Pierre Boulez. Photo by Philippe Gontier.
In Tuesday’s (4/8) New York Times, Joshua Barone writes, “In the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris, next to the Centre Pompidou, you’ll find IRCAM, the sound research center that [Pierre] Boulez founded in the 1970s…. On the outskirts of the city, at Parc de la Villette, his Cité de la Musique complex produces concerts, exhibitions and classes, a factory of culture where industrial slaughterhouses once sprawled. The most recent addition to the Cité de la Musique is the Philharmonie de Paris, a concert hall whose main auditorium is named after Boulez. It was completed in 2015, a year before his death, at 90, but he never got to see it. Still, it stands today as a kind of monument to this titan of the past century’s music, a composer, conductor, theorist and a canny political force…. A hundred years after his birth, and nearly a decade since his death, his legacy isn’t necessarily as a composer…. His music, like that of his peers from the post-World War II generation of high modernists, like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, is brilliant but out of fashion, and difficult to program…. Boulez changed how we think about music itself: how it is created, performed and heard, as well as where these things happen.”
