When Boulez returned to France in the mid 1970s, he assumed a number of significant roles in French cultural life, setting up IRCAM, forming the Ensemble Intercontemporain and assuming a professorship at the Collège de France. While undoubtedly a practical man, he was also interested in theorising about music and its relationship with the other arts, its place in culture and its philosophical underpinnings. The early years after his return to France brought him into the orbit of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, three of the most active intellectual figures in France of the 1970s and all four of them were to participate in the seminar Le Temps musical, which Boulez organised as an IRCAM event in 1978. This chapter considers Boulez’s contact with these three intellectuals, the seminar on musical time which brought them together and the small body of letters they exchanged in the years that followed.

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.

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.

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.

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 end of the 1970s, the spectral composers were being invited to speak at the Darmstadt Summer Courses and were enjoying favourable press coverage in France. Recognising the need for a common epithet for their musical movement, they discussed a few possibilities: ’spectral’, ’liminal’, and ’vectorial’. This chapter explores, in turn, Dufourt’s concept of spectral music, which signified a compositional approach recognising and drawing on the microscopic scale of sound as the composer’s true material; Murail’s more technical vision of spectral music, and how, at IRCAM from the beginning of the 1980s, beginning with the electroacoustic work Désintégrations, Murail developed a sophisticated music drawing on computational resources; and Grisey’s notion of écriture liminale, a psychoacoustics-informed approach to compositional writing based on blurred statistical parameters and musical mutation. The chapter ends by detailing how the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982, at which the composers of l’Itinéraire gave a joint seminar, were the end of their common movement and the beginning of spectral music as an internationally known compositional attitude.