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Alan Stout in 1971
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra family notes with sorrow the passing of Alan Stout, composer and longtime composition and theory professor at Northwestern University. Stout died yesterday, February 1, 2018, at the age of 85.
Stout’s music was first performed by the Orchestra on two concerts given at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium on May 29 and 31, 1967, when Esther Glazer was soloist in Movements for Violin and Orchestra with Henry Lewis conducting. Soon thereafter, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra presented four world premieres by Stout, under the batons of Seiji Ozawa, Sir Georg Solti, and Margaret Hillis, at the Ravinia Festival and in Orchestra Hall.
On August 4, 1968, Ozawa led the world premiere of Stout’s Symphony no. 2 at Ravinia. The work was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival Association through a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and the performance was made possible by a Composer Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
World premiere of Stout’s Second Symphony at the Ravinia Festival on August 4, 1968
The symphony was “vivid [and] multi-dimensional . . . a collection of musical rituals,” according to Thomas Willis in the Chicago Tribune. “The work is a marvelous tapestry of textures, combining a superior craftsmanship, a remarkable ear, and encyclopedic knowledge of the inventions of his colleagues, [including] Messiaen, Penderecki, Elliott Carter, and Pierre Boulez . . .”
The composer’s Symphony no. 4 was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in celebration of its eightieth season and dedicated to Georg Solti, who led the world premiere performances on April 15, 16, and 17, 1971. The score calls for a small chorus, and members of the Chicago Symphony Chorus were prepared by assistant director Ronald Schweitzer.
The following year, Solti also led the world premiere of Stout’s George Lieder (Poems from Das neue Reich) on December 14, 15, and 16, 1972, with baritone Benjamin Luxon as soloist.
Composer and conductor review the score of the George Lieder in December 1972 (Terry’s photo)
Stout’s large-scale Passion for Soloists, Chorus, and Orchestra was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts and was dedicated to Margaret Hillis and the Chicago Symphony Chorus. Hillis led the world premiere performances on April 15, 16, and 17, 1976. Soloists included Mary Sauer on organ, Elizabeth Buccheri on piano, along with soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, tenors Frank Little and John McCollum, baritones Leslie Guinn and LeRoy Lehr, and bass Monroe Olson.
The premiere of Stout’s Passion, on which the composer worked for over twenty years, was a “monumental undertaking [and] provided the most difficult music the Chorus has undertaken since Fritz Reiner brought Margaret Hillis here in 1957 to found the now internationally known ensemble,” wrote Willis in the Chicago Tribune. “Stout fashions his church Latin text into curtains and tapestries of sound. Like a sonic aurora borealis, they expand and contract as needed, supplying intimate but still objective commentary on an emotional-laden event, creating towering climaxing as the peak points of the action, or providing canopies of tightly woven, often contrapuntal sheets of sound against which other portions of the action can take place.”
Detail from the first section of Stout’s Passion, with markings by Margaret Hillis
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Detail of title page of the score to Boulez’s Notations VII
According to Phillip Huscher, “Pierre Boulez composed the original Notations for piano in 1945, when the twenty-year-old composer was still a student of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. Boulez wrote twelve pieces, each twelve measures long (the number was central to the manifesto of the time). These Notations are concise, highly polished studies, each a precise and taut exploration of a single musical idea. Although Boulez quickly put them aside and moved on to greater challenges, they are among the works with which he opened a new chapter in the history of music.”
Boulez orchestrated the first four Notations in 1977 and 1978, and these versions were premiered by the Orchestre de Paris in 1980 with Daniel Barenboim conducting. Claudio Abbado led the Chicago Symphony’s first performances in October 1984, and Boulez himself conducted them with the Orchestra in October 1987. Near the end of the centennial season, music director designate Daniel Barenboim first led the Chicago Symphony in the four Notations in April 1991, and shortly thereafter, a second set of four orchestrations was commissioned for the Orchestra by the Edward F. Schmidt Family Commissioning Fund.
