French composer and musician Pierre Boulez dies, aged 90

(AGI) Rome, Jan 6 - French musician and composer Pierre Boulez died at home in Germany on Tuesday, at the age of 90. He was a master of the technique known as integral serialism and a champion of experimental music. Influenced by his mentor at the Paris Conservatoir, Olivier Messaien, he explored new horizons and broke boundaries in an attempt to open up new avenues of composition. He made dozens of recordings, which testify to the originality and depth of his interpretations of Bartok, Mahler, Shoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky, as well as Debussy and Ravel, in a constant search for innovation. He conducted a great many premieres of works by contemporary composers all over the world, including Messaien, Stravinsky, Kolb, Carter, Birtwistle and Frank Zappa, from whom he commissioned an orchestral piece which he then conducted for the famous recording of The Perfect Stranger with the Ensemble Intercontemporain. This came about through his work with the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), which he founded in 1976. Its name reflects Messaien's theories on the relationship between music and sound, exemplified in his score for Oiseaux Exotiques. Boulez stayed at the helm of IRCAM until 1992, turning it into a laboratory for musical innovation. He wrote music from an early age and was in intellectual symbiosis with Stockhausen and Henri Pousseur, expanding his serial technique to the entire structure of musical syntax, radicalising Anton Webern's punctilistic style. The list of his works is as great as that of his recordings, impregnated with his love of experimentalism, which was never a means to its own end, but always rigorous and aware. These ranged from the Dialogue de Lombre Double, involving a live clarinet shadowed by a recorded one, to piano sonatas and polyphonies, from Le Visage Nuptial to Tombeau to Domaines to Rituel in Memoriam de Bruno Maderna, always in an inexhaustible quest for evolving compositional technique. As he told Mario Campanino in an interview: "The art of poetry is expressed through technique. It absolutely cannot exist without technique; true 'poetic art', I mean. These two faces of musical creativity must rest against each other, otherwise there is no technique. Poetic art remains nebulous and can never be more than a sum of intentions, but not a reality." (AGI). .