Pierre Boulez at 100: Part 1: Musical Formations

Pierre Boulez would have been 100 today, March 26th, 2025. Let's give this serialist defender some love.

Pierre Boulez doesn’t get enough street cred in today’s electronic and experimental music scenes. He doesn’t have the same cache of compositional cool as his fellow maverick of European serialism, Karlheinz Stockhausen. He doesn’t retain the respect of American noiseheads driven on the by the sound of Cage’s silence. He didn’t drone on an on and on as La Monte Young has, so the worshippers at the amplified altar of drone don’t think much about his message. Neither was he awakened to the trance reducing repetitive power of pulse as were Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. His music doesn’t suck the listener in with these entranced dances of sound. His fellow Frenchmen Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry embraced technology at the expense of traditional instruments. Boulez never did away with the orchestral palette he knew so well, and combined it only in small ways with electronics to enhance the sound color of the instruments in play, even though he hung out in the world of concrète. His total dedication to total serialism kept him on the avant edge of classical composition, and often had him playing intellectual fisticuffs with its detractors, and he wasn't afraid of lambasting things he didn't like to smithereens. His stance was combative and he could come off like a total asshole. Yet the severity of his jerkiness can be tempered when it is realized that for French intellectuals, this sneering pose was in part an act, a role to play. ( His fellow Frenchmen weren’t as hurt or put off by this stance, as people in the English-speaking world were more inclined to be, because they were familiar with all the other intellectual jerks who make their national life of the mind as interesting as it is irritable. Think of Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Louis René Deleuze and Felix Guattari as similar arrogant types, and Boulez fits right in.  For us Americans, his bombast can come across as rudeness layered on top of egocentric rhetoric. Yet for the most part it seemed the European crowd was hip to this ruse, and overlooked his brusque shenanigans. 

Yet Boulez was also a conductive force. Not just through the sheer love of music that he exuded from his years as a conductor, but in this other role he took on as an ambassador of the avantgarde. His luminosity excited the minds and musical capacities of those around him, as he continually challenged the old forms and encouraged composers and musicians to take up the challenge of the new forms. 

As Boulez wrote, “A composition is no longer a consciously directed construction moving from a ‘beginning’ to an ‘end’ and passing from one to another. Frontiers have been deliberately ‘anaesthetized’, listening time is no longer directional but time-bubbles, as it were…A work thought of as a circuit, neither closed nor resolved, needs a corresponding non-homogenous time that can expand or condense”.

So let's take a look at his life and celebrate his accomplishments. The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music.

His devotion to music can be seen in the way the path of his life moved him through his own non-linear circuit path to a dual career as composer and conductor. Part of his perceived arrogance can be thought of as a defense mechanism against the hostility of critics opposed to the new music. He didn’t let it deter him.
Boulez was born in Montbrison, France on March 26, of 1925 to an engineer father. As a child he took piano lessons and played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. Boulez was gifted at mathematics and his father hoped he would follow him into engineering, following an education at the École Polytechnique, but opera music intervened. He saw Boris Godunov and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and had his world rocked. When he met the celebrity soprano Ninon Vallin, the two hit it off and she asked him to play for her. She saw his inherent and talent and helped persuade his father to let him apply to the Conservatoire de Lyon. He didn’t make the cut, but this only furthered his resolve to pursue a life path in music.

            His older sister Jeanne, with whom he remained close the rest of his life, supported his aspirations, and helped him receive private instruction on the piano and lessons in harmony from Lionel de Pachmann. His father remained opposed to these endeavors, but with his sister as his champion he held strong. In October of 1943 he again auditioned for the Conservatoire and was struck down. Yet a door opened when he was admitted to the preparatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot. Following this his further ascension in the world of music was swift. 

            Two of the choices Boulez made that was to have a long-lasting impact on his career was his choice of teacher, Olivier Messiaen, who he approached in June of 1944. Messiaen taught harmony outside the bounds of traditional notions, and embraced the new music of Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Debussy and Stravinsky.

