­der and ques­tion and mostly mar­vel at the odd­ness of it all. The rep­u­ta­tion of the Grosse Fugue, the ini­tial finale of the Quar­tet in B-Flat Major, Op. 130, was that it was too dif­fi­cult to lis­ten to. It does begin sternly, but then it grows increas­ingly warm as Beethoven seems to enthrall him­self with how much nice music the mate­r­ial can pro­duce. Per­haps the mys­tery of this late style is that it is the sound of a man hum­ming to him­self in his pri­vate moments.

To explore that mys­tery, lis­ten to the Tokyo Quartet’s set of the late quar­tets, and also to the first two vol­umes of the Cypress String Quartet’s record­ings of the late quar­tets. Both groups of record­ings are at the high­est level, and they are quite dif­fer­ent from each other. The Tokyo is a vet­eran group, their sound, espe­cially in the bril­liant Har­mo­nia Mundi SACD sound, is bright, pol­ished but not smoothed over. Their tem­pos and play­ing style is lighter, they have a focus on ensem­ble una­nim­ity of pur­pose, giv­ing the feel­ing that they have clearly deter­mined the thing they will express and then doing so with great style. Their set is full of energy, bravura in every way. The Cypress is a younger group, their sound is rougher and darker (both types of sound are great in this music). Their play­ing is more delib­er­ate, like they are think­ing out loud, and at times they seem to be delib­er­ately giv­ing an inde­pen­dent voice to each of their mem­bers, explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the music and con­fi­dent it will bear them safely to a con­clu­sion — this strikes me as a nat­u­rally bril­liant approach to these pieces, with their will­ful­ness and depth. Where the Tokyo excites with beauty, the Cypress excites with a thrilling kind of grav­i­tas, a will­ing­ness to con­tem­plate what is hap­pen­ing in front of them while they play the music. Their CDs have superb sound, and I’m eagerly await­ing the final install­ment. Both sets would be a valu­able part of any Beethoven col­lec­tion, and with their qual­ity and dif­fer­ences make great ‘bookends.’