Crack in the Wall

By William Bender

For much of the 20th century, many leading avant-garde composers have arranged their notes, rhythms and timbres according to predetermined schemes or series. Such major works as Arnold Schoenberg's Serenade and, more recently, Pierre Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre have been serial compositions. Indeed no one has championed serialism more than has Boulez, the onetime enfant terrible of French music who is now the 47-year-old conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony. Yet there was Boulez in Manhattan last week introducing his new 31-minute composition . . . explosante/fixe . . . and conceding that it had little to do with serialism. Moreover, the work includes the very electronics that Boulez has scorned volubly since his own youthful experiments in Paris.

A crack in the serial wall? Definitely. . . . explosante/fixe . . . will offer no solace to the many who would like today's composers to get back to good old melody, but it should send a few shock waves throughout the international composing ranks. Boulez is searching for a harmonic scheme that he finds wanting in serialism, but without a return to the strictures of traditional tonality. "To find that," says Boulez, "is the great problem of our time."

. . . explosante/fixe . . . is scored for eight instruments, each equipped with floor microphones, plus an electronic supergadget called the Halaphone. In the first performance of the piece by the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Halaphone not only transmuted the instrumental sounds electronically, but sped those sounds around the concert hall via loudspeakers pinned to the walls. Boulez remained onstage cuing the technicians. The title of the composition is descriptive: while the violin, flute or vibraphone plays on a given pitch level (fixe), the trumpet or cello explodes (explosante) with violent rhythms or scale passages. But fixation can sometimes change to explosion, and vice versa. Through another of the Halaphone's circuits, for example, tones produced by the clarinet actually trigger electronic changes in the sound of the viola.

The effect is roughly like listening to medieval organum (primitive polyphony) done up in the manner of Switched-On Bach. Beyond the "accidental" harmonies achieved by the passage of contrapuntal ships in an electronic night, Boulez also uses what he calls pilot tones (not unlike pedal point) to achieve, at times, gripping harmonic tension. All in all, Boulez has made a daring experiment in what might be called kaleidosonics.

The audience's reception could hardly be called anything more than polite. The score is one of those seemingly loveless works that, like virtually the entire catalogue of John Cage, may eventually turn out to be more important as philosophical statement than as musical expression. The odds are good, for example, that it will never be any more popular than Arnold Schoenberg's atonal manifesto of 1912, Pierrot Lunaire; yet it could well rival its historical importance.

When the Philharmonic picked Boulez to succeed Leonard Bernstein as of last season, it was a courageous act fraught with risk. Would he visit the "horrors" of modern music on the Philharmonic's subscribers night after night? Would he fall on his face in the bread-and-butter 19th century repertory--an area in which he was largely untried? The answer has turned out to be no to both questions. Boulez has programmed adventurously but wisely, dipping into Karlheinz Stockhausen and George Crumb, but generally going no further into the futuristic past than the relatively easy-to-take Alban Berg. Not much worse, in other words, than the old Bernstein days.

As discreet as he has been, Boulez has not pleased everybody. Of the Philharmonic's 23,000 subscribers, some 3,500 failed to renew for this season, partly out of stubborn lack of interest in the music of their own time. Fortunately, there were 3,100 other music lovers standing by ready and willing to pick up the vacated subscriptions. With a 12% rise in single-ticket sales, the Philharmonic now finds itself selling out 97 1/2% of the house. Accordingly, Boulez's three-year contract has been extended to six.

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