" One must be absolutely modern, " a 19-year-old Frenchman — Arthur Rimbaud — wrote in 1873, and his dictum has been a cri de cœur for French artists ever since. Last weekend, Harvard University’s Music Department and its Center for European Studies devoted an entire day to the subject of French Modernism, and the sun around whom the day’s events revolved was the most absolutely modern of living French artists: conductor, composer, æsthetic philosopher, institutional organizer, hero of the avant-garde, teacher, and witty raconteur Pierre Boulez. It had been five years since he’d appeared in Boston and 40 years since he’d spoken at Harvard.

The day’s events began with a closed session between Boulez and students and faculty from the Harvard Music Department and continued with a panel (sans Boulez) on French Modernism in music, photography, and art. Johns Hopkins art historian, critic, and poet Michael Fried (some of whose poems John Harbison has set to music) discussed Roland Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography ( " Reading passages of Barthes gives one the illusion of great intelligence " ), especially Barthes’s irritation with any theatricality of intention — an issue that would return later in the day when Boulez was asked about the theatrical aspects of his own music. Then Yves-Alain Bois of Harvard’s Art Department spoke on " non-compositionality " in post-war French painting and the use of chance as a way of avoiding " subjectivity. " " I’m not familiar with these painters, " one of the panelists admitted to Bois. " Why should you be? " , Bois replied.

Then New Yorker/NY Times music critic and Elliott Carter librettist Paul Griffiths spoke revealingly about Boulez’s early years in Paris during and just after the Occupation (the Nazis had banned French music), about how the precocious firebrand expressed the " unqualified moral anger of the young " and the idea that " any important work of art had to be a criticism — an annihilation — of what had come before, " what Boulez called " a new language shocked into existence by the destruction of the old " : the " organized delirium " of 12-tone musical serialism.

After a coffee break, Harvard Music Department chair Thomas Forrest Kelly introduced the maestro himself, who was fed questions by Griffiths and the chair of Salzburg University’s Music Department, Jürg Stenzl. Boulez was at his most forthright and charming — much mellowed from the young iconoclast who dared to challenge the sacred cows. The subject was " Modernism and French Music " but his comments were more personal — and practical.

Stenzl asked about musical nationalism. Before the war, Boulez said, " I was 14, not very old, and Modernist? — nothing. " In France, he said, knowledge of Romantic music had stopped with Wagner. Mahler and Bruckner were " missing links. " Spanish composer Manuel de Falla had strong ties with France, but only two pieces of music from the Second Viennese School were known in Paris: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Berg’s Lyric Suite. After the war, Boulez said, he was " interested in breaking down walls. . . . My generation was eager to have international contact. " But scores were hard to find. " You couldn’t buy them — and this kind of difficulty was provoking the desire to know what was out of reach. " Darmstadt, in Holland, became not a " school " but a " meeting point, a melting pot " for contemporary composers: Berio, Nono, Stockhausen. Later, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, Ligeti arrived, then Polish composers. " A generation or two " later, traveling was easier, visas — and scores — became available. National identity seemed less important (though recently, nationality has resurfaced as a musical impulse). " Berio and Stockhausen were considered as French as me . . . but that’s not completely the truth. I’m not a typical Frenchman. "

Griffiths asked Boulez how conducting had influenced his composing. " I don’t believe in tradition at all, " Boulez answered. " It’s like the game I played as a small boy. You whisper to someone, ‘My handkerchief is in my pocket,’ and it gets passed along until the last person says, ‘The cat has eaten my chocolate.’ Tradition is mannerism transformed. "

He spoke about changes he made in his own music as a result of having performed it. " Discovery is in the act of performing. Some sounds need more time. I need to perform a piece to be totally aware of what it is. " He compared composing to learning to swim by lying on a chair and practicing the strokes, then suddenly getting into the water and encountering the " resistance " of performing. " Sometimes the metronome doesn’t mean anything, though in some music, like Stravinsky’s Les noces or Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, the pulse is really integrated into the music. " Some tempo markings by Schoenberg or Berg, he said, are impractical — a kind of symbolic numerology that can damage the music in performances that take them too literally.

