Imagination Can Be Self-Conscious, Says Boulez in Lamb Lecture

"Imagination loses nothing in becoming conscious of itself," said Pierre Boulez last night in the third 1962-63 Horatio Appleton Lamb Lecture.

Boulez examined the role esthetics should play in a composer's work, and what effects an esthetic consciousness would have on a composer's imagination. "If your imagination is not strong enough to withstand investigation, you are destroyed," he said, "and the sooner the better."

"Every esthetic in my opinion is based on doubt," he said. "Doubt assures the necessary distance between the creator and his own work. Without this distance we lack self-judgment." Boulez cited the example of his first place for two pianos, in which he tried completely to negate expressionism. "By being purely automatic, relying on purely rational relations, I found the necessity of personal intervention. When you are not strong enough to destroy yourself., you cannot find another life."

What role does esthetics play? It must affect everything from the most elementary morphology to the overall form. Composers of electronic music who ignore the need for esthetic awareness in creating elementary sounds produce fundamentally wrong sounds, he said. Again, style depends on esthetic principles of selection and rejection; here most often "the freedom of the composer is the right to be wrong." Finally, esthetics must be applied to the concert life, the only means of communication between the composer and his audience.

At the end of this analysis, has one grasped the experience of the composer? Poets cannot go to the heart of the mystery, but can only capture its radiations. "But if the composer could express the obscure instinct of composing with words alone, he would no longer be a composer, but a writer," Boules added. "I can go to the essential idea of music only through my own music. Music is a kind of sonorous order, and to live in this order is the only solution."

"I have little confidence," Boulez said, "in someone afraid of investigation," for such a fear is a fear of discovering oneself as nothing.

The difficulty is that "in such an investigation you play both Oedipus and the Sphinx. If Oedipus is stronger, fine. If the Sphinx is, you, the composer, are done," he said.

"When imagination comes out of the fire of investigation, it need not fear the Gospels," Boulez concluded. "In any great composer, there is an unbreakable core of night.