Born in Montbrison, southern France, in 1925, he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen, René Leibowitz and Andrée Vaurabourg, the wife of Arthur Honegger. In 1946 he was appointed musical director of the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault and, supported by the Compagnie, he initiated the ‘Domaine Musical’ series of concerts. The first performance of Le Marteau sans maEtre at the iscm Festival in Baden-Baden in 1955 made him famous as a composer. He also began to be in considerable demand as a teacher of composition. In 1955, and for many years thereafter, he lectured at the Darmstadt Courses (his Sonata No.3 was premiered there in 1957). 1958 saw the premiere, in Hamburg, of his Deux Improvisations sur Mallarmé. In later years, he devoted much time to teaching and conducting. Between 1960 and 1963 he was professor of composition at the Musikakademie in Basel. In 1963 he was visiting lecturer at Harvard University. In 1966 he was entrusted with Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival and a year later became a guest conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1971–75 he was principal conductor of the bbc Symphony Orchestra and in 1971–77 also led the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1975 he founded Ensemble InterContemporain. Two years later he established ircam and remained its director until 1991.
Boulez’s honours include the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (1979), the French National Award of Merit (1980), the Ring of Honour of the City of Vienna (1989), doctorates from the University of Frankfurt (1991) and Connecticut College (1998), the Theodor W. Adorno Prize of the City of Frankfurt (1992), a Grammy in the category of classical contemporary music for Répons, (2002), as well as the Israeli Wolf Prize for the Arts (2000).
Boulez’s 75th birthday in 2000 was marked with a wide range of concerts featuring his music in major centres, including London, New York, Paris and Vienna. In 2001 Boulez inaugurated the Hungarian Year in France with a series of performances of Bartók’s works, with the participation of Maurizio Pollini, Gil Shaham and Ensemble Inter-Contemporain. He also conducted workshops on his Le Marteau sans maEtre at New York’s Carnegie Hall. In 2002 he was composer-in-residence at Lucerne Festival, giving workshops for conductors and concerts with the bbc Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic and Ensemble InterContemporain.

Selected works: Le Marteau sans maEtre for alto and six instrumets (1953–55); Piano Sonata No. 3 (1955–57); Pli selon pli – portrait de Mallarmé for soprano and orchestra (1958–62); Poésie pour pouvoir for mixed choir, chamber orchestra, large orchestra and electronic devices (1958, new version 1982–83); Figures–Doubles–Prismes for orchestra (1964); Éclat for orchestra (1965); Domaines for clarinet and 21 instruments (1968–69); ...explosante-fixe... for ensemble and live electronics (1972–74); Rituel ‘in memoriam Bruno Maderna’ (1975); Messagesquisses for cello principale and six cellos (1976–77); Notations I–IV for orchestra (1978); Répons for six soloists, chamber orchestra, computer sounds and live electronics (1981); Notations V–XII for orchestra (1984); Mémoriale (...explosante-fixe...Originel) for solo flute and chamber ensemble (1985); Dérive 2 for 11 performers (1992), Dérive 2 for 11 instruments (1988/2001), AnthŹmes 1 for violin (1991–92), ...explosante-fixe... for flutes (midi), ensemble and live electronics (1991/93), Incises for piano (1994/2001), sur Incises for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists (1996–98), AnthŹmes 2 for violin and live electronics (1997).

Notations I–IV, VII
Boulez composed the original Notations for piano in 1945, when the twenty-year-old composer was still a student of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. He wrote twelve pieces, each twelve measures long (the number was central to the manifesto of the time). These Notations are concise, highly polished studies, each a precise and taut exploration of a single musical idea. Although Boulez quickly put them aside and moved on to greater challenges, they are among the works with which he opened a new chapter in the history of music.
During the summer of 1976, Boulez began to think about these tiny pieces. He had been hoping to write something that would reflect what he had absorbed while conducting a wide repertory of music with many orchestras (he was Music Director of the New York Philharmonic at the time). ‘I wanted to put my orchestral experience into a work where I had nothing to compose, but only to work on ideas,’ he later said, in a videotaped conversation with Daniel Barenboim made in Germany in 1991, and so he turned to the Notations he had written as a student more than thirty years before. ‘At first, the idea of transcribing these pieces was just to transcribe them,’ Boulez continues.
‘But as it was conceived for a big orchestra – because I needed a large orchestra for colour, for timbre, for massive effects – the pieces for piano were much too short. You cannot have a really massive orchestra for pieces which are only twenty or thirty seconds long. Therefore I began to think about it. The first sketch was just orchestration. And then when I was finished with four or five pieces, I thought: It’s not enough, I must really enlarge the original ideas. If I may make a comparison, I read around the same time that in some Egyptian tombs they found corn seeds, and they put these seeds in water and in earth, and the seed produced again. I think that’s a little bit of the process here: the seeds were there, far away, and then I began to conceive these as seeds for new thinking, for new development. And so it began.’

Boulez finished the first four Notations for orchestra in 1978. They were premiered on 18 June 1980 in Paris, by the Orchestre de Paris conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The pieces bear the following tempo markings: I. Modéré – Fantasque; II. Rhythmique; III. Tr?s modéré; IV. Tr?s vif. Strident. The first and third pieces are unstable in tempo and mercurial in texture, while the second and fourth are fixed in pulse and feature relatively homophonic types of rhythmic treatment, the last piece being enlivened by kaleidoscopic colour-changes in the percussion parts. Boulez has changed the sequence of Notations’ four pieces so that the original No. 4 (Rhythmique) becomes No. 2; consequently, the original No. 2 (Tr?s vif) is played as No. 4. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra subsequently commissioned Notations V – VIII. Notations VII, written in 1997, is the first one that Boulez has finished. It is among the slower, and therefore longer, of the original piano pieces. Its orchestral version lasts about 8 minutes. Like the original piano work, it is marked Hiératique – formal, stylized. It is to be played slowly, steadily, ‘without rigidity’.

(adapted from programme notes by
Phillip Huscher and Benjamin Folkman)