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Thread: RIP Pierre Boulez

  1. #1
    Member chalkpie's Avatar
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    RIP Pierre Boulez

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/ar...s-90.html?_r=0

    A sad day for music. My favorite conductor of all time without question, and a visionary who altered music forever.

  2. #2
    Oh shit!

    Grand Master of Allthings contemporary; one of the very last truly great ones of his day and age - although obviously he was getting increasingly frail these past years. His legacy in French music probably exceeds anyone else post-Messiaen, so there's an ideal to uphold.

    And YES, he was *PROGRESSIVE*.
    "Improvisation is not an excuse for musical laziness" - Fred Frith
    "[...] things that we never dreamed of doing in Crimson or in any band that I've been in," - Tony Levin speaking of SGM

  3. #3
    Ouch! A truly sad day indeed. bon voyage...

  4. #4
    Member Phlakaton's Avatar
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    One man who really "got" Zappa too.

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  6. #6
    Yesterday my favorite living jazz musician, today my favorite living classical musician.

    Yikes.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by chalkpie View Post
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/ar...s-90.html?_r=0

    A sad day for music. My favorite conductor of all time without question, and a visionary who altered music forever.
    Yes a very sad day, one of my favorites. Condolences.

  8. #8
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    One of the greats for sure RIP


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

  9. #9
    Traversing The Dream 100423's Avatar
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    He was a masterful artist. RIP

  10. #10
    Jazzbo manqué Mister Triscuits's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by chalkpie View Post
    A sad day for music. My favorite conductor of all time without question, and a visionary who altered music forever.
    A sad day indeed. Boulez was a true titan of modern music. R.I.P.

  11. #11
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    RIP

  12. #12
    All Things Must Pass spellbound's Avatar
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    Rest in peace, Pierre Boulez, conductor and composer extraordinaire.
    We're trying to build a monument to show that we were here
    It won't be visible through the air
    And there won't be any shade to cool the monument to prove that we were here. - Gene Parsons, 1973

  13. #13
    Bon Voyage, Boulez! The breadth of his intellect and musical knowledge was staggering. The world has lost a musical giant.

  14. #14
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    FZ described him as "one of the real guys."

  15. #15
    Progga mogrooves's Avatar
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    mort.

    RIP......
    Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes

  16. #16
    My thanks for the years of awesomeness! Rest in peace, sir.
    Sleeping at home is killing the hotel business!

  17. #17
    RIP Mr. Boulez, your compositions and conducting works will fill my ears today.
    A vie, a mort, et apres...

  18. #18
    Member Phlakaton's Avatar
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    Been listening to all his work on the György Ligeti - Clear Or Cloudy (Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon) release. Excellent stuff.

  19. #19
    Boo! walt's Avatar
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    For those in the greater NYC metropolitan area,radio station WKCR,89.9 on the FM dial,is playing the music of Pierre Boulez from 3pm today(Wednesday) through tomorrow evening.

    Unfortunately, WKCR's streaming service has been suspended,no one from the station has provided a reason for this.Bummer for those outside the NYC area who enjoy WKCR via streaming.

    RIP Pierre Boulez.
    "please do not understand me too quickly"-andre gide

  20. #20
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    Sad news, but not unexpected. I love his conducting, especially stuff he did later in his career that would have once been unthinkable such as Szymanowski and Scriabin. He was a fantastic opera conductor, the film he made of a WNO production of Pelleas et Melisande with Peter Stein is incredible. Then there's his championing of non-tonal stuff, I love his recording of one of my very favorite pieces of music, Birtwistle's Earth Dances. He *gets it*, the textures are so transparent and they rhythmic drive he gets is incredible:



    As a composer, I'm not a big fan of the early total serialism pieces, but he started writing in a more sensuous, "French" way and things like Pli selon Pli (which I was lucky to hear years ago in Amsterdam), Rituel - In Memoriam Bruno Maderna, Sur incises and especially Répons are favorites.



    He, of course, was a big polemicist about music, he's got some great quotes over the years:

    1957: What can we conclude? The unexpected: I, in turn, assert that any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but, in all exactness, experienced – the necessity for the dodecaphonic [12-tone] language is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

    1967: Only with the greatest difficulty can one present modern opera in a theatre in which, predominantly, repertoire pieces are played. It is really unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses up. But don’t you think that would be the most elegant? […] Or one can play the usual repertoire in the existing opera houses, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, up to about Berg. For new operas, experimental stages absolutely need to be incorporated. This apparently senseless demand has already been widely realised in other branches of the theatre

    2000: Shostakovich plays with clichés most of the time, I find. It’s like olive oil, when you have a second and even third pressing, and I think of Shostakovich as the second, or even third, pressing of Mahler. I think, with Shostakovich, people are influenced by the autobiographical dimension of his music

    RIP Pierre Boulez.
    ...or you could love

  21. #21
    A sad day, indeed. He was my teacher and mentor, and will be greatly missed.

    Now as to the Times article:

    1.Harold Schonberg's and Donal(d) Henahan's comments remind me of what fools they both were. As Sibelius said, nobody has ever built a statue of a critic and put it in a public square. Perhaps a better commentary is the role of Beckmesser in Wagner's Die Meistersinger, which portrays another idiot of a critic in Eduard Hanslick.

    2.He did not always conduct without a baton...early on he did use one.

    3.The comment that he embraced Mahler in the 1990's is wrong. He did a complete cycle (except Symphony #1 due to an orchestra strike...it HAD been programmed) as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the '70's, including the most amazing Symphony #9 I have ever heard (at one of the rug concerts).

  22. #22
    Boo! walt's Avatar
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    Comments on Pierre Boulez by composer, writer,musicologist Kyle Gann:

    http://www.artsjournal.com/postclass...-est-mort.html
    "please do not understand me too quickly"-andre gide

  23. #23
    Jazzbo manqué Mister Triscuits's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by meshuggah View Post
    3.The comment that he embraced Mahler in the 1990's is wrong. He did a complete cycle (except Symphony #1 due to an orchestra strike...it HAD been programmed) as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the '70's, including the most amazing Symphony #9 I have ever heard (at one of the rug concerts).
    He did an incredible recording of Das Klagende Lied in 1970, coupled with the Symphony #10 Adagio. I think he was the first to record the full version including the first movement that Mahler suppressed.

  24. #24
    One of my idols as a composer. He was also among my very favourite conductors - simply brilliant.

    He had a good, long life and contributed so much to the world. Rest in peace, Pierre. You've certainly earned it
    And the code is a play, a play is a song, a song is a film, a film is a dance...

  25. #25
    Horrible news

    I have been devoting a lot of time recently on his Bartok box set. Am so sorry to hear about this. Wonderful musical - so passionate

    RIP

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