Leon Kirchner and 'a Boo for the Boos of Boulez'

Known throughout his career for his controversial stances and outspoken polemics, in 1952 Pierre Boulez aroused considerable ire with his essay “Schoenberg is Dead”, which denigrated the aging composer for being too conservative in comparison to Webern.

In 1963 Leon Kirchner was in his second year of teaching at Harvard. Despite his discomfort with Boulez’ attack on Schoenberg, he was prepared to offer camaraderie to the Frenchman during his own sojourn in Cambridge. During the following years Boulez became increasingly active and successful as an orchestral conductor and remained in contact with Kicrhner. Robert Riggs takes up the story in his recently published biography, Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher:

In January 1969 Boulez’ appointment as music director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London was announced, and in the spring of that year he came to the United States again, this time as a guest conductor with the orchestras in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, and New York. Boulez agreed to be interviewed in Boston by Joan Peyser for a feature article to be published in the New York Times. During the interview over a long lunch at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Boulez became quite expansive, providing Peyser with numerous quotable but also controversial remarks for her article, which appeared in the Arts and Leisure Section on Sunday, March 9, 1969. The headline, “A Fighter From Way Back” (supplied by the Times editors), already gives a premonition of the article’s thrust: an attack by Boulez on various aspects of American musical life.

According to Boulez, composers who publish in Perspectives of New Music “think they are great scientists. They are not. I know great scientists and they possess invention and imagination. Composers who publish in this journal never discuss important questions of choice and decision. They write only about putting different things together. This is not an esthetic point of view. It’s what I call a ‘cashier’s point of view.’’’ Addressing the perceived rivalry between European and American composers, Boulez asserted: “The Americans do operate under a severe handicap, of course; they have no strong personalities in the field. If they were strong enough to establish their personality on the world, they would see that no national favoritism exists. . . . They have no one in America as good as Hans Werner Henze, and that is not setting your sights very high. A composer the stature of Stockhausen they have not.” Boulez also offered a diagnosis of what caused this alleged impoverished state of music in America:

European music in not connected with the university. There is no ivory castle for us. But here, the university people and practical musicians ignore each other. It’s a very unhealthy state of affairs. I do not like this pedantic approach. I do not like scholars who bring only Death to music. The university situation is incestuous. It is one big marriage in which the progeny deteriorates, like the progeny of old and noble families. The university musician is in a self-made ghetto, and what is worse, he likes it there.

The night before “A Fighter From Way Back” appeared in the New York Times, Boulez was a guest at the home of Leon and Gertrude Kirchner in Cambridge. Although Boulez obviously knew that the interview/article would be coming out soon, if not the very next day, he was, according to Kirchner, urbane, charming, and completely relaxed that evening. After the very pleasant dinner party on Saturday, the Sunday paper brought Kirchner a rude and totally unexpected shock. Boulez’s inflammatory and judgmental remarks, the sting of which was augmented by his deceptively collegial demeanor the previous evening, disturbed Kirchner. In response, three weeks later he sent a lengthy letter to the editor of the Times.

Peyser had begun her article by recounting how Boulez, as a twenty-year-old, had booed a performance of Stravinsky’s music in Paris. Boulez explained that his action had been directed not at Stravinsky, but rather at those in the music establishment who considered him a God and an idol. Thus, Boulez had booed Stravinsky in order to draw attention to Schoenberg, and eventually he was successful in doing so. Then, a few years later, after Schoenberg’s serial techniques had attracted a wide following, Boulez attacked him in order to promote Webern.

Kirchner prefaced his letter with an extract from Peyser’s article that recounted this story of Boulez’s boos. Then, in the manner of Robert Schumann—who divided his persona between two fictitious interlocutors in order to debate musical issues in his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik—Kirchner launched a satiric dialogue between “Leon” and “Kirchner” who discussed their reactions to the Boulez interview:

LEON: What did you think of “A Fighter from Way Back?”
KIRCHNER: Boulez lost his “cool.” He led with his right. Perhaps he should confine himself to leading Booing Groups.
L: Have you ever led a Booing Group?
K: Well, to be perfectly frank, I’ve booed Boulez’s Boos, not that I was attacking him. I have the greatest respect for him. I was only attacking the establishment which considers Boos “the God, the Idol, the Only Truth.” I’ll be honest with you. I did it to draw attention to Babbitt’s Boos. However, I soon realized I would have to defl ower Babbitt’s Boos with a dwindling supply of my own. Not that I didn’t respect him but I thought it was time to draw some attention to Carter. But really, I don’t want to be drawn into this, it can only lead to Boo dropping. I’d have to mention so many.

