Top 35 Quotes & Sayings by Pierre Boulez

I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience.

I discovered 'Rite of Spring' when I was 21. As a matter of fact, not with orchestra first, because it was still a work which was not often performed. Don't forget that I was 19 in 1944, still the Occupation time. So it was performed slightly after the end of the war, in 1945.

Acting and performing music is exactly the same. Therefore, an actor, for instance, who is very impressive, he's not simply imitating or trying to imitate, but he must dominate this kind of feeling, and then he transmits it in a much stronger way.

I always admired very much the virtuosity in Strauss because, really, he's a master of using the orchestra. And I like virtuosity, I must say, even if the taste of the music is not always mine.

I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past.

The most difficult problem in conducting is intonation. You must know what is wrong and how to correct it.

Conducting is more difficult than playing a single instrument. You have to know the culture, to know the score, and to project what you want to hear. Some conductors are well prepared but cannot transmit their ideas to an orchestra, and others are good communicators but have nothing to transmit because they are not absorbed enough in the score.

My parents were so far from the music world that they couldn't conceive how you could make a living. But for me, it was the only solution for the rest of my life.

Webern was a kind of 'Kamchatka of music,' an unknown country of music. That's true; for me and people of my generation, he was a radical - you couldn't be more radical than he was.

Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.

'Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta' is a kind of expansion of chamber music.

The first time I came to New York in 1952, I was busy with music. I made the acquaintance at this period with John Cage, and also the acquaintance of Varese for the first time. We were very good friends. He gave me some scores, and we recorded them a little later.

In business, in the music world, people know that I can be very friendly and warm but that, after a certain moment, the business is closed. I like to be alone: in order to concentrate on my work, the social life does not exist. It has never existed for me, really. I have chosen instead the working life because I prefer that.

I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time.

I said if I ever conducted, I would always give myself the best chance to succeed - though sometimes, despite everything, you still fail.

I always think the relationship between a teacher and a student should be short and maybe violent. You don't need to spend years together. All you need is an explosion: you are the material to explode; the teacher is the detonator.

Some members of the Vienna Philharmonic convinced me to try Bruckner, which I have never done before. And that was interesting to me to have this experience with this orchestra, which knows the repertoire very well, and to be confronted with this knowledge, and to learn from them.

People see me as a theoretician, but my music is also seductive, even spiritual.

All the people with whom I was very close at one point in my life - Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Nono, Bernd Alois Zimmermann - they are all gone.

Music should be a collective magic and hysteria.

I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.

All art of the past must be destroyed.

Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music.

Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'.

More and more I find that in order to create effectively one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it.

The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music.

Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

For me, curiosity is life. If you are not curious, you are in your coffin.

The function of pop music is to be consumed.

It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.

We have to fight the past to survive.

Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.