This chapter examines the lively intellectual and artistic exchange between Pierre Boulez and John Cage that took place from 1949 to 1952. The writings of the French poet, dramatist, actor and visual artist Antonin Artaud (1886–1948) inspired the ‘organised delirium’ in Boulez’s Second Sonata for piano (1946–8). Its continuous variation and reading ‘a great deal of Artaud’, contributed to Cage’s decision to compose the Music of Changes (1951) using chance operations. Both composers were interested in ‘non-tempered pitch space’ – Cage, in his Sonatas and Interludes (1946–8) and Boulez in his Quatour pour Ondes Martenot (1945–6) and Le Visage nuptial (1946, 1948/1951–3). In the early 1950s, Cage and Boulez explored different approaches to a dialectical relationship between choice and chance, which eventually led to the publication of ‘Alea’, Boulez’s scathing condemnation of ‘accidental chance’ in 1957 and the end of their friendship.

When Boulez returned to France in the mid 1970s, he assumed a number of significant roles in French cultural life, setting up IRCAM, forming the Ensemble Intercontemporain and assuming a professorship at the Collège de France. While undoubtedly a practical man, he was also interested in theorising about music and its relationship with the other arts, its place in culture and its philosophical underpinnings. The early years after his return to France brought him into the orbit of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, three of the most active intellectual figures in France of the 1970s and all four of them were to participate in the seminar Le Temps musical, which Boulez organised as an IRCAM event in 1978. This chapter considers Boulez’s contact with these three intellectuals, the seminar on musical time which brought them together and the small body of letters they exchanged in the years that followed.

Olivier Messiaen’s teaching exerted a notable and formative influence on Pierre Boulez’s work as it matured from 1944 to 1946. Many historiographies of the twentieth century provide accounts of this relatively brief teacher-student relationship, as well as of Boulez’s subsequent turn away from Messiaen’s music. This chapter provides a chronology of their much more enduring relationship, based primarily on music analysis and historical data rather than on both composers’ often mythologised testimonies about each other. It surveys Boulez’s time of study with Messiaen, as well as the significance of Messiaen in Boulez’s account of his own role in the historical progress of music after the Second World War. Finally, discussion of Boulez’s artistic cooperation with the pianist Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s second wife, leads into a presentation of Boulez as an important champion of Messiaen’s orchestral music.

No French composer active in the twentieth century could avoid being affected by Debussy’s music, and Boulez was no exception. The two composers shared a number of poetic interests, with Mallarmé being important to both Debussy and Boulez for different reasons. An interest in music from non-Western traditions was also central to both composers, and Boulez wrote approvingly that for Debussy, this was a ‘corrosive influence.’ Boulez considered Debussy to be a revolutionary composer. He always pushed back against the notion that Debussy was a composer of delicate and floppy music, preferring to focus on the emotional intensity of his work. Boulez understood that the rigour and freedom that Debussy sought in his music were two sides of the same coin, and he sought the same balance in his own compositions. In his writings, Boulez constantly portrays Debussy as a revolutionary modernist – as a harbinger of his own work.

This chapter focuses on the use of spatial technique in key works that span a great deal of Pierre Boulez’s career: Poésie pour pouvoir (1958) for orchestra and tape, Domaines (1968) for clarinet and ensemble, Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974–5) for orchestra in eight groups and Répons (1981) for six soloists, live electronics and ensemble. These works are then compared with spatialised instrumental music by his contemporaries, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Iannis Xenakis and Luigi Nono, which will shed light on Boulez’s specific approach to this artistic practice. Boulez’s unique contribution to the history of spatialisation lies in the strong articulatory function he ascribed to this performance practice. He created a typology of sonic movements that clarify the structural relationships of his spatialised works.

Pierre Boulez spent a great deal of time in post-war Germany. His close connection with the country began when Heinrich Strobel commissioned him to compose Polyphonie X, initiating his ongoing close contact with both Strobel and the city of Baden-Baden, where he would take up residence in 1958. The chapter considers the 1951 premiere of Polyphonie X at Donaueschingen and the controversy which followed. It also contextualises the piece within the various compositional projects Boulez was preoccupied with at the time. The chapter considers Boulez’s attitude towards dodecaphony as focused on the Second International Twelve-Tone Congress of 1951 and his reflections on how Webern might be approached profitably by composers of new music. Given Boulez’s move to Germany in the late 1950s, the chapter reviews his disillusionment with the musical scene in France and the fact that a number of his most important compositions were first premiered in Germany.

Besides his teachers and mentors, Pierre Boulez was surrounded by a circle of friends at the turn of the 1950s with whom he shared artistic and political interests and whom he often met in the more personal context of his social life. His interest in contemporary painting and interdisciplinary relations connected him with the painter Bernard Saby who, like Boulez, had pursued mathematical studies. Armand Gatti and Pierre Joffroy (pseudonym of Maurice Weil) were engaged journalists and writers, marked by the terror of the German occupation and the political turmoil of the post-war period. From this circle of friends emerged significant stimulations and influences in the transition from the composerʼs youthful works to the first phase of maturity

This chapter surveys Pierre Boulez’s recording career. It began in the 1950s, as a pianist in Mussorgsky and Stravinsky songs and directing incidental music by Milhaud. In the early 1960s, he conducted Mozart (with Yvonne Loriod) and C. P. E. Bach (with Jean-Pierre Rampal). His earliest recording of Le Marteau sans maître was made in 1956 and he first recorded The Rite of Spring in 1963. From the mid 1960s onwards, he recorded for Columbia (now Sony), including much of what is considered his key repertoire: Stravinsky, Varèse and Bartók; Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen; Berg, Schoenberg and Webern; and Boulez himself. In the 1980s, he made the first recording of the three-act Lulu and several new recordings of his own works. In the 1990s, for Deutsche Grammophon he made new versions of many pieces previously recorded for Columbia, as well as a Mahler cycle and, more surprisingly, works by Szymanowski, Richard Strauss and Bruckner.

