As an integral figure in twentieth-century music, Pierre Boulez innovated new musical ideas through extraordinary creative processes. His formative years tracked his compositional development from his confrontations with serialism to drafting one of his major works, Pli selon pli, in the early 1960s. Part biography, part survey, Pierre Boulez: The Formative Years situates Boulez and his compositions among a complex network of influences.

To best understand Boulez's creative process, author Joseph R. Salem organizes the book into three parts. First, Boulez's early life, training, and education provide biographical context for his career. Salem provides a fresh, revisionist perspective of the composer's life by drawing upon a mix of primary and secondary sources. Second, the brunt of the biography situates Boulez's musical works and experimentation among a host of contextual contexts. In place of scores and complicated musical analyses, Salem employs sketches as a visual metonym. The sketches denote Boulez's continual ability to self-reform, accept feedback from his peers, mentors, and family members, and revitalize old material. Third, Boulez's legacy is associated with contemporaneous aesthetic movements and artistic challenges. While his creative processes undoubtedly influenced music today, Boulez remains a controversial, even taboo, figure among contemporary musicians and audiences. A book that both celebrates and critiques its subject, The Formative Years urges a reconsideration of narratives and discussions surrounding Boulez's life and works.

Joseph Salem's profile page

Joseph R. Salem is Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Victoria. His research interests include musical semiotics, form, post-war music, non-notated music, and sound studies.

"The absence of a definitive biography of Pierre Boulez, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, is astonishing. Enter this panoramic study, which takes Boulez's conducting as seriously as his composing, music theatre as seriously as esoteric French literature. Salem's breathtaking summa honors classical music's favorite enfant terrible, while illuminating the intellectual and social energies that made him tick. Far from an individual genius, Salem's Boulez is a brave, unfinished, contradictory seeker formed, most of all, in community." -Jennifer Iverson, Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago