Pierre Boulez
Born March 26, 1925, Montbrison, France
Died January 5, 2016, Baden Baden, Germany

Born in 1925 in Montbrison, France, Pierre Boulez initially trained in mathematics and later pursued studies in piano, composition, and choral conducting at the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers included Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. In 1954, he founded the Concerts du Petit Marigny, one of the first concert series entirely dedicated to the performance of modern music, which later became the Domaine Musical series.

Throughout the next decade, he was intensely involved with musical analysis, and he taught in Darmstadt and at Basel University. In 1963, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and in 1976 he became a professor at the Collège de France.
Boulez began his conducting career in 1958 with the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Baden-Baden, Germany. His success there brought him to the Cleveland Orchestra in 1965, where he held posts as principal guest conductor and musical advisor from 1969 until 1972. In 1971, he became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra; that same year he succeeded Leonard Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held until 1977.

In 1974, Boulez became creator and director of the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). This led to the creation of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, one of the world’s finest contemporary music ensembles, which Boulez conducted in France as well as on extended tours abroad. He also co-founded the Cité de la Musique, a music center in Paris created in 1995.

Boulez was one of the leaders of post–World War II musical modernism and his advocacy of modern and postmodern music was decisive for many. His numerous compositions still are widely performed, including Le marteau sans maître, Livre pour cordes, Pli selon pli, three piano sonatas, Le visage nuptial, Répons, . . . explosante-fixe . . ., and Notations. Boulez’s many awards and honors included honorary doctorates from Leeds, Cambridge, Basel, and Oxford universities, among others; Commander of the British Empire; and Knight of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2002, he was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize for his contributions to the Collège de France, and in 2009 he was awarded the Inamori Foundation’s 25th Annual Kyoto Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Arts and Philosophy.

Pierre Boulez made his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in February 1969, leading two weeks of subscription concerts. The first week included the subscription concert debut of Daniel Barenboim as soloist in Bartók’s First Piano Concerto and the second week included Jacqueline du Pré as soloist in Schumann’s Cello Concerto along with the U.S. premiere of Boulez’s Livre pour cordes. He returned as guest conductor in 1987 and beginning in 1991, he began appearing annually in Chicago. In 1995 he was invited by Daniel Barenboim to become the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s third principal guest conductor, and in 2006 he became the CSO’s Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus.

Boulez led the Orchestra on numerous trips to New York’s Carnegie Hall and tours to England (London), Germany (Berlin, Cologne, and Essen), Hungary (Budapest), and Japan (Tokyo). He also curated several MusicNOW concerts, delivered lectures on a variety of contemporary issues at the Art Institute of Chicago, participated in Beyond the Score presentations both in Chicago and in New York, and conducted the Civic Orchestra of Chicago on many occasions both in concert and in reading sessions of new music.

Read the entire article on cso.org

Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor who was a dominant figure in classical music for over half a century, died on Tuesday at his home in Baden-Baden, Germany. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his family in a statement to the Philharmonie de Paris. Prime Minister Manuel Valls, also in a statement, said, “Audacity, innovation, creativity — that is what Pierre Boulez was for French music, which he helped shine everywhere in the world.”

Mr. Boulez belonged to an extraordinary generation of European composers who, while still in their 20s, came to the forefront during the decade or so after World War II. They wanted to change music radically, and Mr. Boulez took a leading role. His “Marteau Sans Maître” (“Hammer Without a Master”) was one of this group’s first major achievements, and it remains a central work of modern music.

Mr. Boulez came to give more attention to conducting, where his keen ear and rhythmic incisiveness would often produce a startling clarity. (There are countless stories of him detecting, for example, faulty intonation from the third oboe in a complex orchestral texture.)

He reached his peak as a conductor in the 1960s, when he began to appear with some of the world’s great orchestras, including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra. His style was unique. He never used the baton, but manipulated the orchestra by means of his two hands simultaneously, the left indicating phrasing or, in much contemporary music, counter-rhythm.

His characteristic sound — unemotional on the surface but with undercurrents of intemperateness, at once brilliant in color and rhythmically disciplined — depended on his famously acute ear and suited his core repertoire: Stravinsky (several of whose works he introduced to Europe), Debussy, Webern, Bartok and Messiaen. It was refreshing as well in his many excursions into earlier music.

As a young composer, he matched intelligence with great force of mind: He knew what had to be done, according to his reading of history, and he did it, in defiance of all the norms of French musical culture at the time. To be a conductor, though, meant working with the existing machinery.

