Pierre Boulez - Piano Sonata No. 1

[@stueystuey1962]

Somewhere toward the end, I hear the influence of schoenberg op 25. I take that back. There is recognizable influence of sch throughout even including the first measures.

[@johnappleseed8369]

Very exciting piece!

[@BrianJosephMorgan]

Superb.

[@gerardbegni2806]

I always found that there was something fascinating in this sonata in which Boulez is not still himself and where he uses the serail technique in a very personal way with a renewed sensitivity of his own. .

[@stueystuey1962]

In other words this sonata is an inside joke and i just don't get it....yet. i will keep trying, similarly austere works have reached their floruit in ny ears. This one not.

[@gerardbegni2806]

@@stueystuey1962Not exactly, I even should say absolutely not without offending you. This sonata is by no ways a joke. Actually, the Webern's music was so fascinating, so PerFect and if I may say that so closed to itself that having it as roots to develop quite innovative music was a hard job Indeed. Dallapiccola, for instanc, succeeded but he lost. a lot of Wbern's purity. Boulez chose a more demanding way, which explains that this sonata includes much from Webern, but that the joung Boulez beins to clearly appear without being himself fully.

[@stueystuey1962]

@@gerardbegni2806 no offense, and never fear to correct me. All I'm saying or rather acknowledging is that the staggering importance accorded to this sonata eludes me. I can sit and listen to say Carters Piano Concerto or Babbitts Clarinet Concerto or Schoenberg op 25 and be mesmerized and transported to wonderful places of the mind. Boulez Sonata 1 just always misses me; i cant grab onto it. Quite frankly both Boulez and Stockhausen are very highly regarded and left to me i think they are grossly overrated on almost every level from intention to realization.

[@gerardbegni2806]

@@stueystuey1962 Dear friend, For sure you are quite free not to grab unto scores by Boulez or Stockausen. This is a matter of personal feeling. For instance, in romantic music, having tried for over 50 years, I never succeeded in finding any kind of pleasure in the 4th Tchaïkovski's Symphony, which is in my mind the apex of musical bad taste. But in my maind, writing "they are grossly overrated on almost every level from intention to realization" is partly a technical point of view that I don't share. In a quite objective way, the scores by Boulez are very carfully built and written, sometimes in two versions which are in my mind of equal interest. This is the result of objective analysis. In terms of 'intention', for instance, Mallarmé rises to artists a challenge which goes by far beyond symbolims and poetry. Ravel illustated it Perfectly within the tonal system (notably extended). But Mallarmé's art invites to go beyond that system whike keeping a very strict musical language and aerchitecure; "Pli selon pli" Perfectly fulfills this challenging goal, in my opinion. It took me yers (if not décades) to grab it in a satisfactory way. Stockausen for sure had stupid ideas, for instance in his "Helicapter quartet": by Jove, wnat does it add to music to fly the 4 intruments of the string quartet in 4 f different helocoters and to record the noise of the engine with the individual part of the string instrumant onboard? This is bullshit. But listen to his first Kalvierstûcke, or to 'Gruppen' or 'Carrée' interms of orcheter, or "Zeitmasse' in terms of chambre music: this is quite another story? Thne very old Starvinsky, who had a quite complex relationshiop with Boulez, considered "Gruppen" as " the best score ever written in the 10 last years - and rather convincingly developed his position. ------- Keep safe !

[@stueystuey1962]

While I still for the most part ignore Stockhausen Boulez I listen to regularly from Piano Sonata 1, various Orchestral works and now the String Quartet i am much better able to place Boulez squarely in the tradition of much of my favorite composers including but not limited to Carter, Babbitt and Maderna. To this day whether i consciously choose to listen to Stockhausen or if in the midst of an autoplay sequence one of his works streams somewhere in the course of listening i get annoyed for one reason or the other. Other composers where this happens include Haas and Manoury. Literally a visceral negative reaction.

[@rugbyslug]

this is like the theme-song to my horrid commute.

[@pelodelperro]

Sounds like a great commute.

[@sleepylagoon1310]

Count me in , "All aboard".

[@theomartin6238]

This sound like avant-garde jazz :)

[@MrGer2295]

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing!

[@Matt_Kole]

MrGer2295 compare this to anything Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven touched. people like Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Stravinsky, those are the good contemporary composers

[@davidt8657]

Amazing... Very truly interesting music. Enlightening...

[@robertwalker3087]

If I like the performance, does it make me an idil worshipper?

[@pelodelperro]

You bet!

[@odedfried-gaon2880]

cool

[@stueystuey1962]

When Kafka read portions of his work the metamorphosis to his buddies he would laugh so hard that he hyperventilated.

[@nemo-nb3gh]

interpretive free form dance time

[@reiinsomnia5379]

Philistines... Philistines everywhere...

[@nandocordeiro5853]

The guy who performed this work must have a phd in “piano playing seizures”

[@stueystuey1962]

As a Philistine, I'm assuming you are using the term as a pejorative, and further that you do not like this music? You are wrong and betray yourself as an immature listener. Multiple listens reveals a cohesive work of genius. Admittedly Boulez is slightly less important, as a composer, than a few others but only a few. Work of genius. All you have to do is listen.

[@nigeluno36]

Aleatoric music!

[@frentom]

Is it?

[@kappsapp583]

no it is serial music (12 tone )

[@manuelmolina1622]

no 12 tone, it is integral serialism

[@gerardbegni2806]

Integral serialism implies 12 tone.

