Pierre Boulez Studies

Description

Pierre Boulez is acknowledged as one of the most important composers in contemporary musical life. This collection explores his works, influence, reception and legacy, shedding new light on Boulez's music and its historical and cultural contexts. In two sections that focus firstly on the context of the 1940s and 1950s, and secondly on the development of the composer's style, the contributors address recurring themes such as Boulez's approach to the serial principle and the related issues of form and large-scale structure. Featuring excerpts from Boulez's correspondence with a range of his contemporaries here published for the first time, the book illuminates both Boulez's relationship with them and his thinking concerning the challenges which confronted both him and other leading figures of the European avant-garde. In the final section, three chapters examine Boulez's relationship with audiences in the United Kingdom, and the development of the appreciation of his music.

Edward Campbell is senior lecturer in music at the University of Aberdeen and a member of the University's Centre for Modern Thought. He specialises in contemporary European art music and aesthetics. He is the author of the books Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge, 2010) and Music after Deleuze (2013). Peter O'Hagan is a pianist specialising in the performance of contemporary music. He has performed Boulez's piano works at festivals in the UK and abroad, and in 2008 gave the London premiere of the unpublished three-movement version of the Third Sonata at Wigmore Hall with the composer's authorisation. He has recently completed a monograph, Pierre Boulez and the Piano (2016).

'By bringing together a substantial amount of recent scholarship in a highly accessible format, this collection of essays should open up numerous avenues for exploration and have a significant impact on future research in this area. ... The availability of groundbreaking scholarship that had previously only been published in other languages to the general English-speaking public will hopefully have an impact, broadening and refining understanding of his music. The diverse readership that this book targets through the accessibility of its content is clearly beneficial to its wider aim of disseminating scholarship on this relatively understudied repertoire.' Catherine Losada, Music Theory Spectrum