Introduction
This article scrutinizes the relationship between Pierre Boulez and his two major composition teachers, Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. Besides offering a summary of established accounts on what transpired between Leibowitz and Boulez in the late 1940s, it contextualizes Boulez's position within both his own writings and compositions and the broader institutional context of New Music in Europe in the early post-war era. The aim here is to provide a more contingent understanding of what was at stake for musicians active in New Music at this time, an understanding that qualifies the grimly familiar textbook narrative of succession wherein Schoenberg begat Webern who in turn begat Darmstadt.Footnote 1
The resulting view of the development of ‘serialism’ presented here is both simpler and more complex than such a genealogy. Simpler because, through the work of Inge Kovács, I demonstrate that not only were Boulez and Leibowitz reproducing the same discourse but also pursuing the same musical practice – no intensification, no radicalization, just polyphonie.Footnote 2 More complex, because the essential identity in both discourse and practice between Boulez and his supposedly estranged teacher means that textbook shorthand descriptions for the music of the Darmstadt School – total serialism, multiple serialism, integral serialism, post-Webernianism, pointillism, and so on – could only have come from some alien practice, hence M. J. Grant's claim that ‘there is no such thing as “total” serialism.’Footnote 3 The central (and substantially novel) contention of this article is that Boulez's contribution to the narrative of music history in the 1950s was not musical at all, but discursive: he identified a musical practice characterized by systematically determined treatment of isolated sound events, suppressed its Catholic, neo-Platonist (and thus potentially ‘reactionary’) aesthetic foundations, and reconciled it with the institutional framework inaugurated by his teacher. But at no point could the practice of ‘total serialism’ be identified with Boulez's own music.
Thus, unfortunately, the practice of ‘true’ total serialism exceeds the scope of the current article, as indeed it has escaped the notice of historiographical accounts that nevertheless deploy it as an aesthetic category that encompasses the totality of avant-garde musical production during the 1950s. Eric Salzman, for one, asserts that ‘literally dozens and even hundreds of totally organized, post-Webern serial pieces were written, nearly all for small combinations of instruments and nearly all based on a highly rationalized arrangement of isolated, “pointillist” events and textures, often surrounded by generous amounts of highly organized silence’.Footnote 4 Salzman may well be telling the truth, but, as this article demonstrates, he certainly is not talking about Boulez's music. The obvious question raised by this conclusion, then, is ‘if not even Structure 1a shows a meaningful distinction from Leibowitz and his numerous students, where did the aesthetic presuppositions for a supposedly radically newer New Music arise from?’ In regards to ‘true’ total serialism, then, the following study does not so much provide an account of its origin or aesthetic or ideological contents but how it came to be spoken of as the house style of the Darmstadt courses.
Foundation and interregnum
René Leibowitz's first official stint as a composition instructor at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1948 made an enervated impression on the press. Reporting on the courses, Fritz Bouquet wryly observed:
One regarded oneself as ‘radical’ and oh so ‘modern’ by praising evidence of the destruction of form and experiments by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern which were topical to the point of being scandalous twenty-five and more years ago. And today's epigones of this style are considered dernier cri.Footnote 5
Despite his cynicism, Bouquet appears to have adopted a distinctly Leibowitzian (and Adornian) frame for his description of the courses, juxtaposing the ‘worldview and design [Weltschau und Gestaltung]’ of ‘on one side, Stravinsky's fluidly striking and rhythmically emphasized classicism or Hindemith's transparently balanced mastery, and on the other side Arnold Schoenberg's early and late, thematically scattered twelve-tone style’.Footnote 6 Remarkably, after deriding the ‘totally uninspired music-mathematics’ of Leibowitz, Bouquet connects him with a general ‘amalgamation of constructivist radicalism and ideological romanticism, which was also disseminated by the younger Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and A. v. Webern’, which also explicates works by Hans Erich Apostel, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and even Hermann Heiß, who, despite being ‘influenced from Matthias Hauer's “atonal” [sic]’, is nevertheless placed within Leibowitz's aesthetic category.Footnote 7
Moreover, the presence of such an ‘amalgamation’ that (by Bouquet's account) incessantly professes its own radicalism had certainly not been identified by commentators on the prior iterations of the Darmstadt courses. To the contrary: writing on the 1947 courses, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt characterizes the attitude of ‘today's German youth’ as ‘sceptical about revolutionary ideas; in the realm of the intellect they prefer to content themselves with the traditional, make the world just a bit more comfortable and do not care all that much for the eternal mysteries’.Footnote 8 Echoing the Nachholbedarf concept prevalent in the immediate post-war years in German artistic culture and seminal in the foundation of the Darmstadt courses, Stuckenschmidt goes on to define the courses in general as a ‘restoration of contact between people’.Footnote 9 A similar assessment can be found in press accounts of the 1946 courses.Footnote 10 This discrepancy in accounts is not purely a case of diverging interpretations on the part of the critics: writing in 1960, Stuckenschmidt describes Karlheinz Stockhausen as exemplifying ‘the “angry young man” of the post-war years’, part of a ‘young generation … in revolt against convention and tradition’,Footnote 11 an iconoclastic modernist seemingly antithetical to the traditionalist German youth Stuckenschmidt reported on in 1947. Indeed, Stuckenschmidt already described an entirely different sort of Darmstadt in his review of the 1949 courses, one where ‘the weeks were thoroughly marked by a decisive Avant-gardeism’, and dominated by Leibowitz, the ‘fanatical follower of Schoenberg and his method’.Footnote 12 By the 1950 courses, this orientation had been made official, with Steinecke describing the work and thought of Arnold Schoenberg as the ‘pedagogical foundation’ and ‘primary departure point for work within the courses’ in the programme booklet for the Ferienkurse.Footnote 13 Yet for the first two years of its existence, there was little to indicate that the Darmstadt courses had any distinct association with twelve-tone music,Footnote 14 nor was there even any impression that Darmstadt as an institution was essentially concerned with modernity in either a singular or discursive sense, only with a (supposedly) renewed internationalization of musical practice. Since his argument insisted on a single, universally valid musical vocabulary, Leibowitz was able to handily usurp the foundational principle of the Darmstadt courses – internationalization – as an institutional organ for the dissemination of his ideological discourse: if dodecaphony is the only internationally legitimate method of composition, and the Darmstadt courses were established to promote international New Music, then naturally the Darmstadt courses would have to become a pedagogical institution of twelve-tone music. That in a single year the aesthetic image of Darmstadt was inverted, and has remained so for the greater part of a century, appears to be one of the most spectacular ideological coups in the history of music.
