Stocktakings

Reviews / Votes

`...there are several particular reasons to welcome Stephen Walsh's new translation, whose connotatively neat (and newly allusive) title stocktakings from and Apprenticeship, usefully facilitates its separate identification. ...Stephen Walsh's new translation is a considerable help to the reader. ...few composers can ever have possessed so radical a sense of music history and given it such complete definition as Boulez achieves in these pages. ...Its welcome reappearance in this considered and scholarly translation will meeet needs in both respects.'
David Wright, The Musical Times `a new translation - an impressive job by Stephen Walsh - of Boulez's first (1966) gathering of manifestos and trenchant analyses.'
London Review of Books `These jibes, japes and brilliant theoretical flourishes date from his twenties and early thirties. But Stephen Walsh's translation at last makes one of the century's key musical books available in strong, supple English.'
Paul Griffiths, Times Saturday Review 'the quality of Walsh's work is itself a salient reason for acquiring this volume ... this translation amounts to a much-needed critical edition of the Releves - meticulously referenced and footnoted, and encompassing such details as can be traced of the revisions made by Boulez when the collection was published in book form ... The result is a tour-de-force of the translator's art, unselfseekingly equal to the restless protean virtuosity of the pronouncements of Young Boulez Rampant. Virtually everything else is essential reading; indeed the whole book is studded with passages that absorb, provoke, fascinate, and enchant in their voracious cultural awareness, breadth of reference, and keenness of insight.'
Malcolm Hayes, Temp, 3/92 `Stephen Walsh's translation of Relevds d'apprenti is excellent and fulfils the need for a much more lucid and more available text than was formerly the case.
Jonathon Harvey, Times Literary Supplement 'Throughout, one is impressed by Boulez's assuredness, his meticulous assessment of the musical score, his determined if narrow vision of the "right" path to the musical future.'
F. Goossen, University of Alabama, Choice, Apr '92 'an enlightening source of information on Boulez's position within the French literary tradition. Stocktakings is a major work, clarifying Boulez's discovery of sound worlds, his "apprenticeship" as a composer, and his place within contemporary artistic circles.'
Fiona Richards, Goldsmiths' College, Modern and Contemporary France, No. 49, April 1992 `there are several particular reasons to welcome Stephen Walsh's new translation, whose connotatively neat (and newly allusive) title Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, usefully facilitates its separate identification ... Readers will benefit from Walsh's careful footnoting ... This assistance helps to establish a more informed understanding of the nature of Boulez's enterprise ... Stephen Walsh's new translation is of considerable help to the reader. Its quality of straightforwardness and general fluency is evident' LMusical Times 'Walsh's translation not only has the advantage of making musical (and, unlike much of Weinstock's, grammatical) sense but also reads well. The book should perhaps be read mainly for its value as a historical document charting some of the main lines of thought in European music in the period after the Second World War.'
Douglas Jarman, Music and Letters, Vol. 73, No. 3, Aug '92 'crucial document ... The passion behind Boulez's polemics is perhaps the most old-fashioned aspect of these essays - and also perhaps the most admirable.'
David Schiff, Reed College, Notes, March 1993