Person

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez

French composer, conductor, and institution-builder (1925–2016); a central figure of post-war modernist music, founder of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the research institute IRCAM in Paris, and later principal conductor of orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Boulez shaped how twentieth-century music was written, performed, and studied. As a composer he pushed serialism to new rigour (works such as Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli, and Répons); as a conductor he became a benchmark interpreter of the modern repertoire, prized for analytical clarity; and as an organiser he built the institutions — the Ensemble Intercontemporain for contemporary performance, IRCAM for music-and-technology research — that gave new music a permanent home. His public reputation for severity (a New York headline greeted his Philharmonic arrival as ‘The Iceman Cometh’) sat oddly beside accounts, like the conductor David Robertson‘s, of a flexible and generous collaborator.

In the wiki

  • David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation — David Robertson, whom Boulez handed the Ensemble Intercontemporain despite almost no prior contact (a bond Robertson calls ‘grandfilial’), pushes back on the cold-modernist caricature. He recounts Boulez rehearsing Explosante-fixe with disarming flexibility — letting a clarinettist tell him a tremolo did not work — and, when Robertson stretched the sensual passage of Transitoire VII to nearly double its marked slowness and apologised, replying ‘No, no, you can actually do more.’ Robertson’s reading: Boulez welcomed intense emotion in his works but could not supply it himself as a performer. The episode also traces his shifting time signatures to a genuine choice between two notational logics (subdividing a span versus building from an underlying pulse), and the steel drums of Sur Incises to his hearing Caribbean players on a beach while touring with the Renaud-Barrault theatre company after the war.

See also

  • David Robertson — conductor and interpreter of his music, who discussed him with Tyler Cowen