Spectacular as it might appear, the conjunction of the Darmstadt courses with serial music of one kind or another is by now a thoroughly banal point of music historiography. But it is difficult to reconcile Leibowitz's established centrality with another equally well-established point of music historiography: that the historical significance of Leibowitz's teachings is limited to one student who rather loudly and publicly wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him. The question remains, then, if Leibowitz's understanding of New Music became institutional shorthand, why are neither Leibowitz nor his students associated with the most significant subject in the history of the post-war avant-garde: the Darmstadt School? Why did Leibowitz's ‘school’, as identified by the press at the 1949 Darmstadt courses, not retain the historiographical posterity Leibowitz had meticulously established for it?
In the first place, against the received historical narrative, Leibowitz's students are almost all terribly obscure figures, some worthy of footnote or specialized interest (but even then most often as case studies; Mark Carroll's use of Serge Nigg, for example, is exclusively confined to his extremely brief Zhdanovite stance in 1948Footnote 15) but most falling well beneath the threshold of musicological notice. Indeed, the one widely recognizable name to populate this institutional ecosystem, Hans Werner Henze, is characterized by his bitter and prolonged opposition to multiple generations of ‘Darmstadt’ composers.Footnote 16 Henze himself frames his disillusionment with the Darmstadt School as a case of paradise lost:
The Darmstadt summer courses were extremely important in promoting the knowledge of modern music, at any rate during the first few years. It was the idea of the chief cultural administrator there, Wolfgang Steinecke, to bring congresses and conferences to the blitzed city of Darmstadt.Footnote 17
Naturally enough, the face of this new internationalism is Leibowitz himself. Henze's account illustrates his enthusiastic adoption of the position of an international dodecaphonic composer on plainly Leibowitzian terms:
As early as 1947 René Leibowitz took [sic] a class analysing Schoenberg. He was a marvellous teacher and, what is more, a delightful man; he taught me a great deal. We wanted to know in more detail what twelve-note composition was all about … we very quickly realized that dodecaphony and serialism were the only viable new techniques: fresh, and able to generate new musical patterns.Footnote 18
So far, so familiar. But Henze's first person plural is soon shattered by a fateful arrival.
Along came Karlheinz Stockhausen, amid much pomp and circumstance, with claims that were immediately acknowledged. He said out loud what he thought: there was nobody around who knew anything about music apart from him. This marked the end of the solidarity that had previously existed among young composers. At the beginning it had looked as though we were all working together on a humanistic project, as if we were all brothers, comrades, allies. That was now gone.Footnote 19
For Henze, then, New Music existed as a positive and coherent phenomenon only before the advent of the composers associated with the Darmstadt School, when ‘the production of music that was totally mechanized and incapable of expressiveness’ triumphed. Henze presents himself as a modern Jeremiah bearing witness to a world turned upside-down on the fulcrum of Anton Webern:
My antipathy was directed not against Webern's music, but against the misuse and misinterpretation of his aesthetic and, indeed, of his technique and its motivation and significance. Thanks to the initiative of Boulez and Stockhausen, this had become institutionalized as official musical thinking, whose maxims the body of lesser mortals now had to put into practice (allowing for seasonal variations) with religious devotion, esprit de corps and slavish obedience. The old Webernians, people who had known him and worked with him, and who were now to witness the spectacle of this aesthetic error, began to feel more and more redundant, went down in the estimation of the technocrats of Darmstadt, and were no longer ‘in’ but ‘out’.Footnote 20
In Henze's telling, the bad guys won, and the institutional subject position intended for international, historically mandated dodecaphony had been seized by ex-centric subjects of unhistorical, pseudo-Gnostic obscurantism: ‘The atmosphere was that of an – admittedly well-heeled – early Christian sect, and people even talked of an “Ars Nova” – a crass example of the unhistorical thinking that prevailed at the time.’Footnote 21 The inside-outside of New Music had been turned inside-out. This was a disaster of the highest order. It was nearly inexplicable. Henze comes close to suggesting that the apparent popularity of this music that should properly have been confined to the margins of cultural life and discourse was the result of a capitalist-popish plot: ‘The reason why this “non-communicative” tendency, which possessed a mystical, indeed an expressly Catholic element, was so vigorously promoted was, I think, the desire to prevent people from seeing music as simple, concrete and comprehensible communication between human beings.’Footnote 22 Clearly, then, the blueprint for an international, institutional avant-garde did not go precisely as Leibowitz had envisioned.
