Joyce Music: Pierre Boulez
- At May 15, 2022
- By Great Quail
- In Joyce
0
It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All the art of the past must be destroyed.
—Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez
(1925-2016)
A brilliant and often controversial interpreter of Schönberg, Debussy and Mahler; a musical revolutionary who conducted Wagner in the opera halls he once called to be demolished; a thorny intellectual with a notorious temper and a near-mania for privacy; a Frenchman who repudiated his country only to become a national hero—Pierre Boulez was a man as complex, contradictory, and uncompromising as his music; a music that springs from the twentieth century with as much authoritative genius as the novels of James Joyce or the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky.
Like many twentieth-century Modernists, Boulez’s work has been criticized for being stylistically obsessed, overly complicated, and generally inaccessible. And while there’s some truth to this, his music is also filled with great passion and beauty. Along with a few other atonal composers such as György Ligeti and Luciano Berio, Boulez’s music engages the listener both intellectually and emotionally. Though beneath the surface of each composition lurks a complex system of theoretical gears and process-oriented clocksprings, the music itself seems unencumbered, free, and restlessly alive. Perhaps the best metaphor for Boulez’s music may be borrowed from one of his own titles, explosante-fixe. Like an explosion frozen in time and space, his works are quivering webs, strung with sudden splinters of violence and blossoms of strange beauty; atomized musical particles following paths laid down by the secret mechanisms of a detached creator.
Boulez, an avowed Joyce enthusiast who frequently credited the author as an inspiration, shared a similar approach to his own art. Boulez was constantly pushing the envelope of his medium, developing new modes of expression and relentlessly expanding his technique. As with the music of Cage, Berio, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Carter, and other composers embracing a Modernist aesthetic, performing one of Boulez’s works—and to a lesser extent, hearing one—requires active participation in the compositional process. Like a puzzle waiting for a solution, a Boulez composition requires the performer to engage its complexities and make creative decisions. This may be selecting a path through a labyrinth of musical choices (Third Piano Sonata, Structures II), ordering a sequence of interchangeable movements (Livre pour quatuor), navigating physically through the acoustic space (Rituel, Répons), or spiraling through a web of variational ripples to recover the “original” theme (…explosante-fixe…). Although the process underpinning these works is rarely intelligible to the casual listener, awareness of these internal dynamics offers an additional level of enjoyment—at the very least, one may better appreciate what the musicians are going through! In this, Boulez is not unlike the Joyce of “Sirens,” “Oxen of the Sun,” or Finnegans Wake—there’s a certain “playful seriousness” at work, and the more one is willing to grasp the structural innovations of the piece, the more rewarding it becomes.
For those visitors mainly interested in Boulez’s two Joyce-related works, analysis and reviews can be found below. A biographical sketch of Pierre Boulez follows, highlighting his relationship to the literary works of Stéphane Mallarmé and James Joyce.
Joyce-Related Works
Third Piano Sonata (1958)
A complex labyrinth of sound and theory, this infamous piece of Modernist music was partially inspired by Joyce.
Répons (1981)
Requiring an orchestra, six soloists, a digital processor and six loudspeakers, Boulez considers this inventive work to use Joycean techniques.
Biography
I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.
—Pierre Boulez
Early Years
Born in Montbrison on March 26, 1925 to a bourgeois family of staunch Catholics, young Pierre was raised in a somewhat chilly and restrictive environment governed by his industrialist father. As a child, Pierre was a curious but serious boy, harboring doubts about religion from an early age, but always remaining respectful to his family. His closest relationship was with his older sister Jeanne, whom he often stated as being the “real intellect” of the family. Young Pierre showed aptitude in both music and mathematics; needless to say, his father the engineer encouraged him to follow the scientific path, and in 1941 he took engineering classes at the University of Lyon. And like so many rebellious sons destined for artistic greatness, Pierre carried on in his own direction, developing his skills on the piano and taking music lessons. Gaining the support of his sister, he successfully argued his way to a musical career, finally entering the Paris Conservatoire in 1942.
