Pierre Boulez was a great letter writer and a frequent correspondent. Since the extent of his correspondence is vast and very little of it has been published in English, this chapter looks solely at Boulez’s epistolary exchanges with the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Elliott Carter. While the correspondence with Stockhausen is one of the richest of all, only a brief sense of this can be given here. The correspondences have been selected on the basis that all four composers were pivotally important for Boulez in different ways. He had important friendships with them. He valued and performed their music and they in turn were fulsome in their appreciation of his championing their music as well as of his achievements as a composer. This brief consideration shows how Boulez not only pursued his own musical path but also promoted the music of his composer friends.

This chapter deals with Boulez’s early knowledge of African, Asian and Latin American civilisations and musical cultures and the encounters and experiences which mediated it. The role of Messiaen’s harmony class, the training for an unrealised mission in Cambodia, the tours of South America with the Renaud-Barrault Theatre Company and the relationships with the ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner, from the post-war years to the beginning of the 1960s, are considered and contextualised with respect to the fields of contemporary French ethnology and ethnography. Boulez’s statements on ‘traditional cultures’ from his writings and correspondences are reconsidered against the background of colonial institutions and discourses and the transformations they were undergoing during the incipient phase of decolonisation. The composer’s analogical and comparatist habits, grounded in interwar models, are shown through the examples of his reflections on John Cage’s prepared piano (1949) and the staging of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1961).

The critique which Boulez addressed to Schoenberg had its origins in the musical-aesthetic debates which took place in France after the capitulation of 1870: Wagner, of course, but also Brahms. The opposition between Parisian and Viennese perspectives: Debussyan dualism (Wagner/Mussorgsky) versus Schoenbergian dualism (Wagner/Brahms). Half a century later, Boulez in turn, following Debussy’s model, proposed a renewed perspective (Schoenberg/Stravinsky) – substituting for the influence of the Brahmsian agogic, to which Schoenberg’s art still remained deeply attached, a rhythmic serialism deduced from the Stravinskyan model, following Messiaen’s attempts at formalisation. Hence the need to re-establish cultural origins according to cross-border perspectives.

Olivier Messiaen’s teaching exerted a notable and formative influence on Pierre Boulez’s work as it matured from 1944 to 1946. Many historiographies of the twentieth century provide accounts of this relatively brief teacher-student relationship, as well as of Boulez’s subsequent turn away from Messiaen’s music. This chapter provides a chronology of their much more enduring relationship, based primarily on music analysis and historical data rather than on both composers’ often mythologised testimonies about each other. It surveys Boulez’s time of study with Messiaen, as well as the significance of Messiaen in Boulez’s account of his own role in the historical progress of music after the Second World War. Finally, discussion of Boulez’s artistic cooperation with the pianist Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s second wife, leads into a presentation of Boulez as an important champion of Messiaen’s orchestral music.

This chapter discusses Boulez’s formal and informal music education, beginning with his early musical training and his formal studies in Lyon and Paris. In Paris, the importance of his informal education emerges, including his relationships with important mentors. His development as a conductor and lecturer on music is also considered. Although many would consider these professional activities, Boulez’s emergence as a writer, lecturer and conductor was accomplished during a period of extensive experimentation in composition. He reflected, in retrospect, on his mentors and related ‘apprenticeships’ and how they shaped his thinking as a musician. While Boulez was a lifelong autodidact, the discussion closes at the end of his formative period around 1960.

George Benjamin recalls his friendship with Pierre Boulez which lasted over thirty-five years. He pays homage to Boulez’s quite extraordinary musical abilities and remembers the exceptional lucidity and brilliance of his mind.

From his student days, Boulez was fascinated by music from outside Europe, which influenced his piano writing before 1945. He describes his encounter with them as ‘decisive for [his] form of musical thought’, from Le Marteau sans maître to sur Incises, by way of Pli selon pli, Rituel and Répons. Stimulated by Cage’s works for percussion and prepared piano, he investigated timbre and rhythm, leading to new forms of writing and new conceptions of form and time; appreciation of the importance of resonant instruments, autonomous rhythmics, heterophony ensuring the fusion between harmony and polyphony, opposition between ‘striated time’ and ‘smooth time’, ritual and sacred dimensions, and ‘plastic and physical’ (Artaud’s words regarding Balinese theatre), not ‘psychological’ expression. This interest in non-European music, influenced by Messiaen and Jolivet, is part of a French tradition and distinguishes Boulez’s approach from that of most of his contemporaries in the immediate post-war period.

The concept of serialism appears conspicuously in the academic literature on twentieth-century music in technical, theoretical, and philosophical contexts. These various contexts, expressed over the course of much of the twentieth century, expose differing connotations of the serial concept. Part I of this chapter explores the serial concept before 1945, reflecting on the multi-dimensional origins of the concept in Arnold Schoenberg’s earliest serial compositions and the significance of Olivier Messiaen’s distinctive serial conceptions prior to the Second World War. Part II explores the serial movement in Europe after 1945, the prominent roles of the journal Die Reihe and the Darmstadt New Music Courses, and the contrasting approaches and attitudes to serialism in the United States after 1945. Tensions between rupture and continuity on both sides of the Atlantic and divergent priorities in discourse about new music demonstrate that theorising serialism entails an understanding of its dynamic disposition, instability, and impermanence.