The remainder of this article gives a brief account of an event that has been widely glossed in both scholarly and popular accounts of the development of New Music in Europe: Pierre Boulez's break with his teacher René Leibowitz. It puts these accounts in dialogue with the penetrating analytical research of Inge Kovács, which demonstrates that Boulez's compositional practice was broadly indistinguishable from that of Leibowitz for more than a decade. Going some ways further than Kovács, it argues that the explicating discourse adopted by Boulez particularly in his early polemical writings was also that of his teacher – the institutional discourse detailed in the first section. It is key, then, that Henze is left out in the cold while Boulez becomes central within New Music, despite both composers sharing a largely identical understanding of compositional practice. In light of Kovács's research, the discursive repositioning of this key member of the Darmstadt School is examined, alongside its consequences. As such, Boulez's very public break with one of the central figures of international New Music is treated as a case study in how its explicating discourse mutated to stabilize its subjects. The fact that practice and explication, music and discourse, are wholly separate in such a manoeuvre is central to understanding precisely what, and who, was ‘total serialism’.
Boulez as student
Coursework and assessment
As might be anticipated from his popular conception as a musical fascist in Anglophone literature, René Leibowitz appears by all accounts to have been an intensely demanding teacher both abroad and in Paris.Footnote 23 Certainly his students were remarkably zealous in their study of the Second Viennese School: Jean-Louis Martinet went to Vienna on a scholarship to copy Webern's manuscripts by hand, and many of Leibowitz's own handwritten copies of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern scores were eagerly copied and disseminated among his circle of students.Footnote 24 And it was under Leibowitz's influence that these students, among them a 20-year-old Pierre Boulez, caused a minor scandal by booing a performance of Stravinsky in the winter of 1945.Footnote 25
As one of Leibowitz's pupils, Boulez was among the first musicians in France to become acquainted directly with the music of Webern, but, consequently, this acquaintance was directly mediated by Leibowitz. This mediation was not simply the passing inconvenience that Boulez would later attempt to brush it off as: Inge Kovács remarks that Boulez's understanding of Webern ‘remained remarkably closely bound to that of Leibowitz’.Footnote 26 Significantly, Boulez performed in the French premiere of Webern's Symphony op. 21 and Schoenberg's Herzgewächse on 5 December 1945 under the direction of Leibowitz.Footnote 27 Much later, Boulez would recall the ‘lack of competence’ involved in the performance of the music of the Second Viennese School that reigned before the advent of his Domaine musical.Footnote 28 He does not mention that he himself participated in these early performances.
However slight, such an ellipsis is a succinct illustration of the extent of Boulez's efforts to portray himself as both totally separate from and in opposition to Leibowitz. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that, at least in retrospect, being a pupil to Leibowitz was the most humiliating period of Boulez's artistic life. This explains why – in an account by Peter Heyworth – Boulez is depicted as the leader of the students who booed the Stravinsky performance in 1945.Footnote 29 Conversely, in Heyworth's telling, Leibowitz's role is rather diminished, as an inconvenient middle-man between Boulez and his real creative object: ‘Schoenberg himself was a frail old man, living in distant Los Angeles. The only person Boulez knew of in Paris who had studied with him was an obscure composer and conductor called René Leibowitz.’Footnote 30 Such was Boulez's subsequent influence that even the historical position of Leibowitz – who even by 1945 was well known among Parisian artists and intellectuals, and counted Georges Bataille, Tristan Tzara, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Limbour as close friends, with friendships with Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss following later Footnote 31 – was retroactively dictated by Boulez's personal mythology.
The published account of Boulez's break with his teacher – which Kovács describes as ‘disputed [umstrittenen]’ Footnote 32 – is found in New York Times journalist Joan Peyser's book-length profile Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma. Despite Boulez's evident antipathy towards the idea, Peyser tracked down Leibowitz to his small apartment on the Left Bank and, after some coaxing, recorded his telling of Boulez's departure. According to Leibowitz, Boulez had brought him a manuscript of his First Piano Sonata, which Leibowitz then began ‘marking up’ in red pen.Footnote 33 This act of defacement enraged Boulez so greatly that he snatched the score back from his teacher and left with a rude appraisal of his efforts (‘vous êtes merde!’), never to return.Footnote 34 Michel Fano, a lifelong friend of Boulez, finds no reason to doubt the basic premise of Leibowitz's account as presented by Peyser.Footnote 35 However, he suggests that the ‘marking up’ undertaken by Leibowitz was most likely a ‘correction’ of instances where Boulez had deviated from a strict unfolding of the twelve-note series.
