THE LOOP GROUP
Boulez’s interest in the Loop Group is a sign of its growing importance, for he is arguably our greatest living figure in music. Once a radical, outspoken enfant terrible who advocated that concert halls and opera houses be burned to the ground because they were dead monuments to an irrelevant past, Boulez is now known as one of the world’s greatest interpreters of that past. The leading serialist–or twelve-tone composer–of his generation, who once said that serialism would become “the only musical direction of the future,” Boulez later abandoned and today dismisses the entire movement as “a moment in music.” The frustrated artist, who once vowed he’d never return to his native France, has now headed the world’s largest experimental music research center for over a decade–IRCAM (Institute of Research for the Coordination of Acoustics and Music), located in Paris at the Centre Pompidou.
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Marteau was the second half of this Loop Group concert. In his intermission fund-raising announcement, the group’s founder, president, and guru Ray Wilding-White remarked on how difficult the work would be to perform, but the warning proved hardly necessary. It was immediately clear that Marteau was being performed by a capable but nervous ensemble, walking on eggshells the entire time. The group had all they could do just to count the work’s awkward rhythms and metrical changes and make proper entrances–which, for the most part, they did, thanks to the precise but very slow beat of conductor and Loop Group music director James MacDonald.
The Loop Group gave the work its Chicago premiere, presented in concert form in one act and two scenes. It was generally sung adequately by Jane Green, Sheldon Atovsky, John Murrya, and David Huneryager. In lieu of orchestral accompaniment, Robert Pherigo provided an accurate but slow piano accompaniment that unfortunately lacked the mystery we associate with Debussy.