[@pedropuyol91]

It is, in fact, the entire opposite xD It's thoroughly thougth music. Inspired by Webern and Schoenberg

[@michaeltan1315]

tbh this isn't a good interpretation... Aimard's recording is worlds better

[@41BobDylan]

We went from the likes of Beethoven to this...

[@pelodelperro]

Carl 90 Yes. This is indeed deeply inspired in Beethoven...

[@jooch_exe]

Amen. After the great war and rise of 'democracy', royalty and aristocracy disappeared almost overnight. They hired many great composers, without them composers found themselves out of work. Many moved to America looking for opportunities, the result of that is very well portrayed in this music. Slowly composers got employed at Hollywood, so modern classical music is mostly found in movies.

[@mrnarason]

Carl 90 You say "We" as if you and I were the composers.

[@stueystuey1962]

Nah, there were numerous stops in between. Brahms, Reger, Debussy, Prokofiev, and Schoenberg and still others. And what followed is often much better. I suspect your comment is pejorative and love the way in which the commentors spinned it into a positive. An indication imo of the high quality of listeners and their ability to control the discussion without going negative or troll. Bye Felicia.

[@Bojanmarsetic]

This experiment with music was made in means of the question if composition could be purely based on math and intentionally without emotions, therefore dont be silly and take this as real music. It is like a painter would paint lines in the pitch of a note. It was just an experiment. Music without emotions could be some other name of sound but not music as we call it. Read about dodecaphonic serial composition.

[@gerardbegni2806]

Who decided that there are no emotions behind this music? Boulez studied in depth such composers as Debussy and Webern, his musical sensitivity is probably different from yours, but you have no right to deny that it exists.

[@Matt_Kole]

Janne Seppänen because art is the expression of a human idea, which inherently has emotional bias. Even if AI wrote the music, humans (who have emotion) coded the AI. And emotion must still exist in the mind of the listener

[@denisgeerts4970]

It's music, not math

[@rockysmitt]

When I was younger (about 30 or 40 years ago), this kind of music used to be debated quite passionately. Hardly anyone cares anymore, but you still occasionally see little embers of the old fire smolder. Roughly speaking, there was a small group of True Believers in "new music" who passionately defended it, believed it was as beautiful as any of the great music of the past. Then there was a larger group of devotees of classical music of the 19th or 18th century, who regarded this kind of music as a radical departure, devoid of beauty, sophistication, or emotion, and perhaps not even music at all. The new music people regarded the classical devotees as closed minded and uninformed, while the classical devotees regarded the new music lovers as perverse and/or phony, or just lacking any real artistic sense. I myself was more on the new music side, but didn't agree completely with either group. First, anyone who thinks Boulez was musically untrained or an artistic light weight is quite mistaken. If anything, he was more accomplished than the vast majority of musicians. Also, it's not true at all that there's no emotion in his music. There are very clear contrasts between many hues of emotion, intensity, and aggression. Also, this kind of music is not easy to memorize and has some very real performance and interpretive challenges, so I do not think it is fair to regard it as simple-minded or shallow. On the other hand, I don't think it's such a big mystery why a casual listener would go away thinking it sounds like a child randomly batting at the keys. The composer is deliberately avoiding the sorts of devices that most listeners primarily use to make sense of music, such as repetition, a rhythmic pulse, adherence to a set of harmonies familiar and pleasing to the average listener, step-wise melodic movement through familiar musical scales, familiar musical forms, an apparent rationale for changes of mood and intensity, etc. If you read music notation, you can see pretty easily from the score that the music is devoid of these things and the ear won't decode the structures on the page very directly, so the music won't sound intelligently structured. Why new music composers seemed to tie their hands behind their backs is a whole other long story, which you can read about in many places. On the other hand, you can also see that it's not completely devoid of structure, so if your ear tunes in to the right things, there could be interest. How much interest really comes down to personal taste and familiarity. I wouldn't know how to quantify a comparison with more popular styles, but I feel that roughly speaking, compared to a typical 19th century sonata by, say, Beethoven, the amount of emotion and musical complexity in this sonata is arguably about the same, or, at least not *too* much less, but I hear them as in different sonic places. Similarly, compared to a typical top 40 pop song, I would say that, in some sense, there's *at least* as much going on in this piece, arguably much more, but they're really totally different animals, even more different than with Beethoven. I wouldn't say that makes either of them invalid as music though. I would challenge you to listen to this piece about a dozen times over the course of a week or so before completely dismissing it as "not real music." I doubt you'll fall in love with it, but you might well find some value in it.

[@paulhoffmann3405]

@@rockysmitt Thank you very much for this enlightning piece. I am no musician, I even cant read notes but I have to say this music grows on me. You can feel some gestures there, different worlds of sound, contrasts who are presented as completely distant from each other at first before coming together. And the idea to build music upon contrasts is a pretty old tradition in terms of western music I think. I think the music is on some level very abstract. Its about sound and pure emotion like rhythm, gestures and an intellectual concept behind it. And I think its deliberately not easy to listen to, its completely bare of any "pretty" sounds... and that is probably a very honest approach for a young composer right after the horrors of World War 2, the Holocaust, a time, where an entire civilization crashed down. On the other hand Boulez didnt seem to be completely controlled by the 12-tone technique by Schönberg. He wanted to be free. So its very interesting music. I really start to like it more although Boulez later pieces are more emotional and accessible to a certain degree.

[@lugojeanullugojeanul5461]

Music for the horror movies!