Whatever its cause, Boulez's hatred of Leibowitz was immediate, fiery, and lasting. Indeed, this particular polemical loathing was likely the most consistent aesthetic position Boulez maintained throughout his mature creative existence. It did not take long for the first results of this fallout with his former teacher to materialize publicly: Boulez's article ‘Incidences actuelles de Berg’, which Kovács characterizes as an ‘anti-Leibowitz manifesto’, appeared in the journal Polyphonie in 1948.Footnote 36 This tenor continued through the more famous polemics, such as ‘Schoenberg est mort’ and ‘Éventuellement …’, wherein Boulez's attack was now broadened to include all ‘dodecaphonists’. This swipe is not nearly as offhanded as it may appear now. Two important elisions are enacted here, both of which simultaneously reinforce and circumscribe Leibowitz's practice. First, by identifying ‘dodecaphonists’ as both an international and essentially unified phenomenon, Boulez affirms, like the criticisms of Stuckenschmidt and Bouquet, the essential ideological premise of Leibowitz's position and positions himself within their specific understanding of New Music. Second, through his characterization (‘playing the sniper’) of these dodecaphonists as ‘Organizing congresses – those of specialists playing at initiate ceremonies for fearful beginners – falsely doctrinaire, absurdly conservative, they lord it in stupid repletion for the greater glory of the avant-garde’, Boulez places Leibowitz within the reactionary position Leibowitz had earlier described for Stravinsky.Footnote 37 As a result, ‘they know how to count up to twelve and in multiples of twelve’, making them quasi-Gnostic ‘[e]xcellent spirits as apostles and disciples’, but utterly detached from the historical logic of the musical material.Footnote 38 This double-barrelled attack would be repeated, largely unaltered, for the entirety of Boulez's mature creative career. Towards the end of his life, in a 2012 interview for his publisher Universal Edition, Boulez marshals the same invective against his former teacher: ‘You know, with Leibowitz, the academicism of this analysis and so on, it was unbearable to me. … Leibowitz, you know, that was just salt on nothing. That was so dry and so unimaginative. That was only one to twelve, twelve to one, six to one, one to seven, and so on. It was really dreadful.’Footnote 39 These complaints, largely unaltered over more than half a century, take on a sort of quasi-catechetic shorthand suggesting that hatred of Leibowitz's ‘academicism’ is indeed the fundamental grounding of Boulez's understanding of his artistic practice. This is certainly the case in a letter addressed to Jean-Jacques Nattiez from 1990, describing ‘the context of the period’ in Paris during the late 1940s and early 1950s, which suggests that Leibowitz is not only the single most significant figure in Boulez's early development, but also the singular influence within all Parisian music: ‘At that time, there really wasn't anything apart from the asphyxiating academicism of Leibowitz.’Footnote 40 Boulez's stated project of totally annihilating Leibowitz from music history (‘I will let you know again that R. Leibowitz's credit is at low ebb and nobody, here, any longer believes in that false prophet. He has had his day, and justice is being done’, he wrote to John Cage in December 1950Footnote 41) is thereby uncomfortably undermined by his own inability to conceive of his artistic practice from any other reference point, negative or otherwise.
Learning outcomes
It should not be unexpected to assert, then, that Boulez's musical thinking, especially in its polemical form, is fundamentally identifiable with that of his teacher. Most obviously, Boulez wholly and repeatedly recapitulates Leibowitz's historical teleology that ends with twelve-tone composition: in ‘Schoenberg is Dead’, he describes an organic ‘development [which] starts with the post-Wagnerian vocabulary and ends up with the “suspension” of tonality’, a ‘preparatory’ phase whose works ‘we may reasonably allow ourselves to regard … now as above all documentary’.Footnote 42 The real interest commences from the fifth piece of Schoenberg's opus 23, where ‘[w]e are here in the presence of a new way of organizing sound’.Footnote 43 But just as essentially, Boulez and Leibowitz (and Adorno) share an understanding of what constitutes an authentic compositional practice, one that is historically conditioned by the developing logic of the musical material. Leibowitz's musical conviction was, throughout his mature creative life, an explicitly existentialist one, and, as such, his adoption of the twelve-tone method is framed as the discovery of an artistic form that gives meaning to both the creative act and the contemporary existence. In his preface to Schoenberg et son école, Leibowitz describes such a moment of enlightenment as ‘what some would call a revelation, and what I like to call a sudden consciousness of the true meaning of the language of music’.Footnote 44 Leibowitz's explanation bears quoting in full:
In the case of the composer, this sudden consciousness comes at the moment when, in the work of a contemporary musician, he discovers what seems to him to be the language of his epoch, the language which he himself wants to speak. Up to that point, he may have assimilated, in more or less accurate fashion, the language of the past; he may have believed that he has profited from certain excursions into a style which seems to him to furnish fresh possibilities. But his real consciousness of being a composer cannot be foursquare and unshakable until some master of our time brings him the assurance, the irrefutable evidence of the necessity and the authenticity of his personal language.Footnote 45
This passage is the positive antecedent, in vocabulary, logic, ideology, and phenomenology, to Boulez's negative pronouncement that ‘any musician who has not experienced – we do not say understood, but truly experienced – the necessity of dodecaphonic language is USELESS. For his whole work is beneath the necessities of his epoch.’Footnote 46 In fact, Leibowitz's discursive orientation manifests itself throughout Boulez's early publications. His position in ‘Moment de Jean-Sébastien Bach’ that the serial language engenders new syntactical forms analogous to those which arose from the modal and tonal systems is a paraphrase of the argument in the first two chapters of Schoenberg et son école,Footnote 47 although Boulez cannily asserts that Webern, not Schoenberg, is the true heir to Bach. Indeed, Boulez's position towards Bach here – presenting the composer as a vital forerunner to the contemporary avant-garde against his formal mummification by naïve, conservative musicologists – largely overlaps with that taken by Adorno at the same time in ‘Bach gegen seine Liebhaber verteidigt’.Footnote 48
