Another episode

Boulez says in the liner notes to either "Repons" or "Pli Selon Pli" in the DG 20/21 series that he often starts a piece thinking of popular melodies.

In the notes to "Pli selon pli," he says: "When I want to relax I always think of a very simple melodic line, one which is certainly not dodecaphonic. This may surprise you, but I've often found the obligation to use all twelve tones to be unbearable, because the result is so predictable. In this melody [he's talking about the first of the three "Improvisations sur Mallarmé" that lie at the center of the work] there are repetitions, polarities are formed which interest me. The first version of "Improvisation I" essentially revolves around this phenomenon. For its articulation [in a later, revised version] I went back to sketches for my "Notations,' which I've interpolated between these melodic segments. The form is thus elucidated by means of a self-quotation."

In other words (at least as I read what Boulez says): (a) When he talks about a "simple melody," it's certainly not a popular tune, but rather one that simply isn't 12-tone. (b) As an example of a simple melody, he apparently cites the start of the "Iimprovisation I," which is extraordinarily lovely (it might be my favorite Boulez moment; the other might be the entrance of the tam-tam at the end of "Le marteau sans maitre"). But it's also atonal, and certainly not like any popular tune any of us have ever heard. (c) To elaborate the piece in which this melody occurs, Boulez quotes from another, fully atonal, non-melodic work of his, thus doing something that's about as far from Joyce as possible, or at least from the Joyce who quotes fragments of genuine popular tunes (and other bits of popular culture) throughout both "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake."

Greg--

I think you do your project a grave disservice by saying that a failure to quote popular song in music ipso facto represents a disconnect form everyday life.

Musical quotation is a very different beast from literary quotation. In music, or so it seems to me, the piece actually becomes the piece quoted for the length of the quotation, whereas quotes in literary works have a different effect, that of allusion.
I can't speak in detail about Boulez, except to say that the music I know does have an astonishing sensuous beauty, but I find Carter's music to be very much in touch with everyday life in that he has abstracted modern urban life and offered an artistic re-presentation of that life in sound. Offering up to people information they already have (popular tunes) and calling it communication seems to me to be a fairly low-level ambition for art.

I don't mean this as a condemnation of music that includes direct reference to popular music. I just think that that is only one way to do it, and maybe not the most interesting way.

Steve, thanks for this. And it's well worth thinking about. But I do think my point was more complex than this. I didn't say anyone absolutely has to quote popular music, or else be condemned for staying aloof from everyday life. I'm saying that literary modernism -- Joyce in particular -- has a colloquial side that modernist classical music mostly hasn't had. This goes (as maybe I should have said) much further than quoting popular songs. Joyce is full of allusions, references, and outright celebration of all kinds of everyday things. That was at the core of his work.

I like the distinction you draw between quotations in literature and music. And yet I think it's possible to wedge musical quotations in a larger context so that they don't take over the piece. Look at Berio in "Sinfonia" (or "Coro," for that matter, where the quotations come from world music). Or Shostakovich whose quotes are manifold, and usually much more sublte than the famous Rossini quote (and, less famously, but just as foregrounded, the Wagner quote) in the Fifteenth Symphony."

In fact, I'd hold Berio up as a modernist model here. In music, several things can be going on at once (as they always are in "Finnegans Wake"). So you can sneak in a quote from a song somewhere in your texture, without disturbing your overall progress, and certainly without the quote taking over your music, even for a moment.

I stand corrected. The tricks one's memory can play...

My memory plays tricks like that all the time...

Thanks for expanding on your idea, Greg.

And I was already thinking of Berio as a way to do it, and he himself was certainly a Joycean.