I once attended a Kennedy Center symposium given by Aaron Copland around 1974. Someone asked him " who is your favorite contemporary composer?" He answered " Pierre Boulez." Of course, soon after I looked up Boulez, found some recordings and began a musical journey that's lasted to this day. I've been having a "bowl of serial" every day since.

Thank you very much for these videos. There is finally someone that does video analysis of 20th century classical compositions.

A wonderful analysis: rich, because of its perspective, both historical and musical-periodicity, but also because of its keen understanding and explication of the musical structure and detail. Bravo, Sam, it has stimulated an urgency to listen to, and study, Boulez's music.

Your presentation is clear and enlightening; the perfect preparation for attending a live performance of the work. Thank you for posting it!

Great stuff fella! I really appreciate your presentation and style. Also, the statistical density and depth of information is welcome. Many thanks.

Thank you very much for making this video. I've had a hard time finding someone writing intelligently about this piece.

Thank you for the analysis. This was very interesting to watch.

I love much of Boulez's work, the Sonatas are no different. This will be another very interesting analysis, thanks :)

I subbed after two minutes in. Excellent content. Thank you!

Apropos Lynch’s comment about the mistake of certain filmmakers, who dress a ‘period’ set as if the look of the period in question consisted of perfectly concordant elements. That seems relevant, as you say, to Boulez, but also to the arts that derive from modernism generally. It may even be that this is the character of the modern period per se. Ernst Bloch spoke of non-synchronicity of societies in the early decades of the last century - different temporal elements coexist. The Germany of the 1930s is a world of both the autobahn and heimat culture. The old and the new are cheek by jowl. Arno Mayer wrote of the ‘persistence of the old regime’ in Europe before 1945, his sense, contrary to the orthodox view of an all-conquering capitalism that had rapidly liquidated the past in the preceding decades, that absolutist structures were still alive and kicking. Bruno Latour acknowledged Mayer’s point but insisted that in fact we’ve never been and still aren't modern. The new or modern in art isn’t what one might assume it to be - art without past - but art in which different temporal materials are recognised as such and their strange objectivity given expression. A term like ‘absolutely modern’ applied to a work of art might lead one to think that the past is simply absent from it, but no,the past has rather become ‘material’ to be manipulated - denatured. However violent this piano sonata is, it’s still a piano sonata.

I'm in eager anticipation for your analysis of "...explosante-fixe..." Thank you for what you are doing. There is truly a dire need for analysis of post-Schönberg music in KZfaq.

I've said this in other places, but I believe Boulez owes a lot to Maestro Maurizio Pollini and his recording of Piano Sonata N° 2. Other recordings attracted me because of the sheer destructiveness and hysteria. But it was Pollini's recording where I first realized that there was a method to his (so called) madness: the first recording where I feel I heard Boulez himself, rather than someone's impression of him. Pollini saw music in Boulez that other artists simply could not see. Boulez was crazy like a fox.

Very very informative video, thanks! I couldn't help feeling surprised by hearing you say 'major fifth' and 'major fourth' though.

Thank you for your comments and for giving some hints how to approach this very complex work.

A compelling and useful exploration of a challenging work. What a pity it doesn't examine the whole work with a few more examples elucidated. Excellent resource, superb teaching!

Thank you; this is really useful.

Andreyev's analysis of Bowlegs is a necessary introduction to the composers style of composition in my opinion. Andreyev is not only knowledgeable but also a good communicator.

I love this piece

Excellent explication. While Boulez is often described as a "cerebral" composer, my advice is to listen to his music simply as a succession of sounds, rhythms and textures, as you so wisely suggest. This piece reminds me of a Pollock painting far more than a Bach fugue.

His work is always make me confuse... However this video is really easy to undetstand to me for understandig his work. Thank you for uploading.

love it!!

Wow, so much hate! This is a really good introduction to the music of Pierre Boulez. Great job, Samuel!

Listening to this sonata is like a trip through organized chaos, improvised madness, or restless ambiguity. It may be better suited for the young at heart. When you get to my age you lose your patience for this much bedlam.

I was amazed when I first saw how beautiful Boulez' music looks on the page . the machine age is apparent in every bar ! That Boulez went on another 70 years and eschewed repetition is extremely admirable . Le Marteau ... will get my attention next . It's high time I order the piano score .

Great! thanks!

Thanks!!!

Bravo, Boulez.

@ Samuel I'm enjoying your videos and after some considerable difficulty, I have started getting a hang of Boulez and the contrasting currents of ideas that he employs. However, you describes these melodies as wild and completely chaotic and wondered is there perhaps not something immanent about this chaos? I had in mind what Babbitt wrote in his essay "Twelve-tone invariants", where he discussed his own music and also demonstrated how neither Schoenberg, Berg and Webern chose twelve-tone rows arbitrarily, but that they all had these invariants (for example, two discreet notes) which under different transformations/transpositions didn't change. I wonder if there is a similar principle at work when Boulez wrote his serial pieces? (Also I got a better idea about serial music reading "RUSSIAN PITCH-CLASS SET ANALYSIS AND THE MUSIC OF WEBERN" by Philip A. Ewell which, an analysis of Webern. Basically it says that all chords can be reduced to such thrichords where there is at least one semitone.)

I always look forward to your videos. Any chance you would do an analysis video on Elliott Carter's music?

Any plans on doing an analysis of some Shostakovich? Maybe a string quartet or his famous trio?

27:15 couldn't you theoretically play one of the outer notes with an elbow and use a finger of the hand of this arm for the middle Note? Sounds Strang but Who knows...?

