Pierre Boulez was born in Montbrison, near Lyons. At 17 he went to Paris to pursue his musical ambitions, studying with Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. Messiaen opened his mind to rhythmic irregularity, to sonic dazzle, and to Asian and African cultures. From Leibowitz, Schoenberg's chief apostle in Paris, he gained the passionate conviction that the future lay with serialism. In 1945, he became music director of a theater company run by Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud. Boulez soon became the intellectual leader of a European movement for new music, a position he maintained through his writings, regular teaching at the Darmstadt summer school, and conducting.

 

Boulez became a conductor as head of the Domaine Musical, a Parisian concert series he founded in 1954, and whose innovative mixed programming he took with him when he worked in the late 1950s with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and German radio orchestras. Boulez gave his first concert with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1961, conducted Berg's Wozzeck at the Paris Opera in 1963, and made his British orchestral debut in 1964, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

 

The combination of immense gifts and a vision for the musical future made him a sought-after leader in the field, and he was appointed concurrently principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and music director of the New York Philharmonic. He broadened his repertoire rapidly, but stayed committed to innovation, and at the end of his time in New York, founded and developed the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/ Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. After the establishment of IRCAM he drastically scaled down his conducting and began learning the new language of computer music. Although his tactics in advancing his agenda were sometimes harsh (including loud booing at concerts featuring Stravinsky’s neoclassical works), Boulez demonstrated an unwavering commitment to music. The composer stated “I’m not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.”