A legacy is something inherited by a successor, and in Boulez’s case what he handed down to posterity (his writings, activities and compositions) evolved in complex ways from his own early mentors and influences, particularly Messiaen, along with what the young Boulez determined to be the essential innovations in works that had the greatest unfulfilled potential in the 1940s and early 1950s. Boulez’s own works were naturally part of his legacy but in his later years changes in musical fashion meant that his accomplishments as conductor, writer, teacher of performers and institutional figurehead provided an even more potent example to potential emulators than his actual compositions. His unambiguously modernist sensibility and concern to place serious music at the heart of the prevailing culture brought a remarkable coherence to bear on the rich diversity of his life and work.

This chapter seeks to place/locate Boulez relative to the literary history (especially French) of his time, particularly his formative years of the 1940s, which was still the heyday of Artaud and the Surrealists. The writers important to Boulez included not only poets like Char and Mallarmé, but also novelists, Proust chief among them. Boulez was interested in structural aspects of the modern novel: open or circular (nonlinear) form, the fragment and reflexivity, all of which he found in Joyce, Proust, Kafka and Musil. The Third Piano Sonata is one of Boulez’ most literary works, modelled on the labyrinth he found in works like Kafka’s story ‘The Burrow’, or the circularity of Finnegans Wake. Recent studies of Boulez’s sketches show his work proliferating organically and in an open-ended way, as did Proust’s or Kafka’s novels. Other literary aspects might include spatial form, Joyce’s medievalism or Proust’s symbolist aesthetic.

In the Autumn of 1952, both Stravinsky and Boulez were invited to dine at Virgil Thompson’s New York apartment. Boulez had already written ‘Stravinsky Remains’ which analysed the rhythmic invention in The Rite. However, Boulez did not hide his disdain for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism in this chapter. Similarly, although Stravinsky praised Le Marteau, Boulez’s music remained foreign to him. For some years, the two friends entered into an unspoken pact that Boulez would stop speaking disrespectfully regarding Stravinsky’s neoclassicism and Stravinsky would speak eloquently about Boulez, as well as pointing to Webern as the way forward in serialism and not to Schoenberg. In spite of Stravinsky’s turn to serialism, he could seemingly do nothing to be accepted by the European avant-garde. His friendship with Boulez ultimately ended due primarily to problems over the 1957 performance of Threni and Souvtchinsky’s machinations, even though Stravinsky liked Boulez the man and respected the musician.

This chapter discusses Boulez’s formal and informal music education, beginning with his early musical training and his formal studies in Lyon and Paris. In Paris, the importance of his informal education emerges, including his relationships with important mentors. His development as a conductor and lecturer on music is also considered. Although many would consider these professional activities, Boulez’s emergence as a writer, lecturer and conductor was accomplished during a period of extensive experimentation in composition. He reflected, in retrospect, on his mentors and related ‘apprenticeships’ and how they shaped his thinking as a musician. While Boulez was a lifelong autodidact, the discussion closes at the end of his formative period around 1960.

Boulez’s status as a modern is rarely doubted. Yet he provided relatively little by way of explicit reflection on the concept of modernity. This chapter traces a path via Charles Baudelaire’s formulation in his essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, and Michel Foucault’s commentary on it, to Foucault’s essay on Boulez himself, ‘Pierre Boulez, ou l’écran traversé’. There, Boulez is seen as motivated by ‘the necessity of a conjuncture’, an imperative for action demanded by whatever nexus of circumstances and contradictions confronts the individual in the present. The conjuncture, as further amplified by Louis Althusser, offers useful perspectives on Boulez’s modernity, which is often characterised as prescriptive and deterministic but which emerges here as relativist and perspectival, stressing contingency rather than inevitability. Above all, modernity comes to signify not a binding aesthetic but an enduring ethic, whose manifestations remain particular to the historical and problem contexts in which they arise.

Although Boulez never met or corresponded with the Second Viennese composers (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern), their influence on him was palpable. He first encountered their music through René Leibowitz in 1945 and began writing about their compositions from 1948. This chapter examines Boulez’s extensive writings on the music of the Second Viennese composers as well as his programming and conducting of their works, demonstrating that he was a central figure in their post-war reception. He frequently criticises the Second Viennese composers for reliance on conventional formal structures and explains that he is most interested in compositions that display ‘ambiguities’. He extols Webern’s compositions for using ‘elements of classical language’, which through their distorted use become ‘the elements of a new language’. Treating the Second Viennese composers’ innovations as building blocks, Boulez’s compositions expand upon what he identifies as their most important attributes: serialism and the crafting of novel timbres and sonorities.

