Pierre Boulez

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There is nothing like a dogmatist. At the age of 86, Pierre Boulez is still arch-charioteer of the musical vanguard, as well as being the world's leading conductor. His compositions are a rigorous and dogmatically modern way of looking at sound. I like his chamber composition Répons in particular: it presents a definite idea of sound that is quite separate from what came before. While it may go too far, entering the realm of the unlistenable at times, it does so wholesale and coherently. The performance was recorded at IRCAM, the Institute he founded with a huge financial endowment from the French government, and it uses all the insights and research from that Institute.

Boulez does not step over the line - that would be too puny - instead he barges through and occupies his own territory, with a Gallic lack of interest in whether or not you come with him. He is not a wheedling modern-influenced composer, but a muscular modernist. The CD box even gives instructions on how to listen to it (with a stereo, not with headphones).

Boulez is a man of such force of opinion that it strains his face into deep lines. It was curious, then, that in the edition of Diapason magazine in which I saw this photograph of him he seemed washed out in the rain. In the first image, I have painted him in watercolour and washed it out. That runs contrary to his character. The second image, a quick line drawing, is more representative.

A recording of the first part of Répons

 

Michael Nyman

If the music of Michael Nyman can be criticised for relying too heavily on a comfortable Western tonalism, then it can also be praised for the same. His prospectus, in building his music on the Classicist European symphonic canon in which he was trained, is quite unusual in New Music, which is about pushing boundaries. But it is in a sense wholly honest and coherent. He does not dissect away some part of African or Indian music and slot it into Western music. Though I do not criticise those who do - and I love Glass and Reich - I think that his minimalism is in that respect more cogent, if less ground-breaking. Western music has always been enriched from its frontiers; indeed, Brahms and Bartók did that. But it also needs to revise itself from within, in an elemental way, and Nyman has been contributing to that for decades.

Nyman's very occidental minimalism is by its nature introspective, and that is valuable. Apparently, he found his musical style when he played Don Giovanni's catalogue aria in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis. There is something powerful in that: taking Mozart's Don Giovanni - the work that Kierkegaard said was "of total perfection" - and bending it through rock and roll, which is just as tall a totem of Western culture.

In Re Don Giovanni - Introspective Western Music

The illustration is a quick one, in Indian ink and watercolour, that I did based on a photograph I saw.

Shostakovich

Before I heard Shostakovich, I never knew that music could be sarcastic, or that it could be bluffing. I had never considered the possibilty of a disingenuous melody. He is probably my favourite composer. His famous Fifth was the first symphony I bought, and each of the dozens of times I have played it in the years since, I have learned something.

In Leningrad in 1937, they wept when they heard the Largo of his Fifth Symphony. They say that, under the artistic tyranny of socialist realism and the real-life enforced optimism of the Great Purge, no one had dared to show sorrow, for fear that it looked like counter-revolutionary action. The Gulags had dispatched or then still contained over ten million - everyone in Russia had been wrecked by the Terror - but they had had no chance to grieve. But under Mravinsky's baton that night, in D minor, for the first time in years they had permission to cry.

To boot, Shostakovich wrote a tonal work that satisfied the regime, who had made him fear for his life after his dissonant Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District went down badly with apparatchiks. They called it decadent and anti-popular, even counter-revolutionary, and that was a serious charge: Stalin was displeased, and Shostakovich was denounced in Pravda. But the critics were largely satisfied with the Fifth. Alexei Tolstoy, the leading critic in the Soviet Union, famously called it "a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism", but to the audience it was anything but.

At first hearing, of course, the symphony can sound like honest tonal music, a Mahler past its time, which is how Shostakovich is often criticised. It could be heard as a heroic socialist realist work for the New Soviet Man. But the composer wrote a lie so he could say what he had to say. So much of his music is like that. I love its imperfection: it is so human, and behind its dishonesty is a raw, bleeding honesty. Shostakovich used to sleep in the hallway with his bag packed so that his family would not be harmed when he was taken away to the Gulag, and you can hear that bitterness and fear in music. You can hear the injustice and the frustration.

In his String Quartet No. 8, you can hear his deepest sorrow and profoundest self-loathing as he joined the Party after so many years of resisting. You can hear in his Leningrad Symphony his hatred of Stalin and Lenin: how disturbed he was by seeing his town turning into "St Leningrad", as he once called it. He took the artifice and the angry machinations and put it in notes and mocked it, and used it to write from his soul.

Of course, the Party blocked and frustrated him, and it wrecked him. It is hard to imagine having one's life so strangulated and macerated. At every point in his life, his music tells of how that savaged him to the depths of his soul, because although he was sarcastic and satirical, they took their toll on him. Shostakovich wished that he had been able to write what he wanted, and a man as talented as him could well have produced unparalleled music. But in his oeuvre is the most human and soulful and thinking of music, and though he was beaten, he has that as his legacy.