Sound of the Future?

The liner notes on the new record describe the musician: "A short man growing slightly stocky, bald, Napoleonic. Smokes cigars. Can drink four framboises after dinner with no decline of intellectual focus. Never eats breakfast. Is generous with money. Could organize and run even the French government. Was a choir boy . . . Has nervous blink . . Lives near Paris' Place de la Bastille (in an old building; you expect to find J.J. Rousseau sitting in bed writing when you enter)."

The individual thus described: charming, highly gifted French Composer-Conductor-Pianist Pierre Boulez, 33. The name is virtually unknown in the U.S., but Americans are sure to hear more of both him and his music, although he makes satanic demands on both listener and performer.

Few First Words. A listener to a new Boulez cantata once recalled the story of the man who took his first bath: "I can't say I liked it, but I think it's something everybody ought to go through once." Despite such reactions, Auvergne-born Pierre Boulez (rhymes with who says), organizer and director of Paris' successful Domaine musical concerts of new music, has established himself securely as the undisputed darling of European music's Young Turks. A new Columbia recording* of his 1955 cantata Le Marteau sans maitre, to a text by Surrealist Poet Rene Char, gives Americans their first real chance to take a Boulez bath.

To Boulez, Tchaikovsky is "abominable," Brahms "a bore," Twelve-Tone Pioneer Arnold Schoenberg an arrested post-Romantic who "discovered the words but never found the proper syntax for them." Just about the only older composers for whom Boulez has a kind word: Schoenberg's late pupil Anton Webern, and France's 49-year-old Organist-Composer Olivier Messiaen, from whom Boulez sought composition instruction after giving Paris' traditionalist Conservatoire the back of his hand ("The composition professors were imbeciles"). From Webern, Boulez derived and refined Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique to its uttermost austerity, and from Messiaen he absorbed an interest in Oriental cultures. Today Old Master Igor Stravinsky, 76, admits that Boulez has influenced even him, regards Le Marteau as the "most [attractive work] from a composer of the younger generation." He adds simply: "I like to listen to Boulez." So will the more adventurous and patient among U.S. record buyers.

Uncountable Hours. In dealing with music's four basic elements, Boulez has all but jettisoned conventional melody, turned harmony virtually inside out, distilled rhythm to a subtle juxtaposition of sound and enhanced silence, invoked Balinese gamelans and other Oriental sources for new wrinkles in tone color. Le Marteau begins with a flurry of seemingly unconnected tones from viola, alto flute and vibraphone, leading into a pointillistic passage that introduces guitar and xylo-rimba in now-and-then sirums and clacks. In another section, the flute meanders insouciantly over an animated background of xylorimba and bongo drums. One movement is a lullabylike colloquy between singer and flutter-tongued flute, reminiscent of Schoenberg's 1912 bombshell Pierrot lunaire. Never earsplitting, Boulez' music seldom rises even to a forte. His rhythm is less a matter of meter than of pulse; the music surges forward in rhythmic eagerness, draws up in silence to catch its breath, surges on, halts, proceeds.

To achieve Columbia's shimmering recording of the nine-movement. 29-minute cantata, Avant-Garde Specialist Robert Craft conducted Contralto Margery Mac-Kay and six Hollywood virtuoso instrumentalists in "uncountable" hours of rehearsal, 15 hours of actual recording. Busiest man in the group: the percussionist, whose "kitchen" includes small cymbals, regular cymbals, maracas, tambourines, claves, bells, tam-tam, triangle, gong. Not for lazy ears, the piece demands great concentration from listeners, but rewards with a fascinating foretaste of what may very well become the music of the future.

* Which also includes Zeitmasse, an instrumental work (for five woodwinds) by electronic music's outstanding practitioner, Karlheinz Stockhausen (TIME, July 7).

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