What you are saying is informative and valuable. I just wish KZfaq would not add their transcriptions using an app that results in many inaccuracies and to make things worse, places the transcription over your examples. While transcriptions of what you are saying could be quite helpful, they need to be accurate and not cover up other valuable visual information.

can you do other analysis of other piece/s of boulez?

Samuel, can you offer any tips as to what atonal music is available for primary students of the pianoforte? By the bye I'm enjoying your series very much, they are most beneficial.

Your patience is formidable. I just hyper expressively hit random intervals spontaneously to much the same effect. Thanks! Enjoying your channel.

Can you analyse Boulez's first sonata too?

now i wrote my second sonata in one way "little" like boulez, but more close to webern poetic.

Every now and then I sit down and try to tackle some of Boulez's first sonata for piano (I don't think I will attempt the second any time soon). The two questions I'm always struck with is: 1.) How literal is his rhythm meant to be followed? 2.) If it is pretty literal, how the heck do you even begin to approach developing an "inner clock" that can match Boulez's rhythm? The metronome is obviously of no use in this matter.

Did Mozart, or Beethoven, or..., think that someone needs to explain in order to understand in order to listen in order to to enjoy... Probably not. In a sense it is like Physics. One needs to be a physicist to understand. I have never seen a physicist bursting in tears after solving Dirac equation. Maybe art, as science, has become something of the initiated. Science deals with facts remote from the intuition. So is music?

What is the name of the notation software you use where you can play the selection only?

Please do an analysis of Répons, Sir.

An interesting and thoughtful presentation, but I'm afraid it doesn't make the piece sound any better (or cohere better in my mind qua music). I am trained in 12-note technique, set-theoretical analysis, Schenkerian theory, Lerdahl and Jackendoff's GTTM, Neo-Riemannian theory, etc., so I am not just some middlebrow listener who struggles with any music written after Tchaikovsky.

23:52

I first heard the 2nd Sonata when I was at McGill (forty years ago). I didn't like it then but on your recommendation I gave it a second hearing. Regrettably, I have to say I still don't. Part of the reason may be explained by your opening remarks on Boulez. I am deeply skeptical of music that has as a deliberate goal the subversion and destruction of previous aesthetics. I view that as a product of and leading to, nihilism. Le Marteau is a work I enjoy so I'm not reflexively anti-Boules but this piece doesn't resonate with me. Anyway, thanks for the insightful analysis.

in the first listen i hate this sonata, but now i liked it.

Is there really no one who noticed he talks about "major fifths and fourths" instead of "perfect fifths and fourths" oops...

Someone wrote "wtf is that? Tom chasing Jerry?" haha The same thing came to my mind. Beyond the blackboard justifications that could impress a listener that's fond of conceptual or geometric sophistication, the effect it has on listeners is very much like the analogy this guy made. In fact one could even argue any musical style finds its ultimate truth, its real cultural meaning, in the way cinema will use it eventually. At least in his orchestral pieces there is a lot of work on timbre, but this… Répons would work well on some documentaries about nervous micro-organisms living in antartica or other planets, a visual world of crystals or else… Or maybe the mirror scene at the end of Enter the dragon. But this sonata is just good for a Chuck Jones film. The world is cruel.

This video is like using enormous amounts of brain power to rationalize that you actually enjoy chewing on broken shards of glass.

Epater le bourgeouis. Nothing more. The motto of the postwar European avant garde.

Yea, so the world is ugly...but I don't want my music to be ugly also.

Interesting but please drink water. When you speak the clicks and pops are not very pleasant.

Garbage can be fascinating too....but still smelly.

Boulez spent much of his life criticizing the music of Schoenberg and yet copies him in most ways as in this piece of "small cells" (Schoenberg and his followers were doing this at the turn of the century)-same with Messiaen and Boulez's best stuff is when he goes back to copying Messiaen-only Boulez's music is boring in its longing to be completely unpredictable, long, and ironically repetitive and in the case of "Structures" and many other of his pieces the music is of no value at all in its "rigour". And it seemed to take him forever to put out this overworked crap--like an overworked loaf of bread that is hard as a rock when finally baked. He hated Leibowitz but mirrored his career to the letter-a conductor who considered himself a composer but in the case of Leibowitz could actually write compelling music. Boulez-A brilliant conductor, boring uninteresting longwinded composer, and in print a real conceded self-important postmodernist asshole.

Boulez and the rest are "bead game" composers. shut away in a world that the average person will never enter. You can't hum there songs, and you certainly can't dance to them. The problem is that all this music ends up sounding like a movie sound track or a drunken Pan.

Boulez could not have been more misguided.

So little Pierre sat in his playpen and smashed up classical Sonata. What a precocious naughty boy! A non achievement. Music is not just bland analysis. This sonata is boring, bland and drearily superficial. Post-modernist nonsense. Its time is over.

Major success of writing the worst piece of music in history.

It's a piece of garbage.

why to waste time in trying to explain what this pseudo music cant express by itself ? this form of art is a dead end and a complete failure. It is ugly, boring and absolutely useless to humanity. Boulez music is so predicable in it inability to take shape and express motion or anything by the way. Boulez was someone who hated pleasure in any of its form and that's all we can feel in this random piece of junk noise.

It is always possible to analyse nothingness and find something to comment on. Alas, this work will not stand the test of time, nor the patience of truly cultured listeners. This music has no interest whatsoever, and expresses no creative effort. Just pretentiousness and an admission of impotence.