The Boulez-Cage Correspondence [Paperback]

Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Editor), Robert Samuels (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 1995

Between May 1949 and August 1954 the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of remarkable letters that reflect on their own music and the culture of the time. This correspondence, together with other relevant documents, has been edited and annotated by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and is now available for the first time in English in a paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This small but heavily annotated correspondence between French composer Pierre Boulez and recently deceased American composer John Cage contains letters dating from 1949 to 1954, as well as supplementary documents. The age difference between the two men is apparent, and the older Cage often assumes the role of teacher and mentor. The letters contain no striking personal revelations, but they record the activities and musical ideas of the composers, who at the time were moving in different directions. Often technical, the letters contain graphs and tables of sounds, durations, amplitudes, and more. The friendship between the composers later cooled, but these documents provide a historical record of the musical climate during the era of their relationship. Recommended for academic libraries.-- Debora Richey, California State Univ.
Fullerton Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Their letters detail an intense interchange and illuminate the differences between the frankly eclectic Cage, who was then deepening his acquaintances with Zen Buddhism, dada, and abstract expressionism, and Boulez, who was immersing himself in his notions of mathematical control of his composition." Booklist

"The book's contrapuntal portrayal of the widening chasm is quite fascinating. It is a necessary book; an invaluable document of its time." The Guardian

"This admirably edited collection, containing all the surviving letters exchanged between Pierre Boulez and John Cage, helps to answer one of the great questions about post-war music--how was it that these men arrived at such similar premises for the writing of the 1950s New Music from such disparate backgrounds?....It is a necessary book: an invaluable document of its time." John Bentley, The Guardian

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Product Details

• Paperback: 188 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (January 27, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521485584
• ISBN-13: 978-0521485586
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,047,135 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the early seeds of modernity discussed in brief letters., April 28, 2000

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scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Boulez-Cage Correspondence (Hardcover)

John Cage was the first to introduce Pierre Boulez to the United States. In New York he took Boulez around visiting painters and musicians, this was the early Fifties. David Tudor(long a Cage friend) was performing Boulez's Second Piano Sonata for the first time. Bookstores were frequent stops and Boulez( we learn) never heard of the poet e.e.cummings, and bought a modest book of his poetry. Some thirty years later Boulez set a text of cummings for 22 unaccompanied voices. This correspondence was between two innovators coming from radically different places yet stopping at the same conceptual places. And it is a shame that this friendship fell out quickly,each going into radically different venues. Boulez although fascinated with chance procedures(which Cage had been working with the I Ching, Book of Changes at that time) Boulez was arrongantly fascinated by the aesthetic object,its history and attenuation, and has remained so since. This correspondence has frequent entries on the concept of indeterminacy, again Boulez comes to it via Mallarme, and aleatoric thinking, the throwing of the dice.Boulez sought a musical structure that contained the element of chance as in his Third Piano Sonata in the latter Fifties. Both however were at a creative place in modernity when the Western canon of structure and comprehensibility was falling itself.However it is odd for Boulez to this day thinks of his work as moments containing a "freedom" of something, when he conducts Mahler, he thinks of those passages that are freer than others,like a symphony is a dialogue between the two. Mahler's Sixth Symphony is the case in point. There are letters of Boulez to Cage, while in South America with the Barrault Theatre Company, one entry includes a description from Boulez that he is having a good time "milhauding" around, referring to Darius Milhaud the composer who frequently utilized folk elelments in his music by collecting them in volumes.Nattiez is a very sympathetic observer to this cause of modernity and the roots of things.