Top 17 Pierre Boulez Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta’ is a kind of expansion of chamber music.

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.

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

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

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