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Editorial Review Product Description
Beginning with Stravinsky and "The Rite of Spring," this book traces the course of classical music from the early twentieth century to the present day and beyond, as it moves into the twenty-first century. This elucidating text covers the major figures in music of the past hundred years, from Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varese, and Webern to Boulez, Cage, Henze, and Stockhausen. Describing a dramatic revolution against music traditional and a new artistic sensibility, this book offers a guided tour and a concise analysis of the major trends in classical music. ... Read more Customer Reviews (5) 
The most deceptively titled work I've come across in a while
Joan Peyser's book TO BOULEZ AND BEYOND: Music in Europe Since the Rite of Spring has a rather deceptive title. I assumed that it would be an overview of contemporary music, profiling various composers. Instead, Peyser's book is divided into two halves. The first is a history of the work of Stravinsky and of the Second Viennese School, exploring how they each contributed to European music. The second half is a gushing (but that's okay, I admire him myself) biography of Boulez alone, that only goes to the 1970s in significant detail and has only a few anecdotes from the 1980s and 1990s. These two parts are entirely incongruous, and as other reviewers have commented, this is a freakish abortion of a work that inexplicably got published. There is a brief and unsubstantial foreward by Charles Wuorinen that relates only to the first half; I suspect he had no idea what sort of book he was contributing to.
About the only thing I found worthwhile about the book are the many stories about Boulez's rocky tenure in New York. Many biographies of Boulez mention that he faced challenges and angered people, but don't go into significant detail. Here there is all kinds of juicy detail that Boulez fans will enjoy.
Otherwise, the work is poor. There is no real musicological analysis here, it's all simple historical writing. The typesetting is poor and the entire enterprise has a self-published feel about it.
A messy book about Joan Peyser
It is very hard to believe that a book as defective as this is thrown onto the market as a glossy hardcover with one of the most misleading titles ever. "Never ... use the word gossip in a pejorative sense. It's the very stuff of biography and has to be woven in," Peyser once told her students at NYU. And so what you get here is essentially an extended tabloid gossip-column, full of unsubstantiated hear-say and personal opinions, including that of Peyser's beautician (I'm not joking!). There is no discernable structure, logical order or clear argument. Solid research isn't Peyser's concern either; one gets the impression that her only source is the New York Times. Even keeping track of the consistency in her own writing appears too much to ask. Just compare pages 123 and 126. On page 123, admiring words from Christian Science Monitor writer Winthrop Tyron are quoted with regard to Varèse's Ameriques. What a surpise then, to find the exact same quotation three pages later, but this time in praise of Intégrales! Apparently, BOTH were "the first original score for grand orchestra that has been made in America since the twentieth century began" - a qualification that is suprising indeed for Intégrales, which is scored for 11 winds and 4 percussion... Obviously, attempts at high-flying statements on the progress of musical history fall completely flat in such a context. Peyser's credentials as a qualified musico-historian all but evaporate as early as page 10, where she calls Vienna the birthplace of Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert and Mozart: wrong three out of four times. Or later, when she says that Berlioz's Requiem depends on "huge masses of sound", a claim that can only be upheld by one who has never heard the piece (which, though it requires large forces, is very quiet almost all through). Or even, and more to the point, in the first sentence on page 1: "It was an inevitability that tonality would outlive its role as the foundation on which serious music was based."
Only 350 pages later it turns out that Peyser did not completely fail to notice the minor role that serialism, aleatory and other such inventions played on the overall musical stage of the twentieth century. They formed a very particular niche that contains much that is all but obsolete nowadays, if not downright absurd. (I laughed out loud reading about pianist Tudor, who was deeply shocked to find rhythmic values notated in a piece by Stockhausen. He "frantically tried to get out of the four walls that the piece represented to [him]." Fortunately for Tudor, Cage wrote his 4'33" to counter exactly this problem). The vast majority of composers, thank god, are today (and have always been) working on the assumption that music should speak to ear and to the heart, not merely to the mind. Even the greatest works of the serialist age, like Le Marteau sans Maitre, or Moses und Aaron, remain the rarest of occurences on stage as well as on disc. This hasn't changed in the past 50 years, and isn't likely to in the next 50. It takes frightening doses of narcissism to maintain, as many avant-gardists did and do, that this is due to the stupidity of 'bourgeois' audiences, and not the fault of the music itself. Peyser admits as much when she cites evidence from neurophysiology to explain the limited appeal of serialist music. She fails to notice that these observations refute her opening claim. In general, her book would have considerably gained in interest if she had delved deeper into the complex nature/nurture debate and research regarding music perception, and had related them to the activities of the 20th century avant garde.