Of course, the early 1940s were a difficult period in France, and Paris was occupied by the Germans. This seems to have had little negative effect on Boulez, who actually welcomed German art and culture, going so far as to claim that “the Germans virtually brought high culture to France.” During these rebellious teenage years, Boulez also rejected Catholicism, flirted with the Communist party, heaped scorn upon the “leadership” of France, and openly mocked traditional musical forms from Brahms to Stravinsky’s neoclassicalism. It was obvious that the angry young man was looking for something, some outlet for his iconoclastic creativity, and in 1945 he found it in the 12-tone music of Arnold Schönberg.
Boulez was ripe for such a discovery, and had kept himself surrounded by numerous radical and creative elements: Paul Klee adorned his walls, James Joyce sat upon his bookshelf, and he learned advance harmony from Olivier Messiaen, who took an almost fatherly interest in his young pupil. Boulez tried several new forms of composition during this time, but nothing seemed to offer an adequate language for the ideas he was struggling to express. Then he heard a performance of Schönberg’s Wind Quintet conducted by the Polish composer René Leibowitz.
René Leibowitz
Having studied briefly under Webern and Schönberg, Leibowitz was instrumental in bringing dodecaphony to postwar France, and in some ways was a counterpart to Nadia Boulanger. To Boulez, who was only familiar with Schönberg’s music up to Pierrot Lunaire, hearing the 12-tone system was “a revelation,” and quickly led to his discovery of Webern, a composer whom Boulez would champion and revere the rest of his career. Working closely with Leibowitz and a few others, Boulez began to establish his own ideas about 12-tone music, counterpoint, and increasing amounts of “serialization” in composition.
Anyone who has not felt—I do not say understand—but felt the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS.
—Pierre Boulez, 1952
Serialism and Chance
It is not unfair to say that in discovering the Second Viennese School, Boulez experienced something akin to a religious conversion. He took up the banner of serialism with a passion—almost a vengeance. With his sharp tongue, acid wit, and burning desire to see the new sweep away the old, Boulez cemented his reputation as a controversial and somewhat difficult young artist, and he was never afraid to make broad statements consigning traditional composers to the ash-heap. (It’s mandatory at this point, when writing about Boulez, to apply the label enfant terrible.) Several remarkable compositions of his own proved that he had the talent and discipline to back up his words, and many of his early works combined his thorny temperament and intellectual iconoclasm with intriguing approaches to form. Especially notable are Notations, a sequence of crystallized ideas cast as 90-second piano shorts; the First Piano Sonata, Boulez’s first serial work; and Le visage nuptial, a surreal song cycle incorporating the violent imagery of poet René Char.
Though his compositional life had taken a creative upturn, Boulez still needed to earn money, and so he played the Ondes Martenot—an early electronic instrument favored at the time by Messiaen and other progressive composers. This led to work with Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, two performers who had established a theater company at the Théâtre Marigny. Appointed Musical Director in 1946, Boulez arranged scores, played the Ondes Martenot, and got his first real taste of conducting. Nothing could have been more fortunate for the young composer. For the next ten years, Barrault and Renaud treated Boulez like a son. His stay with the company gave him practical experience with working musicians, granted him time to compose, and would eventually whisk him around the world on several tours. (It would also lead to the formation of the Domaine Musical in 1956.)
Pierre Boulez in the 1950s. Photo: Israel Shenker
Although Boulez was extremely closed about his personal history, it’s known he had a very turbulent affair around this time, a love-hate relationship that terminated in a “double suicide pact.” Nothing more is known about the affair—not even, as Boulez biographer Joan Peyser writes, “whether or not the other person went through with the fatal act.” The pervading grimness of Le visage nuptial is often attributed to this dysfunctional relationship. Another interesting story related by Peyser involves the dedication to the First Piano Sonata. It was originally dedicated to René Leibowitz; but after the older composer tried to make some editorial suggestions with a red pen, Boulez tore it from his grasp with the cry, “You shit!” It was the end of their relationship. From that point on, Boulez attacked Leibowitz incessantly, accusing him of a dry, pedantic adherence to Schönberg’s methodology. Three years later, when Boulez’s music publisher asked whether or not the dedication should be retained, a furious Boulez seized a letter-opener and savaged the manuscript. It had to be glued back together.
