Conference Agenda

Pierre Boulez’s early music and writings are typically situated in relation to his well-known mentors, such as Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. Yet many of Boulez’s early works also bear the trace of a composer at Paris’s urban and social periphery: the Russian émigré, Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979) (Campbell 2013, 70–73). I uncover the events that led Boulez to absorb Wyschnegradsky’s ideas about quartertones and musical space, as he visited the latter in a working-class, Russian-speaking enclave of Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement. Drawing on novel archival sources in both French and Russian, I argue that Wyschnegradsky’s ideas were crucial in shaping Boulez’s earliest conceptions of atonality.

Boulez first encountered Wyschnegradsky through Messiaen, who had become fascinated with Wyschnegradsky’s music after hearing it in concert in 1937. Messiaen encouraged his students to visit Wyschnegradsky and absorb his ideas (Leroux 2019, 11), and Boulez performed Wyschnegradsky’s music in concert in 1945 and 1951 (Potter 2024, 71). Messiaen also taught his students some of Wyschnegradsky’s ideas, as evidenced in an unpublished, 1952 Paris Conservatoire syllabus held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and in Iannis Xenakis’s unpublished class notes, held at the Xenakis Archive in Paris.

Boulez deepened his relationship with Wyschnegradsky through the émigré music patron Pyotr Souvtchinsky (1892–1985), who tried to help publish Wyschnegradsky’s music-theoretic manuscript, “La Loi de la pansonorité.” Drawing on Souvtchinsky’s Russian-language correspondence, held at the BnF, I reveal that Wyschnegradsky read aloud from “La Loi” to both Souvtchinsky and Boulez in 1952, and that Boulez tried to reconcile that manuscript’s ideas with serialism, presaging his later Darmstadt lectures. I further show that Wyschnegradsky’s music theories explain harmonic structures in several of Boulez’s earliest pieces—the Quartet for Ondes Martenot, the Prelude, Toccata and Scherzo, and the Trois Psalmodies—suggesting a longer relationship between the two men beginning around 1945.

Although Boulez and Wyschnegradsky broke contact later in the 1950s, Boulez evidently took much from his émigré colleague, as archival evidence attests. Wyschnegradsky’s ideas provide crucial context for the young Boulez’s most enigmatic works, and for his conception of atonality in the aftermath of World War II.

The composer Arnold Schoenberg and the composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni enjoyed a friendly correspondence from 1903 until 1920. In this paper, I analyze the letters they exchanged from 1916 and 1917, amidst the throes of World War I. These letters, held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Library of Congress, reveal how the two supposedly apolitical composers conceived of their roles and responsibilities as artists during this unprecedented inter-European conflict.

Schoenberg sent his first letter to Busoni’s temporary home in Zürich on November 14, 1916, responding to the piece Busoni had published on Umberto Boccioni’s death in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In this letter, Schoenberg laments the violence of the war, claiming idealistically that, “if we two, and people like us in every country, could sit down together and discuss peace, we could give it to the world in a week.” This letter is followed by a second from January 30, 1917, which includes a draft of an article inspired by American President Woodrow Wilson’s recent peace rhetoric that Schoenberg intends to publish anonymously. In it, he details fifteen actionable tenets to ensure lasting international peace. Busoni finds Schoenberg’s political aspirations bemusing. He claims in his letter from November 24, 1916 that his article was “about the death of an outstanding painter as a soldier; not a peace piece, but one in which art is weighed against war.” Furthermore, he doesn’t respond to Schoenberg’s article draft.

In this paper, I theorize the misunderstanding between the two composers, challenging prevalent assertions in existing scholarship that many early twentieth-century composers (including Schoenberg and Busoni) were disinterested or uninformed about politics. These letters evidence a situation that was infinitely more complex, speaking to competing understandings about the proper relationship between art and politics. Many intellectuals considered art an expression of European culture despite the sicknesses of modern civilization and thought that it should transcend the immanence of political life. In the 1910s, it became unclear whether this attitude met the unique challenges of the times.

Before dedicating herself to painting, Lithuanian-German artist Aliutė Mečys (1943, Koblenz – 2013, Hamburg) worked as a stage and costume designer at Schillertheater Berlin and later at the Hamburg State Opera. Between 1970 and 1982, Mečys shared a personal and professional partnership with composer György Ligeti (1923, Transylvania – 2003, Vienna). She introduced Ligeti to Michel de Ghelderode’s play La Balade du Grand Macabre (1935)––the source for his “anti-anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre––and designed costumes for its premiere and subsequent performances in Stockholm, Hamburg, and London in 1978.

Beyond her theatrical career, Mečys created several paintings portraying Ligeti in ways that radically depart from traditional composer iconography. Inspired by the trauma of their separation, in the 1980s Mečys incorporated representations of Ligeti into her paintings that depict the complexity of this man, indeed his inner conflict. While these works allude to the couple’s intimacy and eventual estrangement, they embed Ligeti’s abstracted figure within a symbolic universe drawn from prehistoric, European, matriarchal culture and Lithuanian, animistic mythology—traditions Mečys increasingly explored as an independent artist. At the same time, these portrayals also illustrate the idealistic aspirations of Mečys’s art. Through these hybrid images, she envisioned a utopian world free from violence and corruption, countering the trauma that marked both artists’ early lives: Mečys’s father served under the Nazi regime; Ligeti lost close family members in concentration camps.

My music-iconographical analysis situates these paintings within Mečys’s self-described style of “irrealism”—in her own words, “realistic pictures of unreal realities” (Stahnke, 2024). Mečys’s irrealistic synthesis of old and new, real and unreal, personal and mythical interrogates the ideologies of perception and reframes the visual representation of composers in late-twentieth-century art. Her illustrations intertwine themes of mythology, cultural identity, and mystical allegories. They illuminate an overlooked dialogue between music, myth, and modernism, challenging conventional narratives of artistic influence. Yet, in the case of those artworks that integrate Ligeti’s image, the Canvas speaks of a difficult relationship between the two––art filled with anxiety, fear, mental conflicts, loneliness, and images of personal degradation.