" I have the reputation of being very precise, " he admitted. " With Elliott Carter, I try to be as meticulous as he wants. But I try not to be only precise. I try to give meaning to the phrasing, a spirit. The more you perform a piece, the more intuitive you get to be. " When another conductor plays his music, he doesn’t want to be a " back-seat driver. " Griffiths asked, " Have you ever been surprised by someone else’s performance of your music — in a good way? " Boulez thought for a second and chuckled: " Not really. "

He said he tries to put time between performances of the same piece of music, otherwise you get " fed up " and the music can turn into a product. " You sell your oranges or bananas. " For him, the most interesting part about being a music director was the programming. One of his favorite programs had Berg’s Opus 6, Webern’s Opus 6, and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony ( " 666 " ). Each one has a march; the Berg and the Mahler both have a ländler. " You could feel the continuity, the history. "

Asked about the difference between concerts and recordings, he said that they’re not the same product. " Making a recording, time moves both forward and backward. You want no defect — but you want life. I’m much more nervous making recordings, but that tension can be good. There’s always the possibility of patching — you have your screwdriver, then you fix it. But too many patches can be too artificial. You lose tempo, trajectory, élan. "

He revealed some secret information about his famous recording of Berg’s Lulu. Everyone had agreed to have the recording sessions during the run of live performances. But soprano Teresa Stratas discovered that she needed time to recover between performances. " So we recorded all of Lulu without Lulu. " Three months later, Stratas dubbed in the title role. " There are very free places in the last act, but the engineers were extremely good. "

Another favorite program was one he mentioned in the evening session, when his interlocutors were the organizers of this remarkable visit, Harvard music historian Karen Painter and Case Western Reserve’s Mary Davis. Someone in the audience asked him about Frank Zappa, three of whose pieces he recorded in 1984 (Zappa’s liner notes conclude: " All material contained herein is for entertainment purposes only and should not be confused with any other form of artistic expression " ). Zappa had tracked him down in Paris. " He wanted to meet me, " Boulez said. " I was surprised. He was intent on going out of the commercial road of rock music. He wanted to compose something his own. I think he would have had a very interesting development. " Boulez wanted to find the right context for Zappa, to show he was taking him seriously, so he put him on a program with Elliott Carter. " Part of the audience was totally dissatisfied. I like this confrontation — two sides became aware another side was existing. "

Boulez spoke eloquently about taking harmony classes with Messiaen ( " I heard he was a kind of madman, and I was interested — I’d never heard this language " ); about revision ( " Why do I revise? Very simple — because I am not happy. " ) and the unpredictability of composition ( " You think you are composing chronologically — but no. Sometimes I have a kind of map, from alpha to omega; sometimes I don’t know where I want to go. " ), and how much he learned about putting music together from writers (Mallarmé, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce); about his first encounter with an American composer (John Cage — Boulez put on the first Cage concert in Paris) and his second (Carter); about the influence on his music of the rhythms and percussion sounds of African folk music, the expansions of time in Japanese gagaku, and vocal aspect of the music of the theater of China ( " In 1946, I was on the way to being an enthnomusicologist " ). He spoke about lighting and other theatrical components of his own works ( " You can see with your eyes how a piece is organized " ); about teaching composition ( " You can teach analysis, how to look at music, after that — it’s entirely impossible to teach " ), and his latest project, a two-year workshop with the Festival of Lucerne that would help young musicians develop a composition and ultimately perform it ( " It’s not my duty but my interest " ).

Too bad there was no music. How illuminating it would have been to hear his thoughts on a piece of his that had just been performed. No longer brash and obstreperous, at 78 he continues to tell the truth as he sees it, unflinchingly. The passionate sense of that music is hard enough to come by.

AT THE END OF THE LAST CONCERT in Emmanuel Music’s seven-year traversal of Schubert’s chamber and vocal music, one of 69 eminent musicians and promising newcomers associated with this enterprise, pianist Russell Sherman, who had just concluded the series with a profoundly meditative, " thinking-aloud " performance of Schubert’s last and greatest piano sonata, D.960, toasted Craig Smith, " the Orpheus of this project. " It has been an honor, Sherman said, to have been " his teacher — and his disciple. "

Earlier came songs most people had never heard in public before and some familiar ones, like Schubert’s final work, " Der Hirt auf dem Felsen " ( " The Shepherd on the Rocks " ), with clarinet obbligato by Bruce Creditor and Smith at the piano. The young soprano Alice Tillotson performed it at a week’s notice, replacing the ailing Kendra Colton. Tenor William Hite brought tears to my eyes with Schubert’s piercing last solo song, " Der Taubenpost " ( " Pigeon Mail " — that faithful carrier pigeon whose real name is " Longing " ). Smith kept his promise that he’d been saving some of the best pieces for the end.

Next year we’re promised " John Harbison and His World, " followed by a four-year Schumann series. No group in this city has attempted such ambitious undertakings, and it’s hard to imagine another that could succeed so deeply.