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.

Besides his teachers and mentors, Pierre Boulez was surrounded by a circle of friends at the turn of the 1950s with whom he shared artistic and political interests and whom he often met in the more personal context of his social life. His interest in contemporary painting and interdisciplinary relations connected him with the painter Bernard Saby who, like Boulez, had pursued mathematical studies. Armand Gatti and Pierre Joffroy (pseudonym of Maurice Weil) were engaged journalists and writers, marked by the terror of the German occupation and the political turmoil of the post-war period. From this circle of friends emerged significant stimulations and influences in the transition from the composerʼs youthful works to the first phase of maturity

This chapter surveys Pierre Boulez’s recording career. It began in the 1950s, as a pianist in Mussorgsky and Stravinsky songs and directing incidental music by Milhaud. In the early 1960s, he conducted Mozart (with Yvonne Loriod) and C. P. E. Bach (with Jean-Pierre Rampal). His earliest recording of Le Marteau sans maître was made in 1956 and he first recorded The Rite of Spring in 1963. From the mid 1960s onwards, he recorded for Columbia (now Sony), including much of what is considered his key repertoire: Stravinsky, Varèse and Bartók; Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen; Berg, Schoenberg and Webern; and Boulez himself. In the 1980s, he made the first recording of the three-act Lulu and several new recordings of his own works. In the 1990s, for Deutsche Grammophon he made new versions of many pieces previously recorded for Columbia, as well as a Mahler cycle and, more surprisingly, works by Szymanowski, Richard Strauss and Bruckner.

In Boulez’s artistic framework, the principle of negation serves as a pivotal ideological and compositional foundation, symbolising a generational reset and a radical departure for new music. This chapter delves into Pierre Boulez’s utilisation of poetry and the singing voice as foundational elements in his pursuit of the negational principle. Focused on his concept of ‘reforming’, I examine Boulez’s vocal compositions based on selected poems by René Char, Henri Michaux, Stéphane Mallarmé and E. E. Cummings. Within these compositions, Boulez skilfully juxtaposes traditional elements with serialism, using the serial language to neutralise and negate the established norms. The ‘centre and absence’ principle takes centre stage, serving as Boulez’s fundamental approach to implementing deconstructive processes. This analysis proposes a novel interpretation, presenting this principle as a dynamic force governing the dramatic trajectory of vocal compositions beyond its role as a mere structural device.

The archives and testimonies concerning Pierre Boulez’s childhood are fragmentary, rendering a biography difficult to write without making assumptions or risking irrelevance. Yet, some aspects of his childhood emerge that help to understand Boulez as man and composer: his early years in the provincial town of Montbrison, the strong personality of his father, the role of his mother and sister in his discovery of music, his scholarship to the Catholic Institut Victor de Laprade, where music had a prominent place in his life.

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.

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.

Through the mediation of Messiaen and Leibowitz, Boulez became acquainted with the repertoire of modern music during his student years, leading him to conceive of its synthesis at an early stage. First with Cage, then with Stockhausen, he maintained a fruitful dialogue, linked to the construction of a coherent language. Nevertheless, he was suspicious of Darmstadt and critical of the music he heard there, such as that of Nono. From the 1960s onwards, he pursued his compositional approach in a more solitary fashion, while interpreting the music of his contemporaries as a conductor. Open to the influences of writers and painters but an adept of absolute music that produced its own meanings, Boulez drew close to contemporaries such as Berio, Carter and Ligeti, who admired his work and his commitment to creation. In his writings, however, he relies essentially on his predecessors, making almost no reference to his contemporaries.

Boulez’s conducting career developed in the United States in the mid 1960s, when he was invited by George Szell to become guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. From then until 1971, he conducted in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and was the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra during 1971–7. In later years, he conducted often with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1991–2010). In the context of these engagements, this chapter focuses on Boulez’s involvement with the music of a number of North American composers whose works he conducted, primarily in New York and Chicago. In New York, he pioneered the Prospective Encounters concerts in Greenwich Village, the Rug Concerts and a number of mini-festivals. While Elliott Carter was by far his most favoured North American composer, in Paris he conducted and recorded the work of Frank Zappa and finally in Chicago he conducted several compositions by Augusta Read Thomas.

