Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez (1925- ), French composer, conductor, and pianist, born in Montbrison. He graduated from the Paris Conservatoire in 1945. His principal teacher was the French composer Olivier Messiaen. Boulez became music director of the Renaud-Barrault Company at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris in 1948. During the late 1940s and 1950s he composed a great deal of critically acclaimed, highly experimental music, based on the twelve-tone system. He became one of the most influential composers advocating the extension of serial principles to all the parameters of music: dynamics, rhythm, timbre, as well as pitch. Through the summer school held each year at Darmstadt, he had a profound influence, along with Karlheinz Stockhausen, on the post-war European avant-garde, helping to create a new language of musical techniques and gestures. His compositions include three piano sonatas, an orchestral song-cycle Pli selon pli (Fold on Fold, 1957-1962, settings of Mallarmé), and Domaines (1968) for solo clarinet and 21 instruments. Boulez also wrote music criticism.

In the 1960s he gained recognition as guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. From 1971-1975 he was Principal Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and simultaneously (1971 to 1977) Music Director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1976 he became director of the prestigious French instrumental group, the Ensemble InterContemporain. His conducting has always focused on his own work and that of his contemporaries, but has also become known for his interpretations of the standard repertoire, particularly Stravinsky and Debussy. In 1976 he conducted the centenary production of Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth.

In 1976 Boulez founded the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), which he directed until 1991. Housed in the Pompidou Centre, Paris, it has been one of the foremost electronic music studios in the world, bringing together scientists and composers, and developing new computer technology for music. Boulez himself has used live electronic treatment of sounds quite sparingly, beginning with Explosante-Fixe in 1972. He unveiled the latest version of this work in 1994, highlighting another aspect of his method—the slow and continuous revision of earlier works, producing a catalogue full of “works-in-progress”, including Repons, begun in 1981 and Eclats/Multiples, begun in 1965. In 1978 he began reworking Notations (a set of 12 piano pieces from 1946) for orchestra—a process that is still going on.

In 1995, Boulez was appointed principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Their recording of Bartók’s The Wooden Prince and Cantana Profana was awarded four Grammy Awards in 1993. He was appointed composer-in-residence at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1999. In 2000 his 75th birthday was marked by a major festival of his works in London, as well as by international tours with the Ensemble InterContemporain and the London Symphony Orchestra.