Pierre Boulez

Tom Stewart celebrates a composer, conductor and musical iconoclast for whom breaking from tradition was not an option but a must

- MATT HERRING

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG IS DEAD is the title of a 1951 essay by Pierre Boulez, who would have turned 100 this month. Schoenberg had indeed just died, but Boulez’s memorial pulled no punches. While the Austrian’s 12-tone method had effectively liberated composers from the system of keys that had governed them for some four centuries, he had flinched, Boulez thought, before he had finished the job. The responsibility now fell to Boulez and others of his generation, he argued, to finish what Schoenberg had started.

Born in Montbrison, close to Lyon, Boulez was the last of the 20th-century musical vanguard and his legacy is perhaps the most enduring, as he led a furious, focused charge on behalf of contemporary classical music that still resonates loudly today. Not for him Stockhausen’s extra-terrestrial ramblings, Xenakis’s architecture side hustle or even Ligeti’s easy sense of humour. Although Boulez did not share the religious devotion of his one-time teacher Olivier Messiaen, his music has just as much proselytising fervour, only the ‘God’ is music itself.

Boulez’s work as a composer, conductor, theorist and advocate for new music was all united by a rigour that appears never to have had a day off. His music is highly complex, a challenge for performers and listeners alike – the key is to enjoy it for its blistering energy and glittering power. One way into Boulez’s scores is to think of their composer as a sort of descendent of Ravel, albeit one driven by an indefatigable modernist urge. Both men were inscrutable, obscure characters who wrote meticulous, highly precise music that was still full of danger and sensuality.