Pierre Boulez: The Formative Years

As an integral figure in twentieth-century music, Pierre Boulez innovated new musical ideas through extraordinary creative processes. His formative years tracked his compositional development from his confrontations with serialism to drafting one of his major works, Pli selon pli, in the early 1960s. Part biography, part survey, Pierre Boulez: The Formative Years situates Boulez and his compositions among a complex network of influences. To best understand Boulez's creative process, author Joseph R. Salem organizes the book into three parts. First, Boulez's early life, training, and education provide biographical context for his career. Salem provides a fresh, revisionist perspective of the composer's life by drawing upon a mix of primary and secondary sources. Second, the brunt of the biography situates Boulez's musical works and experimentation among a host of contextual contexts. In place of scores and complicated musical analyses, Salem employs sketches as a visual metonym. The sketches denote Boulez's continual ability to self-reform, accept feedback from his peers, mentors, and family members, and revitalize old material. Third, Boulez's legacy is associated with contemporaneous aesthetic movements and artistic challenges. While his creative processes undoubtedly influenced music today, Boulez remains a controversial, even taboo, figure among contemporary musicians and audiences. A book that both celebrates and critiques its subject, The Formative Years urges a reconsideration of narratives and discussions surrounding Boulez's life and works.

Table of Contents:
Part I: A Path Toward Integrating Serialism Acknowledgements Notes on Sources and Abbreviations Preface Introduction A Short Primer on Boulez's Sketch Types and Procedures Chapter 1: From Pianist to Composer Rural Roots Transitioning to Paris Chapter 2: Student Efforts <"Influences> " versus <"Teachers> " Specters of Messiaen Leibowitz and Dodecaphony The Emergence of an Original Voice Chapter 3: Conventional Titles, Unconventional Forms Structuralism, Surrealism, Schloezer, and Char The Sonatine for flute and piano The First Piano Sonata Souvtchinsky, Souris, and the Second Piano Sonata Part II: The Challenges of Integral Serialism Chapter 4: Before Integration Experimenting with Cage Failure without Defeat: Polyphonie X Chapter 5: Self-Ordained Stockhausen and the Studio The Death of Schoenberg The ABC's of Structures, Book 1 Chapter 6: Other Theatrics The Tremendous Influence of Incidental Music Boulez's Künstlerroman: Marteau as Cumulative Synthesis Postlude-The Darmstadt School Part III: Testing the Limits of Serialism Chapter 7: Competing Trajectories How blocs sonores Changed Everything A Triptych, Part I: L'Orestie and the Theater A Triptych, Part II: More Structures A Triptych, Part III: A Third Sonata Chapter 8: The Politics of Poetics A New Approach to Prose Darmstadt, Revised Chapter 9: Stereophony and Spirals Virtual Doubles: Figures-Doubles-Prisms Spiraling Poetry: Poésie pour pouvoir Chapter 10: An Expanding Universe Becoming Bourgeois (and a Conductor) The Power of Unpublished Works: Strophes and <"Don> " for piano Chapter 11: Folding Space and Time Improvisation I Improvisation II Improvisation II Bookends: Tombeau and Don Epilogue Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Joseph R. Salem is Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Victoria. His research interests include musical semiotics, form, post-war music, non-notated music, and sound studies.

Review :
Joseph Salem's Pierre Boulez: The Formative Years is an impressive study that examines Boulez's personal and educational background, as well as his relationships with his mentors and other artists, to reveal that Boulez's "formative period"—the blossoming of his career and development of his individualistic compositional technique from ca. 1945 to 1962-was invigorated by his expanding circle of friends and associates and his own reflection on his work.