Pierre Boulez at 100: Pt. III: Conductivity at IRCAM

A couple of days ago on March 26 2025 at the time of this writing, the centennial celebration of serialist defender, Pierre Boulez began. He was an ambassador of the avantgarde, and a celebrator of poetry. In today's post we will explore his legacy as a conductor and as the creative force who behind the establishment of one of the worlds great sonic laboratories of sound innovation, IRCAM. The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music. 

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At the end of the 1950s Boulez had left Paris for Baden-Baden where he had scored a gig as composer in residence with the South-West German Radio Orchestra. Part of his work consisted of conducting smaller concerts. He also had access to an electronic studio where he set to work on a new piece, Poesie Pour Pouvoir, for tape and three orchestras. Baden-Baden would become his home, and he eventually bought a villa there, a place of refuge to return to after his various engagements that took him around the world and on extended stays in London and New York. His experience conducting for the Théâtre Marigny, had sharpened his skills in this area, making it all possible.

Boulez had gained some experience as a conductor in his early days as a pit boss at the Folies Bergère. He gained further experience when he conducted the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra when he was on tour with his friend Jean-Louis Barrault. In 1959 he was able to get further out of the mold of conducting incidental music for theater and get down to the business he was about: the promotion of avantgarde music.

The break came when he replaced the conductor Hans Rosbaud who was sick, and a replacement was needed in short notice for a program of contemprary music at the Aix-en-Provence and Donaueschingen Festivals. Four years later he had the opportunity to conduct Orchestre National de France for their fiftieth anniversary performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the piece had been first been premiered to the shock of the audience. Conducting suited Boulez as an activity for his energies and he went on to lead performances of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. This was followed by him conducting Wagner’s Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde.

In the 1970s Boulez had a triple coup in his career. The first part of his tripartite attack for avantgarde domination involved his becoming conductor and musical director the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Then second part came after Leonard Bernstein’s tenure as conductor of the New York Philharmonic was over, and Boulez was offered the opportunity to replace him. He felt that through innovative programming, he would be able to remold the minds of music goers in both London and New York.
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Boulez was also fond of getting people out of stuffy concert halls to experience classical and contemporary music in unusual places. In London he gave a concert at the Roundhouse which was a former railway turntable shed, and in Greenwich Village he gave more informal performances during a series called “Prospective Encounters.” When getting out of the hall wasn’t possible he did what he could to transform the experience inside the established venue. At Avery Fisher Hall in New York he started a series of “Rug Concerts” where the seats were removed and the audience was allowed to sprawl out on the floor. Boulez wanted "to create a feeling that we are all, audience, players and myself, taking part in an act of exploration".
The third prong came when he was asked back by the President of France to come back to his home country and set up a musical research center.

Back in 1966, Pierre Boulez had proposed a total reorganization of French musical life to André Malraux, the Minister of Culture. Malraux rebuffed Boulez when he appointed Marcel Landowski, who was much more conservative in his tastes and programs, as head of music at the Ministry of Culture. Boulez, who had been known for his tendency to express himself as an epic jerk, was outraged. In an article he wrote for the French magazine Nouvel Observateur, he announced that he was “going on strike with regard to any aspect of official music in France.”

When confronted about this aspect of his reputation later in life, Boulez said, “Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.”

So when Boulez was asked by French President Georges Pompidou to set up an institute dedicated to researching acoustics, music, and computer technology, he was quick to recant his strike with regards to official music in France and get busy with work. This was the beginning of the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique, or the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM). The space was built next to, and linked institutionally to, the Centre George Pomidou cultural complex in Paris, and official work started in 1973. 

​Boulez modeled the institute after the Bauhaus, the famed interdisciplinary school of art in Germany that provided a meeting ground for artists and scientists from 1919 to 1933. His vision for the institute was to bring together musicians, composers, scientists, and developers of technology. In a publicity piece for IRCAM he wrote: 

The creator’s intuition alone is powerless to provide a comprehensive translation of musical invention. It is thus necessary for him to collaborate with the scientific research worker… The musician must assimilate a certain scientific knowledge, making it an integral part of his creative imagination...at educational meetings scientists and musician’s will become familiar with one another’s point of view and approach. In this way we hope to forge a kind of common language that hardly exists at present. 

To bring his vision into reality, he needed the help of those at the forefront of computer music. To that end, Boulez brought Max Mathews on board as a scientific advisor to the IRCAM project, and he served in that capacity for six years between 1974 and 1980. Mathews’ old friend Jean-Claude Risset was hired to direct IRCAM’s computer department, which he did between 1975 and 1979. The work that their colleague John Chowning was doing back in California was also crucial to the success of the institute, and he was tapped as a further resource.

