We love the Second Viennese School, but daughter's practice of Boulez's music is wearying us. How can we appreciate Boulez?

Question

We love and listen to the Second Viennese School like Berg, Schoenberg, Webern — even before my daughter was born! My daughter's studying music at university. To guard privacy, I don't want to write more details on her or our family.

But starting 2019, she's been practicing many pieces composed by Pierre Boulez — and this Ultraserialism is maddening my husband and me! It sounds like random notes and/or noise to us! We haven't confronted her, because she knows more about music, and we know Boulez is a world famous composer and conductor. Boulez conducted "Classical" and Romantic tonal music like Beethoven, Berlioz, Haydn, Mahler — so this emperor is wearing clothes??!?? Boulez doesn't look like a sham or phony, and we're taking Boulez's music in good faith.

But how can we learn Ultraserialism? Since 2019, we've watched Boulez's music on YouTube and listened to recordings. But like many others, we still can't "GET" Ultraserialism. When asked in 1999, why so few major pieces of the 1950s and 1960s had become repertory, Boulez replied

"Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener" (as cited in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, 2007, p. 571).

The Music SE question My child's violin practice is making us tired, what can we do? is similar. But the issue here is not my daughter's practice, but THE ULTRASERIALIST COMPOSERS she's practicing.

Observation on June 20 2021.

I don't know if the responders below will see this, but I found — perhaps too late — another quotation by Boulez rebuffing his own Ultra Serialism on Wikipedia. theartsdesk Q&A: Composer Pierre Boulez | The Arts Desk

Would you rather not have this piece [Referring to Boulez's Piano Sonata no. 2] played any more.

I am not terribly eager to listen to it. But for me it was an experience that was absolutely necessary.

Answer 1

If you enjoy the Second Viennese School, but can't get into Boulez, I suggest you turn to the missing link in this timeline: Olivier Messiaen. He was the person who taught people like Boulez about the Second Viennese School, and his own experiments with Serialism (where the note pitches are serialized, as in Schoenberg's twelve-tone music) and Total Serialism (where all aspects of the music are serialized) had a strong influence on his pupils.

The interesting thing about Messiaen's music is that it developed through many stages, moving toward and away from (Total) Serialism at different times, and also incorporated many other techniques and influences. E.g. his use of transcribed bird song can be seen as a counterweight to the search for formalized composition techniques such as serialism, which was typical of much 20th century classical music; one is the sound of nature untouched by man, the other very much man-made and intellectual. (I suspect Messiaen turned to bird song whenever he had doubts about the validity of other composition techniques.)

The most Total Serialist of his composition is undoubtedly Mode de Valeurs et d'Intensités from the Quatre Etudes de Rythme for piano from 1949/50. This probably comes closest to what Boulez did in the 50's and 60's. But Messiaen moved away from this composition style after a few years, and serialism became only one of several techniques that he combined in his later works.

I would suggest exploring Messiaen's music chronologically, and also listening to Boulez's music of the same time when you reach the 50's. Maybe this will give you a way in, or at least a context in which to approach Boulez.

With a bit of luck, you may even get your daughter interested in exploring Messiaen and/or some of his other pupils besides Boulez.

Thème et Variations (1932) played by Janine Jansen and Itamar Golan
Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus (1941) played by Gil Shaham and Myung-Whun Chung

Answer 2

Well, the way you phrase this, it is a "music appreciation" question for which there is different StackExchange group.

But the real question I see here is more one of rehearsal hygiene. A professional music career requires an exercise regimen that is not expected to be attractive to witnesses, including your daughter's teachers who just get an occasional sample of the progress. And of course where you are practising individual parts of pieces arranged for multiple performers, it very much depends on the kind of music whether the part gives a good foreshadowing of the larger whole it is part of.

So the question is whether you can find an arrangement where a good part of the time your daughter is practising, you just don't get to hear her.

There may be still a third aspect, namely whether the skills and experience your daughter acquires are sought after enough that her education will enable her to a career she considers fulfilling and that is able to meet her financial needs. Of course, this is a general problem of becoming a professional musician. In her case, it would definitely also involve whether she can bring something into this kind of music that gives the listener a better appreciation than what he gets his ears on otherwise.

There is some music where metering your progress in the lens of audience appreciation may start making sense (or at least being forward-pointing) earlier. But that's to a good degree your tough luck: in the end, it is mostly between your daughter as an adult and her teachers to make that determination, and if that niche is where your daughter wants to thrive, trying to be supportive of her choices is what you likely should do, and your question indicates that it is also what you want to do.

The best way to do that may not involve you gauging her playing but let her navigate that minefield on her own and with her teachers. At least as you are reasonably sure that her heart is in on this for her own good reasons rather than because she is trying to prove something to you.

Answer 3

From my recent experience working from home, frequently in the same room as my wife, and inspired by the suggestion in the other answer to "find an arrangement where a good part of the time your daughter is practising, you just don't get to hear her," I suggest investing in a good pair of noise-canceling headphones and listening to something else while she is practicing.

Answer 4

The existing answers ("Maybe don't listen?") make a good point, especially that practice is not performance. (I'm tempted to name-check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Cares_if_You_Listen .)

But to address the intent of your question, "How can anybody actually like this?" I can't claim that I sit down and listen to serialist music for enjoyment. But the closest I came was for a few weeks of my "20th century music theory" course in undergrad in which we had to actually learn the techniques, and submit a paper analyzing a Webern piece. I spent weeks staring at the score, circling things, and I discovered that what sounded abstract and arbitrary was in fact incredibly, meticulously, deliberate. I found patterns, inverted patterns, reversed patterns, chords that added up simultaneously to the pattern, patterns in the rhythms and even the meter, patterns handed off from one voice to another (or chased in canon). Even dynamics and articulations were mathematically calculated. To this day, when I go back and read the paper I wrote, I don't understand half of it. But in that moment, while I certainly didn't enjoy the piece, I understood it. To attempt to just sit down, let it wash over you, and appreciate the experience is perhaps comparable to listening to a recitation of a Shakespeare sonnet translated into Russian, without either analyzing the poem or understanding Russian.

It's a great irony that a genre born of a compulsion to totally control every aspect, and to pursue ultimate and absolute order, comes across sounding unordered and arbitrary. Of course, the practitioners of serialism believed that our facility to hear and appreciate the mathematical precision would evolve over time. It's telling that most, like Boulez, gave up on that dream and in fact turned to the opposite, indeterminism. Rather than giving the composer ultimate control, they set boundaries between the composer and the compositional process, like deriving content from the I Ching or putting tracing paper over star charts.

TLDR? Who says you have to enjoy everything? Even if your daughter does? But you can at least have a chance at understanding it, and for serialism that's the best kind of appreciation.