Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez’s music is tightly argued and often brief, yet full of sudden colour, rhythmic snap and hard-edged attack. His Douze Notations for piano pack twelve distinct characters into a few concentrated minutes.
Those early pieces already show the habits that shaped his later writing: serial organisation, extreme contrasts of tempo and touch, and sounds that glitter one moment and turn mechanical or hieratic the next. Larger scores such as Le Marteau sans maître and Pli selon pli carried that thinking into voice and ensemble; Répons added real-time electronic transformation of instruments. He revised obsessively, so the finished catalogue stayed small. Beside Messiaen and other Conservatoire voices his piano and chamber music reads as strict Paris modernism; set among Australian piano works it still sounds foreign, exacting and full of bite.
Compositions by Pierre Boulez appear on
Notations
Stephanie McCallum is a Sydney-based pianist who specialises in contemporary music. Her performances bring light and colour to these works. Music by Xenakis and Boulez sits well beside a generation of Australian composers.