ABSTRACT
After a lifetime of performing, composing and thinking about music, I find myself asking the question: why am I troubled? It struck me recently while I was reading an interview with Boulez by Rob Cowan in The Independent entitled ‘Voulez-vous Boulez?’, and sub-headed ‘modernist bête-noire or champion of the new?’ 1 The interview itself was intelligent and informative, and thus ill-served by the phrases I have quoted, suggestive of a polarizing of attitudes wholly unrepresentative of the subtle arguments of the interview itself. While ‘Voulez-vous Boulez?’ defies comment, the presumption that modernism is a territory inhabited by aliens is obfuscation taken to its limits. I say obfuscation, because labelling is a mere convenience for identification rather than an explanation of individual qualities. To confuse the two, as some historians frequently do, simply creates a false impression. The idea that you can only be a composer if you join a labelled school certainly makes things neat and tidy for commentators, but it says nothing about the individuality which is essential for true creativity. For instance, no three composers are more distinctive than the so-called Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, yet their historical epitaph is chiselled in stone. I go further, and maintain that the music of no substantial composer in history or today can be qualified by the tenets of a fashionable cult. Couperin defended his distinctiveness in copious prefaces. J.S. Bach was seen as an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy during his life but he is timeless in his eternal monumentality. Mozart avoided the galant style almost completely, but stands as a monument to its age.
