Susan Bradshaw

Susan Bradshaw isn't a musician with whom I've ever been familiar, so when I checked her name on the Net, I found that she had only died a couple of years ago, and like Richard Rodney Bennett, had been a student of Boulez. Like Bennett, she was no worshipper at the altar of modern music (such as that of Boulez), and she apparently had a good idea of what was true and what was false in the modern music scene. So it's with some delight that I quote this paragraph from her obituary:

She already possessed a critical attitude and a fine ability to distinguish the genuine from the false. An interminably repetitive piece by LaMonte Young was being hammered out at an avant-garde concert, when Susan's slender figure suddenly left the audience, climbed on the stage and, to general approval, dragged the performer off his piano stool.

From the Guardian obituary by Hugh Wood.

A definition of the series

Pierre Boulez attempting to define modern composition. I leave it to you to decide whether he’s achieved his end. (There’s a lot more, by the way, but this extract should suffice.)

The world of music today is a relative world, that is to say, one where structural relationships are not defined once and for all according to absolute criteria, but are organised instead according to varying schemata.
This world has arisen from the expansion of the idea of the series; that is why I should first like to establish a definition of the series from the strictest point of view, and then to infer from it an ensemble, a network of probabilities.
What is the series? The series is – in very general terms – the germ of a developing hierarchy based on certain psycho-physiological acoustical properties, and endowed with a greater or lesser selectivity, with a view to organising a FINITE ensemble of creative possibilities connected by predominant affinities, in relation to a given character; this ensemble of possibilities is deduced from an initial series by a FUNCTIONAL generative process (not simply the consecutive exposition of a certain number of objects, permutated according to restrictive numerical data).

Is it surprising, when you read this sort of thing (a) that Boulez’ own compositions are seldom heard? or (b) that the old tonal systems still continue their long-held sway?

From Boulez on Music Today, at the beginning of the third, and by far the longest of the three chapters, all of which continue on in this vein. Translated (I imagine with some difficulty) by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett.