Pierre Boulez has long been one of the leading voices of contemporary music, both in the development of total serialism, and as a lightning rod for criticism. Boulez' continued respected activity as a conductor has let him remain before the public in a positive light, despite relatively little enthusiasm for his complex modern style.
Boulez' music is one of the leading bodies of work in the field of total serialism, the application of twelve-tone practices to all musical parameters. His music revels in icy sonorities and a generally sparse texture, with large-scale structures elaborated over extended spans of time. His use of syntax and syntactic structures in general is among the most advanced, lending much of the characteristic flow to his music.
Boulez has composed little in recent years, being content mainly to orchestrate and revise the series of works he wrote earlier in his career. His output is correspondingly compact, and so his masterwork is usually identified tidily as Pli selon pli, based on texts of Mallarmé. A recording of Boulez' revised version:
While some value Boulez' youthful enthusiasm and consequently his earlier music (and recordings), the carefully chiseled lines and relationships which characterize the "stuff" of Boulez' musical argument seem to mature like fine wine. The above represents the quintessentially reflective interpretation of what was once seen as radical music.
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Todd M. McComb 2 July 2002