Aurelia Butler

Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s personal partnership has thrived since their duo’s last release. During the pandemic, they reconnected musically for “Fuse,” reclaiming the group’s modern melancholy.At first, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt didn’t want to admit to themselves that they were re-emerging — after 24 years — as Everything but the Girl.The duo, who built a dedicated following in the 1980s and ’90s making elegantly troubled music and had an international smash with “Missing” in 1995, returned to writing and recording together during the pandemic. But Thorn and Watt carefully labeled their first new collaborations “TREN” — for Tracey and Ben — instead of reviving a moniker with as much of a back story as Everything but the Girl. They were well aware, as Thorn said understatedly in a video interview, that “it’s not going to be a small deal to come back after this length of time.”They spoke from their home in London, sitting side by side and dressed in shades of gray and black, in a room where they’ve sometimes recorded music. There was a small keyboard on a table behind them, next to full bookshelves. Each listened fondly and attentively as the other spoke.Thorn and Watt, both 60, remained partners while Everything but the Girl was dormant. They have been together since 1982, when they were students at University of Hull in England, and they raised three children — now adults — after suspending Everything but the Girl, which gave its last performance in 2000. In April, the duo returns with “Fuse,” its first album since 1999 and one that fully lives up to its best work.During the intervening decades, Thorn and Watt maintained separate, prolific careers. Watt produced albums; traveled the world as a D.J.; founded a label, Buzzin’ Fly; and made solo albums and toured as a singer-songwriter, which he’d been planning to do in 2020 when the pandemic shut things down. After some years devoting herself to their toddlers, Thorn got back to songwriting, releasing four solo albums; she also wrote books, including the wryly revealing career memoir, “Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star,” and “Naked at the Albert Hall,” her reflections on the physicality and mentality of being a singer.Working independently, with projects appearing at different times, allowed them to “tag-team” bringing up their family, Watt explained.“We probably made a conscious decision at some point that if we want the kids to stay sane, we want the family to stay together, you know, something’s got to give,” he said. “And I think we decided we would carry on working on our own solo paths for a while. It was almost like an escape valve from everything else.”But they hadn’t entirely put Everything but the Girl behind them. In the 2010s, Thorn and Watt oversaw expanded reissues of the group’s catalog that found an eager audience. By then it was clear that their music had aged to sound classic, not dated.“There’s an emotional simplicity and directness that’s just so powerful to me lyrically,” Romy Madley Croft of the British band the xx said in a phone interview; she first heard Everything but the Girl because her parents were fans and “Missing” was on the radio. Thorn has recognized their musical kinship by recording her own version of the xx’s “Night Time” in 2011.“You feel close to Tracey and in her words and voice that is very, very intimate and just the emotion that is carried,” Madley Croft said. “One of my goals always is to say a lot while saying very little, and to leave people with space to make their own minds up about what it means, and I definitely think that Tracey does that. When you hear that line that just says a huge amount very, very simply, it’s very satisfying.”Everything but the Girl got its name, with post-punk cheekiness, from the sexist tagline of a local furniture-store advertisement that showed a model next to the goods on sale. “For God’s sake, if we had known we were going to carry on for years we would have come up with a better name,” Thorn wrote in “Bedsit Disco Queen.”For its first decade, the group maintained a solid midlevel recording career — until 1995, when a remix of “Missing,” by the American D.J. Todd Terry, became an international smash. With each album, Everything but the Girl took a different approach: from skeletal to maximal, bossa nova to rock, retro Wall of Sound to sleek Los Angeles pop. Its songs used subtlety as a stealth tactic, with smooth, richly tuneful music concealing lyrics that challenged political and psychological assumptions. Through every change of style, Thorn’s voice — low, smoky and pensive, rarely indulging in vibrato or ornamentation — gave the duo’s songs an emotional equipoise.