Pierre Boulez (1925 – 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer.
He was born in Montbrison in the Loire region of France, to a strict catholic steel engineer father, Léon Boulez, and a genial, loyal mother, Marcelle.
In his school years he took piano lessons and played in chamber ensembles, alongside an intensive schedule of advanced mathematics.
In spite of his father’s hopes he’d be an engineer, it was music that beat maths and increasingly became Boulez’s calling. Against his father’s wishes, he moved to Paris in 1943, and enrolled in Paris conservatoire to study harmony, with Georges Dandelot.
Outside the institution, he delved further into composition, including through counterpoint lessons with Andrée Vaurabourg and further studies with the renowned composer Olivier Messiaen, and René Leibowitz, who took him down the path of serialism, the strict 12-note technique devised by Arnold Schoenberg.
As Boulez developed his compositional style, he produced music that took on the harmonically rich, melodic qualities of Messiaen while exploring modernist concepts of serialism and aleatoric music, the latter of which incorporates controlled elements of chance.
His compositional output was compact and careful: he didn’t have a particularly large output because he would craft a work, and revisit it over time to evolve and perfect it.
Pierre Boulez’s key works include Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master), written for alto voice and six instruments, Pli selon pli (Fold by fold), again for solo voice (soprano) and orchestra, Memoriale a Bruno Maderna, Répons for chamber orchestra, and a selection of Piano Sonatas and other instrumental works.
Award-winning composer George Benhamin described Boulez as producing “a catalogue of wondrously luminous and scintillating works. Within them a rigorous compositional skill is coupled to an imagination of extraordinary aural refinement.”
Boulez was also an acclaimed conductor, and in his sixty-year career he was at the helm of some of the world’s biggest orchestras: he served as music director of the New York Philharmonic, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony and Cleveland Orchestras. He was a regular guest with others of the world’s best, including the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras.
He was a revered thinker and writer on music, and left a huge legacy with his work in all fields.
Accordingly, after Boulez died in 2016, the famous Philharmonie of Paris named its largest concert hall after him, and a new concert hall in Berlin, designed by famous architect Frank Gehry (who also made the Walt Disney Concert Hall) named the Pierre Boulez Saal was opened in 2017.
Did you know… Pierre Boulez wanted to enter Paris Conservatoire as a pianist, but didn’t pass the audition, instead enrolling in harmony.
