Of similar composition

On March 26, Pierre Boulez celebrated his 80th birthday in Berlin by going out to lunch -- along with leading three rehearsals! Though it was a Saturday, I can’t imagine he stayed out late drinking champagne. He had to be up early the next day. At 11 a.m. in the city’s main concert hall, the Philharmonie, he conducted Mahler’s epic Second Symphony with the Staatskapelle Berlin.

That evening, across town in the ornate opera house, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Boulez conducted yet another concert. This one featured Ensemble InterContemporain, the French new music group he founded in the 1970s, playing a demanding program of his own music. The performance completed a four-day Boulez birthday festival that also included concerts with the Chicago Symphony led by Boulez and Daniel Barenboim.

Reportedly, it was quite a do -- and completely in keeping with Boulez’s stature. As composer, conductor, polemicist, institution builder and all-around visionary, he has been an indispensable figure in music since the end of World War II. Also in keeping with his stature, the event coincided with the release of a host of impressive CDs -- Boulez conducting Bartok and Mahler with the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics and the Chicago and London symphonies, plus three discs of his own music.

On Tuesday night, in a smaller town in our own state, a more modest birthday celebration will take place. The Pacific Rim Festival in Santa Cruz is honoring Terry Riley’s upcoming 70th birthday (June 24) with a Kronos Quartet concert. It may be out of the way, but it is significant. It will feature Riley’s new string quintet for the Kronos and pipa player Wu Man (which is to receive its premiere tonight in Berkeley). Composers John Adams and Pauline Oliveros will also be contributing works as birthday presents for Riley.

The Santa Cruz concert -- along with the fact that the only recent Riley CD is a collaboration with the poet Michael McClure that he has released himself -- is in keeping with Riley’s stature: outsider artist. In 1964, as an obscure young Bay Area hippie, he wrote “In C,” the work that single-handedly toppled the hegemony of the complex, mathematically organized maximalist music for which Boulez had become the famed spokesman. With “In C,” Minimalism, the most influential musical style of the past 40 years, was born.

Boulez and Riley have long been held to be the very antithesis of each other. They divide the musical community. They seem to exist in radically different worlds and to appeal to radically different audiences.

Could anyone possibly be more cosmopolitan than Boulez? He lives stylishly in Paris, eats in the best restaurants and knows his wine. He is an extraordinary conversationalist who speaks rapidly and demonstrates a wickedly enjoyable sense of humor. He can be amusing and charming and hobnobs with world leaders and the cultural elite. He favors neatly tailored jackets and polo shirts and refuses to wear concert white tie and tails -- a simple tuxedo is as far as he will go. Yet his elegance is unmistakable.

Riley lives in the remote Sierra Nevada foothills in Northern California. He dines well too, but more simply, often on food that he and his wife grow at their Sri Moonshine Ranch (their salsa is magnificent). But then everything about Riley appears much simpler than Boulez. His speech is slower and folksy. His scores are far less adorned. He sports a long Mr. Natural beard that makes him as unmistakably of his place as Boulez is of his -- which is to say he appears as naive as Boulez does urbane.

But those are only appearances. Scratch the surface and you will find remarkable similarities between Boulez and Riley. However different their personalities, their lifestyles, their careers, their music, their involvement with the music business, they share a deep musical DNA. Indeed, in some elemental way, they complement, even complete, each other. They are the yin and yang of modern music.

BACKWOODS BOYS

Both composers come from the boonies. Boulez was raised in Montbrison, in the Loire Valley. He studied mathematics and music in nearby Lyon but came to Paris in 1942 pretty much a musical hayseed. Olivier Messiaen’s class at the Conservatoire changed all that.

Boulez quickly became the quintessential angry young man. A firebrand, he is said to have stormed into fashionable Parisian salons, played his all-but-unintelligible first piano sonata and stormed right out again. A product of the postwar generation that wanted to forget the past and reinvent music, he demanded that music be rigorously organized and took Schoenberg’s 12-tone system to new levels of complexity by mathematically organizing rhythm, dynamics, articulation, even tone color. “Schoenberg is dead,” he wrote when the older composer died in 1951, and he meant it in two senses. Later he called for the burning down of all opera houses. When France seemed too artistically provincial for him, he dubbed Andre Malraux, the minister of cultural affairs, “a babbler and weakling.”

Riley also grew up in a musically unsophisticated small town about 50 miles from a provincial capital: Colfax, Calif., which is on the highway between Sacramento and Reno. But at Berkeley, where he earned a master’s in composition, he came under some of the same influences that Boulez discovered in Paris. One of Riley’s composition teachers was Arnold Elston, who had been a pupil of Webern. It was Webern’s condensed miniatures that became the model for the so-called total serialism that Boulez advocated in the ‘50s.