“I can see the through line,” Thorn said. “We’re exploring things with a different costume on. You know, if you were a film director, your vision, or the ideas that you keep, might be identifiable whether you make a western or a detective movie or a romance. There’s something of that going on in these records. Complexity and simplicity is very key to it.”Watt picked up her thought. “Ambivalence and mixed feelings is a big through line in all our stuff as well,” he said. “That’s true both in the choice of notes we use and in the lyrics that we write. There’s that element of suspension. The space that you leave allows room for the listener. I always like the idea that people can step into our audio picture, you know, and almost walk around in the reverbs.”A life-threatening health crisis for Watt in 1992 — he has a rare autoimmune disorder, Churg-Strauss syndrome — led Everything but the Girl to pare away verbal and musical frills to reveal rawer feelings on “Amplified Heart” and “Walking Wounded,” the albums that would mark its artistic peak in the 1990s.“There was a period in the ’90s where we had to learn what it was like to live with each other again, mostly because of the aftermath of my illness, which left me a very changed person,” Watt said. “And Tracey had to witness that change, which was very difficult in its own way. Both ‘Amplified Heart’ and ‘Walking Wounded’ — it’s there in the titles of those albums, you know? — they’re very much songs about us both feeling isolated by the experience, but also learning to live with each other again.”“Amplified Heart,” released in 1994, included the original version of “Missing.” Then Terry’s club-ready remix with a new, danceable beat, carried Everything but the Girl to a worldwide audience; the single went gold in the United States and platinum in Britain. The song has had an endless afterlife, and a broad influence, for its precise chemistry of melancholy, suspense and propulsion. With Thorn’s voice leaping as she sings “like the deserts miss the rain,” “Missing” is a dance-crying milestone: equally potent on the dance floor or at home alone through headphones.Watt and Thorn were already intrigued by the fast-evolving music in London’s dance clubs. For its late-1990s incarnation, Everything but the Girl merged moody introspection with electronic dance music for two albums: “Walking Wounded,” and “Temperamental” from 1999. It’s a sound that “Fuse” reclaims and determinedly expands.“We talked about trying to find new ways of writing, new ways of using our voices, new ways of landing on different notes,” Watt said.“Fuse” embraces electronic soundscapes and grown-up empathy. It opens with a subterranean bass throb and a declaration of vulnerability in “Nothing Left to Lose,” as Thorn sings, “I need a thicker skin/This pain keeps getting in.” And it ends with a husky, ardent mission statement that sums up Everything but the Girl’s dual imperatives. In “Karaoke,” Thorn vows that she sings both “to heal the brokenhearted” and “to get the party started.”In between, “Fuse” proffers compassionate advice in the gloomily majestic “When You Mess Up,” goes on a surreal European club-hopping chronicle in “No One Knows We’re Dancing” and makes a pinging, handclapping, gamelan-tinged plea for “something I can hold onto” in “Forever.”It took the pandemic to bring Thorn and Watt back to working together. “We were confronted with that decision that a lot of people were confronted with,” Thorn said. “What are we going to do now? Are we going to go back to what we were doing? Or is this the start of something new? And we weren’t really sure.”Isolated at home — and sometimes distancing even from each other because of Watt’s illness — they began trading small musical ideas: chords, lyrics, sounds.“We were trying to do that thing that artists sometimes do,” Thorn said, “where you trick yourself into thinking that we’re not really doing this thing that feels like a bit of a big deal. We’re doing something much smaller and more manageable. We’re just making some music. We don’t need to tell anyone. We don’t need to have anyone waiting on it or expecting anything of it or putting pressure on. Let’s just see what happens.”The album’s beginnings were decidedly lo-fi. “I started to put things on my phone,” Watt said. “I just tried to improvise without thinking too much about actually writing finished work. I would just sit there, with Voice Memo on the piano, and play and hope that I captured something. When Tracey came to me and said, ‘Shall we work together?’ I had these fragments and ideas of chord movements, improvisations, and some voicings that we hadn’t used before — slightly spiky, fourths and sixths rather than thirds and fifths. For people who’ve made music together for 20 years, to find a new note to land on was a lot of fun.”The music that emerged at first was slow and atmospheric. Danceable, upbeat songs came later, after the duo relocated to a recording studio in Bath, England. “The record started out in this mood of, you know, ‘We’re not putting any pressure on,’ with a couple of fairly downbeat, quite ambient-sounding tracks,” Thorn recalled. “And within about three days of being in the studio, we started getting more and more excited. There was a period when we had about eight tracks and, ostensibly, you know, we’ve almost got an album here.