Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez: The Formative Years mixes a biographical journey with the musical development of the central twentieth-century composer Pierre Boulez. The book is chronologized into three parts, each with a different thematic emphasis: Boulez's early life and education, his musical works and experimentation, and his legacy among contemporary aesthetic movements and artistic challenges.

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.

- 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- The Power of Unpublished Works: Strophes and "Don" for piano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