Modern music giant, Pierre Boulez dies aged 90
French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez has died Tuesday, January 5th. He was 90 years old. His family said the world-renowned musician died at his home in Baden-Baden, Germany. "For all those who met him and were able to appreciate his creative energy, his artistic vigour... will remain alive and strong," they said.
As well as being a world-famous composer and conductor he was a prolific writer and pianist and head of the music venue The Paris Philharmonic. Boulez was also the founder and former director of the Paris based Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique and was famed for his work alongside leading experimental composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen.
Boulez had been considered one of the most influential voices in contemporary music since the 1950s and, as a conductor, he was in demand on both sides of the Atlantic. One of his particular trademarks as a conductor was that he shunned the baton, always choosing to conduct with his hands. As a composer, Boulez's work was noted for its difficulty, with one of his most celebrated works, Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master), being inspired by the complexity and lack of formal artistic structure of surrealist poetry.
Born in the Loire region of France in 1925, he began his musical career at the Conservatoire in Paris, one of the world's most celebrated music schools. He graduated in 1945 and, still only 21, became musical director of the theatre company of Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud. During this period he composed violent early pieces, such as his first two piano sonatas and Livre pour Quatuor (for string quartet).
The orchestras he conducted include the New York, Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, the Cleveland Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Ensemble InterContemporain and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. In 2005 he began a collaboration with the Staatskapelle Berlin.Frank Zappa's fans surely remember 1984 album Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger. The late rock genius greatly admired the modernist maestro and Boulez always kept an open ear for new music. One of the giants of 20th century art music has left us.