It was during this period that Boulez established another creative friendship that would soon turn sour, this one with American composer John Cage, whom he first met in Paris in 1946. (John Cage is another composer influenced by Joyce, and has his own page at the Brazen Head. Although Boulez had already read Ulysses, it was Cage who gave him his first copy of Finnegans Wake.) Attracted to the older composer’s break with the past and his concept of chance operations, Boulez found in Cage a friend and fellow traveler, and the two established a very productive relationship. Cage was instrumental in getting Boulez’s works published, and went to great lengths to promote his music in the United States. Boulez in turn introduced Cage to Messiaen and the musical centers of Paris. Their correspondence from this period (1949-1952) shows two creative talents working at the peak of their abilities, open to each other’s ideas but each preserving a very clear sense of identity, with Boulez exploring serialism and Cage experimenting with indeterminacy.
John Cage preparing a piano
It was with his Second Piano Sonata of 1948 that Boulez firmly positioned himself at the forefront of the avant-garde. A highly original work that showcased many of his complicated theories on serialism, it was performed to great acclaim in Europe and America, and marked Boulez as a figure of international importance. This led to his next experiment, Livre pour quatuor, a piece that juxtaposed Boulez’s serialism with limited aleatoric elements, in that the performers are free to select from a menu of movements the ones to actually be performed. This desire to free the music from the “tyranny of the composer” would become more evident in Boulez’s later works, and would inform the spirit and structure of his Third Piano Sonata.
Rather than working towards a greater degree of freedom, for the next few years Boulez tightened the reins on his music, pursuing increasing levels of serialization: not only would pitch be regulated to mathematical formulae, but other dimensions such as rhythm, duration, and intensity would also be subject to control. Despite Boulez’s claims to the contrary, this was not a completely original idea—Messiaen had tried and abandoned it, and Milton Babbitt had been working on a similar concept in America—but Boulez’s mania for organization, complexity, and large-scale works set him aside from his like-minded contemporaries.
In 1951 Boulez completed Polyphonie X. A rather dissonant work for “18 solo instruments,” Polyphonie X is the musical tip of a theoretical iceberg, and its premiere created a succès de scandale at the festival of Donaueschingen, which was actually known for introducing new music. (It was also well-understood that the conductor, Hans Rosbaud, loathed the piece.) Undeterred, Boulez followed this in 1952 with Structures for Two Pianos. Like Bach’s Art of the Fugue or Philip Glass’ Music in 12 Parts, the piece was intended to take the composer’s new language through a complete set of vigorous paces. Boulez realized that he was exhausting the limits of serialism, and the work represented an artistic turning-point, forcing him to reconsider his compositional approach in order to avoid sterility, stagnation, and musical “Totalitarianism.” As he remarked in 2000, “I grew tired of counting to twelve.”
I think that music must be hysteria and collective spells, violently of the present.
—Pierre Boulez
A New Language
The mid-1950s brought Boulez to several crossroads in both his personal and professional life—the two, at times, appearing to be almost indistinguishable. To begin with, he made a sudden break with John Cage, who had become more interested in total chance operations. (For instance, his Music of Changes was composed entirely by tossing coins and consulting the I Ching.) Cage was also becoming more fascinated by the actual sounds he could produce, rather than the theoretical ideas behind his compositions. After spending several months in New York City with Cage in 1952, Boulez determined that the American’s ideas were incompatible with his own, and he began to distance himself from his friend. It was a decision that confused and saddened Cage, who didn’t understand how Boulez could place theoretical differences over friendship. It was made worse by Boulez’s increasingly strident attacks on Cage and his ideas. As he did with René Leibowitz, it wasn’t enough to turn his back on a friend and mentor, Boulez sought to vilify him. But Cage would not be the last composer to experience this harsh side of Boulez; though he was probably the least deserving. In 1952 Boulez met a man who possessed a comparable amount of genius, arrogance, and ambition—Karlheinz Stockhausen.
A pioneer in electronic music, Stockhausen also displayed a fascination with serialism, open forms, and aleatory music, and had traveled to Paris to study under Messiaen. There he met Boulez, who sent the younger composer back to Cologne with a fresh respect for Webern and a renewed sense of mission. Almost immediately, Stockhausen filled the void left by Boulez’s break with Cage, and the two struck up an intense friendship. Over the next year, they exchanged many ideas, but their relationship grew increasingly competitive, with the inevitable difference in theory serving as a creative wedge. This was aggravated by the fact that Stockhausen composed more rapidly than Boulez, and often beat Boulez to the punch in realizing musical innovations in an actual piece. After a while, this began to grate on Boulez, who was a slow and methodical composer, deeply invested in perfection. (Some might say too deeply invested.)