            In February of 1945 Boulez got to attend a private performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quartet and the event left him breathless, and led him to his second influential teacher. The piece was conducted by René Leibowitz and Boulez organized a group of students to take lessons from him for a time. Leibowitz had studied with Schoenberg and Anton Webern and was a friend of Jean Paul Sartre. His performances of music from the Second Viennese School made him something of a rock star in avant-garde circles of the time. Under the tutelage of Leibowitz, Boulez was able to drink from the fountain of twelve tone theory and practice. Its waters of inspiration continued to renew him all his life.

            Boulez later told Opera News that this music “was a revelation — a music for our time, a language with unlimited possibilities. No other language was possible. It was the most radical revolution since Monteverdi. Suddenly, all our familiar notions were abolished. Music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein.”

The work of Leibowitz helped the young composer to make his initial contributions to integral serialism, the total artistic control of all parameters of sound, including duration, pitch, and dynamics according to serial procedures. Messiaen’s ideas about modal rhythms also contributed to his development in this area and his future work.

            Milton Babbitt had been first in developing has own system of integral serialism, independently of his French counterpart, having published his book on set theory and music in 1946.  At this point the two were not yet aware of each others work. Boulez’s first works to use integral serialism are both from 1947: Three Compositions for Piano and Compositions for Four Instruments.            

While studying under Messiaen, Boulez was introduced to non-western world music. He found it very inspiring and spent a period of time hanging out in the museums where he studied Japanese and Balinese musical traditions, and African drumming.  Boulez later commented that, "I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time."
           
​ In 1946 the first public performances of Boulez’s compositions were given by pianist Yvette Grimaud. He kept himself busy living the art life, tutoring the son of his landlord in math to help make ends meet. He made further money playing the ondes Martentot, an early French electronic instrument designed by Maurice Martentot who had been inspired by the accidental sound of overlapping oscillators he had heard while working with military radios. Martentot wanted his instrument to mimic a cello and Messiaen had used it in his famous symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, written between 1946 and 1948. Boulez got a chance to improvise on the ondes Martentot as an accompanist to radio dramas. He also would organize the musicians in the orchestra pit at the Folies Bergère cabaret music hall. 

His experience as a conductor was furthered when actor Jean-Louis Barrault asked him to play the ondes for the production of Hamlet he was making with his wife, Madeline Reanud for their new company at the Théâtre Marigny. A strong working relationship was formed and he became the music director for their Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. A lot of the music he had to play for their productions was not to his taste, but it put some francs in his wallet and gave him the opportunity to compose in the evening. He got to write some of his own incidental music for the productions, tour South America and North America several times each, in addition to dates with the company around Europe. These experiences stood him well in stead when he embarked on the path of conductor as part of his musical life.

            In 1949 Boulez met John Cage when he came to Paris and helped arrange a private concert of the Americans Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. Afterwards the two began an intense correspondence that lasted for six-years. In 1951 Pierre Schaeffer hoste the first musique concrète workshop. Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Yvette Grimaud, André Hodeir and Monique Rollin all attended. Olivier Messiaen was assisted by Pierre Henry in creating a rhythmical work Timbres-durè es that was mad from a collection percussive sounds and short snippets.

            At the end of 1951, while on tour with the Renaud-Barrault company he visited New York for the first time, staying in Cage’s apartment. He was introduced to Igor Stravinksy and Edgard Vaèse. Cage was becoming more and more committed to chance operations in his work, and this was something Boulez could never get behind. Instead of adopting a “compose and let compose” attitude, Boulez withdrew from Cage, and later broke off their friendship completely.

In 1952 Boulez met Stockhausen who had come to study with Messiaen, and the pair hit it off, even though neither spoke the others language. Their friendship continued as both worked on pieces of musique concrète  at the GRM, with Boulez’s contribution being his Deux Études. In turn, Boulez came to Germany in July of that year for the summer courses at Darmstadt. Here he met Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and Henri Pousseur among others.

All of his experience, training and new found connections converged to force him into a role as an acerbic ambassador for the avantgarde. 

.:. .:. .:. ​This was in part, an excerpt from my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere. 

The celebration of the Pierre Boulez centennial will continue tomorrow in an exploration of the way he fused music and poetry together.