Pierre Boulez (Montbrison, France; 1925 – Baden-Baden, Germany; 2016) began studying mathematics at college in Lyon, before deciding at age seventeen to leave for Paris and devote himself to music. In Paris, he trained with Olivier Messiaen – his maestro – Andrée Vaurabourg and René Leibowitz, who introduced him to the twelve-tone technique. In 1946, aged just 21, he was appointed Music Director of the Renaud-Barrauld Company, which brought the “total theater” concept to France and spread its message round the world. It was at this point that Boulez began to develop his total serialism technique.
In the early 1950s, he began teaching musical analysis at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, where he would exert a decisive influence in the new musical languages emerging after the Second World War. It is in this academic and creative setting that he composed the work that would seal his growing reputation: Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master, 1955) to texts by the surrealist poet René Char.
From the 1960s, his growing prestige as a conductor led to invitations from leading orchestras, initially in Paris, then Los Angeles, Bayreuth (Germany), Japan, concluding in 1967 with the post of guest conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1969, he was appointed chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, alternating his duties there with his work as music director of the New York Philharmonic, where he took over from Leonard Bernstein. He also found time to teach conducting courses in Basel and to publish works which would stand as cornerstones of contemporary aesthetic thought: Penser la musique aujourd’hui and Relevés d’apprenti.
He left his post with the British orchestra in 1976 (and the American in 1977), in order to concentrate on the institutional facet of his musical enterprise. It was in these years that he set up the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) – one of the world’s top electronic music studios, housed in the Pompidou Center – which he founded and led until 1991. In 1976, he established Ensemble InterContemporain, which not only specializes in the performance of contemporary works, but also promotes musical creation by commissioning works from authors in every corner of the world, selected by a panel of composers, musicologists and eminent professionals.
Despite his dedication to the IRCAM, he found time in the 1980s to compose a number of pieces including Dialogue de l’ombre double, Dérive, Antiphonies and Répons, to tour Europe, the United States and Australia with Ensemble InterContemporain, and to take on regular conducting duties with the BBC, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Chicago orchestras.
His conducting activity became even more intense after he stepped down as head of IRCAM. In 1995, he inaugurated the Cité de la Musique concerts in Paris; toured Paris, London, Vienna and New York with the London Symphony Orchestra; took part in the Boulez Festival in Tokyo; conducted Schönberg’s Moses and Aaron in the Amsterdam Opera House; received two Grammys, along with the Edison and Grammophon awards; and was named principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1997, he premiered Anthèmes 2.
In the first decade of the 21st century, Boulez took some periods of leave from his busy conducting schedule to compose and premiere Dérive. In 2005, coinciding with his 80th birthday celebrations, he was appointed honorary member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Wien and the Vienna Philharmonic, and honorary conductor of the Staatskapelle Berlin.
Pierre Boulez died in 2016 in Baden-Baden (Germany).
Speech
Contemporary Music, 5th edition
That the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Contemporary Music found its way to Pierre Boulez was justified by the extraordinary importance of his artistic endeavor, informed as it is by a particular ‘idée fixe’ – the ceaseless search for imagination in reason or, put another way, the essential task of reconciling logic and intuition. Pierre Boulez’s name will enter the history of thought and culture for his tireless pursuit of those subtle and fragile points where simplicity and complexity meet. Some may approach this idea from the standpoint of science alone, but Boulez always championed the role of intuition, imagination and poetry.
The career of Pierre Boulez was an outpouring of energy, explosive at times, in favor of a cause: the musical creation of the time he lived in. An energy so vital that he became a towering figure in three areas: composition, orchestra conducting and arts management. To find similar success in combining writing and conducting, we have to go back to Mahler, and there the road ends. But adding management into the mix made Boulez a unique case. For his body of work and the recognition attained in each of these fields, taken one by one, would suffice to ensure his place among the greats of contemporary culture. Boulez quickly rose to prominence with the Domaine Musical concerts, which became a fixture in the fifties and sixties.