Starting with his break with Leibowitz in 1946, Boulez consciously directed his artistic development towards an annihilation of Leibowitz's influence, an annihilation that Boulez was never fully successful in realizing either discursively or compositionally. Furthermore, such a position served to confuse the reception of Boulez's own work, resulting in, prior to the advent of the Darmstadt School, Boulez's ‘innovations’ being likened to those of André Jolivet and Pierre Schaeffer. This confusion belies the peculiarities of the nascent avant-garde tradition in Paris. As Kovács observes, the concept of an overarching ‘polyphonie’ was something of an idée fixe in the Francophone music culture of the 1940s, attested to by the founding of the journals Polyphonie and Contrepoint.Footnote 49 This had an indelible influence on the creative logic and rhetoric, both verbal and musical, of Leibowitz and Boulez – Kovács notes, for example, that both composers throughout their writings refer to ‘vertical aggregates’ rather than ‘chords’Footnote 50 – and provided the latter with the figurative vocabulary with which he would frame his break with Leibowitz. It should come as no surprise that polyphony, for Leibowitz, was a deeply rooted historicist category that informed the teleological development of Western Music, the most recent authentic manifestation being the Second Viennese School. And for Leibowitz (as for Adorno), such a historical necessity was to be found not in the genius of the composer-subject (as it was for Schoenberg) but in the immanent logic of the musical material itself. Reinhold Kapp's summary highlights the clear Adornian sympathies of this position:
The basis of Leibowitz's every discussion was the concept of a history of polyphony (with all that term implies) considered as the main strand of art-music. As against Neoclassicism's mistaken sense of tradition, he recommended orientation by the Viennese School [sic], where the problems of composition were accepted in the framework of the actual state of development of the musical language, and genuinely solved. This continuity must be preserved, the commitment expressed by this music must be taken up.Footnote 51
The ultimate objective for Leibowitzian compositional practice was the dialectical fulfilment of the historical tendency of the twelve-tone works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern in polyphonic terms. The competition between Leibowitz and his prodigal student in the pursuit of this goal was as vicious as it was terminologically wrought. While Leibowitz referred to ‘the constructive antagonism of “counterpoint/harmony”’ as the ‘conceptual pairing “horizontal/vertical”’,Footnote 52 Boulez depicted his own practice as the fulfilment of this dialectic by his discovery of the ‘diagonal’. Yet such a fulfilment necessarily presumed the historical legitimacy, at least contextually, of Leibowitz's own practice, an allowance that Boulez could not abide. To counteract this, Boulez argued that such a ‘new dimension’ had already been ‘created’ in the work of Anton Webern,Footnote 53 thereby reframing his work as a direct, unmediated continuation of Webern's and rendering Leibowitz – and his dodecaphonic contemporaries – irrelevant and superfluous. Unfortunately for Boulez, this was the exact argument, in the same Euclidean terms, that Leibowitz himself had put forward when describing Webern's creation of a meta-relationship between ‘the horizontal plane’ and ‘the vertical plane’.Footnote 54 Indeed, both arguments in fact appear to be little more than a historicist gloss on a conceptual model of Schoenberg's, wherein ‘THE TWO-OR-MORE-DIMENSIONAL SPACE IN WHICH MUSICAL IDEAS ARE PRESENTED IS A UNIT.’Footnote 55 As such, Boulez's attempts to eradicate Leibowitz were manifested through the ideological premises, and, more properly, the discourse of Leibowitz himself.Footnote 56
A similar conclusion may be drawn through technical and musical analysis. Prefacing her examination of the two composers, Kovács frankly describes Boulez's output as ‘following in the footsteps of his teacher Leibowitz’.Footnote 57 Kapp goes some way further, referring to ‘a whole orchestra of concepts’ introduced by Leibowitz ‘which seems to anticipate the Darmstadt terminology, not least the actual term “serial” used as the formula of generalization that implies a whole programme. From a safe distance one almost gets the impression that there is no aspect of Webern of importance to the serialists to which Leibowitz had not already drawn attention.’Footnote 58 Kapp's caution here (‘seems to anticipate’) is indicative of the state of almost total historical oblivion to which Leibowitz had been relegated, since even his retaliatory argument cannot imagine that Leibowitz's terminology quite literally does anticipate the codification of the ‘Darmstadt School’. In the Chamber Symphony, op. 16 (1946–48), Kovács demonstrates, Leibowitz had ‘attempted to imbue the musical space with rationality by creating a systematic availability of differentiated ‘dimensions’ of the composition – pitches, rhythms, form, timbre.’Footnote 59 What appears in retrospect to be a fairly self-evident example of serial pre-composition can be seen most obviously in the relationships between the twelve pitches of his various row-forms and the twelve instruments of the chamber ensemble. This piece was written as an exercise in precisely those diagonal relations – interrelationships between the ‘horizontal and vertical planes’ – that Leibowitz had previously described in Webern's Symphony and which were the rhetorical object of Boulez's practical self-justifications.Footnote 60 Indeed, the compositional process of Leibowitz's Chamber Symphony appears to be precisely what Boulez is describing, about four years later, in ‘Possibly…’, namely, ‘to link rhythmic to serial structures through a common organization which will also embrace the other characteristics of sound: dynamics, mode of attack, timbre; and then to expand this morphology into an integrated rhetoric’.Footnote 61
Consequently, Boulez's understanding of his musical practice during this period appears fundamentally confusing, if not simply confused. For all his polemical posturing, the only concrete compositional method he proposes had been both described and at least partially undertaken by Leibowitz several years prior. Indeed, the hard-won dialectical acquisitions of Boulez and Leibowitz hardly even appear distinctive within the artistic network of international twelve-tone conferences: at one such event in Munich in 1950, it was ‘pointed out in the discussion that, linked with the new organization of tonal material, there must be a consequent revaluation of rhythmics [sic] and dynamics’.Footnote 62 If – with the benefit of both hindsight and Kovács's research – Boulez's practice in the early post-war years appears to be directly within the lineage of Leibowitz's school (and international twelve-tone music more generally) in both form, content, and rhetoric, it is difficult to reconcile Boulez's iconoclastic reputation and conceptual primacy in the historical narrative of avant-garde music with this aesthetic context. What did Boulez manage to do that Nigg, Martinet, or, say, Maurice Le Roux did not?
