Pierre Boulez Studies

Pierre Boulez is considered one of the most important composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This collection explores his influence, legacy, reception and works, shedding new light on Boulez’s music and its historical and cultural contexts. In two sections that focus firstly on the context of the 1940s and 1950s and secondly on the development of the composer’s style, the contributors address recurring themes such as Boulez’s approach to the serial principle and the related issues of form and large-scale structure. Featuring excerpts from Boulez’s correspondence with a range of his contemporaries here published for the first time, the book illuminates both Boulez’s relationship with them and his thinking concerning the challenges which confronted both him and other leading figures of the European avant-garde. In a third and final section, three chapters examine Boulez’s relationship with audiences in the UK, and the development of the appreciation of his music.