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.

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.