Realignment through Messiaen
He covered his tracks. Although, in his advocacy of individuating and re-combining the various parameters of music, Boulez ultimately proposes a fairly exact copy of Leibowitz's working method, the musical precedents Boulez himself identifies for these procedures are slightly skewed from a Leibowitzian perspective. Even within an obviously Leibowitzian understanding of music history, describing the separation of rhythm from polyphony in ‘Possibly…’, Boulez writes: ‘If we need a precedent’ – and, assuredly, we do – ‘we can take the isorhythmic motets of Machaut and Dufay.’Footnote 63 Of course, a teleological explanation for contemporary musical practice that traces its historical development from the late Middle Ages is itself familiar from Leibowitz, but Boulez's departure from Machaut here leads elsewhere than Schoenberg or any other figure in Leibowitz's reckoning: Olivier Messiaen. To be sure, Messiaen is not the only modern figure Boulez uses to bludgeon Leibowitz – Kapp identifies Stravinsky and Bartók as wellFootnote 64 – but Messiaen most consistently illustrates how Boulez's understanding of music history and attendant compositional practice are supposedly irreconcilable with Leibowitz's. In Boulez's account, Messiaen is credited with ‘the creation of a conscious technique of duration’, a procedure that, according to Boulez, had been largely absent from occidental music since Dufay. Indeed, Boulez had already deployed Messiaen as a specific foil to Leibowitz's myopia as early as 1948, beginning his essay ‘Proposals’ by taking Leibowitz to task for his evident dismissal of Messiaen's assertion that rhythm and ‘polyphony’ were separable.Footnote 65 But Boulez's claim is rather misleading since, for both Leibowitz and himself, rhythm in fact is axiomatically inseparable from polyphony, rhythmic organization existing simply as a further delineation of polyphonic organization – ‘polyphony’ thus referring to relationships of pitch and rhythm. Indeed, Boulez even says as much:
How then can we coordinate and enrich these innovations of Messiaen and those of his predecessors? Accepting the principle of a contrapuntal style in which all parts must have equal importance (to explain why is beyond the scope of the present discussion), I would say that rhythm must be integrated with polyphony in a more or less independent way: must, that is, be either dependent on or independent of the contrapuntal figures according to the development we have in view.Footnote 66
Boulez's musical practice is no more Messiaenic than Leibowitz's – Kovács has clearly and repeatedly demonstrated as muchFootnote 67 – yet when he describes his practice as the only historically legitimate and fundamentally new manifestation of musical material, Boulez cites Messiaen as a corrective to Leibowitz and, concomitantly, Webern as a corrective to Schoenberg. In light of this, one might even suggest Boulez's use of Messiaen's pitch material from ‘Mode de valeurs’ for the basic series in his Structures appears less a straightforward homage than a deliberate attempt to obscure the relationship between Boulez's compositional methods and those of Leibowitz.
At any rate, if Boulez's attempt to annihilate Leibowitz in his own music and thought was unsuccessful, his efforts to destroy the influence of his former teacher in the discourse of new music were rather more fruitful. Throughout the 1950s, written accounts of contemporary French music devote less space to Leibowitz and his school (in particular Nigg and Martinet). Instead, they describe a technical lineage stretching from Messiaen and Webern to Boulez, precisely the lineage Boulez himself was promulgating. The cornerstone of this narrative was ‘Éventuellement…’, which was read roughly as a contemporary redux of Messiaen's Technique de mon langage musical. Writing in 1953, Jean-Étienne Marie, himself a former student of Messiaen, reproduces both Boulez's arguments and his musical examples (of rhythmic augmentation and diminution and duration matrices) verbatim, describing them as extensions of the work of Messiaen.Footnote 68 There are three immediate consequences of this emplotment. First, the pieces of Messiaen that Marie gives as examples to explicate Boulez's work – the ‘Mode de valeurs’, the Messe Pentecôte [sic] (1949–50), which was never officially premiered, and Timbres-durées (1952), the musique concréte piece realized in collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry that was subsequently disavowed by Messiaen – are almost uniquely non-representative of Messiaen's oeuvre.Footnote 69 Second, Boulez's practice is, by nature of its supposed debt to Messiaen, now also portrayed as a continuation of the Jeune France group in toto.Footnote 70 Third, because Leibowitz and his school are now immaterial to Boulez's music, whatever serial features his music exhibited must be accounted for by recourse to Webern. Each of these is a distortion of Boulez's position aesthetically, historically, and ideologically, and is irreconcilable with the material of Boulez's music and the content of his critical writings.
