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).

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.

Boulez’s prolific writings, of which Stocktakings, Orientations and Music Lessons are representative in English (originally in French, 1966, 1981 and 2005, respectively), show his preoccupation with the dialectical and the deductive, his passion for creativity in all its forms and his focus on the craft of ‘écriture’ (‘writing’ in the sense of composing). He detested archaism, hence his notorious critique of Schoenberg’s dodecaphony, and rejected the concept of schools of composition or interpretation. In the mid 1960s, he turned to ‘formalism’ in all his activities, aiming at the comprehensibility of transitory truths, including music – analytically in his commentaries covering a century and a half of musical works by others. The dialectic between system and idea infuses all his writings. Challenging though it is to embrace such a large collection of outputs, Boulez’s unity of thought and purpose is evident throughout.

Following his early appearances during the late 1940s and early 1950s as musical director of the Renaud-Barrault Theatre Company and the Domaine Musical, Boulez enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence in the 1960s, becoming a conductor of international renown and securing prestigious posts with orchestras in London and New York. He also made waves in the opera house and pioneered seminal interpretations of works by Wagner, Debussy and Berg. Throughout his long career, he championed the music of the early modernist generation, much of which had been grievously neglected by other conductors, and also promoted key compositional figures of his own generation and a number of younger figures. This chapter explores Boulez’s development as a conductor in the context of his compositional activities and explains how his selfless commitment to the music he believed in changed the very nature of the conducting profession away from authoritarianism to a spirit of cooperation and collaboration.

While Boulez stated on a number of occasions that he had no great interest in teaching or indeed any particular gift for it, he worked nevertheless in the course of his career in a variety of pedagogical contexts. In this chapter, I consider his work as an occasional teacher of composition, with the small number of individual students he accepted in the late 1950s in Paris for private sessions. Second, there is the teaching he transmitted in the body of lectures he delivered primarily at Darmstadt, Harvard and more extensively at the Collège de France. Finally, I explore his arguably more engaged pedagogical work, exemplified by the courses in analysis, composition and conducting he delivered in Basel in the 1960s, as well as his committed interaction with young composers, conductors and performers at the Lucerne Festival Academy from 2003 to 2015.

This chapter examines the lively intellectual and artistic exchange between Pierre Boulez and John Cage that took place from 1949 to 1952. The writings of the French poet, dramatist, actor and visual artist Antonin Artaud (1886–1948) inspired the ‘organised delirium’ in Boulez’s Second Sonata for piano (1946–8). Its continuous variation and reading ‘a great deal of Artaud’, contributed to Cage’s decision to compose the Music of Changes (1951) using chance operations. Both composers were interested in ‘non-tempered pitch space’ – Cage, in his Sonatas and Interludes (1946–8) and Boulez in his Quatour pour Ondes Martenot (1945–6) and Le Visage nuptial (1946, 1948/1951–3). In the early 1950s, Cage and Boulez explored different approaches to a dialectical relationship between choice and chance, which eventually led to the publication of ‘Alea’, Boulez’s scathing condemnation of ‘accidental chance’ in 1957 and the end of their friendship.

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.

Olivier Messiaen’s teaching exerted a notable and formative influence on Pierre Boulez’s work as it matured from 1944 to 1946. Many historiographies of the twentieth century provide accounts of this relatively brief teacher-student relationship, as well as of Boulez’s subsequent turn away from Messiaen’s music. This chapter provides a chronology of their much more enduring relationship, based primarily on music analysis and historical data rather than on both composers’ often mythologised testimonies about each other. It surveys Boulez’s time of study with Messiaen, as well as the significance of Messiaen in Boulez’s account of his own role in the historical progress of music after the Second World War. Finally, discussion of Boulez’s artistic cooperation with the pianist Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s second wife, leads into a presentation of Boulez as an important champion of Messiaen’s orchestral music.

No French composer active in the twentieth century could avoid being affected by Debussy’s music, and Boulez was no exception. The two composers shared a number of poetic interests, with Mallarmé being important to both Debussy and Boulez for different reasons. An interest in music from non-Western traditions was also central to both composers, and Boulez wrote approvingly that for Debussy, this was a ‘corrosive influence.’ Boulez considered Debussy to be a revolutionary composer. He always pushed back against the notion that Debussy was a composer of delicate and floppy music, preferring to focus on the emotional intensity of his work. Boulez understood that the rigour and freedom that Debussy sought in his music were two sides of the same coin, and he sought the same balance in his own compositions. In his writings, Boulez constantly portrays Debussy as a revolutionary modernist – as a harbinger of his own work.

This chapter focuses on the use of spatial technique in key works that span a great deal of Pierre Boulez’s career: Poésie pour pouvoir (1958) for orchestra and tape, Domaines (1968) for clarinet and ensemble, Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974–5) for orchestra in eight groups and Répons (1981) for six soloists, live electronics and ensemble. These works are then compared with spatialised instrumental music by his contemporaries, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Iannis Xenakis and Luigi Nono, which will shed light on Boulez’s specific approach to this artistic practice. Boulez’s unique contribution to the history of spatialisation lies in the strong articulatory function he ascribed to this performance practice. He created a typology of sonic movements that clarify the structural relationships of his spatialised works.