The screen lights up, and Philippe Manoury appears beamed in from his home office in Strasbourg. Our virtual meeting might well be in the style of Pierre Boulez’s open works – without beginning or end. In the background, I spy some photos of the two men together. I’m tasked with writing a portrait of Boulez, and I ask Manoury what he thinks of the festivities being organised to honour the centenary of his birth. “It’s a good moment to discover who he really was. Unfortunately, people tend to tear him down as a character. But we feel his absence – when it comes to orchestral programming, no-one plays the composers from the Second Viennese School. We lack his strong personality advocating for a different repertoire. And after this centenary, who will play Boulez?”
In truth, it’s a question that had arisen already. Boulez the institution-builder is now undeniably a figure of the past. How did the music world react to his death? “There were some people for whom it was greatly liberating,” Manoury notes plainly, without seeking controversy. “Some had the impression of now being able to do what they wanted, whereas before, they felt that Boulez had all the power and was preventing them from widening their horizons.”
I quickly get the feeling that Manoury has set out his stall. He has been asked many times to talk about this Renaissance man and their relationship. While he isn’t of the generation directly influenced by Boulez, Manoury benefited from the attention that Boulez always gave to young musicians, be they instrumentalists, conductors or composers.
As a young student in the mid-1970s, Manoury remembers attending an event given by Boulez at the Paris Conservatoire. “He came with Ensemble intercontemporain, which had just been founded. They were playing scores by students in the composition classes of Olivier Messiaen, Michel Philippot and Ivo Malec. I hadn’t personally been involved. It was sort of a rehearsal with commentary, during which he was suggesting adjustments, advice on the orchestration. His approach was very constructive, done so as to give these scores the maximum quality they could have. Many of the students were impressed, while others were highly reluctant, because it was Boulez and they were under no obligation to take lessons from him. But he reacted calmly and with a great sense of fair play. I have to say that he was very kind.”
Manoury first encountered the music before he met the man. Hearing it for the first time on the radio in the 1960s, his curiosity was aroused: “This was intriguing music, very poetic, very secret, but with a sort of violence, a force lurking behind it. You felt that it could explode at any moment. There was dramatic potential. When people think about Boulez, they don’t think about drama, they think of a musician who is rather structuralist. But I find the exact opposite, that his music is eminently dramatic.”
After this first contact, Manoury soon immersed himself analysing scores like the Second Piano Sonata and especially Pli selon pli, which he “really devoured”. He then set about the writings, Notes of an Apprenticeship and Boulez on Music Today. I ask what he got out of his many conversations with Boulez: “What interested me about him, independently of his music and even of his personality, was that it was essential that things be thought through. Everything was underpinned by the intellectual will not to tinker.” Manoury reflects for a moment before stating a principle to which Boulez always adhered: “Just because you have an idea doesn’t mean it’s going to be the right one right away. You have to work on it, you have to rewrite it.”
A slight smile appears on Manoury’s face. His next anecdote perfectly reveals Boulez’s attachment to life as an intellectual journey. “I was at the inaugural conference of Ircam, at the Théâtre de la Ville in 1974. There was a big press conference. Someone asked Boulez, ‘What are you going to find out by doing this research?’ and he replied, ‘If I knew what I was going to find out, I wouldn’t do it’. He wasn’t saying: ‘we’re going to find something specific’. No, it was ‘we’re going to work, we’re going to search’”.
Located next to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Ircam is a major institution of musical and acoustic research. But before it was was established, as Manoury is quick to remind me, Boulez had left France in 1966 due to his opposition to the Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux. Busy conducting in the US with the Cleveland Orchestra and then the New York Philharmonic, Boulez made few appearances in his native country, to the extent that Xenakis and Stockhausen were more present than he was in the French musical landscape.
“When Boulez returned to France, he was no longer influential,” Manoury says. “The Spectral music movement, which included Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey, Michaël Levinas and later Hugues Dufourt, had been born from Messiaen’s composition class. All of a sudden, the Spectral school claimed Ligeti, Messiaen, and harmonic listening, whereas Boulez had always put contrapuntal thinking more at the forefront. A thinking of complexity.”
It was not until 1981 that Manoury, after a period of teaching in Brazil, really got to know Boulez in the context of the Ircam “Stage”, the forerunner of the current “Cursus”, the institute’s computer music training programme for composers. A shared concern brought them together: “After a year, I composed a piece called Zeitlauf for choir, ensemble (the Ensemble intercontemporain) and synthesised music. He came to the rehearsals and invited me to lunch to talk. After that, I was very much involved in the very first experiments that were being done around so-called real-time electronic music.”
Manoury then took up residence at Ircam. With Peppino di Giugno, Miller Puckette and Lawrence Beauregard, he experimented with the interactions of real-time electronics with instruments to “create zones of permeability between electronics and the instrument. Boulez was immediately interested in what we were doing.” Although the transformation of sound in real time is apparent Boulez’s own piece Répons, he did not continue to create works in the direction of Ircam’s research, instead leaving it to the younger generation to forge new paths. Manoury, for his part, never followed Boulez’s compositional style.
From the 1970s onwards, Boulez spread his net ever wider: he simultaneously conducted two international ensembles, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, in addition to the Ensemble intercontemporain; he was invited to Bayreuth for Wagner's Ring Cycle; he recorded Stravinsky and Berg; and he created and administered Ircam. This begs the question: how did Boulez organise his schedule with so many activities? “When we saw each other, it was at six in the morning,” explains Manoury. “From nine o’clock onwards, he was director of Ircam; he had a ministerial schedule. He had to take care of the staff, the supervisory bodies, the finances... it was administrative management.”
But what about composition – when did he find the time to write? Before nine in the morning? “I don’t know. His sister had work done on their parents’ house in Amilly, near Orléans. On a weekend, he would leave Paris and go there to take refuge and work.”
Boulez’s conducting also left a lasting impression. Manoury saw the master up-close on the podium when he conducted Sound and Fury, which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra commissioned from Manoury on the occasion of Boulez’s 75th birthday. “He conducted an initial reading without stopping. He was really impressive.” The same process struck Manoury during the recording of his Partition du ciel et de l’enfer. “We had technical things to do and he said to me, ‘While you’re working with the computer, I’m going to do a reading of the piece with the orchestra because I haven’t opened the score.’” Recalling the anecdote, Manoury is still astonished that Boulez had made absolutely no annotations to the score. His admiration is clear: “He conducted everything from the beginning, without stopping.”
Manoury recalls that Boulez could sometimes strike very surprising poses, which belie the overbearing character complained about by his detractors: “At Ircam, there was a Dutch researcher called Michel Waisvisz who made electronic music with gloves that reacted to physical movements. It was extremely loud. He had given a demonstration at the Centre Pompidou and almost all the spectators around Boulez had left because of how loud it was. But Boulez stayed, he didn’t move. He liked to surprise people like that. Contradiction interested him a lot.”
Once again, the idea of a progression into the unknown, of unexpected serendipity. Manoury tells me about “something he loved and often talked about: the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the snail-shaped one. What interested him was that you discovered the works not by entering rooms one after the other, but around a spiral. You couldn’t know what was next. This phantasmagorical aspect of the works being revealed while they are somewhat hidden, that really intrigued him.”
This aspect is likewise linked to concept of the “open work” – notably used by Boulez in his Piano Sonata no. 3. It’s an endless spiral that is gradually revealed and which, depending on the actions of the creator and the performers, is always incorporating new elements. Our conversation draws to a close, but I sense Boulez’s many facets could continue to be the subject of an ever spiralling discussion.
See upcoming performances of music by Pierre Boulez.
Translated from French by David Karlin.