The music of Béla Bartók and Edgard Varèse was central to Boulezʼs conducting repertoire, and despite the distance between their aesthetic positions, individual common characteristics of their music can be identified. This includes an expressive sphere of kinetic and sonorous vitality, capable of crossing the border into musical violence, but also fundamental questions of musical composition such as the structural and harmonic integration of dense chromatic complexes. In the case of Bartók, however, Boulez as conductor concentrates on the works that can be termed ‘musical expressionist’ and The Miraculous Mandarin, in particular.

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.

This chapter seeks to place/locate Boulez relative to the literary history (especially French) of his time, particularly his formative years of the 1940s, which was still the heyday of Artaud and the Surrealists. The writers important to Boulez included not only poets like Char and Mallarmé, but also novelists, Proust chief among them. Boulez was interested in structural aspects of the modern novel: open or circular (nonlinear) form, the fragment and reflexivity, all of which he found in Joyce, Proust, Kafka and Musil. The Third Piano Sonata is one of Boulez’ most literary works, modelled on the labyrinth he found in works like Kafka’s story ‘The Burrow’, or the circularity of Finnegans Wake. Recent studies of Boulez’s sketches show his work proliferating organically and in an open-ended way, as did Proust’s or Kafka’s novels. Other literary aspects might include spatial form, Joyce’s medievalism or Proust’s symbolist aesthetic.

In the Autumn of 1952, both Stravinsky and Boulez were invited to dine at Virgil Thompson’s New York apartment. Boulez had already written ‘Stravinsky Remains’ which analysed the rhythmic invention in The Rite. However, Boulez did not hide his disdain for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism in this chapter. Similarly, although Stravinsky praised Le Marteau, Boulez’s music remained foreign to him. For some years, the two friends entered into an unspoken pact that Boulez would stop speaking disrespectfully regarding Stravinsky’s neoclassicism and Stravinsky would speak eloquently about Boulez, as well as pointing to Webern as the way forward in serialism and not to Schoenberg. In spite of Stravinsky’s turn to serialism, he could seemingly do nothing to be accepted by the European avant-garde. His friendship with Boulez ultimately ended due primarily to problems over the 1957 performance of Threni and Souvtchinsky’s machinations, even though Stravinsky liked Boulez the man and respected the musician.

This chapter discusses Boulez’s formal and informal music education, beginning with his early musical training and his formal studies in Lyon and Paris. In Paris, the importance of his informal education emerges, including his relationships with important mentors. His development as a conductor and lecturer on music is also considered. Although many would consider these professional activities, Boulez’s emergence as a writer, lecturer and conductor was accomplished during a period of extensive experimentation in composition. He reflected, in retrospect, on his mentors and related ‘apprenticeships’ and how they shaped his thinking as a musician. While Boulez was a lifelong autodidact, the discussion closes at the end of his formative period around 1960.

Boulez’s status as a modern is rarely doubted. Yet he provided relatively little by way of explicit reflection on the concept of modernity. This chapter traces a path via Charles Baudelaire’s formulation in his essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, and Michel Foucault’s commentary on it, to Foucault’s essay on Boulez himself, ‘Pierre Boulez, ou l’écran traversé’. There, Boulez is seen as motivated by ‘the necessity of a conjuncture’, an imperative for action demanded by whatever nexus of circumstances and contradictions confronts the individual in the present. The conjuncture, as further amplified by Louis Althusser, offers useful perspectives on Boulez’s modernity, which is often characterised as prescriptive and deterministic but which emerges here as relativist and perspectival, stressing contingency rather than inevitability. Above all, modernity comes to signify not a binding aesthetic but an enduring ethic, whose manifestations remain particular to the historical and problem contexts in which they arise.