Pierre Boulez at 100: What Is His Legacy Today?

Few musicians could be the focus of an architectural tour. Pierre Boulez is one of them.

In the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris, next to the Centre Pompidou, you’ll find IRCAM, the sound research center that Boulez founded in the 1970s. Not far away, on Place de la Bastille, is an opera house where he suffered one of the few failures of his long career. And on the outskirts of the city, at Parc de la Villette, his Cité de la Musique complex produces concerts, exhibitions and classes, a factory of culture where industrial slaughterhouses once sprawled.

The most recent addition to the Cité de la Musique is the Philharmonie de Paris, a concert hall whose main auditorium is named after Boulez. It was completed in 2015, a year before his death, at 90, but he never got to see it. Still, it stands today as a kind of monument to this titan of the past century’s music, a composer, conductor, theorist and a canny political force.

Michael Haefliger, a friend and colleague from the Lucerne Festival, called Boulez “the Einstein of music.” The conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, an inheritor of Boulez’s ethos, described him as “one of the most influential people in music, period.”

What exactly, though, is Boulez’s influence?

A hundred years after his birth, and nearly a decade since his death, his legacy isn’t necessarily as a composer. Celebrating his centennial at the Philharmonie in March, two performances of his “Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna” were notable mostly for their rarity. His music, like that of his peers from the post-World War II generation of high modernists, like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, is brilliant but out of fashion, and difficult to program.

To get a sense of Boulez’s true legacy, look at how “Rituel” was presented. With an accompanying dance by Benjamin Millepied, the evening embraced experimentation, a hallmark of Boulez, a musician who tried to dissolve the boundaries between performers and audience members in the 1970s.