classical

Composer Pierre Boulez, A Revered Iconoclast, Has Died At 90

Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor whose career spanned from the avant-garde post-World War II era to the computer age, has died, according to the French culture ministry. He was 90. Boulez famously challenged his peers and his audience to rethink their ideas of sound and harmony.

In his music, Boulez often created rich and contrasting layers that were built on musical traditions from Asia and Africa, and on the 12-tone technique pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg — as in his 1955 work, Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master).

“I see music as a kind of continuity, like a big tree,” Boulez told NPR in 2000. “Of course there are many branches, many different directions. I think music is in constant evolution, and there is nothing absolutely fixed and rigidly determined.”

NPR’s Tom Huizenga cited the quote in a piece last year examining the composer’s rebellious roots: Boulez once disrupted a Stravinsky concert, and later said that opera’s problems could be solved by blowing up opera houses.

Boulez also had a knack for polemics — for instance, The Guardian referenced this quote: “anyone who has not felt… the necessity of the dodecaphonic [12-tone] language is OF NO USE.”

But the oft-repeated idea that his music was centered in mathematics is a bit overblown, Boulez told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 2005.

Saying that a musical language always includes both rational and irrational parts, he noted, “What I tried to find, that’s freedom — but a freedom which is based on discipline.”

Boulez, who won 26 Grammy awards, had a prodigiously broad musical reach. In the 1970s, he founded the IRCAM music and science research center at the Pompidou Center in Paris. That’s where, in 1984, he conducted music from Frank Zappa’s album The Perfect Stranger.

Born in 1925, Boulez studied at the Paris Conservatory under Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz, before embarking on a career that perpetually sought new and modern approaches to music.

He emerged as a conductor in the late 1950s, and for a stretch of years in the 1970s, he served as both the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and as the music director of the New York Philharmonic. He also had a long relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which in 2006 named him conductor emeritus.

Discussing Boulez’s work on the podium back in 2010, Fresh Air’s Lloyd Schwartz wrote:

“Boulez is famous for his amazing ear. He lets you hear every detail. But there are two other Boulez qualities he isn’t often given credit for. One is his innate and effortless sense of the right style. In Boulez’s hands, Haydn’s symphony — for a change — actually sounds Viennese.”

As for his famous statement that opera houses should be blown up, Boulez told Fresh Air in 2005 that he was only joking. The headlines that followed, he said, missed the humor in the statement.

“That was very funny to me,” Boulez said. “A number of times I have heard this quote. I thought I would have said only one sentence in my life.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

WDAV To Broadcast Two Live Concerts This Weekend From Brevard Music Festival

JULY 22, 2009 – WDAV 89.9 Classical Public Radio is logging quite a few miles this summer in pursuit of the best classical music being made at the Carolinas’ summer music festivals. In May, WDAV took its listeners to Charleston for all 17 days of Spoleto Festival USA. Last week, WDAV spent time at Greensboro’s Eastern Music Festival. This weekend, the 37-foot long WDAV Broadcast RV, affectionately known to staffers as “Camper Van Beethoven,” makes a stop at the picturesque Brevard Music Festival in the mountains of western North Carolina.

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Where are the Best Small Concerts?

by James Hogan
Back not too long ago when I was in college, I would sometimes spend Friday nights in a somewhat Bohemian way. My friend Nick rented a house on the top of a mountain, and I would drive up and start the weekend there, drinking good beer, as he would set up an impromptu jazz concert in his living room. He kept his drum set there, and there was a Rhodes piano, and his other friends–a bass player, guitarist, two sax guys named Jim and Eric, and maybe a singer would come up, light cigarettes, and play for hours.
Yes, I realize my undergraduate experience was somewhat different.

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Christopher Warren-Green and His English Splendor

By James Hogan
The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra’s performances this weekend came under the direction of Christopher Warren-Green, one of eight guest conductors who could replace departing music director Christof Perick. Given that my last post focused on a visiting conductor accused of poor conducting, I decided to watch Warren-Green during Friday night’s CSO show.
Prior to the concert I asked my good friend Austin Greene, a conductor and teacher who lives in Durham, just what good conducting is. Can you qualify good conducting? Or is good conducting somewhat mystical, easily able to escape black and white terms?

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