Amidst the Notes: RIP Pierre Boulez & David Bowie

Pierre Boulez,
by Carlo Bavagnoli

I've been of two minds about the recent deaths of two leading figures in the world of music, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), and David Bowie (1947-2016), mourning their deaths while also feeling the need to acknowledge key faults--which are not commensurate, let me be clear--that marked the characters of both. Both were musicians of original vision and talent, and born performers. Both left a deep mark not only in the musical cultures of their native countries but in the US and globally. Both wrote music that I turn and return to periodically, for differing but aesthetically and emotionally necessary reasons. So I feel sorrow and grief at their deaths, but at the same time, perhaps akin to the form of negative capability I maintain when reading certain writers like Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot, I keep in mind certain criticisms of them, even if the elation and admiration their music brings sometimes temporarily evacuates that criticism. (Keguro at "With(out) Predicates" offers one of his characteristically profound, moving and concise meditations on the necessary distinction between acknowledging the flaws of a deceased person and haranguing someone who is mourning that person as a way of forcing them to engage in such acknowledgement.)

Pierre Boulez was perhaps the towering figure in avant-garde Western classical music in the second half of the 20th century. He became one of the leading composers and judgmental exponents of new music, championing certain composers, especially those of his generation, as well as key figures in the French tradition, and the leader early 20th century modernists. He pursued a parallel career as a conductor, beginning in the 1950s, and perhaps most famously, led the New York Philharmonic from 1970-1975, a tenure that still provokes mixed reviews, though his focus on contemporary composers and the 20th century repertoire was undeniable, and remains unmatched by the Philharmonic even today, in 2016. His conducting style, without a baton and noted for its precision and clarity, brought the modernist composers Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Gustav Mahler, Bela Bartók, Maurice Ravel, and Edgard Varèse in particular to life. His own work showed their influences while moving in its own direction; just a few years ago I saw Messagésquisse performed at Columbia University, and it was more beautiful and stirring than any recording of it I'd ever listened to. Boulez, however, could be extremely harsh to the point of cruelty in his criticisms. He famously proclaimed Arnold Schoenberg "dead" at the end of an eponymous essay in which he trashed Schoenberg's failure to fully exploit the possibilities of the dodecaphonic system he had developed, and published the essay shortly after that pioneering composer died. Boulez cruelly described the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich as "the third pressing...of Mahler," and cast Karl Amadeus Mozart off as "trite." His fallings out with fellow musicians, including his former teacher Leibowitz, and former experimental compatriots John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, are well recorded. He also apparently never publicly came out of the closet as a gay man, though some critics and many fellow musicians knew about his sexual orientation and relationships. I take all of this into account, but also point to his music itself, which at its best--and there are certainly high points--is the lasting testament of the man.


Pierre Boulez, Répons - Ensemble intercontemporain - Matthias Pintscher, conductor, 2015.


 Pierre Boulez, Messagesquisse - Eric-Maria Couturier - Ensemble intercontemporain, Matthias Pintscher, conductor, 2014.

David Bowie, 2016

David Bowie championed another kind of 20th century music, or several, rock & roll and soul-influenced pop. Born Robert Jones in Brixton, London, he initially launched his career in the late 1960s, and first made the charts with his song "Space Oddity," which introduced the figure Major Tom, whom Bowie would revisit later in his career. In the early 1970s, he created the queer, glam rock alter ego character Ziggy Stardust, the titular figure of his LP The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and transformed the public figure of the male rock icon through his overtly androgynous persona, which he concluded with Diamond Dogs. Throughout his career, Bowie remade himself, shifting into "plastic soul" in 1975, with the album Young Americans, which featured the overtly queer "John, I'm Only Dancing," one of my favorites, includes one of my favorite songs, and 1976's Station to Station, with the track "Golden Years," which he performed as one of the first white musicians on Soul Train. Subsequent shifts included the adoption of electronic elements and collaboration with Brian Eno, a stagy pop style with "Ashes to Ashes," and his biggest hit, which was one of the top tunes during my senior year of high school and freshman year in college, "Let's Dance." Bowie continued to record up through the final months before his death, issuing his final album, Blackstar, just days before he died. He acted in films, including the still striking and bizarre The Man Who Fell to Earth, an unforgettable vampire in The Hunger's sex trial, and an equally memorable Andy Warhol in the biopic Basquiat. David Bowie flirted with Nazism in his youth, adopting some of its trappings as a kind of fashion statement and aesthetic performance, and also had sex with an underage girl, the first of which I knew, the latter of which I didn't, and both disturb me tremendously. On the racist front, he did speak out more than once about the racism in the music industry, famously calling out MTV's overt discrimination while on air; as to whether the song China Girl is heard as something other than the Orientalism it ostensibly is a matter for others to uncover, and whether he ever atoned for what essentially involves the abuse of a teenager I cannot say. I can speak to the electric feeling I felt as an early adolescent watching him perform in a plastic suit, and later drag, with gender performers Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi, which I link to below.

