World-renowned conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, considered one of the most influential voices in contemporary classical music, has died aged 90, his family said on Wednesday.
World-renowned conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, considered one of the most influential voices in contemporary classical music, has died aged 90, his family said on Wednesday.
“For all those who knew him and who appreciated his creative energy, his artistic rigour, his openne-ss and his generosity, his presence will remain alive and intense,” the family sa-id in a statement from the Philharmonie de Paris, which Boulez spearheaded. As well as being an ex-pert interpreter of the works of Stravinsky, Scho-enberg and Scriabin, the Frenchman found himself, with Karlheinz Stockhau-sen, a seminal figure in the mid-20th century experimental avant-garde.
Later in the 20th century, he would push back the frontiers of music still further with computer-generated music at his Paris studio.
Born in 1925 in the small provincial town of Montbrison, in central France, Boulez studied under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire during the war years, where he was influenced by his teacher’s own abstract, atonal style with irregular rhythm.
A frequent guest conductor for great orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, Boulez famously shunned the baton, always conducting with his hands.
He led the BBC Symphony Orchestra and from 1971-77 was music director of the New York Philharmonic, where he favoured contemporary works over the classics beloved by his acclaimed predecessor Leonard Bernstein.
It was his exasperation with the relative conservatism of the French musical world that prompted Boulez to make his home in the southwestern German city of Baden-Baden in the early 1960s, where he eventually died.
Boulez’s compositions were noted for their difficulty, with one of his defining works, “Le Marteau Sans Maitre” (“The Hammer Without a Master”), drawing inspiration from surrealist poetry and lacking any bass line.
French President Francois Hollande offered his condolences to Boulez’s family and hailed someone who “made French music shine throughout the world.”
“As a composer and conductor, he always reflected his era,” said Hollande.