Daniel Barenboim and the Orchestra recorded Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Debussy’s La mer, and Boulez’s Notations VII for Teldec in January 2000
Boulez completed the first of these in 1997, and on January 14, 1999, the Orchestra gave the world premiere of Notations VII. Barenboim conducted the eight-minute work, followed by Pierre Boulez giving a brief discussion on his compositional process that included Barenboim performing the original piano version. Barenboim then conducted the work a second time. “What was abrupt in 1945 is now languorous; what was crude is now done with a lifetime’s experience and expertise; what was simple is fantastically embellished, even submerged,” wrote Paul Griffiths in The New York Times. “Boulez suggested the metaphor of long-buried grain sprouting, but one might rather think of an oyster making a pearl. As if irritated by the original piano piece, the composer has given it a sumptuous, dense, and opalescent coating, not only expanding it but also, in a way, withdrawing its shock. . . . The violent new influences of 1945 are, in the recomposition, being wiped away.”
Following the premiere, Barenboim led numerous performances of the five Notations in Chicago as well as on tour in Carnegie Hall, Berlin, Cologne, and Lucerne, and he included them during his farewell concerts as music director in June 2006. No. VII was recorded by Teldec in 2000.
This article also appears here.
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Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim in rehearsal with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in February 1969 (Terry’s photo)
Pierre Boulez’s first conducting appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1969 were greatly anticipated. His book Notes of an Apprenticeship had recently been published in English, and the Orchestra would be performing his music—the U.S. premiere of Livre pour cordes (two movements from his Livre pour quatuor from 1948, reworked in 1968 for string orchestra)—for the first time.
The concerts also included the CSO debut of Jacqueline du Pré in Schumann’s Cello Concerto on February 27 and 28 and the CSO subscription concert debut of her husband, Daniel Barenboim, in Bartók’s First Piano Concerto on February 20, 21, and 22. (Barenboim first appeared with the Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival on June 24, 1965, in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with André Previn conducting.)
In the Chicago Tribune, Peter Gorner wrote: “If Diogenes [the cynic] could have made it to Orchestra Hall last night, he would have blown out his lantern and become a believer. For there have existed few composers more honest than Debussy, Bartók, Webern, and [Boulez’s teacher at the Paris Conservatory] Olivier Messiaen. And there are few interpreters more honest than Pierre Boulez. Honesty depends upon conviction, and Boulez firmly believes in the classics of our century. He also is immensely qualified to spread the word, possessing a composer’s mind, a conductor’s savvy, and a poet’s soul.”
On Barenboim, Gorner continued: “The Bartók was his flashy First Piano Concerto, with the ubiquitous Daniel Barenboim as soloist, and a magnificent one at that. His technique made the concerto sound easier than it is, and he conjured the steely touch and native awareness of cumulative energy to make it work. The colloquy between percussion and piano in the andante which followed sounded flawless.”
Jacqueline du Pré’s program biography in February 1969
In his review for the Chicago Daily News of the second week’s program, Bernard Jacobson wrote: “Boulez has emphasized that in its new form [Livre pour cordes] is far more than a mere arrangement of the original—it is a full-scale recomposition, tackling the same musical problems but in terms of an entirely different medium. The result is music of formidable textural complexity, great sonorous variety, and powerful dramatic impact. . . . Yet Boulez’s characteristic intellectual control has ensured that the myriad events cohere in a rigorous organization of immediately perceptible unity.”
And in the Chicago Tribune, regarding the “immensely gifted young cellist Jacqueline du Pré,” Thomas Willis added: “[She] plays for keeps all the time. Each note has maximum persuasive power. There is a total commitment of both physiological and musical resources. The melodic line is maximally weighted. When she is not playing, she is often reacting to the orchestral dialog—so much a part of the Schumann concerto.”
This article also appears here.