Karlheinz Stockhausen, who once told a reporter he was an extraterrestrial
Stockhausen began to find in Boulez an easy target for his complaints against the less radicalized avant-garde; while Boulez began to consider the German’s works too hastily constructed and even vulgar. There was also a considerable personality difference. Stockhausen was something of a bohemian, a spiritually-driven “New Age” philosopher with an erotically tangled social life. Frequently accused of being egocentric, manipulative, and self-serving, Stockhausen felt comfortable building up a cult of personality around himself. (At times this reached Wagnerian proportions, with Stockhausen taking mistresses as he saw fit, and eventually demanding that his works not be programmed with any other composer’s.) Needless to say, this sort of behavior was anathema to Boulez, who remarked in 1974, “Stockhausen, with his hippie, hormonal cure, pedantically revived what was genuine in Cage.” Though Boulez maintained the integrity to program and conduct Stockhausen’s work, there was little love lost between the two, and their brittle, artistic Cold War cast a long shadow over Darmstadt.
Rejecting Cage’s indeterminacy, energized by his tense relationship with Stockhausen, and disgruntled by the limits of serialism, Boulez was ripe for a change. He decided to “save” serialism by concerning himself with, to quote Peyser, “the making of music, not system.” As a result, Boulez produced what some consider to be his masterpiece. In 1955 he premiered Le marteau sans maître (“The Masterless Hammer”). Scored for a small ensemble, this landmark work set several poems by René Char, and acted as Boulez’s self-proclaimed Pierrot Lunaire. In Marteau, Boulez combined his ideas on serialism and rhythm with a more human concern for musicality. With its exotic instrumentation, unique approach to setting the poems, and texturally rich passages, Marteau was an unqualified success, and proved that Boulez could mature as an artist as well as a theoretician.
Believing that the future of new music was better pursued outside of conservative France, in 1958 Boulez moved to Germany, a country he was familiar with through seminars at Darmstadt, an important center for serialism and new music. That same year, he completed the Third Piano Sonata, an “open work” of limited indeterminacy which took inspiration from literary figures such as James Joyce and Stéphane Mallarmé. The work also increased the distance between Boulez and Cage; the American was quite upset at Boulez for brazenly incorporating some of his ideas and then disparaging him in a widely-circulated essay on aleatory music. And again, even though Boulez and Stockhausen had discussed the creation of such a piece, Stockhausen published Klavierstück XI first. Stockhausen followed this with Gruppen, a remarkable work for a trio of orchestras surrounding the audience. Despite their differences, Stockhausen asked Boulez to serve as one of the three conductors needed to perform the difficult piece. Gruppen went off beautifully, and even today it’s considered one of Stockhausen’s most important works. Stockhausen was clearly the man of the hour, and the rivalry between the two men intensified. As Stockhausen followed one premiere with another, he gained more adherents and critical acclaim, and eventually began to eclipse Boulez as a composer.
Feeling pressure to produce a new masterpiece, Boulez set his sights on a large-scale project, one that would incorporate limited chance elements, Gruppen-like spatial arrangements, and the modified serial language of Marteau. A setting of Mallarmé’ poetry, the work was called Pli selon pli (“Fold by Fold”), and was scored for soprano, percussion ensemble, and multiple orchestras. Naturally, Boulez spent several years pulling the complex piece together, and by the time it was finished it surely reflected the mood of the composer. Full of bitterness and despair, haunted by images of death and sterility, Pli selon pli was first performed in its entirety in Cologne in 1960. A disturbing, strange, and occasionally beautiful piece, it nevertheless failed to make the impression Boulez was hoping for, and he grew sullen and withdrawn. Boulez’s brand of serialism was fading out, giving way to a more polystylistic approach that included electronics and chance operations. With the success of Marteau five years in his past, some wondered if the Frenchman was out of ideas.
