The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

The emotional content of the music is elusive. The feeling of delirium wears off after a few minutes, giving way to a kind of objectified, mechanized savagery. The serialist principle, with its surfeit of ever-changing musical data, has the effect of erasing at any given moment whatever impressions the listener may have formed about previous passages in the piece. The present moment is all there is. Boulez’s early works, notably the two Sonatas, Structures, and Le Visage nuptial, are perhaps best understood not as intellectual experiences but as athletic, even cerebrally sexual ones. Michel Foucault, the great theorist of power and sexuality, seemed almost turned on by Boulez’s music, and for a time he was the lover of Boulez’s fellow serialist Barraqué. “They represented for me the first ‘tear’ in the dialectical universe in which I had lived,” Foucault said of the serialists. What drove Boulez’s own rage for order remains unknown.