Pierre Boulez in rehearsal at Orchestra Hall in February 1969
As we look forward to celebrating Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Pierre Boulez‘s ninetieth birthday in March 2015, we look back at his extraordinary relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which began in February 1969.
Boulez’s first conducting appearances were greatly anticipated. His book Notes of an Apprenticeship had recently been published in English, and the Orchestra would be performing his music—the U.S. premiere of Livre pour cordes (two movements from his Livre pour quatuor from 1948, reworked in 1968 for string orchestra)—for the first time. The concerts also included the CSO debut of cellist Jacqueline du Pré and the CSO subscription concert debut of her husband, pianist Daniel Barenboim. (Barenboim first appeared with the Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival on June 24, 1965, in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with André Previn conducting.) The complete programs were as follows:
February 20, 21 & 22, 1969
DEBUSSY Jeux
BARTÓK Piano Concerto No. 1
Daniel Barenboim, piano
WEBERN Passacaglia, Op. 1
WEBERN Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6
MESSIAEN Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum
February 27 & 28, 1969
HAYDN Symphony No. 91 in E-flat Major
SCHUMANN Cello Concerto in A Minor, Op. 129
Jacqueline du Pré, cello
BOULEZ Livre pour cordes
BERG Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6
In the Chicago Tribune, Peter Gorner wrote: “If Diogenes [the cynic] could have made it to Orchestra Hall last night, he would have blown out his lantern and became a believer. For there have existed few composers more honest than Debussy, Bartók, Webern, and [Boulez’s teacher at the Paris Conservatory] Olivier Messiaen. And there are few interpreters more honest than Pierre Boulez. Honesty depends upon conviction, and Boulez firmly believes in the classics of our century. He also is immensely qualified to spread the word, possessing a composer’s mind, a conductor’s savvy, and a poet’s soul.”
On Barenboim, Gorner continued: “The Bartók was his flashy First Piano Concerto, with the ubiquitous Daniel Barenboim as soloist, and a magnificent one at that. His technique made the concerto sound easier than it is, and he conjured the steely touch and native awareness of cumulative energy to make it work. The colloquy between percussion and piano in the andante which followed sounded flawless.”
Jacqueline du Pré
In his review for the Daily News of the second week’s program, Bernard Jacobson wrote: “Boulez has emphasized that in its new form [Livre pour cordes] is far more than a mere arrangement of the original—it is a full-scale recomposition, tackling the same musical problems but in terms of an entirely different medium. The result is music of formidable textural complexity, great sonorous variety, and powerful dramatic impact. . . . Yet Boulez’s characteristic intellectual control has ensured that the myriad events cohere in a rigorous organization of immediately perceptible unity.”
And in the Tribune regarding the “immensely gifted young cellist Jacqueline du Pré,” Thomas Willis added: “[she] plays for keeps all the time. Each note has maximum persuasive power. There is a total commitment of both physiological and musical resources. The melodic line is maximally weighted. When she is not playing, she is often reacting to the orchestral dialog—so much a part of the Schumann concerto.”
Pierre Boulez rehearsing Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Bartók’s First Piano Concerto in February 1969
Numerous upcoming programs celebrate Pierre Boulez, including Beyond the Score: A Pierre Dream on November 14 and 16, 2014, and Boulez’s Piano Works on March 15, 2015, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich.
To celebrate Pierre Boulez‘s 89th birthday on March 26, below please find today’s assignment, your reading list of books—by and about our Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus—available in the Rosenthal Archives:
Notes of an Apprenticeship was originally published in French in 1966 and again in English in 1968 by Alfred A. Knopf, as translated by Herbert Weinstock. Boulez commented: “It becomes evident that the parallel between Bach and Schoenberg is devoid of any real significance. Were there place for such a comparison, it could be only with Webern. Considering the respective positions of Bach and Webern—the one in relation to the tonal language, the other with regard to the serial language—one could state that they were situated symmetrically; we could even borrow from geometry the word ‘antiparallel’ to define more exactly the relationships that could be conceived between Bach and Webern. The former displays chiefly an activity of extension . . . the latter is involved essentially in the conquest of a new world.”
