Remembering Modern Music Icon Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)

January 6, 2016, 1:39 PM · French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, modern music icon of the 20th and 21st century, died Tuesday at his home in Baden-Baden, Germany. He was 90.

Pierre Boulez, 1968.

As a composer, his works were distinctly abstract and modern; as a conductor he led orchestras all over the world and was known for his intellect and meticulous attention to detail. He was a tireless advocate for modern music, working to establish it in the repertoire of orchestras and as an institution, through his establishment of the Paris-based Institute for Music/Acoustic Research and Coordination (IRCAM).

As a student at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1940s, Boulez was heavily influenced by Olivier Messiaen. He also studied 12-tone composition with Rene Leibowitz. Known for his avante-garde compositions of the mid-20th century, his seminal work was arguably the serial-based Marteau Sans Maître (1955). He continued to compose throughout his life, with compositions including Pli Selon Pli; Second Piano Sonata (originally pronounced "unplayable," then recorded by Maurizio Pollini); Alongside Rituel -- and for violin, Anthèmes 1 (commissioned by the 1991 Menuhin Competition) and Anthèmes 2 (for violin and live electronics).

His conducting career began in the 1950s, and in 1971 he succeeded Leonard Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic, a post he kept for six years. He also was chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London during the 1970s. From 1991, he had regular residencies and guest conducting posts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which in 2006 named him conductor emeritus.

Boulez was also the founder and former director of the Paris-based Institute for Music/Acoustic Research and Coordination (IRCAM), in institute for the science of music, sound and electro-acoustical art music. Throughout his long career Boulez won 26 Grammy awards.

Here is a sampling of tributes to Pierre Boulez from around the world:

New York Times: "(French) Prime Minister Manuel Valls, also in a statement, said, “Audacity, innovation, creativity — that is what Pierre Boulez was for French music, which he helped shine everywhere in the world.”
National Public Radio: "I see music as a kind of continuity, like a big tree," Boulez told NPR in 2000. "Of course there are many branches, many different directions. I think music is in constant evolution, and there is nothing absolutely fixed and rigidly determined."
BBC News: "Boulez had been considered one of the most influential voices in the contemporary music since the 1950s and, as a conductor, he was in demand on both sides of the Atlantic. One of his particular trademarks as a conductor was that he shunned the baton, always choosing to conduct with his hands. As a composer, Boulez's work was noted for its difficulty, with one of his most celebrated works, Le Marteau Sans Maitre, being inspired by the complexity and lack of formal artistic structure of surrealist poetry."
Cleveland Plain Dealer: "...it is as a conductor that Boulez is perhaps most widely beloved, given his unmatched ability to illuminate musical scores of all types and eras. His prowess when it came to such French masters as Debussy and Ravel was unparalleled, but he was also a legendary interpreter of music by Stravinsky, Messiaen, Bartok, Mahler, the Second Viennese School, and any number of his own peers."
Chicago Tribune: "His work in Chicago was marked by much the same energy, questing intelligence and zeal to liberate the orchestra and its repertory from the rigid confines of hidebound tradition that marked his work elsewhere, including at the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra and BBC Symphony Orchestra, ensembles with which he was long associated."

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Violinist Michael Barenboim performs Pierre Boulez' Anthèmes 2 in 2012 at the BBC Proms: