Abstract
Pierre Boulez was not only the composer of thirty-three works (and their revisions), but also the author of books of various kinds: compositional techniques, interviews, correspondence and three volumes containing one hundred and fifty articles and writings of various kinds (essays, mood pieces, texts written for conferences or lectures), which are the subject of this paper. For their editor (Christian Bourgois), the aim here is to determine the status and functions of Boulez's literary writing in relation to his musical writing, and to attempt to identify some of its stylistic specificities.
To do so, he first recalls how Boulez himself conceived the difference between his critical and creative activities, even if he did not separate them. After an overview of the place of his writings in relation to his activities as a composer and his institutional undertakings, he first focuses on the period of his polemical writings, of which he gives examples, often violent. He then highlights the use of unexpected metaphors and proposes a characterization. He then highlights the introduction of self-criticism into his discourse, and the role played by his conducting practice. In keeping with familiar concepts, I then distinguish between the "poetico-centric" and "aesthetico-centric" points of view, and move on to characterize the style of his thought, dominated by its binary structuring and the quest for totality to which it bears witness. After evoking the articles themselves and the texts written for lectures and courses, it focuses particularly on the stylistic use of ternary groupings, in the wake of a fertile observation of Proust. Finally, the paper examines the care he takes to avoid citing concrete musical examples in his texts, and distinguishes his literary discourse from that of a musicologist.
