Boulez's Two Cultures: The Post-War European Synthesis and Tradition

Abstract

Pierre Boulez is typical of a post-war generation of European composers known for its apparent repudiation of tradition, although the synthesis of such composers as Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen can be shown to be firmly rooted in tradition. Tendencies within both Franco-Russian and Austro-German traditions merged in the formation of Boulez's style. This is reflected both in Boulez's first models, Messiaen and Webern, and by his life-long engagement with both Schoenberg's expressionism and the works of Stravinsky's Russian period. Wagner, Mahler, and Schoenberg had developed a continuous dynamic inflection that Stravinsky, by the 1920s, rejected in his neoclassical works. Boulez's generation reintegrated these tendencies within the absolutely smooth continuums to be found in many of their works. In Boulez's mature works, there is a continuous system of smoothly planing dynamics. No longer expressive inflection, these dynamics exhibit the clean objective character of Stravinsky's discrete dynamic planes. This dynamic continuum was crucial in creating the continuous through-composed forms of Boulez and Stockhausen. Boulez's rhythmic structures are ultimately rooted in Stravinsky's motor rhythms and Schoenberg's prose rhythms, an opposition he has exploited in many works. Schoenberg's and Stravinsky's essentially neutral tonal space furnished the background for the post-war European harmonic language in which harmonic tensions are diffused both by spacious effects of register and by the continuously graded dynamics. The floating stasis projected in Boulez's mature works is as much a culmination of certain trends within the French harmonic tradition as a natural development within the history of atonality. With the post-war generation in Europe, the French harmonic tradition enjoyed unprecedented influence.