Boulez on the XXth Century

[sawyl]

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.