Home Page Jollity's Loners This page updated Sunday, May 21, 2017 One of our dogs, Zelda, is still missing, I put her story at the bottom of this page. These are some of the most expressive and musical sounds out there, and there's no other one-stop sample player or. The purpose of this page is to make it easy for printing the entire listing of composers (so no fancy colors here but only black letters, and hyperlinks are just.
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Pierre Boulez - Wikipedia. This article is about the French composer/conductor. For the French novelist, see Pierre Boulle.
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez. CBE (French: . He was one of the dominant figures of the post- war classical music world. Born in Montbrison in the Loire department of France, the son of an engineer, Boulez studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, and privately with Andr. He began his professional career in the late 1. Music Director of the Renaud- Barrault theatre company in Paris.
As a young composer in the 1. From the 1. 97. 0s onwards he pioneered the electronic transformation of instrumental music in real time. His tendency to revise earlier compositions meant that his body of completed works was relatively small, but it included pieces regarded by many as landmarks of twentieth- century music, such as Le Marteau sans ma. His commitment to the modernist project and the trenchant, polemical tone in which he expressed his views on music led some to criticise him as a dogmatist, a reputation which softened in later years. In parallel with his activities as a composer Boulez became one of the most prominent conductors of his generation.
In a career lasting more than sixty years he held the positions of Chief Conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Principal Guest Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. He made frequent guest appearances with many of the world's other great orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. He was particularly known for his performances of the music of the first half of the twentieth- century—including Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartok, and the Second Viennese School—as well as that of his contemporaries, such as Ligeti, Berio and Carter. His work in the opera house included the Jahrhundertring—the production of Wagner's Ring cycle for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival—and the world premiere of the three- act version of Alban Berg's Lulu.
His recorded legacy is extensive and he received 2. Grammy Awards. He founded a number of musical institutions in Paris, including the Domaine Musical, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Cit. The family prospered, moving in 1. Tupinerie, where Boulez was born, to a comfortable detached house at 4. Alsace- Lorraine, where he spent most of his childhood.
As a child he took piano lessons, played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. Louis, a boarding school in nearby St. The following year he took courses in advanced mathematics at the University of Lyon which his father hoped would prepare him for a career in engineering. The city became a centre of the resistance and Boulez later recalled the terrible reprisals: . It was not a gentle time, and nothing to eat, and terribly cold. Impressed by his ability, she persuaded L.
Boulez was determined to pursue a career in music. The following year, with his sister's support in the face of opposition from his father, he studied the piano and harmony privately with Lionel de Pachmann (son of the pianist Vladimir). He greatly enjoyed working with her and she remembered him as an exceptional student, using his exercises as models in advanced counterpoint until the end of her teaching career. The piece was a revelation to him and he organised a group of fellow students to take private lessons with Leibowitz. It was here that he first studied twelve- tone technique and discovered the music of Webern.
In the autumn he entered Simone Pl. It gives a different feeling of time.”.
Honegger suggested Boulez. He arranged and conducted incidental music, mostly by composers with whom he had little affinity (such as Milhaud and Tchaikovsky), but it gave him the chance to work with professional musicians, whilst leaving him time to compose during the day. His friendship with Cage began in 1.
Cage was visiting Paris. Cage introduced Boulez to two publishers (Heugel and Amphion) who agreed to take his recent pieces; Boulez helped to arrange a private performance of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.
In 1. 95. 2 Stockhausen arrived in Paris to study with Messiaen. We talked about music all the time—in a way I've never talked about it with anyone else.
As Alex Ross observed: . Amid the confusion of postwar life, with so many truths discredited, his certitude was reassuring. As well as Stockhausen, Boulez was in contact there with other composers who would become significant figures in contemporary music, including Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Henri Pousseur. According to Scott Burnham, the so- called Darmstadt School composers created a style that, for a time, existed as an antidote to music of nationalist fervour; an international style that could not be co- opted as propaganda in the way that the Nazis had used, for example, the music of Beethoven.
Towards the end of that year a tour with the Renaud- Barrault company took him to New York for the first time, where he met Stravinsky and Var. The concerts focussed initially on three areas: pre- war classics still unfamiliar in Paris (such as Bartok and Webern), works by the new generation (Stockhausen, Nono) and neglected masters from the past (Machaut, Gesualdo)—although for practical reasons the last category fell away in subsequent seasons.
The theatre was small, the wooden seats hard and the programmes inordinately long, yet the concerts were an immediate success. Crowds of young people cram in together for standing room.
The concerts moved to the Salle Gaveau (1. Th. Boulez remained director until 1.
Gilbert Amy succeeded him. A nine- movement cycle for alto voice and instrumental ensemble based on poems by Ren. Boulez dined several times with the Stravinskys and (according to Robert Craft) . Poorly planned by Boulez and nervously conducted by Stravinsky, the performance broke down more than once. According to Glock, who sat between Stravinsky and Boulez at dinner afterwards, . It received its premiere in Donaueschingen in October 1.
His first engagement as an orchestral conductor had been in 1. Venezuelan Symphony Orchestra whilst on tour with the Renaud- Barrault company.
His breakthrough came in 1. Hans Rosbaud at short notice in demanding programmes of 2. Aix- en- Provence and Donaueschingen Festivals, culminating in a performance of Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin which Boulez remembered as . Photo by Peter Hastings.
Courtesy of the Cleveland Orchestra Archives. That same year he conducted his first opera, Berg’s Wozzeck at the Op. The conditions were exceptional, with thirty orchestral rehearsals instead of the usual three or four and the critical response was unanimously favourable. Boulez and Yvonne Loriod gave the premiere at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in October 1. In January 1. 96. William Glock, Controller of Music at the BBC, announced his appointment as Chief Conductor. Glock was dismayed and tried to persuade him that accepting the New York position would detract both from his work in London and his ability to compose but Boulez could not resist the opportunity (as Glock put it) .
The dependence on a subscription audience limited his programming. He introduced more key works from the first half of the twentieth- century and, with earlier repertoire, sought out less well- known pieces: in the 1. Sch. The players admired his musicianship but came to regard him as dry and unemotional by comparison with Bernstein, although it was widely accepted that he improved the standard of playing. With the resources of the BBC behind him he could be more uncompromising in his choice of repertoire. He conducted works by the younger generation of British composers—such as Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies—but Britten and Tippett were absent from his programmes.