Pierre Boulez was a great letter writer and a frequent correspondent. Since the extent of his correspondence is vast and very little of it has been published in English, this chapter looks solely at Boulez’s epistolary exchanges with the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Elliott Carter. While the correspondence with Stockhausen is one of the richest of all, only a brief sense of this can be given here. The correspondences have been selected on the basis that all four composers were pivotally important for Boulez in different ways. He had important friendships with them. He valued and performed their music and they in turn were fulsome in their appreciation of his championing their music as well as of his achievements as a composer. This brief consideration shows how Boulez not only pursued his own musical path but also promoted the music of his composer friends.

This chapter deals with Boulez’s early knowledge of African, Asian and Latin American civilisations and musical cultures and the encounters and experiences which mediated it. The role of Messiaen’s harmony class, the training for an unrealised mission in Cambodia, the tours of South America with the Renaud-Barrault Theatre Company and the relationships with the ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner, from the post-war years to the beginning of the 1960s, are considered and contextualised with respect to the fields of contemporary French ethnology and ethnography. Boulez’s statements on ‘traditional cultures’ from his writings and correspondences are reconsidered against the background of colonial institutions and discourses and the transformations they were undergoing during the incipient phase of decolonisation. The composer’s analogical and comparatist habits, grounded in interwar models, are shown through the examples of his reflections on John Cage’s prepared piano (1949) and the staging of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1961).

This chapter focuses on the practices of confiscation and forfeiture, by which the government permanently transfers money or property from the individual to the state, without compensation, because of a connection between the property and alleged unlawful conduct. The chapter describes and critically considers the rules on both conviction-based confiscation and forfeiture and those allowed without obtaining a conviction in six jurisdictions in Europe (the European Union, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, England & Wales) and relatively common practices at the federal and state levels in the United States. The chapter describes and examines several of the purported benefits and costs of these practices as well as key issues related to adjudicatory processes and statutory and constitutional protections. In doing so, the chapter identifies a number of fundamental areas of concern, offering some suggested avenues for reform or further study.

China’s property law framework is underpinned by a series of fundamental laws and statutory reforms that define the ownership, usage and transfer of both urban and rural property. These statutes not only reflect the evolution of property law in China but also highlight the country’s ongoing efforts to balance state control with private property rights, aiming to foster economic development while ensuring social stability and equity. The dynamic nature of China’s property law framework continues to evolve in response to domestic and international economic pressures, requiring continuous analysis and adaptation. Notwithstanding the ongoing signs of progress, Chinese property law faces several challenges that stem from rapid economic development, urbanization, ideological inertia and the legal complexities of transitioning to a market-oriented economy. Rather than a linear transition to private ownership, China’s institutional reform of rural land markets is more complex than orthodoxy economic theory, law and development theory suggests.

The epilogue assesses the relationship between PR and foreign relations from the 1970s onward. It examines the evolution of PR and the growth of the communications industry. It considers specific examples from the end of the twentieth century, including the relationship between Marvin Liebman and Chile, Burson-Marsteller and Argentina, and (most significantly) Hill and Knowlton, Kuwait, and Citizens for a Free Kuwait. It also includes twenty-first-acentury examples such as the connections between Paul Manafort and Russia. While the terminology may have evolved, the relationship between PR and foreign relations is as close and as controversial as ever.

The introduction outlines the complex relationship between American foreign relations and the PR industry, revealing a hidden hand of influence on US foreign relations. It explains the significance of the relationship, looking at the implications of the relationship for democracy, and outlining why the relationship has been historically controversial. The introduction also considers the definition of PR, notably contrasting it with advertising and lobbying. Finally, it delineates the main ways PR firms engaged with foreign relations: through support for private groups of American citizens, through support for corporate interests (domestic and foreign), and through support for governmental interests (domestic and foreign).

Musical form is a central issue in the discussion between Boulez and Stockhausen. This discussion, through a dense correspondence and essays, reflects the changes the notion of musical material underwent in European serial music up to its culmination in the mid 1960s. This mutation is examined in three steps. From the basic formulation of integral serial music in Boulez’s Structures and Stockhausen’s Studie I; through a reconsideration of the hierarchy between the parameters of pitch and rhythm in Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître and Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge and Gruppen; to a shift in the notion of material from production to placing as a consequence of reflections on the treatment and perception of sound and their incidences on the shaping of time in Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I and Boulez’s Éclat.

The critique which Boulez addressed to Schoenberg had its origins in the musical-aesthetic debates which took place in France after the capitulation of 1870: Wagner, of course, but also Brahms. The opposition between Parisian and Viennese perspectives: Debussyan dualism (Wagner/Mussorgsky) versus Schoenbergian dualism (Wagner/Brahms). Half a century later, Boulez in turn, following Debussy’s model, proposed a renewed perspective (Schoenberg/Stravinsky) – substituting for the influence of the Brahmsian agogic, to which Schoenberg’s art still remained deeply attached, a rhythmic serialism deduced from the Stravinskyan model, following Messiaen’s attempts at formalisation. Hence the need to re-establish cultural origins according to cross-border perspectives.