Boulez Criticizes 'Scientific' Music

In the second 1962-63 Horatio Appleton Lamb lecture last night, composer Pierre Boulez attacked the inappropriate application of science and philosophy to music. "Those who manipulate numbers to eternity are all brain--no mind," he said. "Music should not have the structure of other thoughts imposed on it."

Boulez deplored the use of scientific language in music by those not thoroughly trained in both science and music. For example, numerical description of the permutations of notes in serial music is "sophism and mania, related more to despair than to science"; such an approach raises the spectre of the medieval fanatics of the Golden Number.

"As long as you have no idea of musical techniques, philosophical comments on music remain only ideas of ideas, fundamentally irrelevant," Boulez said.

"The mechanism of musical creation needs specialized thought," which has absorbed scientific and philosophical ideas. Boulez is equipped to provide that thought: he was trained in mathematics before he began composing professionally. Boulez then discussed the genesis and character of musical creation.

Most people do not understand that composers use a variety of techniques which change in time, he said. "But if you think the same way for 30 years, you are a cadaver."

Drawing on his own experience, Boulez illustrated the variety of ways a work can begin. Sometimes an "abstract conception" of the form arises, sometimes "a purely instrumental intuition" of an interesting combination. Often the composer is like the painter Henry Miller described, who "started with a horse and ended up with an angel."

Boulez began his lecture by criticizing composers who follow a great composer by stealing his tools and using them improperly. "You must know the why of the grammar--not just the grammar," he said.

"Schools, in the worst sense, grasp only the procedure of a composer, not his personality."