What a shame the New York Phil Biennial will come only once every other year. In the past week, I and countless other concertgoers have encountered new, rare, and challenging musical works interpreted by artists from all over. The enthusiasm of these performers and the engagement of the audiences show how vital 20th and 21st century music is to concert life, not just in New York but in any city.
Take Pierre Boulez, whose earliest compositional strategy in post-war Europe was a reaction against nationalist music. His concept of total serialism – like Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, but multiplied to include the serialization of duration and dynamic in addition to pitch – radicalized the music scene, and his pedagogy at the experimental music center IRCAM has influenced generations of composers. Mr Boulez, now 89 and still active as a conductor and composer, also made strides in the areas of electronic music, “controlled chance” methods, and spatialization.
So it was fitting that the Biennial event “Circles of Influence: Pierre Boulez” was so wide-ranging. With only eleven minutes of music composed by Boulez himself, the program relied on other works to illustrate the many facets of his influence: “paying homage from different perspectives”, as conductor Pablo Heras-Casado put it. The four pieces – all U.S. premières – created a portrait of Boulez minus Boulez, reminding me of a middle school art exercise in which we were asked to draw an egg without any white crayons, only colored ones.
Most striking was Heinz Holliger’s Ostinato funèbre. An oboist who studied composition with Mr Boulez, Mr Holliger spent sixteen years composing his Scardanelli Cycle (inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry), of which Ostinato funèbre is the final part. Based on Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music, K.477, the piece equates ostinato and stasis with death, managing to evoke Mozart without employing any direct quotations. Described by Mr Heras-Casado and co-host Ari Guzelimian as “nondirectional, nondramatic, and nondevelopmental”, the piece easily held our attention with its panoply of timbres and textures. One percussionist rustled a pile of leaves; another poured water into a bowl (at one point, some splashed onto the floor). The first percussionist ripped a piece of paper in half; the second swung a bullroarer through the air like a lasso, creating a high resonating vibrato sound. Meanwhile, other musicians from the Orchestra of St Luke’s progressed through a series of haunting, quiet chords, the lower woodwind notes contrasting with shriller, more wibbly phrases from the strings as well as delicate, blustery flute lines and a fluttering oboe.