In 1971 Harvard University Press published Boulez on Music Today, translated by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett (originally published in French in 1963). Boulez writes: “Is the composer then only a pretext? Michel Butor, at the end of his essay on [Charles] Baudelaire, gives a definitive answer to this objection. ‘Some people,’ he writes, ‘may think that, while intending to write about Baudelaire, I have only succeeded in speaking of myself. It would certainly be better to say that it was Baudelaire who spoke of me. He speaks of you.’ If you question the masters of an earlier period with perseverance and conviction you become the medium of their replies: they speak of you through you.”
Joan Peyser‘s Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma was published in 1976 by Schirmer, during Boulez’s tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Boulez studied with Olivier Messiaen in Paris in the 1940s, and the author describes one of their regular encounters: “After class they would often ride the Metro together. Boulez would say, ‘Musical aesthetics are being worn out. Music itself will die. Who is there to give it birth?’ Messiaen replied, ‘You will, Pierre.'”
Paul Griffiths, for Oxford University Press in 1978, wrote Boulez for the Oxford Studies of Composers series. On Boulez’s masterpiece Le marteau sans maître, Griffiths commented: “[The work] does indeed owe its effect to the completeness with which the delirium of a violent surrealism is considered and organized, to a rational technique’s straining to encompass the extremes of the irrational. Its importance lies also in Boulez’s discovery, through his proliferating serial method, of the means to create music which neither apes the quasi-narrative forms of tonality nor contents itself with simple symmetries in the manner of Structures. This was the discovery that Boulez celebrated at the close of his dictionary definition of ‘series’: ‘Classical tonal thought,’ he wrote, ‘is based on a universe defined by gravitation and attraction; serial thought is on a universe in perpetual expansion.'”
Orientations: Collected Writings by Pierre Boulez is the most fascinating and indeed, the most dense of all of the books available (edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, translated by Martin Cooper, and published in 1986 by Harvard University Press; the original was published in French in 1981). On Richard Wagner: “If Wagner’s personality has been—still is, indeed—the subject of such passionate controversy, it is because his ambition was great, indeed limitless. So much the better! What we call romanticism was a great adventure, a bold undertaking of the human spirit, and it must be remembered by something more than a few heroic trifles and pathetic nostalgias. People often try to reduce it to nothing more than that—some faintly extravagant mannerisms, some eccentric attitude or cheap and obvious sentimentality. How wrong it is to see romanticism as anything so feeble as a mere consolation—as it were—for living in such hard times as ours. The claims made by Wagner’s great undertaking [the Ring cycle] were something very different from that; and if in some ways that undertaking failed—and failed disastrously—there is no denying that in other ways it succeeded beyond all imagination.”
In 1991 Harvard University Press published Susan Bradshaw’s translation of Dominque Jameux’s Pierre Boulez, an extensive biography on the composer and conductor (originally published in French in 1984). “Boulez’s thinking is digital rather than analogical. Faced with the offer of a new reality, his reactions are immediate and decisive. He is at ease when confronted with opening-up processes as long as they have a practical application, and are approached successively as the need arises. . . . Boulez thinks in terms of options rather than progressive evolution. Like most intellectuals, he is doubtless afflicted by uncertainty, self-questioning and irresolution, even if he hardly ever lets it appear so. He acts as he thinks—positively. Outwardly he gives an impression of resolution, mental alacrity, perseverance, and self-justification—inwardly, one of evaluation, amendment, realism, and self-criticism.”