Putting together IRCAM was a project that went on for almost a decade before it was fully up and running, and from 1970 to 1977 most of the work done was the preliminary planning, organization, and building of the vessel that would house the musical laboratory. Unlike the BBC or the West German Radio, it did not have the advantage of being part of an existing institution, so everything, including the space, had to be built from scratch. There were several existing templates for electronic music and research that IRCAM could have followed, and it chose the American template, modeled on the work done at Bell Labs and the CCRMA, when Max Mathews was asked to be the scientific director of IRCAM in 1975. 

​In 1975 Pierre Boulez spent two weeks at the CCRMA, studying all they were getting up to and forging a lasting connection with IRCAM. One of the results was that a lot of the American computer workers helped set up IRCAM’s initial system until the French had enough people trained in the technology themselves. Working with the same systems meant those used at each institution were compatible with each other, enabling extensive back and forth visitations between CCRMA and IRCAM staff. James Moorer did a residence at IRCAM, and John Chowning went on to become a guest artist there on multiple occasions. Chowning’s “Phoné” is a case in point of the cross collaboration between the two institutes.

Much of the space for IRCAM was built below ground, beneath the Place Igor Stravinsky in Paris, where the boisterous noise of the city streets above wouldn’t penetrate. The underground laboratories were first inaugurated 1978 and contained eight recording studios, eight laboratories, and an anechoic chamber, plus various offices and department spaces. Though it has since been reorganized with the passing of the years, it was first arranged into five departments, each under its own composer-director, with Boulez as the tutelary head. These departments were Electro-Acoustics, Pedagogy, Computers, Instruments, and Voice, as well as a department called Diagonal that coordinated between the other departments that largely followed their own research and creative interests.  

The piece de resistance at IRCAM is the large Espace de Projection, also known as Espro, a modular concert hall whose acoustics can be changed according to the temperament and design of the composers and musicians working there. The Espro space was created under the direction of Boulez and features a system of “boxes in boxes” to create the variable acoustics. When the space was first opened, Boulez said it was “really not a concert hall, but it can project sound, light, audiovisual events, all possible events that are not necessarily related to traditional instruments.” The position of the ceilings can be moved to change the volume of the room, and the walls and ceilings have panels that are made of rotatable prismatic modules that each have three faces, one for absorbing, another for reflecting, and one for diffusing sound. These so-called “periacts” can be changed on the spot.

Pierre Boulez was busy as all get-out in the 1970s. If it wasn’t enough to be developing IRCAM, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1971 to 1975, and conducting the New York Philharmonic from 1971 to 1978, he also founded the Ensemble intercontemporain (EIC) in 1976. The EIC was built up with support from French Minister of Culture Michel Guy and the British arts administrator Nicholas Snowman. Boulez wanted to cultivate a group of musicians dedicated to performing contemporary music, and EIC would have a strong working relationship with IRCAM, so that musicians were available to play compositions made in conjunction with the institute inside the Espro, as well as tour and make recordings. This of course included Boulez’s own compositions as he had the energy to return to writing music as his conducting activities slowed down.

Though Boulez had made a piece of musique concrète at GRM, and had experimented with tape music with “Poesie Pour Pouvoir,” these were not his main interests in avant-garde music. What concerned Boulez was the live transformation of acoustic sound electronically. He felt that recordings, played in a concert hall, were like going to listen to a dead piece of music. The transformation of live sound was what held promise in his mind. While the possibility for the live transformation of acoustic sounds had been explored by Stockhausen and Cage, these did not have the same precision that was now available with the computers and programs created at CCRMA and IRCAM.  
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“Répons” was created in various versions between 1980 and 1984. The instrumental ensemble is placed in the middle of the hall, while six soloists are placed at various points around the audience, with the six loudspeakers facing the listeners. The solo instruments include two pianos, harp, cimbalom, vibraphone, and glockenspiel or xylophone, and it is these instruments that give “Répons” much of its color. Boulez has said that the title of the work is a portmanteau of words whose meaning is dialogue and response, which indicates the way the instrumental music gets transformed by computers, which take the acoustic music and change it with effects or other treatments and project it through the performance space via the loudspeakers. In “Répons,” the harp, vibraphone, and piano create glittering sparkles that illuminate the space, fulfilling Boulez’s dream of the live electronic metamorphosis of acoustic sound. 

.:. .:. .:. ​ To read the more from the story of IRCAM and other innovative sonic laboratories, be sure to pick up a copy of, 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. 

If you missed the first parts of this sequence on the work of Boulez you can find parts I and II below:

Pierre Boulez: Part I: Musical Formations

Pierre Boulez: Part II: Sound Word Image