I recently witnessed a professor of music accuse a famous 20th-century composer of having “ruined music.” The class was discussing important orchestral works by 20th-century composers, and a student mentioned Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maitre, a blistering avant-garde work filled with rhythmic and harmonic dissonances. The professor claimed that he hated Boulez, that Boulez should not be studied as he had ruined music.
Boulez has always been a controversial figure among 20th-century composers and critics. His death in 2016 left behind a controversial legacy for musicologists, scholars and classical music aficionados to pick apart. As a conductor, Boulez went through periods in which he conducted music primarily from the classical era and periods in which he conducted music almost exclusively from the modern era. As a writer and critic, Boulez published articles both in defense of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and in condemnation of Schoenberg’s (radical) late works. His life as a critic and conductor was riddled with these inconsistencies.
As the composition professor explained to the class, Boulez “ruined music” in that he advocated for a complete rejection of the study of the Western canon of classical music. His famed summer program in Darmstadt was conceived almost entirely in this vein: He refused to study any non-modernist compositions, claiming that the modernist movement required a rejection of the historical legacies of classical music and the use of radical new forms based on emancipated rhythmic and harmonic dissonances.
Boulez’s infamous article “Schoenberg Is Dead,” for example, represents some of his most scathing condemnations of anything but the most radical modernist music. Schoenberg’s late explorations of tonal music, Boulez asserted, had “went off in the wrong direction so persistently that it would be hard to find an equally mistaken perspective in the entire history of music.” Schoenberg’s was erroneously attempting “to construct works of the same essence as that of those in the sound-universe he had just left behind,” a practice which “led to the decrepitude of the larger part of his serial oeuvre.”
“It is time to neutralize the setback,” Boulez exclaims, and “grasp the serial domain as a whole.”
Though Boulez may be among the strongest examples of modernist and rejectionist artists, this idea of rejecting historical forms is the true mark of an avant-garde artist. This is the modern legacy of the avant-garde music: the desertion of artistic customs that had developed over generations, the constant need for radical innovation and separation from historical precedent.
Composers such as Boulez chose to break entirely with conventional musical forms, writing pieces with purely abstract titles in which no note occurs more frequently than any other note. These pieces are hard to palate and harder still to learn to love, especially for those audiences that do not have an extensive background in contemporary classical music.
The same can be said of many of the avant-garde periods most famous plays, particularly Samuel Beckett’s famed “Waiting for Godot”; while the play has been frequently cited by playwrights and other theater buffs for its lack of plot and intriguing ambiguous meaning, few modern companies can sell tickets to productions of this work.
Modern artists, however, are beginning to find new and intriguing means of responding to and shaping this rejectionist legacy. For many, this involves using the language of the pre-avant-garde styles in avant-garde forms and structures. For others, this involves using the language of the avant-garde in pre-avant-garde forms and structures. In both instances, however, the influences of the avant-garde and the pre-avant-garde are broken up and juxtaposed, sparking the formation of unprecedented yet familiar works.
Modern playwrights are finding new ways of using nonlinear or other non-standard forms to depict classic subjects. Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” for example, used an undeniably avant-garde influenced plot structure to reference Biblical messages about the human condition. Though these messages were conveyed through the guise of a purgatorial trial, they were conveyed in the language of the decidedly pre-avant-garde.
Modern composers are also finding new ways of using non-standard formal structures as a means of reinterpreting Classical concepts and forms. Ted Hearne’s “The Law of Mosaics,” for example, uses humorous juxtapositions to deconstruct standard pieces of the string orchestra repertoire. The result, Hearne explains, is a “law of mosaics” in which the meaning of the work is derived not through the standard idea of development but through the piecing together of different pieces “in the absence of the whole.”
Modern opera also shares many of these tendencies, although the avant-garde period has had significantly less of an effect on the genre. John Adams’s many operas about recent historical events, for example, use standard operatic form and convention to interpret previously non-operatic thematic material. Jonathan Dawe’s “Cracked Orlando,” on the other hand, does the opposite — Grazio Braccioli’s libretto, used in Vivaldi’s opera, is fragmented using fractal geometry into a series of ideas between onstage and projected dancers and singers that interact throughout the work.
Our modern idiom is best described as an idiom lacking a defining characteristic: an idiom derived entirely from fragmented ideas taken from other historical idioms. Unlike the avant-garde period, we are no longer obsessed with the creation of new forms or the rejection of old forms. We are obsessed, instead, with the deconstruction of old ideas into new forms.
It is the nonlinear narrative, I believe, that will be the defining legacy of the 21st century. Just as the 20th century was the century of “rejection,” the 21st century will be the century of juxtaposition. Just as Boulez “ruined music,” so are today’s artists de-contextualizing and reinterpreting historical practices to the point that they cannot be recognized for what they were originally intended to do.
Our century, furthermore, is defined by benefits of the internet and the many different types of music that we can all access. Music cannot be ruined because it can no longer be strictly defined. While Boulez and the avant-garde artists may have pushed the performing arts in a radical new direction, the internet has allowed us to experience both new and old art — the rejected and the radically new. We are experiencing a radical democratization of art: A period in which the artists and artistic work that we consume is defined almost entirely by our own taste, not that of an artistic program director or a museum curator.
Boulez may have changed music but he did not “ruin” it. The same can be said of every artist that came before him, and the same will be said of every artist that comes after. He did redefine art, however, and we are still struggling to understand the full implications of the avant-garde movement he propagated.