While today it seems strange to think of composers being involved in such a competitive—and occasionally nasty—creative arms-race, the 1950s were an exciting time for music, and something of a hot-house atmosphere prevailed in Europe. Many new ideas were in the air, and men with healthy egos and prodigious talent were struggling to make their mark. A conductor who introduced a new work one day could just as easily toss off a snide article about it the next. Although the composers of the “Darmstadt school” frequently cooperated to push forward the frontiers of composition, it would be foolish to think that men like Boulez and Stockhausen didn’t have their eyes on their place in history. In the end, Stockhausen absorbed both Boulez and Cage, overwhelming them with his own vitality as a composer and his aggressive self-promotion. His penchant for controversy also generated publicity, and Stockhausen was often in the news for reasons other than his groundbreaking music. By 1960, Boulez had had enough. As he later remarked, “It was Stockhausen’s good period. I felt he could solve all the problems, that it was no longer necessary for me to address myself to them.” Leaving Karlheinz to tend the flock, Boulez successfully turned to the interpretation of others’ work and slowly slipped into the lifestyle of the upper class.
I’m not super-happy to conduct a large orchestra. But I feel compelled to bring new creative aspects of music to the whole of musical life everywhere. To go into a crowd without losing my integrity, that is what I want to do.
—Pierre Boulez, 1969
Boulez as Conductor
Boulez’s beginnings as a conductor were modest, brought on by necessity more than anything else. In 1955 Boulez founded a series of new musical concerts at the Théâtre Marigny, which provided him with a pulpit for espousing new works. It also placed him in the position to conduct more complicated pieces than those generally used in Barrault’s productions. The Marigny concerts turned out to be quite a success, and gained the patronage of several members of the aristocratic salon class. The concerts were renamed the Domaine Musical, and Boulez found himself at the center of a small but vigorous musical explosion. It also established his reputation as an exciting young conductor of contemporary music. (Although he formally left the employ of Barrault after moving to Baden Baden, Boulez continued his relationship with the Domaine until 1964.)
Pierre Boulez in 1964. Photo: Erich Auerbach
Naturally, as his reputation grew, he was granted more conducting opportunities, and in 1957 he led a performance of Le visage nuptial at Cologne, followed a few months later by Le marteau sans maître in Los Angeles. Although his early attempts at conducting outside the Domaine were not universally well received, he rapidly improved as he accepted more engagements, and soon conducting proved to be more lucrative than either composition or teaching. As he later remarked in an interview with Peyser, “The thing began to snowball. There is such a need for conductors today that if you are just a little bit gifted you get sucked into the machinery.”
At first Boulez kept to modern composers and the founders of dodecaphony, but his palette soon broadened to include Wagner, Beethoven, and even Haydn. Taking over the Amsterdam Concertgebouw from Hans Rosbaud, over the next few years he found himself conducting some of the great orchestras of the world, from the Paris Opéra to the Berlin Philharmonic. Having toned down some of his more incendiary rhetoric, he was still considered something of an enfant terrible; but he was universally recognized as a top-flight conductor, an important if somewhat difficult composer, and a powerful advocate of twentieth-century music.
But still his relationship with his home country remained problematic. Although he conducted several important works in Paris throughout the Sixties, he was consistently slighted by the French establishment, which had numerous ties to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. In 1964, the government overlooked Boulez’s suggestions to invigorate the French musical scene, and appointed a second-rate neo-Romantic composer to the Ministry office of Musical Director. Boulez was furious, cancelling all his appearances, severing his connection to the Domaine, and even forbidding the Orchestre de Paris to play his works.
France could wait—the rest of the world was hungry for Boulez. In 1966, he was invited to Bayreuth to conduct Parsifal, a surprising move that brought him into a close relationship with Wieland Wagner. Unfortunately, Wieland died before they could realize additional projects; otherwise Boulez claims that he may have become more established as a Wagnerian interpreter. (He would return in 1976 to conduct the controversial centennial Ring cycle, which producer Patrice Chéreau set in surreally industrialized nineteenth century.) Parsifal was followed by a stint as guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, which produced several recordings and forged a lasting association with Ohio’s premiere orchestra.
In an effort to recall one of France’s greatest artists back from virtual self-exile, in 1970 the French President Georges Pompidou invited Boulez to assist in establishing and organizing a cutting-edge center for modern music. To be called IRCAM, or the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, the center was scheduled for completion in 1977.
