Significant figure of contemporary musical life, Boulez fascinates me. Although criticized by many, he nevertheless remains a key figure of the last 60 years. Whether people like him or not, no one can deny that he greatly contributed to the advancement of musical thought.

And now let’s listen to an excerpt of Sur Incises performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez himself.

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Thanks to a post in muse affiliée, I’ve recently discovered an article by conductor Leon Bolstein, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Against all expectation, this article was published in the Wall Street Journal and confirmed what I was thinking: no, classical music isn’t dead, but quite the opposite, concerts are going well. The number of concerts has exponentially increased during the last forty years, the number of professional orchestras too. More and more young people learn to play an instrument. “An ageing public” you’d say? Classical music has never been a young people’s affair until now, and efforts made to rejuvenate the image of classical music and get new audience have just begun to bear fruit.

Would the sound reproduction be an impediment to the live concert? Would the multimedia change the culture consumer’s behavior by allowing him to do his own home-concert? Though conceivable, this trend won’t grow and won’t be harmful to the concert, but quite the opposite. No hi-fi system will replace the unique experience of the live performance. On the contrary, discs and mp3s can make a new audience go to concerts.

These days, live performance is going well, even if we’d have to find a more flexible concept of concert allowing an audience less accustomed to the concert ritual to swell the ranks of classical music lovers. Hard to please a potential audience without dissatisfying the existing one, but with time we will make it.

And now a question for you, dear readers: how should we improve classical music concerts?

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There are fascinating conversations with leading figures of contemporary music, such as Claude Ballif, François Bayle, Marius Constant, Antoine Duhamel, Michel Fano, Claude Helffer, Betsy Jolas, Yvonne Loriod, François-Bernard Mâche, Ivo Malec, Luis de Pablo and Martial Solal.

The video documents of this series are of very high quality. Thanks to the INA to make publicly available these videos.

Musique Mémoires – INA

Focusing on the electro-acoustic music and electronics, I offer you to listen to the webradio of GRM (I already spoke about GRM in the article on music concrete). There are many programs, from documents with Schaeffer (1959) to interviews with Luc Ferrari in 1989 as well as “concerts reports” in 2005, 2006, 2007.

Les Ondes – Webradio of GRM..

Good listening, and please share your links by adding them to this page!

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