“But I think that was the moment when we both had a kind of awakening and sat up and went, ‘Do you know what? This can be better,’” she added. “We started with low expectations, but actually we’ve impressed us. Our expectations had gone right up. And if you’re going to come back after a long gap, then come back with a bang.”It took the pandemic to reunite Everything But the Girl. “We were confronted with that decision that a lot of people were confronted with,” Thorn said. “What are we going to do now?”Edward BishopThey also reveled in technology that arrived after Everything but the Girl last made an album. In some songs, digital effects warp Thorn’s vocals. “We allowed ourselves to be a bit more disrespectful of Tracey’s voice,” Watt said. “It wasn’t just this kind of sacred sound that always sat on the top of the music. We started mistreating it with pitch-shifting plug-ins and Auto-Tune, seeing if we could just turn it into a texture rather than a vehicle for the lyrics and the emotion of the track. It was another interesting color to add onto the canvas.”In one new song, “Lost,” Thorn sings a list — “I lost my place/I lost my bags/I lost my biggest client” — that moves from prosaic to heartbreaking. Some of the lyrics, Watt said, came from typing the words “I lost” into Google. But as the song unfolds, a quietly devastating line arrives: “I lost my mother.”Amid all of the electronic modifications, Everything but the Girl never hides its heart. Thorn and Watt strove to stay in a freely creative state as they made the album, but their usual self-consciousness wasn’t far away. “When I look back at the lyrics,” Thorn said, “I can see that there’s a lot of urgency in a lot of the lyrics about trying desperately to make contact with someone. I’m sure that comes out of this long period of being unable to do that — feeling very cut off from people, feeling isolated.”There are no plans for a tour. “It brings a lot of baggage with it, more so than with recording an album,” Thorn said.“One of the problems with touring, in part, is that you have to constantly look backwards for your audience,” Watt said. “You’re expected to perform the hits, so you are as much an entertainer as you are a creative artist. And if we’re really honest, neither of us have a great appetite for the old stuff. You know, it was good at the time. We respect it.” He shrugged. “We did our best.” More

Alisa Weilerstein’s latest project is a series of staged solo recitals that weave Bach’s cello suites with newly commissioned works.When the cellist Alisa Weilerstein found herself cooped up with her family at the start of the pandemic, her first instinct, like that of so many classical musicians, was to find some way — any way — to communicate.She joined the artists who found solace on social media, streaming a movement of Bach’s cello suites each day, for 36 days in a row. “I just want to have a kind of outpouring of music, of thoughts, and everything else,” she told The New York Times then. “Right now all I really want to do is give.”It didn’t last. Come that November, Weilerstein had put her cello away, and she was taking long walks on the beaches near her home in San Diego instead of practicing. When she finally forced herself to play again, she found herself staring out of the window, wondering what her field might look like when, or if, performers returned to the stage.“To everyone’s credit, I think, everyone is wrestling with this issue,” Weilerstein said in a recent interview from Toronto. “We all had a lot of time to think about what it means to really connect with an audience, what it means to connect with each other, and an appreciation for being in one communal space.”If Weilerstein’s response was a common one to a common crisis, the result of her reflections shines with uncommon ambition, so much so that it is hard to think of many soloists of a similar stature who would dare to bring anything like it to the stage.Meet “Fragments,” a project whose first installment — of six — Weilerstein will perform at Zankel Hall on April 1. Certain aspects of it may be familiar. She will be there, playing solo. She will perform a Bach suite in its entirety, and she will play it with her typical, heartfelt passion. She will offer new music: quite a lot of it, selected from works by 27 composers she has commissioned.Weilerstein at the “Fragments” premiere in Toronto.Lisa SakulenskyBut this project is intended to reimagine what a cello recital can be, to challenge some of the conventions that Weilerstein thinks might inhibit a listener’s immediate response to the music, and to add layers of theatricality to the arguably staid traditions of the concert hall, in an acceptance that a musician is, after all, performing on a stage.So each of the six programs, which Weilerstein will offer over the next few seasons, will have a dramaturgical element: Hanako Yamaguchi, the former, longtime director of music programming at Lincoln Center, is her artistic adviser, and her production team includes the director Elkhanah Pulitzer, the set and lighting designer Seth Reiser, and the costumer Carlos J. Soto. There will be limited program notes in advance, little to guide listeners except their ears and eyes through a collagelike narrative arc assembled from musical fragments.