This is a past event
Dr Campbell from the University of Aberdeen gives a presentation on the three tours young Pierre Boulez took in the 1950s.
Title: Pierre Boulez: Composer, Traveller, Correspondent
Abstract: This paper focuses on the three tours of South America composer Pierre Boulez undertook with the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in 1950, 1954 and 1956. While drawing on contemporaneous documents and the composer’s writings, a careful reading of Boulez’s letters to John Cage, Pierre Souvtchinsky and Karlheinz Stockhausen enables us to form a vivid picture of the composer’s emerging preoccupations and concerns during three finite and discrete moments of his early career. The letters reveal a young Boulez, conflicted between compositional work and his duties as musical director, rehearsing and conducting music he didn’t value. We discover something of the circumstances in which some key compositions developed, the aborted ‘Coup de dés’ project in 1950, Le Marteau sans maître in 1954 and the ongoing work on the Third Piano Sonata in 1956. We learn something of the competing demands on his time as by 1954 he not only juggles composition, musical direction and the writing of articles, but also the challenge of setting up what would become the Domaine Musical concert series as well as preparing two edited volumes for publication. By 1956, we witness the first steps of Boulez the conductor with the Paris performance of Le Marteau and his first experience with a symphony orchestra in Caracas.
- Speaker
- Dr Edward Campbell
- Hosted by
- Department of Music
- Venue
- MR055, MacRobert Building
- Contact
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Free and open to the public.