This event is curated by Peter Nelson, Composer, University of Edinburgh, Emeritus ; Edward Campbell, Musicologist, Aberdeen University, Emeritus ; Morag Grant, Musicologist University of Edinburgh, and Bjorn Heile, Musicologist, University of Glasgow.
Pierre Boulez and His Cultural Legacy Today
6 & 7 NovAs a composer, conductor, administrator and thinker, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) emerged as one of the decisive figures of the Trente glorieuses, the period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, the welfare state, technological innovation, European integration and cultural participation in France and Europe after the Second World War. There was a darker side, however, notably France’s unsettled colonial history, epitomised by the brutal war in Algeria, as well as deepening social divisions, all coming to a head in the events of Mai 68. The national dimension is at most one aspect of Boulez’s music and personality, in any case: while, for many, his music epitomises a distinctly French, post-Debussyian colourism, he embraced serialism at a time when it was firmly associated with Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School and widely regarded as antithetical to the French school represented by the likes of Nadia Boulanger, Les Six and La jeune France; and he would go on to champion Wagner and Mahler. Moreover, he lived and worked for periods in Germany, the UK and the USA. In addition, he had a long-standing relationship with Scotland: arriving first with the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in 1948, he developed a fruitful collaboration with the Edinburgh International Festival over many years.
Conversant in literature (notably René Char and Mallarmé), painting (Paul Klee) and philosophy (Lévi-Strauss, Adorno, Eco and Deleuze) as well as music, Boulez represented an ideal of modernist and high-art cultivation that formed part of the progressive imaginary at the time but has since fallen under the suspicion of elitist disengagement. This symposium explores the legacy of Pierre Boulez in relation to our times. In a period characterised by the spectres of colonialism, neoliberalism, resurgent nationalism, and cultural populism, we ask what his work, his thought, and the cultural institutions he inaugurated might offer for the present and for the future.
Indicative Themes
Serialism as cultural practice
IRCAM and French and European cultural policy in the late twentieth century
Boulez and the modernist imagination
The post-war avantgardes and decolonisation
Boulez and Scotland
Music, new technologies, and the scientific paradigm
Join us as we revisit Boulez’s ideas and ask what they can offer for the future.
In partnership with