“There’s a lot of things that classical music does uniquely well, and it’s important to preserve those things,” Weilerstein said. “I do think, though, that we clearly have a problem, that we are not connecting with enough people, and that we are relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.So “Fragments” is not, thankfully, another addition to the increasingly passé genre of “response” programming, in which composers are commissioned to write works on the dispiriting condition that they must speak to a piece by the masters of the past. Having scoured the internet to survey the new-music scene, and consulted with past collaborators including Osvaldo Golijov and Matthias Pintscher, Weilerstein invited 28 composers to participate. The 27 who agreed — including Tania León, Joan Tower, Carlos Simon and Daniel Kidane — make up a roster that is remarkably diverse demographically and stylistically, but almost all of them asked if they should write with specific reference to Bach, Weilerstein recalled. She left the choice up to them.“Some did,” she said, “and some very much did not.”Caroline Shaw, whose “Microfictions” for Weilerstein is the second volume in a run of collected miniatures that she has also written for the Miró Quartet and the New York Philharmonic, said that her piece is not an explicit response to Bach, but that his influence was surely present in it.“Fragments” is an attempt to fix a problem, Weilerstein said of “relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”Evelyn Freja for The New York Times“I live with his music all the time, I love it deeply,” Shaw said, adding that the second book of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” has been her “soundtrack” for the past year. “It’s very hard to write anything for solo cello and not have some subconscious relationship to Bach.”Weilerstein did set some rules. She asked that the new pieces be about 10 minutes long, and that they come in two or three fragments that she could intersperse with other scores without violating the meaning of the music. Bach was not available for consultation, but she is subjecting his suites to the same treatment.“There was a temptation to write something really virtuosic, really out there, really avant-garde,” said Reinaldo Moya, one of the more junior composers in Weilerstein’s group, “because you’re not going to have the chance to work with a soloist of that caliber every time. At least I don’t.”Free to write what he wanted, Moya drew on the personal ties that he has to Weilerstein through the conductor Rafael Payare, her husband. Earlier in their careers, Moya and Payare both played in the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, a country that has such an addiction to caffeine that it has a precise linguistic taxonomy for coffee and its functions. Moya’s fragments depict an early-morning brew, an after-lunch pick-me-up and a sludgy cup needed for staying up late.“It felt a little bit — all right, it felt a lot risky to give her a piece about coffee like that,” Moya said. “But I wanted to go with my gut, and relate my work to something that might connect with her on that level, not a technical or a composer-y level.”WEILERSTEIN HAS NEVER had the reputation of being a new-music specialist, but she has given her fair share of premieres, and few of her colleagues on the international circuit can list anything so bold as her recording of Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto on their discographies. She has evidently thought hard about how contemporary composers can be given a fairer chance to break through to audiences, especially to those people for whom contemporary art, say, is an easier ask.“There are myriad reasons, of course,” Weilerstein said, exploring the apparent divergence in the fields, “but there is one very fundamental thing, which is, you walk into an exhibition, you see the painting or you see the work of art before anything, and it can hit you right where it needs to hit — and then you can find out all the context around it. With contemporary music, there’s so much context put around it even before we’ve heard anything.”For that reason, the lack of program notes — before the lights go dark, the audience will be given only the most basic information about the project, and the names of the composers they will hear — is a core part of “Fragments,” and a sign, its creators said, that, for all the deliberate, thoughtful artifice, the focus is on the music.“To shed the Rorschach inclination towards finding meaning in the program before hearing the music was a really important piece of the puzzle,” Pulitzer said. “How many of us do that, where we look at the bio, we’re making assumptions about gender, race, nationality, compositional precedent, who where their teachers, and when were they born?”The aim, she added, is to strip as much of that presumptive meaning as possible away, so that listeners can follow Weilerstein’s attempts to create new meaning in her musical quilts, and “dare to embark on this journey of not knowing, and allow it to be OK.”For Shaw, that was part of the attraction of “Fragments,” beyond the obvious appeal of writing for a soloist whose visible commitment expresses such a clear love of music.