In the third of a four-part series, Peter Reynolds looks at different strands in contemporary music with a focus on composers in the immediate here and now. This week he looks at five composers whose music occupies the challenging end of the spectrum.
The last 20 years have seen a retrenchment from the heroic experimentation that characterised contemporary music in the immediate post-war years. A generation of composers growing up amongst the carnage of Hitler’s Europe turned their faces away from the traditional language of music, which seemed forever tainted by that world, in search of a new musical grammar. But successive generations, without such memories, have been more inclined to take what they want both from the latest developments and the past.
The debate still rages as to whether such a retrenchment is a cowardly betrayal of the zeitgeist or the natural splintering of a more pluralistic society. Many of the architects of the post-war revolution – Stockhausen, Berio, Nono, Xenakis, Ligeti, Carter, Cage and others – are now dead, but there is still a powerful strand of composers, utterly uncompromising in their search for a new sound world, making huge demands on listeners and performers in their efforts to move music forward. A sceptical public and musicians have dismissed such music with expressions like “squeaky gate” but it is undeniable that the avant-garde of the past has influenced popular culture, jazz, crossover and even the most conservative classical composers.
Pierre Boulez launched the post-war musical revolution in Paris in the late 1940s. Declaring that “anyone who has not felt the necessity of serialism is useless” and that opera houses should be blown up, he metaphorically spat on the grave on Schoenberg in his iconic 1952 polemic “Schoenberg is Dead”. His Le marteau sans maître (1955) was as influential as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring 40 years before. Boulez also went on to become a world-class conductor and instigated Paris’ IRCAM, revolutionising the development of music technology. Consequently, his compositions appear infrequently, but even his detractors (and they are many) agree that his music is unmatched in its fastidious finish and subtlety.
Watch an interview with Pierre Boulez
Listen to clips of Pierre Boulez’s music
Over the last 30 years, London-born George Benjamin has been uncompromising in taking music into new and uncharted territory. Like Boulez, he made his way to Paris in his teens to study with Messiaen, haunting the corridors of IRCAM in the following decade. He shot to prominence at 20 with his Ringed by the Flat Horizon at the 1980 Proms and, despite his small, highly polished output, he has rarely been absent from the concert halls since, particularly in Europe where he is regarded as a major figure. In recent years Benjamin has caught the opera bug and his recent Written on Skin, at the Royal Opera House and elsewhere, has seized the attention of a large public.