Trackings

With the twenty-first century only a few years away, it is sobering to realize that what most of us call "modern music" is so very old: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, still shocking to many, is nearly eighty, while Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, with which, according to the arch-modernist Pierre Boulez, "modern music awakened," is now closer to Papa Haydn's time than to our own. Yet controversies still rage, with composers quarrelling over aesthetic issues that go back decades and performers committing themselves with political zeal to one camp or another, while large segments of the concert audience vote with their feet. Trackings is a unique attempt to make sense of this ferment. In conversations of remarkable breadth and intimacy, it captures the thoughts and personalities of twenty-six of the world's leading composers, revealing sharp disagreements, unexpected interrelationships, and a depth and delicacy of feeling that belies their reputation for dogged rationalism. We meet a surprisingly pragmatic Boulez ("We do the best we can to be attractive"), a meek Karlheinz Stockhausen praying for inspiration ("If one is not moved, one should wait"), and a militantly asystematic György L