Modernist Composer and Mahler Conductor: Changing Conceptions of Performativity in Boulez

Abstract

hat conceptions of musical articulation govern the serialist writing of Pierre Boulez in the 1950s? What happens when this diehard modernist composer takes up orchestral conducting and delves deeply into the late romantic repertoire of Wagner and Mahler through the late 1960s and '70s? What changes can be noted when Boulez then returns to Pli selon pli, his main work from the late 1950s, and profoundly revises its musical form in the 1980s? And what differences in musical articulation can be traced when Boulez the conductor again takes up Mahler's orchestral works, and records them in new versions in the years around 2000? These are central questions that I wish to address in this article, which is mainly a study in musical performativity. INTERPRETATIONS OF PERFORMATIVITYDuring the last few years, the concept of 'performativity' (Performativität) has emerged as a weighty challenge to the traditional practices of musical analysis, historiography, and interpretation. The so-called performative turn is claimed to have changed the optics of several related fields, such as the studies of theatre, art, music, literature, media, social practices and rituals, and it has also involved cultural studies, anthropology, philosophical aesthetics and speech-act theory. 1 Some call this a veritable shift of paradigm in the history of the humanities 2 -from semiotics to linguistic performance (Austin, W