French composer, conductor and writer (1925–2016)
He remade classical music twice: first by composing some of the most uncompromising modernist works of the 20th century, then by conducting the world's great orchestras with the same rigor he brought to the page. The polemics were as sharp as the scores.
Born in Montbrison in 1925, son of an engineer, Boulez studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris before becoming music director of a Paris theatre company in the late 1940s. He drove the development of integral serialism in the '50s, controlled chance music in the '60s, and real-time electronic transformation from the '70s onward — his constant revisions kept the catalog small but dense with landmarks like Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli, and Répons. That same intensity carried into a sixty-year conducting career: music director of the New York Philharmonic, chief condu…
Sourced, dated quotes from Pierre Boulez
[A]ny musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS.
Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.
The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.
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