Boulez had no problems filling the time before IRCAM’s inauguration. In 1971, he assumed two monumental positions: he was appointed the principal conductor of the BBC Orchestra, and was chosen to succeed Leonard Bernstein over the New York Philharmonic! While the BBC position bore fruit in a series of landmark Schönberg recordings, New York City proved to too conservative for his tastes (or more to the point, Boulez was too radical for the New York Philharmonic), and his relationship with the New York musical scene was never a comfortable fit. On one hand, he energized the city with an influx of modern European music, and his informal “rug concerts” attracted young, enthusiastic audiences. But the commercial demands of programming and conducting so many traditional works began to take its toll, particularly during his second period of tenure, after he relinquished the BBC position in 1974. He composed less original works, he became more socially detached, and his interpretations of the classics were often criticized as being “cold.” Boulez also tended to completely ignore or disregard contemporary American composers. Perhaps anticipating the possibilities of IRCAM, he began to invest his creative energies in the possibilities of electronic music. In 1977 Boulez did not seek a renewal of his contract—which many traditionalists in New York found more of a relief than a disappointment.
Well, each generation has to solve its problems. I cannot solve the problems of a generation which is forty years younger than me, certainly not. I say always, every period is difficult. There is no easy period. You know, when you think of the fifties, you might think it was very easy, whereas it was not easy at all. There was always the question of whether this new discipline was not completely absurd; there were many questions. Certainly, when I look, for instance, only at Paris, I see that practically all the composers of my generation have disappeared. They made the wrong choices, or they were not courageous enough, or they were not lucid enough; there are many reasons. Or, perhaps they were politically involved, and that political involvement brought them to solutions which were very trivial; this type of thing. So, no, it was not easy! No period is really easy.
—Pierre Boulez, 1993
Rapprochement with France
Boulez returned to Paris, where he accepted a professorship at the Collège de France, and took over the directorship of the newly unveiled IRCAM. He also founded the Ensemble InterContemporain, a group of talented musicians affiliated with IRCAM and solely devoted to the performance of modern music. Meant to be a creative space for composers, artists, scientists, and engineers, IRCAM eventually evolved into a sophisticated studio dedicated to the production of technologically enhanced music. Heavily funded by the French government, IRCAM is still recognized as one of the world’s premiere centers for the exploration of technology and music, and has attracted numerous innovative artists such as Luciano Berio, Tod Machover, and Kaijia Saariaho. (Though it’s not without its share of controversy—IRCAM has been accused of elitism by French musical conservatives, favoritism by the avant-garde, and simple Gallic snobbishness from visiting composers.)
Although Boulez gave up the directorship of IRCAM in 1992, it stands at the center of many of his later works such as Répons (1981-84), Dialogue de l’ombre double (1985), and a new version of …explosante-fixe…(1991-93). These works combine Boulez’s complicated compositional theories with technological advancements such as synthesizers, the 4X digital sound processor, computers, and MIDI technology.
Répons especially is significant; not only was it IRCAM’s first real “hit,” in some ways it marked the return of Boulez the composer. A complicated and fairly large piece for orchestra, six soloists, computer, and six loudspeakers, Répons makes a very convincing use of technology, incorporating digital processing as a real-time element to bring subtle but beautiful effects to the soloists. Scalable to several versions of various lengths and technological requirements, Répons was awarded the 2000 Grammy Award for best contemporary composition. (Boulez also indicates that Répons bears Joycean resemblances in its spiraling structure.)
Liberated from the responsibilities of a full-time conducting post, Boulez spent his later years composing, supporting musical projects, and conducting/recording new works as well as those by Bruckner, Mahler, and Scriabin. Although some of his interpretations are still not to everybody’s taste, it was widely recognized that Boulez had grown warmer and more expressive as a conductor, embracing some of the very qualities he used to deplore. (His 2001 Schönberg Piano Concerto for Philips is a revelation of expressionism.) In 1995 Gramophone magazine named Pierre Boulez “Artist of the Year.” Boulez’s 1998 work Sur Incises was universally hailed, receiving numerous accolades including the prestigious Gramophone Classical Music Award for Best Contemporary Composition. In 2000, he embarked on a worldwide 75th birthday tour and celebration with the London Symphony Orchestra. Appointed principle guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2001, Boulez was also Carnegie Hall’s composer-in-residence until 2003.
In the early 2000s, Boulez divided his time between Baden Baden and Paris, where he was instrumental in directing the Cité de la Musique, a musical center commissioned in 1995 by François Mitterand from (of all things) an abandoned slaughterhouse. The new home of the Ensemble InterContemporain, the 1200-seat concert hall was specifically designed for performances of modern, spatially-oriented works by composers such as Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and naturally, Pierre Boulez.