The Times decided to use “A Boo for the Boos of Boulez” as the headline for Kirchner’s letter.

After addressing several points in this manner, Kirchner discontinued his humorous repartee in favor of a traditional and serious examination of one the most troubling issues raised by Boulez: the role of universities in American musical life. Having been uncomfortable for many years with the increasing emphasis on positivistic approaches in the cultivation of music within academia, Kirchner proposed that the root of the problem was to be found not with the universities but with the individuals who reside there.

As an example of a rare scholar who recognized this condition, he cited German musicologist Friedrich Blume, who, in a recent guest lecture at Harvard, had given “a vigorous polemic ‘against the encroachment of philological methods’ which ‘pushed aside concern with interpretation, meaning and technique’ to the point where ‘scholars forget that they have to do with music at all.’” In agreement with Boulez’s low assessment of much academic writing about music, Kirchner maintained that “composers can, apparently, demonstrate brilliantly that they are subject to the same restrictive and essentially trivial involvements as some of their colleagues in musicology.”

Broadening the discussion beyond music, Kirchner touched on aspects of the relationship between the arts and the sciences that had concerned him in “Notes on Understanding.” He maintained,

What affects the sciences affects the arts: the inability to distinguish between the operation of a calculus and the operation of human language forms. The enormous success of technology in the solution of a variety of soluble problems has made this inability to distinguish operations more difficult, and the result is that profoundly important areas of activity are suppressed and vanish in favour of a monolithic approach to what appears to be all there is. We are caught in a struggle of methodologies; control and prediction of human behavior vs. the demonstration of human competence and creativity.

Buttressing his position from an unlikely source, and at the same time tying it in to current political issues, Kirchner noted with irony that

we must turn to Vice-Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (the New York Times, June 9, 1967) to be told that “war is not quantifiable,” that human life is not a factor in mathematical cost-effectiveness equations that are fed into computers because there is no way to assign intrinsic value and fi nite proportions to it . . . that “our society is threatened by any man who knows method but not meaning, technique but not principle . . . any man who depreciates wisdom, experience and intuition.”

In response to Boulez’s charge that many American composers, in their fixation on systems and analysis, devalue or even ignore the parameters of imagination, choice, and aesthetics, Kirchner admitted,

In our recent craze and almost exclusive involvement with the “substantive,” we tend to fossilize our art and repudiate its function. One of the wonderful things about Schoenberg—whom Boulez not long ago likened to an unfortunate Moses who never got to the promised 12-tone land—is the contest between abstract rule (from time immemorial a catalyst) and sheer musical urge. The resultant modifications, or “mutants” if you like, are exciting, a result which would be statistically unlikely without the two. At all points, there is a choice to be made and it is the memory bank operating in the continuing present and all that the memory stores of experience and of contemplation that guides the choice.

We talk a great deal about systems analysis, determination of rules and so forth, but in the process we forget the act of total involvement, of physical and spiritual play. Rules are valuable and with a proper understanding we can construct models from which invaluable information may be inferred. But the adequacy of a rule is entirely dependent upon highly refined and sensitive observation and, given an adequate rule, we must also understand that the variables (a most productive area) are difficult to “cover.” When we grasp a fact by describing it, there is no reason to assume that we have understood the total phenomenon.

Leon Kirchner is available from all good booksellers, both virtual and real, or in case of difficulty, direct from our website.

Every Day is a Good Day

This is the title of a travelling exhibition of prints, watercolours and drawings by John Cage that will open at the Baltic Centre in Gateshead in mid-June, continuing on to locations in Cambridge, Huddersfield, Glasgow and Bexhill on Sea over the course of the following eighteen months. Echoing Cage’s use of chance, the exhibition will be selected and installed using a computerised version of the I-Ching.

Peter Dickinson’s volume of interviews, CageTalk: Dialogues with & about John Cage, remains essential reading. To celebrate the opening of Every Day, we offer the following short excerpt from Dickinson’s interview with Cage himself:

PD I’d like to try to see whether you feel the Zen involvement needs understanding by those who want to account—in a very Western, logical way—for what you’ve done since about 1950.

JC I’m not sure. I’m thinking, for instance, of a very close friend with whom I feel utter sympathy—Morton Feldman. I would say Morty has no closeness to Zen. His closeness is to Western psychology, don’t you think?