David Bowie - Let's Dance, EMI Music.


David Bowie & Klaus Nomi - TVC15 & Boys Keep... by ZapMan69

Samy Moussa & Daniel Kidane

Not long ago, via Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc blog on Arts Journal, I saw mention of two young art music composers I'd never heard of before, Samy Moussa (b. 1984-) and Daniel Kidane (b. 1986-).

Samy Moussa

Moussa is a native of Montreal, Canada, and studied at the University of Montréal, in the Czech Republic, and at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, as well as with major contemporary composers including Magnus Lindberg, Salvatore Sciarrino, Pascal Dusaupin, Peter Eötvös, Matthias Pintscher, and the maestro Pierre Boulez. He has collaborated with a number of Canadian and European orchestras and ensembles, and composed two operas as well as a number of chamber works. In 2010 he became Music Director of the INDEX Ensemble in Munich.  In 2012 he received the Bayerischen Kunstförderpreis for his conducting with the INDEX Ensemble and this year won the Composers’ Prize 2013 from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. I saw his name mentioned in conjunction with the Lucerne Festival, at which Pierre Boulez commissioned a new orchestral work from him, to premiere in 2015.

Here's a short piece from the Ernst von Siemens foundation on Moussa, whom it calls "the hedonistic composer." (?)

Here are some videos of Moussa's work:


Ernst von Siemens Foundation clip on Moussa


Moussa's "Kammerkonzert"


Moussa's "Cyclus for Orchestra," (2007) performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Canada

Daniel Kidane

Kidane is British, studied at composition at the Royal College of Music Junior Department, followed by the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, after which he attended the Royal Northern College of Music, receiving a BMus (Hons) and a Masters. Several British orchestras have premiered his works. The Manchester Camerata selected his piece "Feuersturm," a musical evocation of the 1945 bombing of Dresden, Germany, for its 2010 season. This year the London Philharmonic Orchestra's Leverhulme Young Composers' program selected him for a 2014 orchestral premiere.

Kidane has a Myspace page featuring a few of his compositions, most of them from 2008 and 2009, when he had just finished his undergraduate studies.

Here are a few of Kidane's compositions, a number of which are available on Soundcloud.


Daniel Kidane's "Temporal Decay," courtesy of the London Chamber Orchestra

Kidane's "Piano Trios" (including "Flux and Stasis" and "Carceri"
Kidane's "Metamorphosis for solo cello"

Daniel Barenboim @ Edward Said Memorial Concert, Columbia University

Daniel Barenboim and Ara Guzelimian

One of the highlights of living in Chicago was the presence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of the best philharmonic orchestras in the country, and up through 2010, one of the world's great pianists and conductors, Daniel Barenboim, helmed it. I did not see Barenboim conduct as much as I could have or would have liked, but I can remember several memorable concerts he led or in which he performed, and so when two friends suggested I join them to see him speak about his friendship with the late scholar, critic, and musician Edward Said, and then conduct a short chamber concert at which he would also perform, I wasn't going to pass on the opportunity.

