Pierre Boulez: Organised Delirium - by Caroline Potter (Hardcover)

About the Book

Pierre Boulez's (1925-2016) creative output has mostly been studied from an analytical perspective in the context of serialism. While Boulez tends to be pigeonholed as a cerebral composer, his interest in structure coexisted with extreme visceral energy. This book redresses the balance and stresses the febrile cultural environment of Paris in the 1940s and the emotional side of his early works. Surrealism, in particular, had an impact on Boulez's formative years that has until now been underexplored. There are intriguing links between French music and surrealism in the 1930s and 40s, arising within a cultural context where surrealism, ethnography and the emerging discipline of ethnomusicology were closely related. Potter situates the young Boulez within this environment. As an emerging musician, he explored radical new musical concepts alongside peers including Yvette Grimaud, Serge Nigg and Yvonne Loriod, performing and exchanging ideas with them. This book argues that authors associated with surrealism, especially Renâe Char but also Antonin Artaud and Andrâe Breton, were crucial to Boulez's musical development. It enhances our understanding of his work by connecting it with significant trends in contemporary French culture, refocusing Boulez studies away from detailed musical analysis and towards a broader and more visceral, emotional response to his work--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Exploring the emotional and cultural influences on Pierre Boulez's early works as well as the role surrealism and French culture of the 1930s and 40s played in shaping his radical new musical concepts.

Pierre Boulez's (1925-2016) creative output has mostly been studied from an analytical perspective in the context of serialism. While Boulez tends to be pigeonholed as a cerebral composer, his interest in structure coexisted with extreme visceral energy. This book redresses the balance and stresses the febrile cultural environment of Paris in the 1940s and the emotional side of his early works.

Surrealism, in particular, had an impact on Boulez's formative years that has until now been underexplored. There are intriguing links between French music and surrealism in the 1930s and 40s, arising within a cultural context where surrealism, ethnography and the emerging discipline of ethnomusicology were closely related. Potter situates the young Boulez within this environment. As an emerging musician, he explored radical new musical concepts alongside peers including Yvette Grimaud, Serge Nigg and Yvonne Loriod, performing and exchanging ideas with them.

This book argues that authors associated with surrealism, especially René Char but also Antonin Artaud and André Breton, were crucial to Boulez's musical development. It enhances our understanding of his work by connecting it with significant trends in contemporary French culture, refocusing Boulez studies away from detailed musical analysis and towards a broader and more visceral, emotional response to his work.

Review Quotes

Organised Delirium is an important contribution to Boulez studies that both raises new points of inquiry and synthesises previously disparate topics into a more coherent picture of Boulez as artist and creator. In a field with a number of books, some by the composer, already published, Potter's achievement is distinctive and laudable.-- "TEMPO"

It's a revelation.--Tom Service "Music Matters, BBC Radio 3"

Potter shows how analysis, history and aesthetics can be connected in a fascinating and convincing way, while each of the building blocks comes into their own.-- "OPUS KLASSIEK"

Potter takes a valuable initiative, and non-Francophone readers in particular will profit greatly from an array of recent sources, as she liberally quotes and translates them - sources which deal with life in Paris and beyond as the city wrestled with the myriad practical problems of life during and just after the German occupation.-- "THE MUSICAL TIMES"

The musicologist Caroline Potter has published a book that is as masterful as it is essential for our knowledge of Pierre Boulez: Pierre Boulez: Organised Delirium.

La musicologue Caroline Potter fait paraître un livre tant magistral qu'essentiel pour notre connaissance de Pierre Boulez: Pierre Boulez: Organised Delirium.-- "CRESENDO-MAGAZINE"

Through Potter's careful research and lively narrative, we discover, and recover, a speed of thought and intensity of feeling in the 20-something Boulez that should help any of us hear his music through fresh ears.-- "GRAMOPHONE"

While not strictly a biography, Organised Delirium provides interesting insight into the composer-conductor's education - particularly his studies with Messiaen and Leibowitz, his dalliances with writings by René Char and Antonin Artaud, a fascination with the ondes martenot, and the impact that these formative years would have throughout his life.-- "BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE"