Pierre Boulez

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 conductor of the BBC Symphony, principal guest in Chicago and Cleveland, defining interpreter of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, the Second Viennese School, and his own era. He founded the Domaine musical to promote new music, later IRCAM for research and the Ensemble intercontemporain for performance, then co-founded the Cité de la musique and the Lucerne Festival Academy. He died in January 2016, leaving a recorded legacy as extensive as the institutions he built.