“Going to hear a concert and not looking at what’s on the program and not knowing what comes next — those have been some of my deepest and most revealing listening experiences,” Shaw said. “There’s also something beautiful and important about presenting different composers side by side, and behind a curtain, so that you’re not focusing on their name, or whether or not they’re Bach.”The staging does offer some hints about the music, as if to hold the listener’s hand. Reiser’s set stays constant, a deconstructed theater arrayed so that it evokes soloists’ constant struggles to create “a room of one’s own” as they travel the world’s halls, Pulitzer said, and at the same time “reawakens the spaces for the people who are familiar with them.” Each composer has a specific lighting color, to give a sense of which fragments combine to make wholes.There may be people, Weilerstein admits, who are put off by even a modest staging, or by her tinkering with performance traditions. For her though, “Fragments” is an attempt to make the concert hall more of a place of adventure again, and less of a dead end.“It’s like the E.M. Forster phrase, ‘only connect,’” Weilerstein explained. “This is the philosophy behind the project, fundamentally: connecting the pieces, connecting the voices of our time together, connecting the familiar and the new, connecting this music with the audience without the barrier of so much contextualization, categorization, bias, all of these things.”“And connecting,” she added, “our contemporary world with the concert format. This is what it’s about for me.” More

As a teenager, he joined forces with George Clinton. Their vocal group, the Parliaments, morphed into Parliament-Funkadelic, one of the wildest acts of the 1970s.Fuzzy Haskins, a foundational member of the vocal group that morphed into Parliament-Funkadelic, the genre-blurring collective led by George Clinton that shook up the pop music world in the 1970s, died on March 16 in Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich. He was 81.His son Nowell Scott said the cause was health problems complicated by diabetes.Mr. Haskins, one of Parliament-Funkadelic’s vocalists and songwriters, was a distinctive presence onstage during the group’s propulsive performances, often wearing tight long johns and sometimes suggestively straddling the microphone.“Fuzzy was always able to capture your attention,” Mr. Scott said by email, “rhythmically gyrating the audience into a deeper consciousness where night after night they were forced to consider if they were really getting it on.”Mr. Haskins was living in Edison, N.J., and was in his last year of high school and singing in a vocal group when he met Mr. Clinton, who had a barbershop in nearby Plainfield and his own fledgling vocal group. Someone from Mr. Clinton’s group had left.“So they chose me out of my group to come and sing with them,” Mr. Haskins recalled in 2011 in a short biographical video. He joined up with Mr. Clinton, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas and Ray Davis, and, Mr. Haskins said, “the rest is history.”Parliament-Funkadelic in 1971. Mr. Haskins is at the far left; George Clinton is fifth from left, uncharacteristically in the background.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe group was called the Parliaments, named after a cigarette brand, Mr. Clinton said in his book “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?” (2014).Mr. Clinton didn’t smoke, but, he wrote, “I thought cigarettes were cool as a symbol, a little dangerous, a little adult, and Parliament was a big brand, so we became the Parliaments.”The group worked a doo-wop sound at first.“Each of us had a distinctive style,” Mr. Clinton wrote, “sometimes in imitation of people who were famous then, sometimes in anticipation of people who would be famous later.”“Fuzzy,” he added, “who was second lead, was a soulful tenor with all the bluesy inflections, like Wilson Pickett, real rough.”The Parliaments had a Top 20 pop hit in 1967 with “(I Wanna) Testify.” Soon the group became simply Parliament and developed an alter ego, Funkadelic. Two different groups, they recorded for two different labels but drew on the same ever-growing collection of musicians. Parliament remained vocally oriented; Funkadelic borrowed from psychedelic rock and the funk sound of groups like Sly and the Family Stone.