He tried to remake that machinery in 1971, when he became music director simultaneously of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. He tried to explore unconventional repertoire, unconventional concert formats and unconventional locations. But he also accepted that he had to rethink some of his own preconceptions, and as his musical outlook broadened, his output as a composer dwindled.

It was his reputation as an avant-garde composer and as a crusader for new music that prompted his unexpected appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic, succeeding Leonard Bernstein. After the initial shock at his arrival, there was hope that he might, as many said at the time, bring the orchestra into the 20th century and appeal to younger audiences. But his programming often met with hostility in New York, and he left quietly six years later.

His destination was Paris. Dismissive of the French musical establishment, he had spent most of the previous two decades abroad, but President Georges Pompidou, keen to reclaim a native son, had agreed to found a contemporary-music center for him in the capital: the Institute for the Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music, known as Ircam. It had its own 31-piece orchestra, the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

In the 1980s, Mr. Boulez gained further government support for his grandest project, the City of Music complex in the Villette district of Paris, housing the Paris Conservatoire, a concert hall and an instrument museum.

Pierre Boulez (the Z in the name is not silent) was born on March 26, 1925, in Montbrison, a town near Lyon, the son of an industrialist, Léon Boulez, and the former Marcelle Calabre. He studied the piano and began to compose in his teens.

A defining moment came when he heard a broadcast of Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale” conducted by Ernest Ansermet; it was a work to which he often returned throughout his conducting career. Against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to study engineering, he went to Paris in 1942 and enrolled at the Conservatoire.

In 1944-45, he took a harmony class taught by Olivier Messiaen, whose impact on him was decisive. Messiaen’s teaching went far beyond traditional harmony to embrace new music that was outlawed both by the stagnant Conservatoire of that period and by the German occupying forces: the music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok and Webern. Messiaen also introduced his students to medieval music and the music of Asia and Africa. Mr. Boulez felt his course was set; but he also knew he needed to go further into the 12-tone method that Schoenberg had introduced a generation before.

“I had to learn about that music, to find out how it was made,” he once told Opera News. “It was a revelation — a music for our time, a language with unlimited possibilities. No other language was possible. It was the most radical revolution since Monteverdi. Suddenly, all our familiar notions were abolished. Music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein.”

To start on this route, he took lessons in 1945-46 with René Leibowitz, a Schoenbergian who had settled in Paris. Soon, in works like his mighty Second Piano Sonata (1947-48), he was integrating what had been separate paths of development in the music of the previous 40 years: Schoenberg’s serialism with Stravinsky’s rhythmic innovations and Messiaen’s enlarged notion of mode. As he saw it, all these composers had failed to pursue their most radical impulses, and it fell to a new generation — specifically, to him — to pick up the torch.

Though he was outspoken about his historical role, he was much warier of talking about what his music expressed. There was the odd reference in his early writings to the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud; there was also an admitted kinship with the poetry of René Char, which he set to music in “Le Marteau Sans Maître” and other works. But he was also capable of ferocious abstraction, as in the first section of his “Structures” (1951) for two pianos, a test case in applying serial principles to rhythm, volume and color.
​
Read the entire article on nytimes.com

Caitlin Cawley was only 15 when she developed tendinitis in both elbows. The condition is commonly known as “tennis elbow,” but Cawley wasn’t practicing her serve. She was studying classical percussion at a pre-college program for aspiring musicians.

She ignored the early signs until the prickling sensation grew to stabbing pain throughout her forearms so excruciating she had to stop playing. It took three months of rest for the inflammation in her tendons to subside, and she has had multiple flareups since then.
​
Now 21 and a senior at Boston University’s School of Music, Cawley is preparing to audition for graduate programs. So while most college applicants can breathe a sigh of relief now that their Jan. 1 deadline has passed, she and other music students are headed back to the practice rooms. Cawley currently averages six hours of independent practice a day, not including ensemble rehearsals. In her words: “Right now I’m doing as much work as I’ve ever done for music.”

That diligence also means risk of injury. For Cawley and other young musicians, the question of this season is: How much practice can my body take before perfection turns to pain?

Their odds are not good. In the mid-2000s, a Chicago-based physician began surveying the incoming music students at a midwestern university, and after four years, the trend in the data was clear: Almost 80 percent of freshman “reported a history of playing-related pain.”

For players of string, keyboard and brass instruments the percentage was even higher. For percussionists like Cawley: 100 percent.

Dr. Michael Charness, who directs the Performing Arts Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, has treated thousands of musicians who play everything from bagpipes and sitars to violas and trombones.

He describes the crux of the problem: “If you look at a string quartet, it’s the most natural looking sight, but if you simply remove the instruments from their hands and pose them on stage, it’s nothing that we were ever really designed to do for any long period of time.”