PD Yes, I do. But he wouldn’t go all the way with you in taking his own tastes and desires, as you call it, out of his music.

JC No, he wouldn’t at all. But he feels very close to my work. He also has, so to speak, as deep an understanding and experience of my work as anyone. And yet he has no experience of Zen.

PD The golden opportunity to get yourself out of your music was the discovery of the I Ching?

JC I was first introduced to the I Ching by Lou Harrison before I went to Seattle, and it made no impression on me, but I remembered it. And later, Christian Wolff brought me a copy that his father had just published— of the Bollingen edition, a translation from the German of Wilhelm by Cary Baynes. At that point, when I saw it—I’m speaking now of the chart with the hexagrams—I suddenly understood how to write the Music of Changes.

PD When Feldman called out, “You’ve hit it?”

JC Yes.

PD A kind of eureka?

JC [laughs] We were at a point with his work, my work, and Christian Wolff’s work with the charmed help of David Tudor—a very intoxicating point—where things were happening quickly and richly.

PD It must have been wonderful to come across a performer like David Tudor?

JC Yes. Another great moment that I enjoyed was the close association with Merce, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. The four of us were often together.

PD Would you account for 4’33”, which everybody knows and talks about in terms of Rauschenberg’s completely white and completely black canvases or of the Buddhas who, when asked to make a statement, said absolutely nothing?

JC All of that. Actually, I wrote a text, which has never been published, called “A Composer’s Confessions,” and in it I described the silent piece before I wrote it. But I didn’t give myself the right to write it until I saw the white paintings of Bob’s.

PD You’ve said quite often that 4’33” is the piece of yours that you like best.

JC Yes.

PD Why?

JC Well, I listen to it all the time! [extended laughs] I wish you’d ask me such questions all the time. [more laughs]

PD You listen to it all the time by your selection [Cage: Yes], but in a concert hall it’s given to a paying audience.

JC The pieces that are given [laughs], that aren’t that, are a terrible interruption! [extended laughs]

PD So all sound is an interruption of the silence?

JC I consider it my responsibility not to interrupt that, you see.

PD But you’ve also said there’s no such thing as silence?

JC True. But there are, in fact, things to be heard when you listen to nothing— to no music.

PD This is now fascinatingly logical in the Zen manner but illogical in the European manner. Was it something of this sort—your insistence on getting yourself out of your music—that caused difficulties with Boulez when you were quite close at one point?

JC I suppose so. We had a very interesting correspondence; I think ultimately it will be published.

PD Some of it was very technical?

JC Oh yes. Some of his letters to me were just absolutely marvellous in terms of information. His handwriting was so very small; mine was scrawly and large. He wrote on pale blue, transparent airmail paper—on both sides—so the writing on one side affects the reading of the writing on the other side. It was very difficult. We used to get microscopes—because it was in French besides. [laughs] We were struggling to understand it.

As we have had to omit Peter Dickinson’s footnotes from this post, we should point out that ‘A Composer’s Confessions’ and Cage’s correspondence with Boulez have since been published. It is also worth mentioning that Cage did not always choose 4’33” as his favourite piece. Nearly twenty years ago Dickinson was asked, by a leading music magazine, to review a ‘recording’ of the piece. The CD was fully packed, complete with booklet notes, but 4’33” was the only work on the disc. Dickinson offered to review it with the normal heading, then a blank space and his name at the end. Sadly the editor declined.

CageTalk is available from your favourite bookseller.

‘Que la musique sonne’

There are few composers - at least among those who lived beyond their three score years and ten - whose musical output can be contained on two CDs. Edgard Varèse, whose work is celebrated over three evenings at the Southbank Centre this weekend, completed and published a relatively modest amount of music, but his influence on the work of a wide range of musicians continues - 45 years after his death.

Anyone captivated by the range of Varèse’s music - whether through the Southbank or Sage, Gateshead, celebrations or Riccardo Chailly’s award-winning recordings - should investigate Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary edited by the Paul Sacher Foundation’s Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann. ‘No-one interested in this composer, or indeed the 20th century modernist adventure as a whole, should be without [this book],’ wrote Bayan Northcott in BBC Music Magazine in 2006.

Exquisitely illustrated with material from the Varèse archive, the book contains essays by a range of contributors. There are, of course, pieces on the major compositions, alongside others on the lost early works - destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire; the influence of jazz on his work (it is said that Charlie Parker begged Varèse to teach him composition); the truth about that mythical phone call from a teenage Frank Zappa; his influence on American music; the Whitney connection and his New York patrons; even the art collection of Varèse and his wife, Louise.