Furthermore, by associating himself with Messiaen and, wittingly or unwittingly, with Jeune France more broadly, Boulez risked categorically alienating himself from the emergent institutional logic of New Music. Positioning Messiaen's practice between Les Six's desire ‘to embrace a modern, egalitarian mass culture’ and ‘the pro-fascist Right, which argued for tradition and autonomy, or the transcendence of politics’, Jane F. Fulcher foregrounds the ideological foundations of Jeune France in the 1930s.Footnote 71 While Fulcher repeatedly emphasizes that this ‘personalism’ rejected both liberal modernity and ‘the panaceas of both the Left and the Right’,Footnote 72 the group's rhetoric consistently frames this rejection as an about-face to the modern condition, most succinctly conveyed in Jeune France's motto, ‘retour au lyrisme, à l'humaine’.Footnote 73 Certainly the Messiaen of Jeune France was a deliberate riposte to a conception of modernity shared by Les Six and Weimar New Music, as an endorsement from fellow Jeune France member Yves Baudrier indicates:
We can affirm that Messiaen has a truly original temperament only through the French and musical humanism in which he is so thoroughly steeped. His God is Christian but Debussyste, his loves include Massenet and extend to Ravel, and although they pass from India, to Béla Bartók and Stravinsky, they only flourish in the harmonic climate of our deep-rooted tradition.Footnote 74
If the spiritualist traditionalism advocated by Jeune France arose from the rich and byzantine specificities of French aesthetic politics during the 1930s and German occupation, from an international perspective, their position appeared to be one of fairly straightforward reactionary anti-modernism. Accordingly, Messiaen's practice was treated with a combination of apprehension and circumvention in the nascent institutions of post-war New Music. Heinrich Strobel's lecture on contemporary French music at the 1946 Darmstädter Ferienkurse is representative, giving much attention to the composers of Les Six as the natural counterpoint to New Music (whatever that category might entail) in Germany: ‘This group Les Six embodies in France what we in Germany term New Music – the young musicians of 1920, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Alban Berg, Ernst Toch, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler.’Footnote 75 On the other hand, Strobel briefly mentions Jeune France towards the conclusion of his lecture as representing a sort of quasi-reactionary new Romanticism (‘einer neuen Romantik’), of whose artistic prospects Strobel was largely dismissive in comparison with Les Six.Footnote 76 According to Strobel, the most representative ‘apparition [Erscheinung]’ from this new Romanticism is Olivier Messiaen, who ‘comes from the world of Catholic mysticism’,Footnote 77 a provenance echoing Henze's ‘mystical, expressly Catholic element’ that undermines utopian modernity. Strobel allows for the possibility that Messiaen's practice might have more than local significance, but it is on the same ghostly reactionary terms as a kind of musical revenant: ‘It remains to be seen whether Messiaen is a lonely apparition – or the beginning of a development.’Footnote 78 The complexities of Strobel's aesthetic outlook notwithstanding,Footnote 79 the general understanding of Jeune France-associated music as a neo-Romanticist practice opposed to New Music proper was commonplace within the discourse of this period. Writing on the state of New Music in 1949, Louis Saguer describes Messiaen's practice in the same quasi-mystical Romantic terms as Strobel, citing him as the last in a historical series of elaborately scored orchestral works – ‘Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, and still today Messiaen’ – which has its opposite in the music of Webern, Milhaud, and Poulenc.Footnote 80 Indeed, the central opposition Saguer employs to illustrate the irreconcilable aesthetic tendencies in contemporary music is between the Romantic mysticism of Messiaen and the clear-headed idealism of Leibowitz: ‘For Messiaen [music] is a “theological rainbow” and for Leibowitz [it is] the objectification of ideal forms.’Footnote 81
Regardless, this presentation of Boulez as a (mostly) loyal disciple of Messiaen is in essence the emplotment adopted by subsequent Boulez scholarship with the implicit project of smoothing over these three analytical and historical discrepancies into the same unified discourse of New Music. A relatively early example of Anglophone high modernist genealogy comes from Gerald Bennett, who analyses Boulez's earliest works (1942–45) as case studies in the influence of Messiaen, who ‘succeeded in awakening and channelling Boulez's extraordinary gifts in a decisive way’.Footnote 82 Indeed, according to Bennett, Messiaen is essentially the sole precedent for these compositions, an inspiration only ‘superseded’ in autumn 1945 when Boulez encountered Webern. Here once again Leibowitz appears as an unhappy mediator (‘a former pupil of Schoenberg's and at the time a not-very-well-known composer and conductor’) with a single purpose: ‘it was through Leibowitz that [Boulez] became acquainted with Anton Webern; and, next to Messiaen, it was Webern who was to exercise the deepest influence on the young composer.’Footnote 83 As told by Bennett, Boulez's formative journey from Messiaen to Webern concludes with the synthesis of the Second Piano Sonata, in which ‘Boulez found a sort of balance between the techniques of ordering the pitch-structure of the music to which Webern had inspired him on the one hand, and the consistent rhythmic structuring of music for which Messiaen had been the model on the other.’Footnote 84 In Bennett's telling, the ultimate goal of Boulez's polemics has been achieved: access to Webern as progenitor without recourse to the practice of Leibowitz and the dodecaphonists.
