Boulez Quotes & Sayings

The most difficult problem in conducting is intonation. You must know what is wrong and how to correct it. — Pierre Boulez

All the people with whom I was very close at one point in my life - Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Nono, Bernd Alois Zimmermann - they are all gone. — Pierre Boulez

Conducting is more difficult than playing a single instrument. You have to know the culture, to know the score, and to project what you want to hear. Some conductors are well prepared but cannot transmit their ideas to an orchestra, and others are good communicators but have nothing to transmit because they are not absorbed enough in the score. — Pierre Boulez

Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be ... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made. — Morton Feldman

My parents were so far from the music world that they couldn't conceive how you could make a living. But for me, it was the only solution for the rest of my life. — Pierre Boulez

I said if I ever conducted, I would always give myself the best chance to succeed - though sometimes, despite everything, you still fail. — Pierre Boulez

I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience. — Pierre Boulez

More and more I find that in order to create effectively one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it. — Pierre Boulez

I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time. — Pierre Boulez

Acting and performing music is exactly the same. Therefore, an actor, for instance, who is very impressive, he's not simply imitating or trying to imitate, but he must dominate this kind of feeling, and then he transmits it in a much stronger way. — Pierre Boulez

The function of pop music is to be consumed. — Pierre Boulez

The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music. — Pierre Boulez

Boulez's only concern is with power. He lost the leadership of the avant-guard more than ten years ago to Stockhausen. Now others have moved in. With the need for power, where was he to go? So he chose to be a conductor. He is a wonderful musician, a wonderful intelligence. It's a pity there is no humanity there. Does he have sex? I think not. When men have no sex, they go after power in this big, obsessive way. — Lukas Foss

Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'. — Pierre Boulez

We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music. — Pierre Boulez

I discovered 'Rite of Spring' when I was 21. As a matter of fact, not with orchestra first, because it was still a work which was not often performed. Don't forget that I was 19 in 1944, still the Occupation time. So it was performed slightly after the end of the war, in 1945. — Pierre Boulez

Some members of the Vienna Philharmonic convinced me to try Bruckner, which I have never done before. And that was interesting to me to have this experience with this orchestra, which knows the repertoire very well, and to be confronted with this knowledge, and to learn from them. — Pierre Boulez

In business, in the music world, people know that I can be very friendly and warm but that, after a certain moment, the business is closed. I like to be alone: in order to concentrate on my work, the social life does not exist. It has never existed for me, really. I have chosen instead the working life because I prefer that. — Pierre Boulez

Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer. — Luc Ferrari

It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed. — Pierre Boulez

When I came across something I liked, I wanted to find out as much as I could about it. This was as true of hearing Hoagy Carmichael for the first time as it was later when I first heard Boulez. — Richard Rodney Bennett

'Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta' is a kind of expansion of chamber music. — Pierre Boulez

I always think the relationship between a teacher and a student should be short and maybe violent. You don't need to spend years together. All you need is an explosion: you are the material to explode; the teacher is the detonator. — Pierre Boulez

For me, curiosity is life. If you are not curious, you are in your coffin. — Pierre Boulez

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. — Pierre Boulez

Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society. — Pierre Boulez

I always admired very much the virtuosity in Strauss because, really, he's a master of using the orchestra. And I like virtuosity, I must say, even if the taste of the music is not always mine. — Pierre Boulez

Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary. — Pierre Boulez

Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end,
full of new paths to discover,
where mystery remains eternal — Pierre Boulez

At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kiekegaard. — Morton Feldman

I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography. — Pierre Boulez

[A]ny musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch. — Pierre Boulez

I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past. — Pierre Boulez

The first time I came to New York in 1952, I was busy with music. I made the acquaintance at this period with John Cage, and also the acquaintance of Varese for the first time. We were very good friends. He gave me some scores, and we recorded them a little later. — Pierre Boulez

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed. — Pierre Boulez

Webern was a kind of 'Kamchatka of music,' an unknown country of music. That's true; for me and people of my generation, he was a radical - you couldn't be more radical than he was. — Pierre Boulez

(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)
At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was ... — Pierre Boulez

We have to fight the past to survive. — Pierre Boulez

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed ... To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition ... Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves-not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with. — Morton Feldman

When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play. — DJ Spooky

Music should be a collective magic and hysteria. — Pierre Boulez

People see me as a theoretician, but my music is also seductive, even spiritual. — Pierre Boulez