Pierre Boulez was a towering figure in contemporary music from the 1940s and 1950s to his death in 2016. This volume demonstrates his distinctive impact on new music and situates him within a wide range of contexts to enhance appreciation of the cultural embeddedness of his work. Successive sections consider his early life and education, his engagements with cultural, musical, literary and artistic modernism, his relationships with his modernist predecessors and contemporaries, and the intersections of his work with literature, visual art, mathematics, philosophy and technology. Contributors explore his various roles as composer, conductor, recording artist, writer, teacher and systems builder, as well as his role in French cultural politics, his move to Germany and the time he spent in the United States. This book is essential for students and educators but also accessible to a general audience interested in Boulez’s legacy and his unique position in recent music history.

Despite the fact that Boulez was criticised by many of his contemporaries insofar as they perceived him as having an excessively mathematical bent, some recent scholars have tended to minimise the significance of mathematical thinking for his compositional approach. This chapter posits that Boulez’s engagement with mathematical thinking cannot be so quickly dismissed. It disentangles the history of ideas and brings a new perspective to Boulez’s relationship with mathematics. After summarising the references to mathematical thinking in the literature on Boulez, it discusses the transformation of the field of mathematics that provided the context for Boulez’s engagement with the discipline and teases out the significance of mathematical thinking in Boulez’s compositional approach. Ultimately, it argues that there is an intimate relationship between the technical and aesthetic basis of his compositional approach and contemporary developments in the field of mathematics.

George Benjamin recalls his friendship with Pierre Boulez which lasted over thirty-five years. He pays homage to Boulez’s quite extraordinary musical abilities and remembers the exceptional lucidity and brilliance of his mind.

From his student days, Boulez was fascinated by music from outside Europe, which influenced his piano writing before 1945. He describes his encounter with them as ‘decisive for [his] form of musical thought’, from Le Marteau sans maître to sur Incises, by way of Pli selon pli, Rituel and Répons. Stimulated by Cage’s works for percussion and prepared piano, he investigated timbre and rhythm, leading to new forms of writing and new conceptions of form and time; appreciation of the importance of resonant instruments, autonomous rhythmics, heterophony ensuring the fusion between harmony and polyphony, opposition between ‘striated time’ and ‘smooth time’, ritual and sacred dimensions, and ‘plastic and physical’ (Artaud’s words regarding Balinese theatre), not ‘psychological’ expression. This interest in non-European music, influenced by Messiaen and Jolivet, is part of a French tradition and distinguishes Boulez’s approach from that of most of his contemporaries in the immediate post-war period.

As composer, theoretician, conductor and founder of institutions, Pierre Boulez’s irrepressible desire for modernity marked the second half of the twentieth century. From immediately after the Second World War, he set himself the task of bringing to the fore a France that was deemed musically retrogressive and sclerotic. A man of action, both visionary and pragmatic, fêted and detested, he waged throughout his life collective and altruistic battles and engaged in numerous controversies, all with the explicit goal of shaking the dust off of musical practice and of stimulating a new model of creation and dissemination: the Domaine Musical in the 1950s; IRCAM and the Ensemble Intercontemporain in the 1970s; the Opéra Bastille in the 1980s and both the Cité de la musique and the beginnings of La Philharmonie de Paris in the 1990s. His unique journey remains relevant to our understanding of recent French political history, the history of ideas and of art.

By the early 1950s, Boulez became known for his controversial and outspoken statements, his notorious snipes at non-serial but otherwise progressive contemporaries, creating a rift that divided French composers into competing factions. Jolivet, Dutilleux and Ohana, as well as others represented not only at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen but also the Warsaw Autumn Festival as leading figures in French contemporary music, found themselves excluded from the Concerts du Domaine musical and subject to what has been called the Boulezian ‘aesthetic of refusal’. Contextualising these issues, this chapter considers Jolivet’s influence on the young Boulez, their subsequent rupture in the very public affaire de scandale that followed and Boulez’s later reconciliations. Compositional common denominators linking particular works of Ohana and Dutilleux with Boulez are also explored in relation to Debussy as well as non-serial dodecaphonic techniques and the style incantatoire to reveal closer aesthetic links than any may have wished to admit.

This chapter focuses on Boulez’s relationship to the dramatic arts and the consequences of that involvement on his life and career. He was appointed as musical director, responsible for accompanying the productions, a position he held for ten years, from 1946 to 1956. Boulez contributed to the productions as conductor in Paris and also went on tour with the Company. He was interested in the music of the countries visited especially that of Brazil for its exotic instruments and their timbres. He composed the score of the Oresteia (1955), arranged and wrote the orchestration of different scores and had the opportunity to create the Domaine Musical series of concerts. It was the beginning of his career as a conductor of prestigious orchestras but also of opera and of collaborations with famous stage directors, Wieland Wagner, Patrice Chéreau, Peter Stein and Klaus-Michael Grüber.