In these essays, the leading French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez explains many of his most significant ideas about music. The essays are divided into four parts, the first three concerned with common preoccupations (aesthetic, technical, and polemical) and the last a collection of entries intended for a music encyclopedia. Boulez offers penetrating and provocative analyses of the music of the major figures of twentieth-century music including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Debussy, Messiaen, and Ravel. His illuminating comments arise from intimate knowledge of the music, and the resulting collection is an essential document of post-war modern music.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
`...there are several particular reasons to welcome Stephen Walsh's new translation, whose connotatively neat (and newly allusive) title stocktakings from and Apprenticeship, usefully facilitates its separate identification. ...Stephen Walsh's new translation is a considerable help to the reader. ...few composers can ever have possessed so radical a sense of music history and given it such complete definition as Boulez achieves in these pages. ...Its welcome reappearance in this considered and scholarly translation will meeet needs in both respects.' David Wright, The Musical Times
`a new translation - an impressive job by Stephen Walsh - of Boulez's first (1966) gathering of manifestos and trenchant analyses.' London Review of Books
`These jibes, japes and brilliant theoretical flourishes date from his twenties and early thirties. But Stephen Walsh's translation at last makes one of the century's key musical books available in strong, supple English.' Paul Griffiths, Times Saturday Review
'the quality of Walsh's work is itself a salient reason for acquiring this volume ... this translation amounts to a much-needed critical edition of the Releves - meticulously referenced and footnoted, and encompassing such details as can be traced of the revisions made by Boulez when the collection was published in book form ... The result is a tour-de-force of the translator's art, unselfseekingly equal to the restless protean virtuosity of the pronouncements of Young Boulez Rampant. Virtually everything else is essential reading; indeed the whole book is studded with passages that absorb, provoke, fascinate, and enchant in their voracious cultural awareness, breadth of reference, and keenness of insight.' Malcolm Hayes, Temp, 3/92
`Stephen Walsh's translation of Relevds d'apprenti is excellent and fulfils the need for a much more lucid and more available text than was formerly the case. Jonathon Harvey, Times Literary Supplement
'Throughout, one is impressed by Boulez's assuredness, his meticulous assessment of the musical score, his determined if narrow vision of the "right" path to the musical future.' F. Goossen, University of Alabama, Choice, Apr '92
'an enlightening source of information on Boulez's position within the French literary tradition. Stocktakings is a major work, clarifying Boulez's discovery of sound worlds, his "apprenticeship" as a composer, and his place within contemporary artistic circles.' Fiona Richards, Goldsmiths' College, Modern and Contemporary France, No. 49, April 1992
`there are several particular reasons to welcome Stephen Walsh's new translation, whose connotatively neat (and newly allusive) title Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, usefully facilitates its separate identification ... Readers will benefit from Walsh's careful footnoting ... This assistance helps to establish a more informed understanding of the nature of Boulez's enterprise ... Stephen Walsh's new translation is of considerable help to the reader. Its quality of straightforwardness and general fluency is evident' LMusical Times
'Walsh's translation not only has the advantage of making musical (and, unlike much of Weinstock's, grammatical) sense but also reads well. The book should perhaps be read mainly for its value as a historical document charting some of the main lines of thought in European music in the period after the Second World War.' Douglas Jarman, Music and Letters, Vol. 73, No. 3, Aug '92
'crucial document ... The passion behind Boulez's polemics is perhaps the most old-fashioned aspect of these essays - and also perhaps the most admirable.' David Schiff, Reed College, Notes, March 1993
`a new translation - an impressive job by Stephen Walsh - of Boulez's first (1966) gathering of manifestos and trenchant analyses.' London Review of Books
`These jibes, japes and brilliant theoretical flourishes date from his twenties and early thirties. But Stephen Walsh's translation at last makes one of the century's key musical books available in strong, supple English.' Paul Griffiths, Times Saturday Review
'the quality of Walsh's work is itself a salient reason for acquiring this volume ... this translation amounts to a much-needed critical edition of the Releves - meticulously referenced and footnoted, and encompassing such details as can be traced of the revisions made by Boulez when the collection was published in book form ... The result is a tour-de-force of the translator's art, unselfseekingly equal to the restless protean virtuosity of the pronouncements of Young Boulez Rampant. Virtually everything else is essential reading; indeed the whole book is studded with passages that absorb, provoke, fascinate, and enchant in their voracious cultural awareness, breadth of reference, and keenness of insight.' Malcolm Hayes, Temp, 3/92
