Pierre Boulez spent a great deal of time in post-war Germany. His close connection with the country began when Heinrich Strobel commissioned him to compose Polyphonie X, initiating his ongoing close contact with both Strobel and the city of Baden-Baden, where he would take up residence in 1958. The chapter considers the 1951 premiere of Polyphonie X at Donaueschingen and the controversy which followed. It also contextualises the piece within the various compositional projects Boulez was preoccupied with at the time. The chapter considers Boulez’s attitude towards dodecaphony as focused on the Second International Twelve-Tone Congress of 1951 and his reflections on how Webern might be approached profitably by composers of new music. Given Boulez’s move to Germany in the late 1950s, the chapter reviews his disillusionment with the musical scene in France and the fact that a number of his most important compositions were first premiered in Germany.

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.

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.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pierre Boulez collaborated as a commentator and conductor on a series of challenging and distinctive BBC Television programmes about twentieth-century music. This chapter discusses the range of Boulez’s appearances on British television but focuses principally on this group of visually innovative broadcasts that combine musical analysis and performance to illuminate the creative processes of composers including Debussy, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez’s own compositions, including ‘Improvisation II sur Mallarmé’ and Le Marteau sans maître, are also imaginatively visualised, with highly distinctive camerawork and cutting-edge graphics. Created initially for the television studio and later as individual film documentaries, these broadcasts often exploit the full potential of the medium of the time. Little seen since their initial transmission, these programmes remain provocative creative resources for all those engaged with combining music and moving images.

The accident of parentage; impinging cultural, social, and political forces; unbidden encounters, events, and opportunities: these are not under a composer’s control, but can have a momentous impact on personal and compositional development. Consequence is not, however, inevitable. So for those trying to gain insight into a composer’s world, his or her decision-making is more important than mere factual circumstance: how they respond to the environment of which they are a part, and, not least, the myriad decisions undertaken in the creation of a compositional persona and in the course of actual composition. This chapter surveys the compositional environment in which Britten made his entrance. It took Britten a while to find the most powerful and ambitious means of employing simplicity, in pursuit of a complexity formed from the density and quality of relationships rather than the mere overlaying, entanglement, or busyness of complicatedness. This quest is traced with reference to some key works, while noting that Britten’s eclecticism refreshes a strong individual voice to the end of his career.

This chapter considers the reception of Mahler by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, with particular attention to parallel threads of interpretation. On one hand, the triumvirate championed their idol with determination and perseverance, to make a place for him in the centuries-long progression of Western compositional history and to establish as the culmination of this history (at least provisionally) their own works, with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method as its most advanced expression. But another, backward-looking Second Viennese interpretation of Mahler’s music existed from the beginning: as the last manifestation of a musical paradise eternally closed to subsequent composers, who, unlike Mahler, rejected the commandment to leave tonality intact. As self-styled heirs, then, the Second Viennese School faced an irresolvable dilemma: their succession through an initially “atonal” and then dodecaphonic language required the destruction of this paradise, which existed on a tonal foundation.

The chapter specifically explores the Futurist aesthetics of noise as manifested in Luigi Russolo’s ‘noise machines,’ or ‘intonarumori.’ Noise, and composition with noises, folds in with the Futurists’ general affirmation of technological modernity and with their related aesthetic practices extolling the virtues of speed, violence and war. The chapter also ponders Futurist noise and its relationship to twelve-tone dissonance, and discovers a common spiritualist thread linking these musical formal practices. For Russolo, at least, the technical and spiritualist connections relate to Leonardo da Vinci’s own plans for music machines, and his general view art’s ‘spirituality.’