Boulez on the XXth Century

More withering sarcasm from Pierre Boulez via Alex Ross, focused this time on Nicolas Nabokov's CIA funded Masterpieces of the XXth Century festival held in Paris in 1952:

Boulez's Structures 1a figured in Masterpieces of the XXth Century as a sample of what the younger generation was doing. The composer and his erstwhile teacher Messiaen played it at 5:30 one afternoon, with Stravinsky and Craft in attendance. Boulez's involvement in Nabokov's festival was grudging; he could not have been pleased to be lumped together with the likes of Britten and Thompson. Two years later he would accuse Nabokov of creating a "folklore of mediocrity" and recommend that a future festival celebrate the twentieth-century condom.