Pierre Boulez: A Symposium is a collection of essays edited by William Glock and published by Eulenburg Books in 1986. In the chapter dedicated to Boulez’s compositions for piano, Charles Rosen begins: “The Sonatas for piano Nos. 1 and 2, along with the Flute Sonatine, are the first items to be admitted to the canon of works acknowledged by Pierre Boulez. Music for keyboard is a traditional outlet for experimentation: it allows an immediate control over the musical idea. If the composer is even a modest pianist, it enables him to escape (momentarily) from the terror of being interpreted; and the limitation of tone-color and range is a positive advantage even for composers for whom timbre is not a compositional element clearly subordinate to pitch—the limited timbre of the piano acts as a focus. Music for piano has therefore become, starting with Beethoven, a convenient form of announcing a revolution in style: Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Debussy, and Schoenberg are the most conspicuous examples of composers who used the piano for this purpose. In spite of later developments, the piano work which initiates a change of direction often indicates at once the nature of the revolution and suggests its limits.”
Jean Vermeil’s Conversations with Boulez: Thoughts on Conducting—originally published in French in 1989—was published in 1996 by Amadeus Press in Camille Naish’s translation. On conducting without a baton: “So, the baton? The more one is inclined toward contemporary music, the less one needs this particular extension. There’s a certain technique involved: the accuracy of the gesture resides in a perfect coincidence between arm, hand, and intention—and what one can physically execute, as well. And so, especially for phrasing, both hands are needed.”
“Between May 1949 and August 1954 the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of remarkable letters which reflect on their own music and the music and culture of the time. . . . At the time, Cage and Boulez were great friends and these amicable letters reflect their differing ideas on the course new music should take. While Boulez was thinking about forms of serialism, Cage was moving in the direction of ever greater compositional freedom and chance procedures.” This excerpt is part of the introduction to The Boulez–Cage Correspondence, edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and translated and edited by Robert Samuels, and published in English by Cambridge University Press in 1993 (originally published in French and English in 1990).
Georgina Born‘s Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde was published by the University of California Press in 1995. Boulez’s words, from the introduction: “The creator’s intuition alone is powerless to provide a comprehensive translation of musical invention. It is thus necessary for him to collaborate with the scientific research worker in order to envision the distant future, to imagine less personal, and thus broader, solutions. . . . The musician must assimilate a certain scientific knowledge, making it an integral part of his creative imagination.”
Peyser’s second book concerning Boulez—To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe Since The Rite of Spring—was published in 1999 by Billboard Books. “What Boulez set out to do was ‘to strip music of its accumulated dirt and give it the structure it had lacked since the Renaissance.’ He went into it, ‘with exaltation and fear. It was like [René] Descartes‘s “Cogito, ergo sum.” I momentarily suppressed inheritance. I started from the fact that I was thinking and went on to construct a musical language from scratch.'”
Scarecrow Press in 2001 published Dialogues with Boulez by Rocco Di Pietro. In Boulez’s words: “Well, when I think of myself as a composer, there are two things in me: the side of the performer and the side of the composer. That’s the same person, of course. But the approach is not exactly the same because, even when I conduct my own works I have some distance with them, not at all like when you are composing. As a composer, yes, you have to be at the same time adventurous, so you don’t know what you will discover; I mean, you are on the path of a discovery and you know it. And you go about this in various ways. For instance, imitation or absorption is one way. You hear something. Or if you see something—a painting; or if you read a book, especially when you are in an overlapping configuration or discipline which is not musical at all. Like painting, for example: suddenly you see someone’s work who has found a solution to the problem, and it may be that you can say, ‘Oh, for my problem that can also apply.’ Of course, you have to transcend that, to find your own solution. It can provoke a solution. That’s what I call not so much imitation, really, but absorption.”
Boulez on Conducting: Conversations with Cécile Gilly was first published in French in 2002. Richard Stokes’s translation was published the following year by Faber and Faber. When asked about how conducting had provided the composer a practical side, Boulez replied: “It has caused me to reflect on speculation and performance. They are like two mirrors. You have the mirror of speculation and the mirror of performance, which reflect each other. That is indispensable.”
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