The arms are elevated, wrist extended, head tilted — all while performing rapid repetitive motions (a two-minute movement from Handel’s “Messiah” includes 740 strokes of the violin bow). It’s a recipe for repetitive stress injuries, and the same could be said of any instrument when played intensively.
High-pressure events such as auditions and recitals bring heightened risk, Charness says; they push musicians to put in eight or 10 hours a day and repeat the same passage over and over to get it right — “things that most athletes know not to do.” He often sees those same musicians in his clinic once the pressure has passed.

Performing Patients
Every Saturday, there is a line of musicians at the Brigham and Women’s clinic carrying instrument cases of all shapes and sizes. Dan Snydacker, a harpsichordist who travels from Connecticut for treatment, describes the waiting area as tense — somber even: “We all share this sense of potential loss.”
About half of the musicians that Charness sees suffer from overuse injuries to the soft tissue, such as tendinitis. The doctor watches each one play, looking for tension in the shoulders or an unnecessary twist in the wrist — subtle habits that can lead to strain.
Slightly less common are nerve injuries — often in the wrist and elbow, where nerves can become compressed or entrapped in the joints. In many cases the condition is totally painless, only affecting the musician’s coordination.
The most rare and debilitating musical malady is focal dystonia, a neurological condition that is rooted in the brain but impacts a specific part of the body — fingers for pianists and sometimes the lips for players of wind instruments. The condition is not well understood even though it affects almost 2 percent of professional musicians — including the celebrated pianist Leon Fleisher and possibly the 19th century composer Robert Schumann.
Snydacker, the harpsichordist, knew something was wrong when he started missing notes on the keyboard. Then he noticed that his fingers were curling under his palm involuntarily when he tried to play. The dystonia was interfering with the motor routines he had developed over years of playing, and he now receives regular botox injections that relax the overactive muscles in his hand. Total recovery is unlikely; Snydacker is just hoping that he can still play the harpsichord for his grandchildren.
Read the entire article at commonwealth.wbur.org

Months before it was expected, the National Symphony Orchestra has named Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, 51, as its seventh music director, taking over at the start of the 2017-2018 season. He will succeed Christoph Eschenbach, whose contract expires in 2017. 

It’s a coup for the NSO. Noseda is a star at the world’s leading orchestra and opera houses, including the Mariinsky Theatre, where he became the company’s first foreign-born principal guest conductor at the start of his career; the Israel Philharmonic, where he is principal guest conductor; and the Metropolitan Opera, where he opened the new production of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” on New Year’s Eve to considerable acclaim. Musical America named him its 2015 Conductor of the Year.

Even better for the orchestra, he — unlike some of the NSO’s previous music directors — combines international prestige with solid conducting technique. In his previous two music directorships — the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, England, and the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy, a post he still holds — he has patiently brought mid-level ensembles to new heights of artistry and recognition. Teatro Regio made its first North American tour in 2014; critics in New York and Chicago counted its performances of Rossini’s “William Tell” as a highlight of the year.
​
He has worked well with the NSO, an orchestra he first conducted in 2011, and to which he returned in November. “I found a fantastic attitude. . . . I felt very naturally committed with them, in a normal sort of way,” Noseda said Saturday in a hotel lobby in New York. “What really impressed me is the development we got together, from the first rehearsal to the first concert, and how much the quality was increasing in the next two performances.”

He added, “You see in the eyes of the players, the wish. ‘We can do it, we have just to be asked to do it, we want to deliver.’ ”

Deborah Rutter, the Kennedy Center’s president, said, “I knew he was a great musician and a really generous, warm man. I didn’t know what the chemistry would be like.” After the first rehearsals, she said, speaking by phone Sunday evening, “people were calling me saying, ‘The musicians are going crazy down here.’ We didn’t want to miss out on anything. We wanted to strike while the iron was hot.” 
​
The swift move may be perceived as a victory for Rutter, who arrived in Washington in 2014 bearing the weight of high expectations for the music director search based on her track record of securing Riccardo Muti as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she was that orchestra’s president. Noseda doesn’t yet have Muti’s stature, but he is also an Italian conductor with a significant international career who specializes in both orchestral conducting and opera. 

The search committee included NSO musicians, board members and members of the administration, and Rutter was only one voice at the table. “This has been a group process,” she said. And the committee, which began convening a few weeks after February’s announcement that Christoph Eschenbach would not extend his contract as music director beyond 2017, identified Noseda as a person of interest early on, without, participants say, more input from Rutter than anyone else.

Read the full story at washingtonpost.com