The first event I was asked to be sure to attend was a concert composed and conducted by Pierre Boulez. I certainly would have wanted to attend this concert even without being specifically reminded to be there, but I clearly understood that as a composer represented on the orchestra concert my presence at this opening festival event was important. I went and was startled, as probably most of the audience was, to find that Boulez devoted the first half of the evening to an interrelated cluster of compositions that can only be described as strong propaganda. It began with a replay of the sound-track of the entire CNN news coverage of the assasination of a group of dissident Columbian workers for the drug cartel. This was commented upon visually in German and in English and overwhelmed by two powerful sound elements: a painfully loud very high pitched dissonant electronic cluster lasting for the full length of the composition and a call to war by Bertolt Brecht specifically exhorting us to a merciless anti-capitalist crusade.
Just before beginning the music Boulez asked all spectators to stand during the whole performance of the first composition. Since I was in a wheelchair loaned by the festival, this request, which I honored, made me unable to stand during the rest of the evening. At intermission I went, wheeled around by Marc Sabat, to the intermission gathering in the lobby. It was a very strange experience, calling for a great deal of self- discipline: i felt very much a misfit.
The second half of the evening was a masterful Boulez orchestra composition. Curtain calls were so many and so enthusiastic that to terminate it Boulez had to signal that he must end the evening and get some rest.