Pierre Boulez
*26.03.1925

Future Performances

Dérive 1
29.05.2012, London (GB)
12 Notations
01.06.2012, Essen (D)
... explosante-fixe ...
08.06.2012, New York (USA)
... explosante-fixe ...
09.06.2012, New York (USA)
Messagesquisse
15.06.2012, Paris (F)

News

  • Pierre Boulez
    Pierre Boulez Interview
    Pierre Boulez Interview
    For the first issue of our new newsletter Musikblätter, Pierre Boulez spoke to Universal Edition ab [...]
  • Pierre Boulez
    Pierre Boulez - Tombeau
    Pierre Boulez - Tombeau
    Boulez' Tombeau is now available in a facsimile edition, including all manuscript versions and corre [...]

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Pierre Boulez

The Composer

Born in Montbrison/Loire on 26 March 1925, Pierre Boulez is a composer, conductor, thinker, a motor of international musical life, an emblematic figure in post-war European, indeed, world culture.

A living classic. Ever since the 1950’s, composers around the world have followed with curiosity what he was writing, to see if they could adapt his ideas in their own music or to reject them in their search for an idiom they could call their own. In 1957, György Kurtág arrived in Paris with the goal to compose something he could show to Boulez (in the end, he left without a work worthy of being presented). The music the French composer has written ever since the late 1940’s [...]

About the Music

For the first issue of our new newsletter Musikblätter, Pierre Boulez spoke to Universal Edition about his own music.

“Sometimes you discover yourself”

Mr. Boulez, for just a brief moment, at the beginning of the 1950s, it seemed that serial methods were asking to be extended across every element of composition. This represented the thrilling possibility that a new musical system might be found, but there was also the anxiety that music’s creation would become as automated as heavy industry – allowing masterpieces to be made without a master, merely by the hammer of technology. But this sort of total organisation proved to be impossible – luckily so, one might say. [...]

10 of 52 Works

Anthèmes 1 | for violin 1992
Anthèmes 2 | for violin and live electronics 1997
Anthèmes 2 | for viola and live electronics 2008
Cummings ist der Dichter | for 16 solo voices or mixed choir and instruments 1986
Dérive 1 | for 6 instruments 1984
Dérive 2 | for 11 instruments 2006
Dialogue de l'ombre double | for clarinet and tape 1984
Domaines | for clarinet 1969
Domaines | for clarinet and orchestra 1969
Don | No. 1 from "Pli selon pli" (Portrait de Mallarmé) | for soprano and orche [...] 1989

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