Then, with the seventies, came the founding of the definitive institutions – Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and Ensemble Intercontemporain – under the wing of the Centre Pompidou. With IRCAM, Boulez set in train what we might call the post-laboratory of electronic music, where musical creation could be conceived starting from the material of sound itself, without the fetishisms that had invaded the post-war electronics labs. IRCAM opened up a space for reflection on computer music, but also where composers could interact with scientists, engineers and musicologists.
The other thread in this part of the story is Ensemble Intercontemporain, where all the sounds of the orchestra are represented, including a string section of soloists only. Boulez called this paradigm “variable geometry”; a group of virtuoso soloists able to offer any chosen combination of instruments. Here too, the model became the standard, providing a sound template for the music of the last forty years.
In the nineties, his influence was felt in the creation of the Cité de la Musique in Paris, a complex housing the Paris Conservatoire, a modular concert hall (now home to Ensemble Intercontemporain), a music museum, and the Centre de Documentation de la Musique Contemporaine (CDMC).
Boulez said that he took up conducting out of necessity, because very few conductors dared to tackle the contemporary works performed at the Domaine Musical. From there, of course, he went on to earn worldwide prestige at the helm of formations like the BBC Symphony Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic.
Gradually, he built up an influential recorded output in a repertoire that runs from contemporary pieces to Wagner, by way of Mahler, Bartók, the entire Viennese School, Stravinsky, Messiaen and a select list of others. Outstanding in the investigative rigor he brought to his scores, which were always listened to and analyzed in careful detail, he was also known for a conducting technique whose signal feature is dispensing with the baton.
But it is in composition that his interest as an artist mainly lies. It was the motor of his activity as well as guiding his objectives – none other than to give creative music the place it deserves. As a composer, he could be credited with situating the total serialism technique at the center of musical reflection in the post-war period. These were years of passion and intense activity, but also of rich exchanges with his colleagues Stockhausen, Nono, Maderna, Berio, and his maestro Messiaen.
Shortly afterwards he would begin to experiment with open-endedness (where his advocacy of a more controlled version would strain his early friendship with John Cage and, to some extent, his relations with Karlheinz Stockhausen). Subsequently, coinciding with the early years of IRCAM, his attention turned to the notion of space as a musical component. And gradually, from there, Boulez came to an awareness of the generative nature of his music writing over all these years, to the extent of viewing his production as a vast sum of experiences under the banner of “work in progress.”
His were among the key contributions to serialism in its second version, i.e., when the control of a series that ends without repetition of its elements is extended to every parameter. Subsequently this vision would find its scientific counterpoint in the discovery of DNA. Total serialism was born of Messiaen’s intuition in his short piece Mode de valeurs et d’intensités. But it were Boulez and his comrades who transformed this incipient concept, demanding its total application to sound language. Boulez, furthermore, was able to meld this language with lyrical passages and a sound poetry which attained full expression in Le marteau sans maître, hailed by the aged Stravinsky as the only truly significant work of the new age, outstanding in its rhythmic agility and temporal coherence.
Having taken this search to its conclusion, Boulez sought to apply the same ordering principles to the emerging currents of aleatory music. His solution, a balance between openness and control, gave his scores of this period a matchless plasticity, the case, for instance, of his Third Piano Sonata.
His next ventures would be capped by a double achievement: defining the function of electronics as an additional instrument which dialogues with rather than supersedes conventional instruments (aided by the growing fever for computer music), and finding ways to rationalize the spatialization of sounds – interrogating the identity of a piece of music that will be heard differently depending on the listener’s location in space. The work that best captured this period was Répons.
Boulez devoted his energies to revising his past output. A vast frieze of sound possibilities which provided material enough for a lifetime of fertile creativity, and whose legacy is a music that captivates the ear while presenting an unequaled portrait of its time.
