BOULEZ AT 80: THE PATH FROM THE NEW MUSIC

Extract

In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern's main purpose was to convince his audience that the twelve-note method was the natural outcome of an evolutionary process; that since ‘we compose as before’, the new was a reinterpretation of the old, not its rejection. Nothing could have been more soberly practical than the aspiration expressed in Webern's claim that ‘we want to say “in a quite new way” what has been said before’. By contrast, it has long been argued that the agenda of the post-1945 avant-garde, with Pierre Boulez a leading member, might be summarized thus: ‘we want to say, in as new a way as possible, what has not been said before’. Adorno based his 1955 critique of the new music around that ‘levelling and neutralization’ which, he believed, were the direct result of the technical obsessions of ‘total’ serialism: ‘the effort to rationalize music completely has something useless and frantic about it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic’. Adorno claimed that ‘what is needed is for expression to win back the density of experience, as was already tried during the expressionist period’. Composers should abandon this false form of the new music and begin to remember its earlier, more authentic manifestation.