History as it is made by great composers is not a history of conservation but of destruction—even while cherishing what is being destroyed.
—Pierre Boulez, 1976
The Iconoclast Sanctified
Even as the world was busy heaping accolades on this former enfant terrible, his health began declining. In 2010, Boulez underwent an eye operation that left him partially blind, and he broke his shoulder a few years later. Nevertheless, he continued making appearances, conducting his own works and continuing his explorations of Mahler. In 2012 he made his last appearance at the podium, conducting a program that included Schönberg, Mozart, and Stravinsky. In 2013 Deutsche Grammophon honored Boulez the composer by releasing a 13-CD set of his collected works. On January 5, 2016, Pierre Boulez died at his home in Baden-Baden.
Boulez’ life was not unlike one of his own compositions—an upwards spiral of irony, a series of revolutions that ultimately placed him in charge of the very institutions he once despised. He’s certainly not the first artist to make the transition from cult iconoclast to cultural icon. (This is a James Joyce site, after all.) But even today, Boulez remains controversial, especially among Wagnerians. New York is still reluctant to program his music—as they are with most European composers of the twentieth century. And younger composers have turned away from the avant-garde, preferring the more palatable sounds of post-Minimalism, Neo-Romanticism, or forms inspired by popular music. Whether Boulez’s complex and uncompromising works will enter the canon or become esoteric curiosities remains for the future to decide. However, it may be instructive to remember Boulez’s own words when informed that his scores were being hermetically preserved for posterity: “I don’t give a crap.”
Additional Information
Wikipedia Boulez Page
Wikipedia’s page on Pierre Boulez.
Pierre Boulez Saal
The homepage of the Pierre Boulez Saal, a unique concert hall in Berlin designed by Frank Gehry and dedicated to Boulez and his visionary approach to music.
IRCAM Web page
The official homepage of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique.
Ensemble InterContemporain
The official homepage for the Ensemble InterContemporain, the group founded by Pierre Boulez.
Pierre Boulez: The Ultra-Serialist
The wonderful Classical Nerd looks at “one of the most highly-opinionated characters in all of music…”
“Unreconstructed Modernist”
David Schiff, The Atlantic. September 1995. Although he has some worthwhile insights into Boulez as a conductor, Schiff’s article is a rather patronizing critique of Boulez the composer, and a dismissal of musical Modernism in general.
“Boulez vs. Stockhausen”
Rhys Chatham discusses the piano sonatas of Boulez in his essay, which also serves as a repudiation of serialism.
“Cage and Boulez: Full Circle”
Jesse Limbacher, ICA, 12 November 2015. A nice reflection on the two erstwhile comrades.
“Serialism of Cruelty: Artaud, Boulez, and Musical Violence”
A short essay on Boulez and Antonin Artaud, written by Andrew Infanti.
Selected Books
 Orientations By Pierre Boulez Harvard University Press, 1986 Available online at: Internet Archive |
 To Boulez and Beyond By Joan Peyser Billboard Books, 1999 Available online at: Internet Archive |
 Pierre Boulez Studies Ed. Edward Campbell and Peter O’Hagan Cambridge University Press, 2016 |
Bibliography
Boulez, Pierre. Orientations. Harvard University Press, 1986.
Boulez, Pierre & John Cage. Edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez & Robert Samuels. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Campbell, Edward and Peter O’Hagan. Pierre Boulez Studies. Cambridge University Press, 2016
Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music and After. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Iddon, Martin. New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Jameux, Dominique. Pierre Boulez. Harvard University Press, 1990.
O’Hagan, Peter. Pierre Boulez and the Piano: A Study in Style and Technique. Routledge, 2017.
Peyser, Joan. To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe Since The Rite of Spring. Billboard Books, 1999.
I’d especially like thank Joan Peyser for her authoritative work, To Boulez and Beyond. I leaned upon it generously writing this biographical sketch, and many of the lesser-known Boulez quotations are taken from her interviews with him. I heartily recommend Peyser’s book to anyone interested in Boulez and the development of modern European music.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 21 June 2024
Joyce Music Page: Bronze by Gold
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