Pierre Boulez was born in Montbrison in 1925. He turned to music in 1942, entering the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris in 1943, where he studied analysis under Olivier Messiaen. He left the Conservatoire in 1945. In 1953, with the help of Jean-Louis Barrault, he founded a series of concerts known as Domaine musical. Their programming followed the principle to which Pierre Boulez remained faithful in his work as a conductor and organizer: to make better known the works of reference for modernity and contemporary production, and to give premieres of new works. While establishing himselfas one of the leading figures of the international avant-gardefrom the end of the 1940s and into the 1950s, Boulez trained as a conductor on the job, with Hans Rosbaud as his mentor. He acquired a growing reputation as a conductor during the 1960s, consolidating it by leading major orchestras in London and New York, and by being invited to conduct at the Paris Opéra and Bayreuth. In the mid 1970s, he founded and directed Ircam in Paris, a research institute dedicated to the exploration of computer music and psychoacoustics, and the Ensemble intercontemporain, an orchestra specializing in the interpretation oftwentieth-centuryworks and the creation of new works.

Composer, conductor and founder of institutions, Pierre Boulez also taught, initially discontinuously or occasionally, at Darmstadt, Basel and Harvard, before being elected professor at the Collège de France and teaching there from 1977 to 1995. Author of just under fifty works, a significant proportion of which have been expanded and re-elaborated according to the work-in-progressprinciple he brilliantly theorized during the final year of his teaching at the Collège de France, Pierre Boulez initially conceived his creative activity as a systematic break with tonal language and the formal constructs associated with it. From 1980 onwards, his research focused on the mastery of large-scale forms and the use of new technologies from Ircam, for computer sound processing and real-time dialogue between performer and machine.