Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez was born in Montbrison, France, in March 1925, and studied composition with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire after abandoning a mathematics degree. He emerged in the late 1940s as one of the most prominent voices of the post-war European avant-garde, both as a composer of strictly serial works and as a polemicist arguing for a clean break with what he regarded as the exhausted languages of the previous generation.

His conducting career developed alongside the composing. He became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971–75) and music director of the New York Philharmonic (1971–77), and founded IRCAM, the Paris-based institute for music research and computer-assisted composition, in 1977. The Ensemble intercontemporain followed in 1976. As a conductor he was particularly associated with the music of Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Stravinsky, Mahler, and the composers of the Second Viennese School.

Boulez was awarded numerous Grammy Awards across his recorded output and was a regular guest with the Vienna Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony in the later decades of his life. He died in Baden-Baden in January 2016. Music Preserved’s archive includes a selection of his work with British orchestras and ensembles.