"One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience." - Alice James
***
(Pierre Boulez - Le soleil des eaux)
"1. Plaint of the Lizard in Love
Don't peck the sunflower seeds, your cypresses would suffer.
Goldfinch, take wing again.
Fly back to your wool-lined nest.
You are no pebble in the sky for the wind to set you free.
Country bird: the rainbow merges into the daisy.
The man is shooting: hide! The sunflower is his accomplice.
Only the grasses are for you. The grasses bending in the fields.
The snake doesn't know you and the grasshopper is grumpy. The mole sees nothing in it. The butterfly hates no one. The echo in this country is certain.
I watch, good prophet that I am. I see everything from my little wall - even the owl lurching along."
I think Dr Seuss makes more sense than this.
Review: Boulez's 'Le Soleil des Eaux'
Tempo, New Ser., No. 68 (Spring, 1964), pp. 35-37
"Olivier Messiaen has emphasised the surrealistic nature of much recent French music... One can see that Messiaen's vivid texts to his own works... rely on the surrealist's dissociation from 'reality'... A quotation from Dali... 'I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advance of the mind, it will be possible... to systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit the world of reality'...
The first poem is a gentle song which captures the atmosphere for a warm summer day, an atmosphere admirably evoked by the shimmering music... The soprano's monody alternates with orchestral sections of great beauty [Ed: It sounds more like a horror movie to me, except that horror movie soundtracks at least have a tune]...
Char's work, poetic and imaginative in essence, contains a clear message. It concerns the installation of a factory in the Sorgue district; the manager sees fit to dispose of the factory's waste products in the river, with the result that hundreds of trout are poisoned... on a deeper plane, liberty is sacrificed to progress... It has much in common with the 'indirect oppression through carelessness of a class which seeks to put the blame for mining disasters and flooding on natural causes' [Ed: Great. Post-Marxism in music. No wonder it sounds so awful]...
It is, above all, the use of several types of vocal declamation, in addition to normal singing, which creates the surrealistic effect... It heightens the artificiality (and perhaps even the absurdity) of the relationship of words to music...
The familiar motive is used to introduce a simple rhythmic canon (Ex. 3e), which is also a melodic canon by inversion. This representation of folding grass is very apt indeed. And again in this section, the Klangfarben technique produces a texture of the utmost luminous beauty.
The enchanting work, exploring as it does the beauty as well as the haunting grotesqueness of a dream-like state, deserves to be far better known, for it is one of Boulez's most accessible scores. [Ed: Maybe you can find it enchanting and beautiful if you're on LSD. After all, it was written in the 60s - everybody was groovin' to a brand new sound, and the world was spinnin' around. I don't want to see Boulez's less accessible scores.]