Such a neat dialectic, familiar from Leibowitz's and Adorno's understanding of New Music, would be complicated by subsequent scholarship. Peter O'Hagan's analysis of the First Sonata is similarly at pains to demonstrate Boulez's aesthetic turn – although here, drawing from the work of Susanne Gärtner, the turn is not from Messiaen to Webern but from Leibowitz to MessiaenFootnote 85 – to the extent that the chapter devoted to this piece is significantly framed on the premise of discovering what exactly Leibowitz would have disapproved of when Boulez presented the work to him.Footnote 86 However, O'Hagan's sharp analytical eye and meticulous sketch studies quickly problematize this premise. While the musical surface ‘hints at’ Bartók and Honegger, O'Hagan's analysis demonstrates that the structural organization of the piece is thoroughly in keeping with Leibowitzian practice; indeed, the ‘series of interlocking transpositions’ which generate the pitch material of the work are directly analogous to those used by Leibowitz in his Chamber Symphony.Footnote 87 O'Hagan's attempt to discern how the First Sonata was systematically opposed to Leibowitz's practice is inconclusive, and he concludes by suggesting that the subsequent revisions Boulez made for publication, transforming the score into ‘essentially a study in two-part counterpoint’, were precisely those that Leibowitz might have suggested in the first place.Footnote 88
Conclusion
If the rooted commonalities between the practice and aesthetic understanding of Leibowitz, Boulez, and twelve-tone composers of the post-war landscape more broadly point towards a re-evaluation of Boulez's position in textbook accounts as an iconoclastic and epochal figure (a positioning most often handily accomplished through a brief reference to ‘Schoenberg est mort’),Footnote 89 it must be emphasized that this continuity is neither comprehensive nor inevitable. Rather, it demonstrates the particular material and discursive concatenations – call it a network – which shaped Boulez's emergent musical practice, a network which gained increasing support and recognition in musical journals, international festivals, academic conferences, and other media during the post-war years not least through the tireless and impassioned advocacy of its actors. The risk, then, is that the fine contingency of Boulez's network supplants rather than challenges a homogenizing historical metanarrative of the European post-war musical avant-garde. Despite her re-evaluation of the technical foundations of Boulez's practice in particular, Kovács suggests that Boulez's generation ‘all worked, so to speak, towards a singular project, the new creation of an authentic contemporary language’.Footnote 90 Here, the Darmstadt generation are all on the same team and, as such, the discovery of an aesthetic and methodological continuity between Boulez and Leibowitz simply recruits more figures to the team, working towards the same ‘singular project’, the ‘musical structuralism’ of Kovács’ title. Similarly, Kapp proposes ‘a mood of fundamental change, tabula rasa, zero hour, demand[ing] a clean break generally’, which led to musicians of the younger generation ‘attempt[ing] to create a whole new order of the musical scene’.Footnote 91 Kapp's subsequent denunciation of ‘mathematical and pseudo-mathematical notions … instead of true expertise’ is familiar but confusing,Footnote 92 considering that his own study has meticulously described the confluence of Leibowitz's and Boulez's understanding music, a confluence that Kapp ultimately dismisses as little more than a missed opportunity: ‘The irritating thing was that there were still areas of agreement.’Footnote 93
However, Kapp's sympathy for Leibowitz ultimately exceeds his apparent Adornian–Leibowitzian understanding of historical necessity.Footnote 94 In his conclusion, he asks a ‘captious and pressing question: would, in other circumstances, a more thorough and promising line of development have been possible from Leibowitz's position?’Footnote 95 Admittedly, within Kapp's argument, this question is posed rhetorically: the answer is yes, and the artistic failure of the Darmstadt generation is linked to their supposed rejection of historical necessity.Footnote 96 Yet Kapp's insistence that ‘Leibowitz could intervene’ in this newer New Music discourse, his proposal of ‘the discussion that never was’, suggests both the limits of the post-war European avant-garde's conceptualization and the potential for alternatives: a sort of ‘serialism otherwise’.
Boulez's contention with Leibowitz – like Kapp's with that of the Darmstadt composers – was never a matter of the historicist discourse deployed to legitimate musical practice but the figures which populated it. Crucially, Boulez consistently argues that dodecaphonic ‘academism’ was not a fulfilment but a betrayal of precisely the historical necessity that Leibowitz had claimed for the practice. Against the metastasized aberration of the dodecaphonic school, Boulez depicts his own practice as the realization of a music that authentically addresses the needs of its epoch. In 1951, Boulez's argument would have been problematic on two counts. First, as indicated above, it is far from clear what exactly, if anything, Boulez was doing compositionally that was a radical departure from Leibowitz's practice, or, for that matter, those of the dread ‘dodecaphonists’ more broadly. Second, if Boulez's practice was the product of an ineluctable historical process, why was he the only composer to have recognized such a necessity? It certainly would not have been lost on Boulez that by publicly allying himself with Messiaen he had invited critics such as Marie to identify him with Jeune France, broadly considered to be a conservative and outmoded movement within the institutional hubs of New Music that had emerged after the war.
Boulez's realignment, then, was one simultaneously of reversal and continuity – the continuity of the Leibowitzian discourse of New Music with a reversal of the figures contained. The figure of Webern here is the fulcrum of Boulez's model: precisely because Boulez is saying nothing new about Webern – certainly nothing that could not be found extensively in Leibowitz's writings during this period – he is able to maintain his connection with international New Music. Within this reversal, Webern is the avatar of the work still to be done, an avatar still familiar from Leibowitz's discourse. Through the continuity of Webern, Messiaen's practice is no longer reactionary, Romantic, mystic, and above all eccentric (and ex-centric), but within the direct lineage of historical necessity. Boulez thus diverted this lineage from Leibowitz and the dodecaphonists, but, in 1951, it was unclear where exactly a historically legitimate, authentic New Music practice could be found, aside from Boulez himself. For Boulez's rerouting of Leibowitz's discourse to be plausible, a new international standard of composition must emerge which aligned with this new teleology: he needed to find a new technique. Such a technique was not to be found in Boulez's own practice, but in that of Olivier Messiaen, and, immediately thereafter, Messiaen's students and fellow devout Catholics Karel Goeyvaerts and Karlheinz Stockhausen.Footnote 97
Here the alien god of Henze's despairing account reappears and gains new significance. From Henze's perspective, the discourse of historical necessity, aesthetic commonality, and institutional legitimacy developed by and for Leibowitz and his students had been usurped by esoteric pretenders. Taruskin's citation of Henze's recollection fundamentally mischaracterizes what is at issue: Henze is not describing a mad intensification of an already existing practice but the intervention of something entirely different. It is not that Messiaen, Goeyvaerts, and Stockhausen pursued the course laid out by Leibowitz (and Boulez) to its logical extremes, they pursued something else entirely. The musicians collected under the masthead of the Darmstadt School, then, shared almost no commonality of compositional practice. They did, however, share a common discourse.