`Stephen Walsh's translation of Relevds d'apprenti is excellent and fulfils the need for a much more lucid and more available text than was formerly the case. Jonathon Harvey, Times Literary Supplement
'Throughout, one is impressed by Boulez's assuredness, his meticulous assessment of the musical score, his determined if narrow vision of the "right" path to the musical future.' F. Goossen, University of Alabama, Choice, Apr '92
'an enlightening source of information on Boulez's position within the French literary tradition. Stocktakings is a major work, clarifying Boulez's discovery of sound worlds, his "apprenticeship" as a composer, and his place within contemporary artistic circles.' Fiona Richards, Goldsmiths' College, Modern and Contemporary France, No. 49, April 1992
`there are several particular reasons to welcome Stephen Walsh's new translation, whose connotatively neat (and newly allusive) title Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, usefully facilitates its separate identification ... Readers will benefit from Walsh's careful footnoting ... This assistance helps to establish a more informed understanding of the nature of Boulez's enterprise ... Stephen Walsh's new translation is of considerable help to the reader. Its quality of straightforwardness and general fluency is evident' LMusical Times
'Walsh's translation not only has the advantage of making musical (and, unlike much of Weinstock's, grammatical) sense but also reads well. The book should perhaps be read mainly for its value as a historical document charting some of the main lines of thought in European music in the period after the Second World War.' Douglas Jarman, Music and Letters, Vol. 73, No. 3, Aug '92
'crucial document ... The passion behind Boulez's polemics is perhaps the most old-fashioned aspect of these essays - and also perhaps the most admirable.' David Schiff, Reed College, Notes, March 1993
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
Original Language: French
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
documentary in value:essays of a young innovator,
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This review is from: Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship (Hardcover)
While riding on the Paris Metro in the early Forties,during the War, a young Frenchmen had turned to his mentor and exclaimed that culture was at an end point , who will reorganize music, "You will,Pierre", said Messiaen.This collections of essays has now fascinating documentary value,for Boulez has moved on we all know, to larger realms in both universes of conducting and composition, and unpretenciously has kept the vision Messiaen had of his young student. Yet Boulez's aesthetic has not undergone a metamorphosis that is unrelated not totally unrecognizable from his youth.And all these essays are reflections and position papers, analyses,technical points like Sprechgesang and encyclopedic like entries. All were a means toward a comprehension of the situation in music at the end of the Second World War.The analytical essay "Stravinsky remains" is perhaps the most valuable item here . This is a dissection of his Rite of Spring, how the rhythm works like cells being placed together into mosaic-like patterns,creating textures,but truncating the rhythmic identities. "To the farthest reach of the fertile country" is an essay here inspired by a quote from Paul Klee, who has remained an enduring inspiration to Boulez to this day. This essay is on the implications of electronic composition, which in the early Fifties represented a new universe of sound and its conception. It was also dangerous, for how will it enter the realm of culture and creativity, how will electronics interface with the expressive concerns of form and content, and sonic manipulation. Recall that Boulez in his youth was a fiery activist for the cause of serial composition. Anyone who didn't follw this cause was useless and unimportant.He, for instance called for all opera houses to be burned to the ground, and loathed the likes of Verdi or Puccini exclaiming the vulgarity of their music. He also led jeering sections at concerts. But all this soon, to use his words, stopped,Boulez stopped barking like a dog outside. The infamous and misunderstood article "Schoenberg is Dead" is included here. Boulez never meant this title in a derogatory way, simply a ubiquitous use of the French phrase, the "king is dead", referring to the French Revolution. All Boulez meant was indeed modest, that Schoenberg's conception of the dodecaphonic language simply didn't extend itself into all the parameters of music.This is true of form in particular, where Schoenberg had retrogressed utilizing Baroque forms situated within atonal means. All of the grande auteurs that Boulez later conducted for the next thirty years are discussed in essay form: Alban Berg, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. There is also an essay on "Alea", the indeterminate aleatoric idea which fascinated Boulez at this time the Fifties, and triggered his lifelong interest in Mallarme. His Third Piano Sonata was the focus of this concept of introducing performative freedoms into a work, much like encountering the mobiles of Alexander Calder, where fixed shapes rotates and interrelate in forever newer configurations.Here Boulez gives indications why he intends to embark on this creative excursion citing points in history without introducing much technical detail.The original of the work entitled "Notes of an Apprenticeship" was published by Alfred A Knopf in 1968 and has been unavailable.
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