Both Boulez and Riley were, in their formative years, Bohemians. Riley didn’t storm salons, but he played piano for beatniks in San Francisco jazz clubs and hooked up with fellow student La Monte Young for all kinds of avant-garde shenanigans. One piece Young wrote for Riley at the time asked him to push a piano onstage until something (say, a wall) stopped it.

In their earliest works, Boulez and Riley were also both control freaks who attempted to build music within the narrowest of parameters. Riley’s building blocks for “In C” were a series of 53 short fragments in or around the key of C freely repeated by each performer. Similarly, Boulez in the ‘50s worked with his version of indeterminacy to write what he called “aleatory music.” His Third Piano Sonata is made up of modules, the order of which is determined during performance by the pianist.

Boulez’s and Riley’s fame arose from works they wrote around age 30. Nothing might seem more dissimilar than “In C” -- with its steady beat, hazy tonality and druggy ambience -- and Boulez’s intensely intricate “Le Marteau Sans Maitre,” which had its premiere in 1955. “Le Marteau” defied simplicity and directness (even the poems by Rene Char used in three of its movements are surreally abstruse). “In C,” in fact, was a reaction against “Le Marteau,” against Boulez’s rejection of tonality, repetition, beat.

And yet these two seminal compositions ask similarly radical things about, and from, music. Whether Riley’s obsessive repetitions or Boulez’s obsessive abhorrence of repetition, each work rejects the narrative form of theme and variation, of building to climaxes. Boulez and Riley are interested in the process of discovery: Once you set out on the journey, you have no idea where you will end up, even though one thing may lead logically to the next.

Non-Western music is also integral to both composers. Boulez’s sound world and concept of music have been as influenced by Japan and Java as Riley’s have been by India. Riley’s work unfolds slowly, and his structures are often like ragas. Boulez, the liner notes for his effervescently great new recording of “Le Marteau” point out, uses the guitar in a way that recalls the Japanese koto.

What really unite Riley and Boulez, however, are their ears and their virtuosity as performers. When rehearsing, Boulez the conductor always starts with tuning. In difficult music, he’ll have the musicians in the orchestra tune first to simple intervals, then gradually add dissonances. Until the intonation is perfect, he can go no further.

Intonation is at the heart of Riley’s music as well. Indian music has taught him to play with elaborate forms of tuning. When he rehearses with the Kronos Quartet, he too tends to start by getting the intervals exactly right.

Above all, practical performance is at the heart of Boulez and Riley. Boulez’s earliest job was as music director of actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault’s theater company. He went on to become as well known as a conductor as he is as a composer, rising to become music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1971 to 1978. And one of the things he is rightly famous for is making his music, which looks so impenetrable on the page, sound so lucid when he conducts it (or when he sings it to the players in rehearsal). In the same way, performers often don’t “get” Riley’s scores until they hear him sing them.

TIMING TIMES TWO

During his New York Philharmonic years, Boulez was once invited to appear on Dick Cavett’s late-night television talk show, and the first thing Cavett asked him to do was show how, as a conductor, he could beat three with one hand and four with the other simultaneously. Boulez’s music takes much of its character, its operating on different but simultaneous temporal planes, from this ability to beat time independently with each hand.

Riley has exactly the same facility. He can sit at the keyboard and start one kind of process in the left hand, a completely different melodic and rhythmic pattern in the right, and then keep going for what seems like forever. He could never have developed his brand of psychedelically repetitive music, so influential on Philip Glass and Steve Reich, without that technical facility.

This idea of ongoing process and evolving forms also has deeper significance for Boulez and Riley. Boulez is always finding new implications in his earlier music, always rewriting and expanding. For Riley, something in one piece can easily become the germ for another.

Where Boulez and Riley really seem to differ is their relationship to the musical establishment. Boulez is sought after by the world’s great orchestras. Riley, who in the ‘60s joined Boulez on the Columbia Records roster, turned his back on that kind of fame.

But Riley hasn’t been entirely out of the limelight. He is the composer most closely associated with the popular Kronos, and he has a stellar status in parts of the pop world, having influenced the likes of Brian Eno.

Meanwhile, Boulez has never lost his anti-establishment streak. He fought the New York Philharmonic and New York’s staid musical life tooth and nail during his music directorship. He may not be an outsider, but he regularly attacks the system from within.

In 1957, during Riley’s student years, Boulez visited Berkeley and took part in a radio debate with skeptical university music professors. In it, he advocated the idea of music as forgetting, as evolving process. He insisted that music should be about what you don’t know, not a reprise of what you do. That is exactly the road that Riley, in his own way, took.

The rest is history. And with these two great men, still energetic and profoundly creative as they enter their eighth and ninth decades, we are living it.