Pierre Boulez

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: Bradshaw, Susan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 07.01.2016
• Subjects: Boulez, Pierre
• ISSN: 0951-9467

His discovery, in the mid-1950s, of Stphane Mallarm, the poet haunted by fear of a decline in creativity, came at a moment when his own inability to recapture the inspiration of his early years was at its height - providing much-needed reassurance and endorsing the concept of the unfinished work. Although in the end this was to prove no more beneficial for [Pierre Boulez] than for Mallarm, at least it encouraged him to proceed during the barren years, bridging the unselfconscious clan of the leader of the avant garde and the more consciously acquired reputation of the father figure to succeeding generations. These were years of sometimes fruitless struggle, during which he was sustained only by the example of Mallarm's magnificent but ultimately sterile project of the unfinished "Livre". In the event, it is perhaps ironic that the only completed work to emerge from this period was Pli selon pli (1957-58) - Boulez's musical portrait of Mallarm. His later involvement with yet another attempt to change the course of events, by bringing electronic music under his personal jurisdiction at IRCAM (the music and science research institute next to the Centre Pompidou in Paris) seemed finally to spark off a new period of creativity - despite the time-consuming effort involved in founding, funding, and organising an independently conceived project on a scale and with an influence till then unprecedented. Then-president Georges Pompidou had asked Boulez to found the institution in 1970; it finally opened, under Boulez's charge, in 1977.