Unfortunately, she is content to limit herself to a very selective, sketchy and random overview of musical developments in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, with Schoenberg and Stravinksy at its core and Webern and Varèse tacked on for good measure. All this, we eventually find, merely serves as a prelude to part 2 of the book: a move to the US, and a portrait of Boulez, who emerges alternately as a supreme musical genius and a robotic kind of unfeeling freak. Peyser clearly is a close personal acquaintance of Boulez (or was, at least; I doubt she is among Boulez's favourites after he read the book); later on we also meet Charles Wuorinen, who wrote the foreword to this book, and who can be seen with his arm around Peyser on the back flap. A niggling suspicion arises that there is a correlation between being a musical greatness in Peyser's universe and being one of her friends. As if to counter this impression, she is quick to list all the prizes these people have won, including in Wuorinen`s case a "MacArthur ('genius') scholarship" (note the (ahum) subtle insertion of the word genius). Clearly, Peyser is happily ignorant of all those composers of the past who won numerous prizes and accolades in their own time and are now completely forgotten. And the gossip continues, of course, including ample examples of the silly feuds the avant-garde engaged in (should music be determined by mathematical tables or by a throw of dice? and other such existential dilemma's...). If Peyser is in need of an explanation of Boulez's style and lacks the information to give it, she doesn't hesitate to throw Freud at him. Actually, she throws anything at him but the kitchen sink. She is thoroughly miffed by his refusal to reveal the intimate details of his personal life, and quick to turn this against him. Eventually, the analysis of his work culminates in that one crucial musical question: "does he have sex?" (Yes, that is a quote!).
Yet after 360 pages we still have no grasp of the essentials of his music as such, and barely any of its effect on the wider musical scene (which is far from equivalent to the admiration of a few young composers whom Peyser interviewed and who happened to be pupils of... Wuorinen). True to herself, Peyser prefers to spend a full page on her eyewitness account of a rehearsel in which Boulez brought a flutist to tears with his insistent perfectionism, and to quote at length from her own newspaper writings. Boulez the conductor, not the composer, takes center stage, no doubt because the public function of a conductor comes with rather more ready-to-serve items of juicy gossip (and I do most heartily use that word in a pejorative sense!). But the main problem is that the "I"-factor in this book is so strong that one is left wondering if Peyser herself isn't its main character.
In short, a thoroughly inadequate and vaguely repulsive book that has quite deservedly gone out of print.
credibility?
As a non-expert reader seeking an introduction in the field, I "learn" on the first couple of pages about a list of composers - Beethoven among them - being born in Vienna. How much is the reader to believe of the information he doesn't already know better by himself?
Essential and Lucid
This work is the combined result of two previous books by Peyser, the first a study of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Varese; the second a biography of Pierre Boulez up to the mid-seventies. Although Peyser has edited her work to eliminate some overlapping material, and has added a short chapter on Boulez' last three decades, there is still a feeling of jerry-rigging and overall incompleteness that cannot be avoided, and one is left craving for more material on Boulez' latter life and composers from the late seventies on.
No matter. These flaws pale in comparison to the value of the work itself -- a lucid, emphatic, and highly readable account of modernism in music. Avoiding serious technical discussion that would alienate anyone but a composer, Peyser casts her subjects in a dramatic light, detailing their works in terms of impact, emotional content, and the challenges they either met or failed to overcome. Of course special attention is paid to Boulez, who emerges as a complex, thorny, enigmatic and passionate figure -- very much like his music, in fact. As Boulez is notoriously private, her objective and highly researched biography is doubly valuable, and some of the anecdotes are simply priceless. Highly recommended to any enthusiast of modern atonal or experimental music.
Boulez Updated
In contrast to a previous reviewer, I found this volume interesting and well worth reading, if hardly up to its subtitle of Music in Europe Since the Rite of Spring.I think what happened was that Peyser intended to update her Boulez biography of 1975 (she says as much), had already started a book about music since the Rite, and finally gave up and combined the two in an unfortunate mishmash, adding bits and pieces of scattered information about other composers as it seemed appropriate to her.It is, however, simply untrue to say that Peyser makes Boulez out to be a saint. That she seems to have some personal feelings for him does not detract from her biography or its assessment of his music, which is certainly not always positive. That she would at least like to have a bias in Boulez's favor I wouldn't deny.Peyser's book does bring Boulez--an infamously private man--to life, and does actually help in approaching his music, whatever the flaws of the book may be.It would be a great buy in paperback.Do not look for any technical information, however:while not a Boulez expert, I might recommend Peter Stacey's Boulez and the Modern Concept as an approach for those familiar with some music theory.
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