In Boulez’s artistic framework, the principle of negation serves as a pivotal ideological and compositional foundation, symbolising a generational reset and a radical departure for new music. This chapter delves into Pierre Boulez’s utilisation of poetry and the singing voice as foundational elements in his pursuit of the negational principle. Focused on his concept of ‘reforming’, I examine Boulez’s vocal compositions based on selected poems by René Char, Henri Michaux, Stéphane Mallarmé and E. E. Cummings. Within these compositions, Boulez skilfully juxtaposes traditional elements with serialism, using the serial language to neutralise and negate the established norms. The ‘centre and absence’ principle takes centre stage, serving as Boulez’s fundamental approach to implementing deconstructive processes. This analysis proposes a novel interpretation, presenting this principle as a dynamic force governing the dramatic trajectory of vocal compositions beyond its role as a mere structural device.

The archives and testimonies concerning Pierre Boulez’s childhood are fragmentary, rendering a biography difficult to write without making assumptions or risking irrelevance. Yet, some aspects of his childhood emerge that help to understand Boulez as man and composer: his early years in the provincial town of Montbrison, the strong personality of his father, the role of his mother and sister in his discovery of music, his scholarship to the Catholic Institut Victor de Laprade, where music had a prominent place in his life.

The new music festivals at Donaueschingen and Darmstadt and Boulez’s Domaine Musical concert series were formative for Boulez’s development as a composer, conductor, writer and institution-builder in the 1950s and 1960s. The Donaueschingen festival was significant for premieres of Boulez’s music, including ‘Tombeau’, the final section of Pli selon pli, which was performed in part there in 1959. Boulez’s attendance was intermittent at the Darmstadt new music courses, but he nevertheless interacted there with key figures from the serial generation, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, and Darmstadt was the venue where Boulez first delivered the lectures that were published later as Boulez on Music Today. Boulez created his own concert series in Paris, the Domaine Musical, which he oversaw from its inception in 1953 until 1967, with the aim of performing key works from the first phase of musical modernism, along with music composed by his own generation.

The twentieth century was a period of radical transformation in the materials, resources and technologies available for music. Pierre Boulez was at the forefront of these developments, yet at the same time he displayed a curious ambivalence towards them. This chapter shows how, as a powerful cultural figure committed to the project of modernity, Boulez embraced the technologies of the new age, particularly through his guiding of the programme of activities undertaken at the music/scientific research centre IRCAM, which he helped to found in Paris in the 1970s. It also shows how, in his own compositional work, he displayed an ambivalent and musically conservative attitude towards new technological developments, leaving the details to others, while maintaining a quite traditional view of musical composition and performance. The chapter explores the conceptual, historical and cultural contexts for Boulez’s engagement with technology, and examines some of the works he composed using the technological resources developed at IRCAM.

Through the mediation of Messiaen and Leibowitz, Boulez became acquainted with the repertoire of modern music during his student years, leading him to conceive of its synthesis at an early stage. First with Cage, then with Stockhausen, he maintained a fruitful dialogue, linked to the construction of a coherent language. Nevertheless, he was suspicious of Darmstadt and critical of the music he heard there, such as that of Nono. From the 1960s onwards, he pursued his compositional approach in a more solitary fashion, while interpreting the music of his contemporaries as a conductor. Open to the influences of writers and painters but an adept of absolute music that produced its own meanings, Boulez drew close to contemporaries such as Berio, Carter and Ligeti, who admired his work and his commitment to creation. In his writings, however, he relies essentially on his predecessors, making almost no reference to his contemporaries.

Boulez’s conducting career developed in the United States in the mid 1960s, when he was invited by George Szell to become guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. From then until 1971, he conducted in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and was the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra during 1971–7. In later years, he conducted often with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1991–2010). In the context of these engagements, this chapter focuses on Boulez’s involvement with the music of a number of North American composers whose works he conducted, primarily in New York and Chicago. In New York, he pioneered the Prospective Encounters concerts in Greenwich Village, the Rug Concerts and a number of mini-festivals. While Elliott Carter was by far his most favoured North American composer, in Paris he conducted and recorded the work of Frank Zappa and finally in Chicago he conducted several compositions by Augusta Read Thomas.

The music of Béla Bartók and Edgard Varèse was central to Boulezʼs conducting repertoire, and despite the distance between their aesthetic positions, individual common characteristics of their music can be identified. This includes an expressive sphere of kinetic and sonorous vitality, capable of crossing the border into musical violence, but also fundamental questions of musical composition such as the structural and harmonic integration of dense chromatic complexes. In the case of Bartók, however, Boulez as conductor concentrates on the works that can be termed ‘musical expressionist’ and The Miraculous Mandarin, in particular.