Looking at Diego Masson it is hard to guess his age. He was born in 1935 and looks at least 15 years younger, and the music he will conduct at a concert on Saturday at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is mostly contemporary. But behind every movement of his hands are the great works of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, Mauricio Kagel, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono. They were the fathers of the musical avant-garde, the formulators of a new aesthetic of music in our time, and for decades Masson has been very close to their music - and to them as individuals.
Today Masson is a free conductor, a guest on important stages in the world of new music but also of romantic opera. He has formed his own modern music ensemble and also conducts in opera houses, primarily the Marseilles Opera House. "Music is music," he says when asked if there is a difference between Italian opera and the avant-garde.
Saturday's concert, with the Israel Contemporary Players, will feature works by Betty Olivero ("Bashrav" ) and Erel Paz ("In the Neighborhood" ) from Israel, British composer Harrison Birtwistle ("Secret Theater" ) and young Spanish composer Elena Mendoza ("Diptico" ).
"I had my own ensemble, Music Vivante, until 1990 but it folded because of a lack of funds," Masson says with a flash of mischief in his eyes, "and I was never a good enough politician to ensure its survival. The Ministry of Culture in France at the time was manned by clerks who had once been composers and I never performed any of them, so the fate of the ensemble was sealed."
And if there is one thing that Masson avoids like the plague, it emerges throughout our meeting, it is "the establishment" - any establishment in any incarnation.
Describing a backlash against the avant-garde in recent years, Masson says: "This approach of 'the new simplicity' is on the rise. I despise this. Talented composers start writing silly music, supposedly simple. The reactionary approach is not reflected only in the music but also in politics - the neo-liberalism, ideology of privatization. People obey the market forces so it seems, in order to sell. But what are those forces, and in the end, who cares if music sells?"
Tough crowds across France
Masson was born in Spain to an artist father who was half-Gypsy and half French, and a Jewish mother from Romania. When civil war broke out in 1936 and Franco came to power, the family fled to Paris. "First it was Franco's fascists and then, a few years later, the Nazis invaded Paris - and so we continued fleeing, this time to the U.S.," he says.
The small family wandered and left its Jewish grandmother in Paris, "but she was saved, despite her thick Yiddish accent," Masson explains. "Not because the French are less anti-Semitic than the others, but because there is a tradition of not informing. People are put off by the police - to this day. No one will report to the police even about a wanted criminal living with the neighbors, and a child will never tell his friends that his father is a policeman, otherwise they will boycott him, and so 70 percent of France's Jews were saved simply because they were not reported on, this is the highest rate of survivors in Europe."
At the end of the war, the family returned to France and settled in Marseilles, "but at the age of 16 I left home to study at the conservatorium in Paris, even though my mother, of course, wanted me to be a doctor," Masson says. Boredom in his classes led him to private lessons with Rene Leibowitz, a student of composer Maurice Ravel - who sparked a revolution in France when he presented the innovative composition techniques of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern to the musical world there.
"He was in love with Italian opera and took me to Paris jazz clubs," Masson says of Leibowitz, who is perceived in music history books as a gloomy and serious person. "Yes, there are many people whose image is very different from what they are," he laughs. "Pierre Boulez, for example - do you know how he earned a living in his youth? He played at the Folies Bergere club and, together with his giant white piano, he would break through the stage straight into the crowd of nude women prancing around him, playing the 'Warsaw Concerto,' engulfed in kitsch and lit by a pinkish light - and that was while he was writing his second sonata."
In the 1950s Masson, a close friend of Boulez, joined his ensemble, Domaine Musical, as a percussionist. There too he was exposed to innovative works by the young composers of the time who later became renowned - the Italian Luciano Berio, along with his wife, Cathy Berberian, France's Vinko Globokar, and the Greek exile in Paris, Xenakis. "We would travel to concerts all over France and often be booed and have things thrown at us by the audience. In Paris, it was better, but Kagel, for example, in Paris he was also booed and the audience had a hard time accepting him," says Masson.
"Those were terrific years, until the late 1960s - young composers and musicians, unknowns, who were performing their music and the music of their time. Working with people like that was just terrific, another world. It's hard to say that you could earn a good living from that, and to support myself I worked as a drummer at nightclubs and afterward doing recordings for pop bands and music for films. There was a lot of money in that."
Were you always a fan of innovative music?
Masson: "No, I had a classical education and as a boy I wasn't even familiar with modern music. And I started to like it after hearing the [Rudolf] Watzke opera in Paris when I was 16 - and also because I was attracted to things that were different, to what most people didn't like. I always liked doing what was forbidden and, by the age of 12, a teacher at school told my mother I'd end up under the guillotine."
And you found that the daring composers you worked with were also outsiders?
"In music, yes, but not in their private lives. The avant-garde composers were not like the surrealist artists in the 1920s, for example, who sparked upheavals and scandals. Musicians are usually conservative."
Among his close friends, whose works he has also conducted, Masson includes Cage, who asked him to gather together some musicians every time he performed in Paris, and Xenakis, with whom he shares a leftist worldview. "Stockhausen was very close to me for a while, from 1968 to 1973," Masson says, "until he became a guru. At one concert he told me that he doesn't need to write the notes because he immediately connects with the players' consciousness, but somehow it didn't work with my consciousness."
Apologies for asking you to talk about others.
"No, what do you mean? It's a given. After all, they're much more interesting than I am - they compose and I just wave my hands."
'I liked jail'
In the late 1950s Masson found himself in a new situation with the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence. "There were 300,000 Algerians in France, and their underground revolutionary organization, the FLN [the National Liberation Front], was very active. I became aware of the underground through my aunt and decided to join. I started as a driver and smuggled people from France to Germany, where the main headquarters were, and I transported letters and packages. One day after a concert, policemen surrounded me, handcuffed me and arrested me."
The arrest and trial of one of France's best-known musicians made the headlines; "Diego Masson caught with a machine gun in his violin case," they blared and he laughs: "I never had a violin, I'm a percussionist." Masson's detention made waves because he was one of the few Frenchmen who was a member of the FLN.
And the trial's outcome?
"I was sentenced to jail and spent two years there. I liked jail. I was with some very interesting people. I moved through five different prisons - in some I was with criminals, in one I was alone and in the last one I was together with other Algerian prisoners. There were 2,000 prisoners there and being with them was great.
"After I was released, my parents told me that Pierre Boulez had offered to put me up in his home in Baden-Baden, Germany, if I had escaped from prison, and he would find me a job."
Did you think of trying to break out of jail?
"No, basically I got two years, and I really liked prison. I wandered to five different prisons and met some fascinating people - at first criminals but afterward I was in a special prison for Algerian prisoners whom I taught math and geography to. Part of teaching them geography meant explaining to them about natural phenomena and showing that God is not the one who causes them. I never was a believing person and neither were my parents or grandmother."
Did prison influence your life?
"Not at all. When I got out, the war was almost over and I found work right away - I went back to Boulez's ensemble and to recording. In spring 1962, at the end of the war, people already realized that it had been totally unnecessary and, in a referendum, 80 percent of the French said 'yes' to an independent Algeria.
"For me, joining the underground was a natural thing to do," Masson says. "That's how I grew up - first by opposing Franco's fascism and then the Nazis and, for me, opposition is not just an abstract expression of ideology, in conversations and in writing, for example, but with action. But to tell the truth, I did it for the fun, and it was a lot of fun."