The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) at Columbia University and The Cogut Center for the Humanities (CCH) at Brown University sponsored the talk, "Remembering Edward W. Said: A Conversation with Daniel Barenboim and Ara Guzelimian," as well as the subsequent performance by selected members of the Seville-based West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Both took place at Columbia's Miller Theater. I hadn't realized it, but this was but the first event in larger program, running throughout 2013 at Columbia, that will commemorate Edward W. Said on the 10th anniversary of his passing. I looked online and cannot find the other events, but I expect they will be posted at some point down the road.

Daniel Barenboim

Guzelimian is the Dean and Provost of the Juilliard School, and he knew how to elicit lively, warm, but quite candid remarks from Barenboim about his relationship with Said and his wife, who was in the audience, and about the founding of the Western-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which involved a fascinating story in which a young Barenboim aided two young Syrian musicians in entering a concert by Arthur Rubinstein (whose daughter also was in the audience, just two seats away from us), only to have students of one of those young musicians many years later present themselves to his assistant as candidates for the orchestra, which brings together young musicians from Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, and the Arab world. As busy as both men were, Barenboim noted that until the end of Said's life, they spoke every day. He went on to register a number of resonant points about culture, music, what Said meant and still means to him, and what sort of work in the world he saw the orchestra undertaking.

Its skill was on display in particular in three of the pieces it performed that night: Pierre Boulez's Mémoriale and Messagesquisse, the latter a favorite of mine and so expertly rendered I wish I had been able to record it (verboten, naturally) and post it here. The soloist, Hassan Mataz El Molla, was particularly adroit in leading and playing his violoncello off against the sextet of violoncellos producing the sonorous buzzing background Boulez devises. Between the two Boulez pieces came an original composition by K. Azmeh, who performed the clarinet solo entitled Prayer, a tribute to Edward Said. Though it possessed some pretty moments, it felt a bit underdeveloped and overshadowed by the virtuosic Boulez pieces. I also couldn't help but think of Douglas Ewart's more successful and dazzling compositions, expertly performed on a range of woodwinds, that I used to catch at Chicago's Velvet Lounge.

Last on the bill Franz Schubert's Piano Quintet in A major D.667, "The Trout." Both Barenboim and his son Michael performed in the latter piece, and I must say that while at the end of the piece I felt as I had heard an animated sewing machine, as I often do when I listen to Schubert's music, I also thought he accompanists in particular were sharp, summing with panache piece's playfulness as well as its darker notes. Barenboim's rhythm seemed a little off at first, but by the middle of the piece he was in sync, and brought the quintet to a powerful close.

L-R: Daniel Barenboim, Yosef Abraham,  Nassib
Ahmadieh, Julia Deneyka, and Michael Barenboim

Tata Nano Coming + Boulez Becalmed + CC & Kundiman in Bkyn

A few years back I posted about MDI compressed-air automobile technology, developed by Guy Negre in France, which seemed to me to be an option that US automakers in Detroit or elsewhere might consider investing in. The ongoing problems with US automaking, symbolized at the time by the faltering Chrysler-Daimler Benz deal, were central in my mind. One of the articles I'd linked to said that Indian auto powerhouse, Tata Motors, had leapt on the technology and was going to start producing compressed-air models later that year. Three years later, it doesn't appear as though Tata has gotten that far with the compressed-air technology, but it has produced the least expensive car on earth ($2,500 US), the Nano, which it'll begin selling over here very soon. The Christian Science Monitor writes that Tata is finalizing a European model, which will require changes to the system's engine to meet the EU's much higher auto-emission standards, and is said to be "tinkering" with its US version. The images remind me of some of the tiny cars C and I saw in Sicily and have seen in other parts of Europe. The price, which is expected to come in at about $8,000 US for the EU and US models, would beat the best current offerings on the market, and I'd love to test one out. I also wonder how well they'd sell in the US, where size, safety, and comfort are paramount. Hitting one of the Evanston or Chicago Sheridan Road potholes might twist the tiny car's axles like a pretzel, and the snow and heavy rains in many parts of the country would also pose a challenge. But I'm excited about seeing one of these in the metal, and even taking one for a spin. Just not on Sheridan Road.