Technology and the Composer

Leonardo, Vol. 1I, pp. 59-62., Pergamon Press 1978. Printed in Great Britain TECHNOLOGY AND THE COMPOSER* Pierre Boulez** Invention in music is often subject to the prohibitions and taboos which it would be dangerous to transgress. Invention must remain the private, exclusive property of genius, or at least of talent. Indeed it is hard to find any purely rational explanation for it; by summoning up unpredictable results out of nothing it escapes analysis. But is this nothing really the total void appropriate to miracle-workers? And does the unpredictable come to exist in a totally unpredicted context? Invention cannot exist in the abstract, it originates in contact with music of the.past, be it only the recent past; it exists through reflection on its direct or indirect antecedents. Such reflection concentrates naturally on the spiritual approach, the mental mechanisms and the intellectual development displayed by the work it takes asmodels, but it concentrates also on the sound material itself, without whose support music cannot exist; musical material has evolved over the centuries, providing for each age a typical sound profile that is continually renewed- slowly perhaps, but inevitably. Yet invention today is faced today with a number of problems particularly concerned with the relation between the conception, we might even say the vision, of the composer and the realization in sound of his ideas. For some time now, the composer’s mental approach, his “wild” invention, has been free to follow very different paths from those that the medium, the sound material, can offer him. This divergence has caused blockages dangerousenough for invention to lose all its spontaneity; when either the material or the idea develops independently , unconcerned whether or not they coincide, a serious imbalance develops,to the detriment of the work, which is tugged this way and that between false priorities. Underlying these blockages there are undoubtedly causes which are beyond the composer’s power and over which he has little control, but of which he is-or should beaware if he is to try to overcome them. We think at once of blockages of a social kind. Since at least the beginning of this century, our culture has been orientated towards historicism and conservation. As though by a defensive reflex, the greater and more powerful our technological progress, the more timidly has our culture retracted to what it sees as the immutable and imperishable values of the past. And since a largerthough still limited-section of society haseasieraccess to musical culture, having more leisure and spendingpower, and since modes of transmission have increased enormously and at the same time are cheaper, the consumption of music has considerably increased. This leads to a growing boredom with pieces that are *Reprinted from The Times Literary Supplement (London) issue of 6 May 1977, with permission. **Music composer and conductor, Institut de Recherche et CoordinationAcoustique/Musique,CentreGeorgesPompidou, 3I rue Saint-Merri,F-75004 Paris, France. frequently heard and repeated, and to search for an alternative repertoire- one within the same radius of action as the well known works and providing a series of substitutes for them. Only too rarely does it lead to a genuine broadening of the repertoire by giving fresh lifeto works which have become the exclusive property of libraries. The search for historical peculiarities of interpretation also serves to divert energies which are all too likely to be swallowed up by it. Thus the “museum” has become the centre of musical life, together with the almost obsessive preoccupation with reproducing as faithfully as possible all the conditions of the past, This exclusive historicism is a revealing symptom of the dangers a culture runs when it confesses its own poverty so openly: it is engaged not in making models, nor in destroying them in order to create fresh ones, but in reconstructing them and venerating them like totems, as symbols of a golden age which has been totally abolished. Among other consequences, a historicizing culture has almost completely blocked the evolution of musical instruments, which have come to a disasterous halt for both social and economic reasons. The great channels of musical consumption which exploit, almost exclusively, the works of the past consequently use the means of transmission...