Our critics cast their eyes over the latest selection of books on all things music
Pierre Boulez: Organised Delirium
Caroline Potter
Boydell & Brewer 208pp (hb) £30 Which composers are most commonly associated with ‘music of delirium and hysteria’? Berlioz, perhaps, for sheer scale, or maybe the whirling creativity of Gershwin or Bernstein? Boulez, a musician best known for his dodecaphonic language, is unlikely to top that list. But in Organised Delirium, Caroline Potter argues that his later fixation with numbers in music is not mathematical: rather, it is magical.
While not strictly a biography, Organised Delirium provides interesting insight into the composer-conductor’s education – particularly his studies with Messiaen and Leibowitz, his dalliances with writings by René Char and Antonin Artaud, a fascination with the ondes martenot, and the impact that these formative years would have throughout his life. Potter sets store by Boulez’s early experiences with Surrealist literature and artists in Paris during the 1940s, and emphasises that the composer himself referenced the importance of objets trouvés (found objects). One example given is the SACHER hexachord – a musical cipher invoking the name of conductor and philanthropist Paul Sacher (1906-99) – that Boulez reworked on numerous occasions. It’s a compelling, albeit fairly dry, contextualisation. Claire Jackson ★★★
The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography
Sophia Lambton
The Crepuscular Press 728pp (hb) £24 Does the world need another biography of Maria Callas? Dozens of accounts exist, meticulously documenting the diva’s life and art.
The latest addition, Sophia Lambton’s 500-page tome (supplemented by 100-odd pages of annotations), doesn’t add anything especially new to the Callas story. But it does give us a dense, well-organised narrative full of novelettish anecdotes, highfalutin’ philosophy and weird poetic flights about the opera singer’s art.
Lambton embarked on her voluminous study 12 years ago when she was just 19, so it would be churlish to dismiss this labour of love as superfluous to requirements. Her timing hasn’t been great though – the publication came out just as the centenary drew to its close.
The book certainly tells you everything you’ll ever need to know about Callas in impressive detail, though Lambton’s writing can be clunky: ‘Tosca lords over Scarpia like a skyscraper. The vicious mien she
