Product Description
Between May 1949 and August 1954 the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of remarkable letters that reflect on their own music and the culture of the time. This correspondence, together with other relevant documents, has been edited and annotated by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and is now available for the first time in English in a paperback edition. ... Read more

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the early seeds of modernitydiscussed in brief letters.
John Cage was the first to introduce Pierre Boulez to the United States. In New York he took Boulez around visiting painters and musicians, this was the early Fifties. David Tudor(long a Cage friend) was performing Boulez'sSecond Piano Sonata for the first time. Bookstores were frequent stops andBoulez( we learn) never heard of the poet e.e.cummings, and bought a modestbook of his poetry. Some thirty years later Boulez set a text of cummingsfor 22 unaccompanied voices. This correspondence was between two innovatorscoming from radically different places yet stopping at the same conceptualplaces. And it is a shame that this friendship fell out quickly,each goinginto radically different venues. Boulez although fascinated with chanceprocedures(which Cage had been working with the I Ching, Book of Changes atthat time) Boulez was arrongantly fascinated by the aesthetic object,itshistory and attenuation, and has remained so since. This correspondence hasfrequent entries on the concept of indeterminacy, again Boulez comes to itvia Mallarme, and aleatoric thinking, the throwing of the dice.Boulezsought a musical structure that contained the element of chance as in hisThird Piano Sonata in the latter Fifties. Both however were at a creativeplace in modernity when the Western canon of structure andcomprehensibility was falling itself.However it is odd for Boulez to thisday thinks of his work as moments containing a "freedom" ofsomething, when he conducts Mahler, he thinks of those passages that arefreer than others,like a symphony is a dialogue between the two. Mahler'sSixth Symphony is the case in point. There are letters of Boulez to Cage,while in South America with the Barrault Theatre Company, one entryincludes a description from Boulez that he is having a good time"milhauding" around, referring to Darius Milhaud the composer whofrequently utilized folk elelments in his music by collecting them involumes.Nattiez is a very sympathetic observer to this cause of modernityand the roots of things. ... Read more