BY ANGUS DAVISON
Today we acknowledge the tragic passing of an incredible figure in the history of 20th Century music, Pierre Boulez.
Born in 1925, Boulez was a French composer and conductor. As a boy, he showed talent as a pianist and singer, as well as an aptitude for mathematics. He briefly pursued the latter at university before enrolling at the Paris Conservatoire where he studied harmony with Olivier Messian (1908 – 1992). During this time, he also took lessons in twelve-tone technique from Rene Leibowitz (1913 – 1972), a pupil of Anton Webern (1883 – 1945). This had a lasting impact, with Boulez famously quoted as saying: “Any musician who has not felt…the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is of no use”.
Boulez’s emergence as a composer was concurrent with the end of WWII. His drive to discover a new musical language appropriate for the post-war era defined much of his output. Along with fellow modernists like Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007) and Luigi Nono (1924 – 1990), Boulez wanted to make a clean break from the past and create a musical language uninfluenced by tradition or his own personal taste.
From 1950-52, he wrote a series of works in which pitch, rhythm, articulation and dynamics were all determined using serial principles, a practice which became known as ‘total serialism’. ‘Structures I’ was Boulez’s last total serialist work. He went on to compose a partner piece to ‘Structures I – Structures II’ and written more intuitively, it possessing hints of the elegant and typically French post-impressionist feel that pervades much of Boulez’s output.
Boulez will be sorely missed in the musical community and his impact on composition is sure to last for generations to come.
Image credit Joost Evers / Anefo (Nationaal Archief) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
