Fold and Rap

By Robert T. Jones

French Conductor Pierre Boulez, who takes over as music director of the New York Philharmonic next season, recently journeyed to the U.S. and announced various plans for revivifying the programs of the Philharmonic. Among them: the idea of snaring young listeners by taking members of the orchestra to Greenwich Village for four avant-garde evenings, to be called "Prospective Encounters: 7-12."

As Boulez sees it, youthful Villagers will be invited for any time between 7 and midnight to "encounter" not only the music but some strenuously avant-garde composers themselves. Boulez clearly hopes there will be as many rappers as listeners.

Whether such plans will lessen the awesome gap that exists between ordinary listeners and modern composers remains the big question. A great deal, of course, will depend on which composers Boulez chooses to encounter --and upon their ability to communicate, musically and verbally, with their audiences. Boulez has so far made it clear that he is unlikely to schedule his own music. Still, the complexity and climate of "Prospective Encounters" may be safely forecast by listening to PH Scion Pli, a Boulez composition just released by Columbia Records.

Pli Selon Pli--meaning "fold along the fold"--is based on three poems by Mallarme and was begun in the late 1950s. With piano, guitar and mandolin, it also enlists a soprano soloist and a full orchestra, runs 60 minutes, and is easily Boulez's most ambitious composition to date, outstripping even his 1955 Le Marteait sans Maitre. Severely serial, the work begins with a crash and a delicate wash of impressionism, a mixture of Debussy and Webern. Much of it glitters with the percussive polka-dotting of pointillism; all of it is abstract, moving in tiers of timbres, skeletal in its economy. Like Stravinsky, Boulez treats the human voice instrumentally rather than vocally. Soprano Halina Lukomska copes expertly, though not easily, with a vocal line that soars and plunges from one extreme end of her voice to the other.

A Village audience might perhaps take to this austere and demanding creation. If puzzled, though, young listeners had better skip Boulez's stygian liner notes. "The necessary transposition," Boulez writes, describing the setting of words to music, "demands the invention of equivalences; equivalences that may be applied both to the exterior form of the musical invention and to its quality or inner structure." Fortunately, when Boulez talks, he is entertaining and outspoken. So much so that he might even be able to explain those liner notes to the Villagers.

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