“White rock groups had done the blues, and we wanted to head back in the other direction,” Mr. Clinton wrote, “be a Black rock group playing the loudest, funkiest combination of psychedelic rock and thunderous R&B.”Mr. Haskins wrote the song “I Got a Thing, You Got a Thing, Everybody’s Got a Thing” for Funkadelic’s debut album, called simply “Funkadelic” and released in 1970. He joined Mr. Clinton in writing “My Automobile” for Parliament’s first album, “Osmium,” released the same year. He was one of four writers (including Mr. Clinton) of “Up for the Down Stroke,” the title song on Parliament’s second album, released in 1974. And he had a hand in other songs for both groups as they released records throughout the ’70s.The stage shows accompanying the album releases grew increasingly elaborate, culminating in the P-Funk Earth Tour, which began in 1976, continued for several years and featured an outer-space theme, including an onstage spaceship.But the original Parliaments were clashing with Mr. Clinton. Mr. Haskins, who had recorded a solo album in 1976, “A Whole Nother Thang,” left the group in 1977 along with Mr. Simon and Mr. Thomas. Under the name Funkadelic, the three released an album that same year, “Connections & Disconnections,” which included tracks openly criticizing Mr. Clinton.Mr. Haskins recorded a solo album in 1976, shortly before leaving Parliament-Funkadelic.Mr. Haskins released another solo album, “Radio Active,” in 1978.In the early 1990s, he, Mr. Simon, Mr. Thomas and Mr. Davis formed a group called Original P, whose repertoire was heavy on songs from the Parliament-Funkadelic catalog.“This act gives us the chance to perform these songs the way they were meant to be heard,” Mr. Haskins told Mountain Xpress, a North Carolina alternative newspaper, in 2000, “with solid arrangements and clear vocal harmonies. We were involved in the creation of these songs, and they are our children.”Whatever the disagreements were with Mr. Clinton, Mr. Haskins was among the 16 members who were honored in 1997 when the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Parliament-Funkadelic, who were introduced at the ceremony by Prince.“Parliament and Funkadelic were the mind-blowing, soul-expanding musical equivalent of an acid trip,” the hall’s website says. “They grabbed the funk movement from James Brown and took off running.”Clarence Eugene Haskins was born on June 8, 1941, in Elkhorn, W.Va. His father, McKinley, was a coal miner, and his mother, Grace Bertha (Hairston) Haskins, was a homemaker.“I listened to country when I grew up,” Mr. Haskins said in the biographical video, since there was not much R&B or other Black music on West Virginia radio at the time.“We used to sing church music — hymns, gospel — at home,” he added. “We’d harmonize.”The family relocated to New Jersey when he was still a child. Before long he had met Mr. Clinton, and he was on his way.“The P-Funk sound is perhaps one of the most significant and impactful crossed-over ideas to ever manifest into a sound,” his son said by email, “and Fuzzy was always excited to be a part of that.”Mr. Haskins lived in Southfield, Mich. His marriages to Estelle James and Lorraine Dabney ended in divorce. In addition to his son, his survivors include two other children, Crystal White and Michelle Fields; a sister, Julia Drew; and 10 grandchildren. Two other children, Michael and Stephanie, died before him.Mr. Haskins was to be inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in May. More

Matthias Pintscher speaks about Boulez’s “Dérive 2,” which the composer’s old ensemble performs in New York this weekend.Pierre Boulez, one of the most commanding musicians of the past century, must have been asked countless times, before his death in 2016, what he thought his legacy might be.It was a mark of his stature that he had so much to choose from. Perhaps his work as a conductor, one of rare clarifying power? Perhaps his visionary inspiration as an institution builder, in his native France and elsewhere? Perhaps his polemical writings? But when pushed, he would often point to his formidable, intricately constructed compositions.“Performances are transient, you know,” Boulez said in an interview in 1999. “That’s just something which happened, and you are happy sometimes. But, I mean, that’s not the main fact in my life. I would like that my works survive myself, that’s all.”Will they? And with what impact?Boulez can no longer promote them himself after all, and some of his most illustrious champions — Daniel Barenboim, Maurizio Pollini — are sadly starting to pass from the stage. Yet there are still artists tending the Boulezian flame, chief among them the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Parisian new-music group that Boulez founded in 1976, and its music director, the composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher. Together, they will perform one of Boulez’s late, monumental works, the 45-minute, 11-instrumentalist “Dérive 2,” at Zankel Hall on Saturday. It will be just the third time that a Boulez piece has been performed at Carnegie Hall since his death.Pintscher, 52, first met Boulez in the late 1990s, and they later became close friends. Describing his mentor as “the most curious, alert, giving and generous man,” Pintscher spoke in a recent phone interview about interpreting Boulez’s works and how best to think about their influence. