ABSTRACT

This chapter describes an interview with Pierre Boulez took place at IRCAM on 13 March 2002. It focuses on the composer's attempts to explain and conceptualize his thinking about music in his extensive writings, and their relationship to his creative practice. The concepts which underpin Boulez's writings, and which are employed with such consistency, have themselves histories and trajectories which, when traced back, point to the key artistic and philosophical figures who have contributed to the formation of Boulez's aesthetic position. As a consequence, the following interview covers what the author think are certain lacunae in Boulez's published texts and in those of his commentators. It is very difficult to explain music; if we explore really deeply into the composition, we have to describe it in terms of technique there is no other way.