Abstract
Pierre Boulez has written and spoken surprisingly little about composers active in the second half of the twentieth century. A prolific author and passionate commentator on composers such as Webern, Schoenberg and Debussy, whom he integrated into a well-developed historical-theoretical narrative, Boulez made little attempt to theorize the aesthetic stakes of the works of his time - those of musicians of his generation or younger - even though he conducted and recorded some of them during his teaching period at the Collège de France.
It is therefore enlightening to find in the archives of his lectures at the Collège de France for the year 1980-1981, devoted to the theme of "Automatisme et décisions", a sketch containing references to some twenty of his contemporaries, most of them active during the 1960s and 1970s. The works in question are by composers as diverse as Vinko Globokar, Heinz Holliger, Mauricio Kagel, Paul Méfano and Dieter Schnebel, although he never mentioned them in the text of his lectures at the Collège, published under the title Leçons de musique in 2005.
This sketch was probably used to prepare a series of workshops on the theme of "Chance and Determination", which took place in 1982 at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and which continued the themes of the previous year's Collège lectures. A study of this draft sheds light on Boulez's aesthetic judgments, sometimes quite critical, of artists very different from himself. In the light of this sketch, his lectures at the Collège de France suddenly appear more polemical and committed than generally remembered, and their coherence with his activities as a conductor and programmer is clearly apparent.