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Boulez conducted an earlier version of “Dérive 2” at Carnegie Hall 20 years ago this week, but this is still music that many listeners — even new-music devotees — struggle to get to grips with. How would you describe it?You are absolutely right, because “Dérive 2” is maybe one of the most austere of the big, major works, in comparison with “Répons,” or “Sur Incises” in particular. I think it’s an absolutely significant score in terms of how it’s put together, the architecture, and his idea of constantly building and extending and letting music just grow by itself. You know, like you plant a seed and just watch how it goes, and a twig becomes a branch, and becomes a tree, and the tree then stands very, very solid.The time has come to revisit the text with all these Boulez scores, especially with the Ensemble, where we still have members that have played this piece with Pierre. There’s always like, yeah, but Pierre did that slightly faster or slower, or he waited there, and it’s interesting because — I mean, we’re talking about very subtle differences — the scores tell something different, and I find it absolutely fascinating to now not be a copy of Boulez, but to really get back to the text.It’s quite funny that Boulez, who as a conductor had such a reputation for fidelity to text, may not have been entirely faithful to his own scores.I mean, it’s like what people always ask myself also, “Do you love playing your works? Doesn’t it feel good, or what does it do to you?” I personally interpret my own works exactly in the same way as a Bruckner symphony, or a Schubert symphony, or a piece by Boulez. When I’m asked to perform a work of myself that goes way back, more than a handful of years or even more than 10 years, I really have to sit down and learn the score. With Pierre it was the same.Of course we had conversations about “Dérive 2.” He was making jokes like: Woah, tonight “Dérive 2,” oof, buckle up, roll up your sleeves. He said this in his most charming and witty way. But yes, it’s a big piece, it’s a long piece, it is very demanding, it is very challenging. It’s like Ravel: Everything is wonderfully logical, but once you abandon that and you forget about the structure and how it has been built, you can really immerse yourself in the energy and the flow of that music.You conduct a huge amount of new music. Does Boulez — and more broadly the Darmstadt School-era composers like Nono and Stockhausen, who shot to prominence in the 1950s — still have a definable influence on composition today, especially on young composers?That’s a big question, huh? I think we have to understand that the significance, the legacy of a composer cannot be measured by the statistics of how many performances a composer or a certain piece has at a certain time. It’s like those works are landmarks for their time — as is the “Goldberg” Variations. I don’t know how many times the “Goldberg” Variations are being performed worldwide, daily.It’s a reference. It adds to the roots of music history, as we understand that the very late Brahms becomes the early Schoenberg, the very late Schubert becomes the very early Bruckner, and the very late Stravinsky becomes Pierre Boulez. If you look at “Threni,” for example, by Stravinsky, there is some sort of transition to where Boulez picks it up, and I think those links in music history are fascinating and important.He created these monuments; they’re cathedrals. “Répons” is an absolute masterwork. It’s very hard to program because it requires an ideal space, very heavy electronics and it’s extremely difficult to play. It’s not just a piece that you put on. So I think we have to understand that it can’t be measured by how many times a piece is being performed. The material that we had in Paris last week was material No. 61. There’s 61 sets — probably more! — of “Dérive 2.” That tells us something.Might we say that this is a transitional period, and it’s too early still to tell — that Boulez’s compositional legacy is still unclear, even if his significance is obvious?I can’t really tell. Maybe you’re right and it’s too early. But as I said, I think those scores are manifests and documents of a certain time, a time of change.There’s so much talent out there. I’m teaching at Juilliard, and those young artists, yes, they’re really troubled by the question, “How can I find my voice?” And in terms of finding your own basic voice, it’s a basic requirement to study the “Brandenburg” Concertos, to study “L’Orfeo” by Monteverdi, to look at the G major Schubert Sonata, look at Schoenberg — and look at Boulez. Like it or not, it is a reference, it is a major key holder in music history. I personally find the music mesmerizing, I find it beautiful, but maybe because I’ve lived for it so long.They’re demanding because you have to use the ear, you cannot just beat what you see and think that does justice to the piece. It requires the human experience, and maybe now that I’m 52, I only start to really realize what it means to play his works with the space that they need — with all the respect that I have for what I see in the text, it also needs to be translated into a human reality.And that’s why those works are major, and that’s why they’re like a Beethoven symphony, or that Schubert G major piano sonata, because it needs you. It needs the individual, the human to find the right context for it. You cannot just play them through, and think that’s it. There’s more; there’s layers. More