One of the most thrilling pieces is ‘Converging Lives: Sixteen Years with Varèse’ by his pupil, assistant and music executor, Chou Wen-Chung. In 1937, Chou was a refugee at 14,

Somehow, despite the chaos and the smell of death around me, I learned of Ravel’s passing, and it dawned upon me that not all composers were dead historical figures. Transfixed by the idea that there were actually ‘living’ composers, I resolved to be one myself.

Some years later, having studied music at the New England Conservatory, Chou found himself in New York, searching for a teacher. He met Colin McPhee who told him, ‘Varèse is your choice,’ but warned him ‘Varèse is a volcano. His music consists of explosion after explosion…you must resist him or you will be buried.’

Varèse telephoned and invited me for a visit. When he asked to see my music, I was embarrassed to show him the first movement of Landscapes (1949)…In this piece I had tried to let fragments of ancient Chinese melodies drift across the sonic space of a western orchestra without conforming to western concepts of musical structure. So I could hardly believe it when I heard him say, ‘Come next week at the same time.’ Wondering how I could afford his tuition, I hesitated. He exploded, offended that I thought he was offering to teach me for money. He then explained how he had benefited from Debussy, Busoni and Romain Rolland without paying ‘a sou’. All he wanted was for me to ‘pass on the heritage’. Then he added with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘but perhaps you will find me a big old Chinese gong someday?’ He did not have to wait for long. In his later years, he was often shown in photos playing the enormous tam-tam I gave him. After his death, Louise gave me his favourite Chinese gong which he had bought on the street in Paris at about the time he finished Ionisation. This exchange of a tam-tam for a gong must have some symbolic meaning.

Chou goes on to describe how he came to edit Varèse’s work after his death, including a definitive version of Amériques for Chailly. ‘His art rests on a delicate balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian, or logical construct and metaphorical suffering,’ he claims. ‘While I would spare no effort collecting information regarding Varèse’s intentions, planning and sketches, I would also attempt to examine every issue from his viewpoint emotionally as well as rationally.’

The book ends with a series of statements from other composers, including Pierre Boulez (‘Was he ever tempted to imagine that he was born too late in a world too young?’), Elliott Carter (‘After his death he was played much more frequently and with greater care. How he would have been cheered by this!’), Dieter Schnebel (‘I can still picture him, fifty-five years [after encountering him at Darmstadt] as if he were standing before me.’), Peter Eötvös - who collaborated with Frank Zappa, shortly before the latter’s death, on some as yet unreleased recordings, and others.

Anyone within reach of London or Gateshead this weekend should treat themselves to the music of Varèse, a pioneer who remains unique, and this superb book. How many other composers have influenced jazz musicians, composers such as Birtwistle and Schnittke, and rock musicians from OMD to Can to jazz-rock combo Chicago?

Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, edited by Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann, is published by the Boydell Press in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation. There is a limited quantity of this lavishly-produced volume left, and further reprints are unlikely. More information about the Southbank concerts may be found here.

Wagner and Wagnerism

This week it was announced that Wolfgang Wagner, Director of the Bayreuth Festival since 1951, would retire at the end of August. Although it seems that problems with his successor have not been completely ironed out, the two main contenders, Wolfgang’s daughters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, have submitted a joint proposal to the foundation that runs the Festival.

It was a production of Parsifal at the 1966 Bayreuth Festival that signified Pierre Boulez’ move into mainstream repertoire. His tempi were controversial, he remembers in a fascinating interview with Nicholas Wroe in the Guardian, and although he claims not to enjoy controversy “if you feel something deeply, then you shouldn’t fear polemic.”

Our US-based imprints the University of Rochester Press and Camden House continue to publish widely on Wagner, with the announcement of John W Barker’s Wagner and Venice for November 2008. Wagner died there in 1883, and this book will use new and previously unavailable sources to chart his visits to the city, what it meant to him, and the process through which Wagner and his posthumous reputation became integrated into Venice’s own cultural image.

It joins a distinguished list of publications on the composer, most recently Chris Walton’s well-received Richard Wagner’s Zurich, as well as a companion to Parsifal, a fascinating book of essays on Wagner’s Meistersinger, an examination of the Wagner cult in Scandinavia and the Baltic region, and an analysis of Wagner’s operas in the context of German nationalist ideology. More on Wagner and Venice in future posts.