Abstracts
Abstract
The adepts of serial music since the end of the 1950s seemed destined to ally themselves with structuralist thought—the broadly defined intellectual movement that profoundly marked the social sciences and humanities. The importance of the metaphor of language to the serialist project of Pierre Boulez in particular seemed sufficient to pave the way towards a conceptual alliance between avant-garde music and structuralist thought. Nevertheless, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s acerbic pronouncements on serial music as well as musique concrète that appeared in the famous “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked (1964) made it clear that Lévi-Strauss was no friend of the serialist project. Drawing on recent research by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Nicolas Donin, and Frédéric Keck, this article will argue that the serialist compositional project of the postwar era, embodied primarily in the figure of Pierre Boulez, can be considered “structuralist” in the sense of the intellectual movement promulgated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, despite the latter’s denunciation of serial music.
Résumé
Depuis la fin des années 1950, les adeptes de la musique sérielle semblaient destinés à s’allier avec la pensée structuraliste – mouvement intellectuel défini d’une manière très large qui a profondément marqué les sciences sociales et humaines. L’importance de la métaphore du langage pour le projet sérialiste de Pierre Boulez en particulier semblait suffisante pour ouvrir la voie à une alliance conceptuelle entre la musique d’avant-garde et la pensée structuraliste. Pourtant, les déclarations acerbes de Claude Lévi-Strauss sur la musique sérielle et la musique concrète apparues dans la célèbre « Ouverture » de Le Cru et le Cuit (1964) ont clairement signalé que ce dernier n’était pas un ami du sérialisme. S’appuyant sur des recherches récentes de Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Nicolas Donin et Frédéric Keck, cet article fera valoir que le projet sérialiste de l’après-guerre, incarné principalement par Pierre Boulez, peut être considéré comme « structuraliste » au sens du mouvement intellectuel mis de l’avant par Claude Lévi-Strauss, en dépit de sa dénonciation de la musique sérielle.
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Appendices
Note biographique
Jonathan Goldman is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Victoria and specializes in the history of the postwar avant-garde. His book, The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez: Compositions and Writings is published this year by Cambridge University Press, in the Music since 1900 Series (Arnold Whittall, director). Editor-in-chief of the bilingual new music journal Circuit, Musiques Contemporaines, he wrote the preface to Leçons de musique, a collection of Pierre Boulez’s writings published in France in 2005.
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