page_title: Pierre Boulez
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Pierre Boulez / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: La grande salle de la Philharmonie de Paris, peu avant l'inauguration de l'orgue dont on voit la console sur scène.
context_page_description: Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez CBE was a French composer, conductor, writer and founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of the post-war classical music world.
  Born in Montbrison in the Loire department of France, the son of an engineer, Boulez studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, and privately with Andrée Vaurabourg and René Leibowitz. He began his professional career in the late 1940s as music director of the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in Paris. As a young composer in the 1950s he quickly became a leading figure in avant-garde music, playing an important role in the development of integral serialism and controlled chance music. From the 1970s onwards he pioneered the electronic transformation of instrumental music in real time. His tendency to revise earlier compositions meant that his body of completed works was relatively small, but it included pieces regarded by many as landmarks of twentieth-century music, such as Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli and Répons.
context_section_description: An article published for Boulez's 80th birthday in The Guardian revealed that Boulez's fellow-composers had divided, and sometimes equivocal, views about him. According to George Benjamin "[Boulez] has produced a catalogue of wondrously luminous and scintillating works. Within them a rigorous compositional skill is coupled to an imagination of extraordinary aural refinement". For Oliver Knussen he was "a man who fashions his scores with the fanatical idealism of a medieval monk minutely illuminating volumes". By contrast, John Adams described him as "a mannerist, a niche composer, a master who worked with a very small hammer". Alexander Goehr thought that "[Boulez's] failures will be better than most people's successes".
  When Boulez died in January 2016 he left no will. During his lifetime, he entered into an agreement to place his musical and literary manuscripts with the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. In December 2017, the Bibliothèque nationale de France announced that the Boulez estate had made a substantial donation of Boulez's private papers and possessions not covered by the Sacher contract, including 220 metres of books, 50 metres of archives and correspondence, as well as scores, photographs, recordings and about 100 other objects.
  In October 2016 the large concert hall of the Philharmonie de Paris, for which Boulez campaigned for many years, was renamed the Grande salle Pierre Boulez. In March 2017 a new concert hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal, was opened in Berlin under the auspices of the Barenboim–Said Academy. It is a flexible space, designed by the architect Frank Gehry, which is home to a new Boulez Ensemble, made up of members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Berlin Staatskapelle and guest musicians from Berlin and around the world.
  Boulez's music continues to be taken up by interpreters of the next generation. In September 2016 Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic paired Boulez's Éclat with Mahler's 7th Symphony for an international tour, which included concerts in New York, Paris and London (at the BBC Proms). In May and June 2017 many of Boulez's major works were presented as part of the Vienna Konzerthaus 38th International Festival, concluding with performances of ...explosante-fixe... and Répons by Klangforum Wien, conducted by Baldur Brönnimann. In October 2017, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by Matthias Pinscher, gave four performances of Répons over two evenings at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, in a presentation conceived by Pierre Audi.  In September 2018 the first edition of the Pierre Boulez Biennial took place in Paris and Berlin, a joint initiative by the Philharmonie de Paris and the Staatskapelle Berlin under Daniel Barenboim. Performances of Boulez's music were set in the context of works which influenced him.
caption: Philharmonie de Paris: Grande salle Pierre Boulez
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