La musique, c’est moi!

"Messiaen's Three Little Liturgies is brothel music and his Turangalîla Symphony makes you want to vomit." He is a lusty polemicist, but there is a relentless seriousness behind it, with which the composer, conductor and institution inventor Pierre Boulez always wanted to make a difference. That is why he has also written texts from the very beginning, for specialist journals, daily newspapers or program booklets, as well as giving lectures; the list of his writings is almost as long as the list of his compositions. The second motive for writing is a public introspection as a composer. In his search for the future potential of the past, where he seeks both models and confirmation of his own ideas, Boulez analyzed the masterpieces of his predecessors and created brilliant portraits of Berlioz, Wagner and Debussy. Boulez also found compositional inspiration in poetry, particularly in Mallarmé and Joyce, or in painting, especially in Paul Klee, about whom he wrote a book. From all this emerges a collection of strict laws that determine how music must be composed: complex, coherent and controlled in every detail. Anyone who composes differently is declared by Boulez to be an incompetent dilettante, from Ives to Cage, from Shostakovich to Scelsi. Not many escape his condemnation, not even Schubert.

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